itchief wrote:Another reason high speed rail does not work in the USA, distance. All of the above routes are not that long. Even the 1 USA high speed route listed is pretty short. The US is a BIG place with major cities a long distance apart.
Swadian wrote:Actually, you are mistaken. Australia and Canada have no better rail service than the USA.
Bingo - long-distance rail at whatever speed works financially when trip distances are short enough to overcome the inherent speed advantages of flying, even when burdened with the time costs of pre- and post-flying rigmarole. In most Europe and many parts of Asia this is very much the case - witness the success of rail travel on routes like PAR-AMS, HAM-BER (which has no non-stop flights at all), and TYO-OSA.
Alter the figures used for distance, air passenger process time burdens, and rail speed, and the balance changes dramatically - an Australian example is SYD-CBR, which at a great-circle distance of 237 km (147 mi) is commonly held to be a stellar candidate for HSR. However no such HSR system has been built (and would be a political nightmare given the rail infrastructure and passenger operations environment in Australia), meaning that the current rail service is only three trains PDEW timetabled at just over four hours on a line takes a less-than-direct route at relatively-low speeds using an outdated safeworking system (
train-order working, for the curious) and is constrained by capacity limits over much of its length by a need to share space with freight services, as well as increasing numbers of regional and suburban services closer to Sydney.
Meanwhile QF alone offer something like 17 services per weekday each-way, blocked for 55 mins gate-to-gate. Obviously one must allow extra time for terminal procedures but considering Australian domestic security screening is less rigorous than that used internationally and the excellent transport links to and from Sydney airport, it's not a hard contest.
Add distance and rail starts to drop off, especially if you don't make the trains all that much faster - so SYD-MEL, which is one of busiest flight corridors in the world by both frequency and passengers-carried, is blocked for 90-odd minutes GTG against a rail timetable of over eleven hours.
The disparity grows to be so vast that there are now only a handful of long-distance rail routes in Australia that still run at all aimed at "normal" travellers, most of them in NSW. The remainder, being the likes of SYD-PER, ADL-DRW, and to a lesser extent MEL-ADL, are pretty much entirely aimed at tourists.
And I believe all of the non-tourist runs are subsidised to some extent or another, which touches neatly on a point also made upthread. It's not a new one either - it's been a political hot-potato in both NSW and Victoria for years on the basis that the subsidy is at least partially justified to ensure some level of public-transport service to regional centres that have limited or no air service, but as a result there's little imperative to improve speed or amenity.
Even in Europe it's a sticky point - I remember watching a documentary made in 1991 lamenting the dire state of British Rail (and rail travel in the UK as a whole) in comparison to the likes of France and Germany where it was pointed out that BR was being held to expectations of performance similar to SNCF and DB but received barely a fraction of the subsidy, and was in fact on notice from Westminster that it would soon lose that fraction too.
