California's Well Mocked and Pathetic High Speed Rail

Country is too big to make it cost effective. Very few areas with the population density to make it worthwhile. The northeast makes sense. LA to San Diego probably makes sense. San Franscisco to Sacramento would work. Cincinatti to Columbus to Cleveland might work. Miami to Orlando is good only because their is so much growth up the coast, it is really only Cocoa to Orlando that is HSR. Orlando to Tampa is good. Dallas and Houston may be stretching a little bit. Maybe Portland to Seattle. And that is really about it. Everything else is too far apart to make that kind of investment worth it.

I love rail. Have some fond memories of traveling by train when I was younger. Wanted to take the kids on a trip, so they could have similar memories, the cost was going to be more than double what it would be to fly. They weren't that good of memories

 

I think people do forget how compact and dense Europe is. In America we really should be looking at how to make cities and dense suburbs more walkable, bikeable and reducing the need to drive in other ways. But even in NYC you have Hochul killing congestion pricing for really bad reasons (i.e. not pissing off rich people and non New Yorkers). Unbelievably bad politics on her part.

 

Not to mention, when you go to Europe, the train stations are in/near the city centers. You can take a train somewhere, and you don't need a car when you get there. When staying in London, we've done day trips to other cities - York, Dover, etc., where we just got off the train and spent the day sightseeing - no cars.

As much as I prefer taking the Brightline (FLL to Orlando) over fighting Turnpike traffic, you still need a car to get anywhere once you reach MCO. Uber, rental car, or someone to pick you up.

 

Not defending this particular project as a whole, but that $11B floating around is nonsense.

No, one high-speed rail bridge didn't cost $11 billion | Fact check

 

Brightline might make a little sense now but it won't in the future. There are already talks in the works to add more stops on the route which would make the trip longer and defeat the purpose of HSR. They are adding stops in Stuart and Cocoa. This will make eight stops. They will probably add more. Making the HSR nothing more than an Amtrak.

Miami to W Palm takes 2 hrs and Miami to Orlando takes 3 1/2 hrs. Adding the two new stops and now that trip is going to be over 4 hrs.

 

Yep, our city centers have, guess what, parking garages in them. (other than the older cities in the NE and San Fran).

 

It's usually about 2:50 from FLL to MCO on the train, which is the one I'm taking. So for ~3 hours, I can sit back in comfort, enjoy an adult beverage, browse on my phone/laptop. Or, I can spend 3-3.5 hours (sometimes more) fighting with idiot drivers on the turnpike. If I take the train, I arrive relaxed and MUCH fresher.

The stops themselves are very brief, 2-3 mins, not 15 mins each. Not every train stops at every station either. I'm not really worried about new stations impacting the schedule significantly.

 

I got my info off the bright line website

 

I took the Brightline for the first time today. Was supposed to take it from Orlando to Miami. Instead, due to the flooding, I got dumped out in Aventura and then had to go through hell trying to get to my hotel in Miami. Not a good start. Yeah, can't control mother nature, but it still wasn't handled well.

 

Even China does not have HSR to all sides and corners of the country. They have HSR between the population centers on the east coast. And their population centers are much more populated than ours. New York City would be a medium-sized city in China, surpassed in population by all of the large cities, often by a factor of three.

Another thing that China had in their favor is that their economy developed rapidly and recently. It is much easier to build your city around the HSR station and tracks if you build it early in the development of the city, and not 50-100 years later. You do not have to tear down nearly as many buildings and re-route roads, sewer mains, and everything else. And you do not have as much uproar with all of the eminent domain land acquisition that has to happen.

Washington, D.C. to New York would be the one HSR route that is desperately needed (most crowded air corridor in the world). It would be expensive, but worth it. Work out the problems, then expand to Boston in one direction, and Chicago in the other. Put a tax of a few cents a gallon on gasoline to pay for it (HSR will reduce gasoline usage). It could be built over a period of 30-40 years.