Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones

If you run the new trains at maximum potential then they will just catch up to the old train in front of them and then have to maintain the old train’s pace. So during the transition period you couldn’t really run the new train faster anyways.

New trains: padded schedule

Old trains: padded schedule

So really, all train schedules are padded - which makes sense, you need buffers to absorb variance in performance to have reliable schedules.

Yes, China is about the same size as the US, but a route from Beijing to Kashgar is 23k feet up and 21 k feet down. A route from Washington DC to Los Angeles is about the same distance, but has 77k feet up and 77k feet down. A lot more elevation to work through. Much of the east side of that map is relatively flat. And there are bottlenecks getting to the west side, as there would be in the US, but the US has a lot more relative population on the west side than in China.

I'm sure that rail wins over flights in terms of efficiency for passenger miles traveled. However, you often have to travel more miles to get to your destination. A direct flight can save a whole lot of time. Flights are much faster, although security theater adds a lot of time[1]; but for longer routes, or routes with many stops or connections for rail, the single segment operation of a flight starts to win.

Also, China has the advantage of authoritarianism which allows it to more easily get right of way that's well aligned for HSR. While it was once easy to get land for railroads, when there were active land grants, now you'd need to do a lot of work to get well aligned land to add a rail line; where they're still active, existing rail right of ways through developed areas are fine enough for slower service, but expanding the right of way to better align the tracks is a lot of work. In theory, you could eminent domain, but that process is long and expensive.

[1] In a world where you think it's possible to have government intervene to expand passenger rail in the US, it's equally possible to have government intervene to streamline the security theater in flights; or they might add the same security theater to passenger rail.

That's not a map of their HSR network, that's a map of their rail network.

Openrailwaymap plots tracks by max speed, and you can see the map of China here: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=maxspeed&lat=30.9587685707... --the tracks that are red-to-purple are the ones that are high speed.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil".

Some of those routes sound nice, but they don't usually have enough daily traffic between them to warrant the massive infrastructure costs. LA to Vegas would rival the distance of the longest European high speed lines, but with many fewer stops between and a fraction of the passengers between. Outside of connector flights, I don't even know how many people even regularly travel between Chicago and Detroit.

Part of the advantage places like Japan and Europe have over the US is not just that they are dense, but that their population skews to one massive metropolitan center. So it's easy to design a hub model where traffic patterns are easy - in and out of one area. You see this in the success of regional commuter rail networks in the US.

(SF and LA is a great candidate though, and it's failure a highlight of how hard it is to build in the US)

It's not technically fast enough to be called high speed rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-speed_rail

But it is worth calling out that good regional rail services exist in the US, and they don't even have to be that fast to be successful!

With an average speed of 70 mph, the Brightline isn't high-speed as it would be defined elsewhere in the world. Neither is the Amtrak Acela, for that matter.

If we price the extra travel time at the level of US minimum wage, $7.25/hr, the extra ~15 hours of travel alone would add up to a price tag of $100. And if you don't have a bullet train, then the time-economy gets even worse.

That sure seems like it explains a lot about the state of US passenger rail.

> cheap and easy travel across town (in your car)

It's only cheap and easy if you discount omnipresent traffic jams, 50,000 deaths per year, ever-worsening climate change and the inability to walk/bike anywhere anymore.

Aside from that, it only costs the average American $1,000/mo to keep that cheap and easy transportation!

Ignoring the point that climate sensitivity wasn't in the parent comment, AFAIK, airplanes generate 0.16 kg/km, whereas trains are around 0.1 kg/km and container ships are at 0.016 kg/km. However, passenger ships and gas cars are at 0.25, diesel cars at 0.28 kg/km and rockets are over 1.0 kg/km, so it appears planes are in the middle, not really "one of the best ways" to worsen climate change.

Sure, through a simple analysis of CO2 kg/km, trains are better for the climate for long distance travel, but they are vastly slower (average time from LA to DC is over 80 hours), which has knock-on effects, e.g., sleeping at home averages 0.25 - 0.32 kg/night, whereas staying at a hotel averages 10-40 kg/night, eating at home averages 2.3 kg/meal vs. 3-8 kg/meal, etc.

What is it per passenger-mile, that's what you would have to compare to e.g. a car, bus, or train.

A passenger train in the USA weighs about 1000 tons, plus another 150 or so tons of locomotive, before we add the passengers (seating 80 per car and about 11 cars for 880 passengers).

That’s about a ton per passenger.

>Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities.

If the cities are closer than 600 km. Trains are good for movement inside a typical state, but rarely between states.

You're preaching to the choir but the average person doesn't care.

I'll take the Acela over flying any day. It's cheaper and less of a hassle. Time-to-commute is a wash when you do the airport security theater dance + delayed flights on the tarmac.