@TwoBitDaVinci Tesla 😆 Where is the roadster and hyper loop. Don't take them secretly. Traffic is so bad we need massive public transportation. Everyone can't drive everywhere. NYC has already passed congestion prices and other cities will follow.
USA traffic is safe ? 40000 killed in traffic - germany is much much safer: 2760 killed where the population is about 1/4th, same about. 11.000 would be killed in germany if we use factor 4 to get to the american population. And germany has even the autobahn with unlimited speeds and a 4 times lower risk. I guess it is time to put things into perspective at least as an industrial power which is killing itself - in car crashes, fires or mass shootings.
no thanks; no interest in having a product that can (at the very least) both map my floorplan and recognize objects send all that data to a tyrannical regime currently engaged in cold war with the West. Let alone one that has claws and can manipulate objects in my house. :o
Easily your worst video yet. Why did you turn FUD CHUD, dude? This video can easily be shredded apart by actual evidence especially when you are comparing Apples and Oranges and Bananas and calling it the same. It's not. This is one of your worst videos ever and I hope you yank it down ASAP lest you see your audience turn on you... Where is your video on the $1 TRILLION DOLLAR BILL leftover from abandoned oil and gas wells across the USA that are putting out more pollution via leaks than the entire US car fleet is now? Or how about comparing good HSR vs bad HSR because that's a much more productive video. Or how does the rest of the world make HSR work and the USA can't or won't? Brightline West holds one key... Using existing free public infrastructure like highway medians... Canada is going to do the same with its Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal line but via Hydro lines which again have tangent designs... Just a lazy video that is clearly just licking the boots and other body parts of Musk... So gross!
You’re missing a key advantage of high speed rail. That is inter-city high speed travel. Traveling from Washington to New York, Boston or Philly is perfect for high speed rail.
Cars aren’t very fast. Autonomous EVs will be. The only reason why EVs aren’t faster now is that it isn’t safe for a human to drive that fast. An autonomous vehicle driving with other autonomous vehicles will be safe because it is software connected with the other vehicles.
@@juliahello6673 That is several generations away unless it is decided that only autonomous vehicles are allowed on some highways. Think about how a large portion of the US population will react to that idea.
@@juliahello6673 Most freeways in the US aren't really designed to go faster than 80 mph. Even in rural areas, you'd have to rebuild all the curves to make them have larger curve radii in order to handle higher speeds.
@@juliahello6673 BS high speed trains LONG DISTANCE and HIGH SPEED + 300 kph (in China high speed trains 400 kph) and MINIMUM 500 km i will see your robo car compete with that
Once again, the issue is that we prioritize cars over every other mode of transit. If we keep every alternative to driving a worse experience, of course people will “love” cars.
@yootoobvyooer - until you realize there’s no weird baggage fees, security checkpoints, you don’t have to arrive like 2 hours before your flight leaves, the tickets are a tiny fraction of the price, etc
@@yootoobvyooer Depending on where you're coming from, where you're going, and how much you're willing to pay, I'd argue flying isn't that much better. For example, I live in NH, which isn't exactly a popular destination. I have a friend who sometimes visits me from AR, a state that's perhaps even less popular of a destination. To fly, I have to drive 45 minutes to MHT (even longer if I have to go to BOS) while he has to drive close to 4 hours to LIT. You're advised to get there a couple hours before your flight. Dealing with baggage and security is a PITA, parking can be expensive, the planes are cramped and stuffy, the air pressure differences are uncomfortable, and most of the flight there's nothing to see and not a whole lot you can do to entertain yourself. Then, since we have undesirable destinations, there's going to be at least 1 layover, potentially wasting several hours. It's no fun leaving the airport since then you have to deal with security again when you walk back in. No matter what destination you have, if you're flying, you've wasted most of a day. Now, compare that to Amtrak, where it's a 10 minute drive for me and a 1 hour drive for him. It takes very little effort to get on the train, you're not met with surprise fees, you get a lot more space, it's quieter, lots of scenery to look at, you can opt to walk around for a bit during your layovers, etc. It takes most of another day to travel but the trip is so much more pleasant. So yeah, the flight itself may be faster but in terms of how much time you actually get to do what you want, it doesn't really add up.
