Ricc, the US HSR strategic report is interesting in that it notes that the US govt. have spent $1.8 trillion in current dollars on the interstate system and air transport, but nothing like that on rail. The graph on page 4 is really interesting – it shows that WW2 aside, that rail had already been losing market share and absolute passenger numbers even pre Eisenhower starting on the interstate system.

The car dependency is obviously a problem, but on those routes sub 500km where the train can probably compete with air simply on frequency and absence of check-in (and not counting home/business transport) the train might be the way to go. The comments about Texas would be pertinent here. There would be several city pairs in other states like those in Texas, eg Memphis-Nashville, the three big cities of Ohio, Florida and so on.

Factor in the other matters:
-ice/snow in the northern USA affects air but not rail
-said to be millions of Americans have a fear of flying
-better on-board comfort and potentially better service
-more reliabilty

It is only on the up.

When we look back at what killed the great American trains, we see 3 things – good air services killing the long distance trains, interstate highways killing the short range ones, and of course, the railroads were freight focussed and had their own networks that didn’t always connect.

All through Europe’s sorry period post WWII, there was always a belief that the railways were there for passengers. And the interchanges between railways were at national borders – meaning that the only people affected were the relatively smaller market of people not travelling within one country, or not travelling on the pan-European expresses like the TEEs. So Europe had an advantage in the passenger market which, combined with heavily regulated aviation and bad weather, kept air in check outside the charter holiday destinations.

Going a little OT here but I’m happy for you to use my photos. Drop me an email about it if you wish (you should know my address!)

For HSR competing with air, that makes a lot of sense – if people can get taxis/conventional PT/a lift to the airport now, who’s to say they won’t just do the same to the station if the HSR offers a better service. In the end, air travel is as much public transport as the 546 bus – it just serves a different market.

For competing with cars, I think there’s probably more need for higher quality feeder PT, but those sort of car trips are often going to be holiday traffic that’s on the road because of luggage etc. For the rest, it’s not HSR’s job to compete the daily car commuter market.

With international airfares so insanely cheap at the moment, I’m seriously considering heading over to New York for a couple of weeks around midyear. Would be really interesting riding around the subway (especially if these planned service cuts go ahead).

On the lack of feeders issue, shouldn’t HSR be compared to aviation? Air isn’t losing out on many of these routes because of it. Look at how they manage it.

The stereotype pushed around here (in Oz) is that PT in the USA is hopeless and that LA has barely any PT. I’d like to go there and see it for myself – although I know the stereotypes issue is much bigger than here.

Just look at terms like “Moving Aficans Rapidly Through Atlanta”, a racist way to explain MARTA! There are some good online articles about this.

The other side of the coin is that areas which have little or no public transport are ripe for application of modern best practice systems without having to worry about inefficiencies built into legacy networks. I can imagine that dealing with something like the Upfield line with its 4000 or whatever level crossings, single track sections and loop constraints is actually a lot harder to fix than when you have nothing and can go from scratch and integrate with land use and a new HSR system.

I don’t know enough about the US, but I wonder if there’s a perception problem with public transport there, that public transport is for losers. In areas where public transport is just emerging, running new high quality services may serve to solve the perception problem more so than where PT is already entrenched, because people haven’t had any experience with it – good or bad.

Service marketing and integration is certainly something that needs to be looked at very seriously – especially with the state based commuter systems like NJ transit etc. I’m not sure how to solve that one, but if the Americans can manage the political will to build decent quality HSR, hopefully they will be able to come up with something.

While I think the lack of feeder services into any HSR service is apparent – I don’t think it is as bad as made out.

Considering the proposed LAX -SFO high speed, SFO has a fairly substantial suburban and interurban network of rail, and LAX has an ‘emerging’ one. San Jose and Sacramento (on a future branch of the line) have light rail services. On the NY to Washington route I can use a range of suburban, interurban and underground rail services in NY, Philadelphia and Washington en route.

Even a Chicago-St Louis journey would have an established suburban and interurban service at one end and an emerging one at the other end, including the line to St Louis airport, more than many Australian or for that matter, European cities can manage.

I suspect the greater problem is the disjointed operation of the systems and timetabling and ticketing.

For example, if I board a Marseille to Paris TGV but am actually am going to Chartres, 1 hour west, and not on a TGV route, I can still buy a through ticket, and can find out the combined timetable on sncf.fr (or use sbb.ch which is better and easier to use!)

OTOH, I can’t buy a through ticket onto the Paris Metro, it is assumed I just know where I want to go and how much it costs.

So I suspect it is a mixture of actual network layout, but also softer issues such as navigability and legibility that will affect the end user.

Any great topic and look forward to more posts from you and others.

I agree that California is a good prospect – there’s certainly a lot of political will to get things happening and even cities like LA are moving back towards public transport. I think the big question there (and also in the Texas area) is how to get HSR working for the exurbs which have been built largely along the interstate and are planned for basically 100% car use. I don’t see this as being such a problem in the Northeast, but I’m not an expert on this. In places like California and Texas, I think the success of HSR is highly contingent on the extent to which the middle and upper classes in the exurbs are prepared to embrace public transport. In the Northeast, the advantage is that several cities (eg Boston, NY) already have wealthy people living in inner city areas well served by PT.

Chicago seems like an interesting idea too – the primary problem is that a lot of the natural destinations for a Chicago service – like Detroit – are simply dying on the vine. The extent to which a Chicago hub would work will really depend on if/how the US can revitalise those rustbelt areas. I also agree the population densities being probably too low across the Pacific Northwest.

I couldn’t agree more that our stimulus money should have been focussed on more infrastructure spending rather than cash handouts. I mean, if they wanted to give cash handouts then give them to the poor who will have a higher marginal propensity to consume. People on $80000 a year don’t really care about an extra $900 – but it could have gone a long way towards high quality public transport infrastructure in Australian cities. It would be interesting to see what proportion of the stimulus has gone toward infrastructure here vs the US. I might have a look at that in more detail over the weekend and hopefully write a post on it.

cheers