Elon Musk's vision of AmericaFollow

Four hours to travel from Chicago to Milwaukee? That's terrible!

Spoiler

I'd rather see neato hand-sketched concept drawings of jet packs.

Probably hoping to cash in on bulk sales in places that matter, but that will probably require the construction of additional pylons if it really takes off.

Does that mean I can have a dinosaur as a pet?

How about a video?

1. Nope. Commuters are still going to experience three times the regulated limit of Gs along curves. Critics are already calling it the new "vomit comet."

2. I believe that this reduces the amount of re-grading and land flipping that needs to be done. Interstates are already carefully graded, and the footprint of the Loop on the ground is only a meter or so per post, which could easily fit alongside the shoulder of most existing interstates. I think it only gets architecturally interesting when you're in mountainous areas that have a giant stone wall on one side and a sheer cliff on the other.

3. Subways don't count, right?

The problem is that you won't be able to. If you look closely at the map, the travel times assume direct point to point travel with no stops in-between. The problem, of course, is that you have all those other dots in-between and only one tube for those cars to travel through (if you have more than one, then the costs skyrocket above those projected). The claimed time to travel from Los Angeles to Salinas is 37 minutes, to Santa Cruz is 40 minutes, to San Jose is 43 minutes, and San Fransisco is 46 minutes. Obviously, the extra 3 minutes for each longer distance doesn't take into account stopping and loading/unloading passengers along each stop before continuing on. Of course, they could have certain times of day with express routes, but then that means less times when you can hit spots in-between (so fewer routes, thus fewer travelers, thus less money). Also, the longer the distance the more impact on shorter routes any sort of express run will have (cause no other routes in-between can be running at the same time). So you could maybe do a once a day express run from Los Angeles to San Fransisco, but trying to do an express run between Los Angeles and New York? Not going to work.

They're seriously sugar coating the numbers of a system like this and just plain ignoring some serious draw backs.

Edited, Nov 14th 2013 1:19pm by gbaji

Oh yes, it's certainly hypothetical. But if it runs with the ruthless efficiency of the Tokyo train system, then the stopping to unload/load in each area would be a minute or less. (The only time the trains in Tokyo are late is when they have a "person entry" otherwise known as a "Chuocide" when someone killed themselves on the Chuo line - or any other line, for that matter. Chuo just goes the fastest.)

It seems to be cheaper than driving or flying in Europe....

Or maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe all of the rail travel they have there is just really rich people who want to sit around in dining cars and laugh at the unfortunates who have to drive everywhere.

Only because in Europe they massively tax cars and gasoline and massively subsidize their train systems. So while the ticket cost right in front of you to go from point A to point B is less expensive, it's artificially made so. This is actually one of the more infuriating aspects of mass transit because the levels of deception involved with regard to cost is pretty ridiculous (and in some cases is so entrenched that people don't even realize they're participating in such deception).

Here's a great example of this

On the surface, this article is about suggesting ways to reduce costs, right? But the proposal doesn't actually do that:



So they aren't changing the actual cost at all, just hiding it in a different budget line item. So instead of it being part of the Amtrak budget, it'll be spread out across a bunch of state transportation budgets. Um... But those can come out of federal transportation funds, so they're really just shuffling money around.

It's even worse though because the article starts off with the whole "short routes are making money, but long routes aren't" fact. But then in the next paragraph we're treated to this:



So wait! The short routes aren't actually profitable either. They've just already had a big chunk of their costs shifted to the states (and maybe back to the fed via transportation funds as well?). So the solution proposed is to lie about the costs on long routes just like we're already lying about the costs for short routes. But at the end of the day, the same dollars end out being spent. We're just obfuscating it.

Fans of public transportation (and especially rail) use this form of deception all the time. And yeah, it's incredibly annoying. When you get into a car, the majority of the costs of your trip are the direct costs you pay to own and operate that car. Very little tax dollars are used. When you get on a train, only a percentage of the total cost of your trip is reflected in the ticket price. The rest is subsidized with taxes at multiple levels of our government, all quite obviously designed to intentionally conceal the true cost of that trip from you.

And even with all that, it's still often not cheaper than driving or flying. So go figure!


Edited, Nov 14th 2013 2:06pm by gbaji

The biggest problem with Amtrak being able to make money is the infrastructure Amtrak is forced to use. For example, To get from Seattle to San Francisco right now, there is a pair of north-south mainline tracks that runs from Canukistan down the left coast. These tracks are shared with freight traffic. There is one northbound track, one southbound track for all of the traffic. You get a derailment? traffic stops. You get a slow moving freight train in front of you? you're delayed. Now add to that mess the 324 at-grade intersections where road and rail are on the same plane along that route. Each one of them is a potential congestion point. Seperating them involves usually building a car bridge over the rail, which costs on average of between $5 and $12 million depending on size, complexity, number of lanes, etc. To get a "high speed' rail line faster than the current 70 MPH speed limit the west coast rail line is capable of, all the at grade interchanges would need to be fixed, 2 rail bridges need reinforcing, and they really need to double the number of rail lanes. That would be multiple billions of dollars worth of investment into a system owned largely by private corporations, in this case burlington northern santa fe railroad company and or CSX for most of the line.Then you would need to replace the cars and engines with the faster style. Bullet train speeds and efficiency would be achievable in the United States, but only if the investment to upgrade the rail lines occurs, and people have a problem with the government paying for that when the government largely doesn't own the rail lines. We can't even aford to repair our existing car bridges at the moment. I don't see us putting in massive new rail lines anywere except california where they somehow snuck that one through any time soon. But we'll see.

I was responding to someone saying how nice it would be to be able to ride a train from Orlando to Nashville for $25. It wasn't specifically about the OP proposal, but about rail travel in general (or at least that's how I took it). I think pointing out relative costs of existing rail travel is relevant with regards to that sort of wishful thinking.

Oh. But to respond to your actual point. Yes, there are cases where rail would be a great idea. What's baffling though is that it seems as though rail advocates don't want to put rail where it would be more useful and less expensive but want to focus on putting it where existing high traffic areas (especially freeways) already are. It's almost as though they care more about eliminating cars than they do about implementing efficient rail systems.

A location where I've argued for some time would be a great place to put a rail line would be the route between Riverside and Las Vegas. Yes, this would not fulfill anyone's dream of a world run by rails, but it would fill a need, and be very cost effective. If you've ever driven the I15 along that route, it's empty desert. It would be trivial to put a high speed rail there (there's actually already a line that runs there in fact). Given the length of that drive and the fact that anyone making it is already intending to spend money on a hotel in Vegas, you could charge competitive rates with airfare and easily make back the cost of building the rail.


I really think the problem with rail in the US is that we can't seem to decide whether we're building commuter rails or high speed rails, and the folks pushing them keep trying to do both at once. The result is that they usually accomplish neither very well. We end out with expensive rails that don't go very fast between distant points, but cost too much for commuter fares to fully cover. If we actually focused on different types of rails in different locations, we might actually be able to get something useful. We just have to accept that rail is not always going to be the best answer in all cases, and it really seems like many of the folks most active in pushing rail can't do that.

Edited, Nov 14th 2013 4:54pm by gbaji

Yeah. I probably should have written that edit as a different post, but I more or less agree. The problem is that it seems like the same feature that is a plus for trains (the track is along the ground and they can stop along the way) also tends to be the negative (cause they stop all the time along the way making long trips *really* long). And, as I pointed out with the whole tunnel-train thing, you can't pass other trains on the same track, so if you have routes that stop along the way, you can't run a train that goes point to point at the same time.

An inherent problem with rail transport is the rails.