@@yootoobvyooer Have you lost your mind? Plane is the absolute last alternative for me, not just because it's an absolute nightmare just getting on/off one, but also because it has a carbon footprint from hell.
The US govt does the bidding of auto and oil industry, resulting in our forced "car culture". "Car culture" is a euphemism for culture of corruption and culture of wasteful stupidity.
I know, not sure how he managed to gloss over that entire issue. Coming from someone living in San Diego with their infamously bad streets, you think that would have occurred to him.
Well add in the fact oil is also heavily subsidized and the massive impact to climate change car culture has (EV or not) and we begin to have problems. Pretty stupid video if you ask me.
He complains about the nearly empty trains, but never complains about all of the time that six or more lane roads are nearly empty. There is no mention of all that space used for storing cars that much of the day are also nearly empty.
Road are different, and maintained by local gov't and all that implies. Private rail will have a ROI and is for profit. Roads are not for profit, other than tollways that are just income for the local slush fund.
@@wakannnai1 imagine subsidizing such a morally disgusting and profitable industry. Shouldn't it be the reverse??? Especially considering the incalculable damage they've done to people and this planet since they've been around in modern form??
Sorry, you are better than this. Love your work but this is the worst thought out and twisted facts mixed trains with airports with self driving cars makes zero transportation logic. This is a mixed up 10 different discussions with no value and factually convoluted costs.
Do you live in California? Because I do and the high speed rail is a disaster. It started in 2008 with a budget of 33b and completion date of 2020. It's 2025 now and there is zero track laid and the cost is now 128b and 2033 completion date. It will be the slowest and most expensive high speed rail project in the world if it ever gets finished.
@@joebuslife9275 I live in California, but honestly that doesn't give me nor you any more authority on this subject over someone else. To say "it started in 2008" is very much a lie, it was approved by voters to obligate bonds for about 10 billion in 2008. Then a massive f*ckton of special interests and lawyers (including one Elon Musk) put together plans to derail the whole thing ... and largely they succeeded. One of the other big problems is politicians too, all putting their grubby little hands in the project (read: special interests) which made it balloon out of control. It was similar to the Bay Bridge rebuild, there was a cheap option of about 400M, and a much more grand option of 1.5B, welp politicians in Oakland mostly, wanted the grand testament to their side of the bay... and yeah that ballooned out of budget too costing around 6B by the time everything was done.... hey 4x the cost... just about what is shown here.
Public transit isn’t meant to make a profit. It is subsidized so more people can use it. Otherwise you have a lot of problems with the low wage workforce not being able to get from where they can afford to live, to work. Transit also means less cars congesting the streets, so the people in cars actually get where they are going. If you got rid of the subway system in New York the city would cease to function. You may not realize that LA has six train lines. Two are subways and a third is grade separated. The other three are a mix of at grade and separate. The subway was built with earthquakes in mind. The reason Brightline in Florida has so many accidents is because it’s at grade level which no other high speed rail line is. All of them are grade separated, so road traffic doesn’t interfere. Here in Washington there is a turn near Olympia, or Dupont which has a 15mph speed limit. One Amtrak engineer didn’t slow down and the train ended up on I-5 and a bunch of people died. I think there is a bridge on the east coast that every north south train passes over that is a massive infrastructure choke point. Not to mention infrastructure like the highway bridge in Baltimore that was knocked down by the ship has become a political football.
more people on the trains less cars on the roads. More trains between cities less flights. Big lobby groups would be against this but over the longer time horizon much better for every one. people over profits
OK, you've looked at the subsidy structure supporting our mass transit. Now look at the subsidy structure supporting our streets, roads, and highways. All forms of transportation are very heavily subsidized. Without exception. In most places, Interstate highways only get about 30% of their funding from fuel and road use taxes and fees. Arterial roads get about half of that. Residential streets are supported almost entirely by subsidy. This is especially true in sprawling, car dependent suburbs. Those of us who advocate for improved mass transit and high speed rail aren't asking for much, all we're really asking for is a level of subsidy already devoted to car dependent infrastructure.
Much less the oil and gas industry in both ongoing active tax breaks BUT ALSO THE $1 TRILLION worth of ABANDONED AND LEAKING wells and pipelines across the USA.. Where is that video??? PBS has done it but that reach is limited to a very niche audience.. This channel has REACH!
Train lines are built for a long long time, most of our tunnels in Switzerland are older than 100 years and are still really useful and important (of course also have to be maintained). Yes, there are higher priorities in California and I understand the conclusion. At the other hand without being able to think one or two generations ahead, especially in infrastructure, itˋs just impossible to create something great. I think it‘s a huge mistake only to think short term, especially the long term thinking had shaped all the great countries!
I agree! But train might not be the best thing long term. As i mentioned our record of maintenance is horrible. And if we have zero carbon shorter flight airplanes and robo-taxis coming... it would really make recouping costs difficult. Thank you for your comment, and I def admire European rail, and I wish we had that here!
@@TwoBitDaVinci Robotaxis won't solve the problem of congestion. Sure, the first robotaxis will be cool, but if you have a situation where you have thousands of rob-taxis driving from LA to San Francisco every hour on publicly funded and congested highways, maybe it would make sense to force them onto dedicated roads that they pay for. Then if you have enough robotaxis you could perhaps save money and energy by replacing the road with tracks, connecting them together and scrapping all the expensive AI, that you won't need because they are on tracks. You see where I'm going here...
High speed rail is not comparable to robotaxis, completely different use cases. Taxis/Uber are for relatively short range trips but high speed rail is for longer trips and would compete with air travel in most cases. Your other points are more valid but that comparison was not.
You don’t give reasons for why high speed rail is for long trips and robotaxis are for short trips. Remember, when you make a comment 1) State your claim 2) Give an argument 3) Give evidence for your argument. I have to guess that you think robotaxis wouldn’t be fast enough. EVs have the capacity to be much faster than they are. They are generally software constrained to a certain speed. On long distance travel on freeways they could move much faster than they do now, since safety concerns would be minimal. Fences could prevent animals and the software would prevent collisions with other tobotaxis.
I would like to see a calculation of energy usage for both modes of transportation. The infrastructure energy cost should be considered for both as well as the energy cost of manufacturing the vehicles.
As a Lakers fan, I enjoy taking the train from Santa Monica to Crytpo. It’s not high speed but it’s $1.75 each way vs being stuck in traffic for 2 hours and paying $40 for parking. The part the gets sketchy is homeless people end up riding it for free and start yelling to themselves on the trains. It doesn’t make me stop riding the train but it makes the experience less pleasant.
Saying that New York Metro runs at a loss (while true) is just silly. It is a public service, not a for profit company. Did you know the US military runs at a loss!? Did you know the US Parks service runs at a loss!? The Interstate Highway System... you guessed it, runs at a loss! Shut it down!!
Saying that it's a "public service" is not a wild card that leftists can use to get whatever they want. If it runs at a loss then everyone else is forced to pay for it and that is not right.
@@jasonk125 if there're private alternatives to all those services that are profitable, I agree, shut them down. But there's plenty of alternatives to Metro that are profitable.
@@yootoobvyooer No, really, public transport systems are literally supposed to run at a loss, because the benefit is increased mobility for everyday people and thus the economy functions better. The money you pay to ride the metro, or HSR, is just enough to lesson the loss, it's never designed to make a profit. Systems that are designed that way universally suck - and they are only run that way when privatised. The UK and Germany both had excellent rail services before they were privatised, and now they are among the worst in the developed world, simply because the companies running them have been chasing profit and not actually focusing on providing a net benefit to the country (though the US is still far worse than either).
@@CJLloyd lost me as well. Honestly just lost all respect for two-bit davinci. This whole video with made with the assumption that all of these issues aren’t solvable. As an engineer I thought he would understand that. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a MAGA supporter at this point. He’s been getting super clickbaity as well. He has a fundamental misunderstanding of how cities and transportation works.
@@kylebrown5803 most tech bros chew up the BS without much thinking, or just one phase thinking. CAHSR is not the norm, it's the red tape that jamming it up, not the plan. You need good medium distance city pairs to make effective HSL.
Exactly - adding cars to roads full of cars is not the solution. Mass transit is the solution to free up the freeways and to reduce intra-city travel time. And for high speed train safety you must remove crossings between tracks and roads. Build bridges. And high speed train center to center is much faster than flight up to certain distance. You have to travel to air port in a rush, safety checks, boarding and on destination travelling.
Streetcars and subways should be the the standard... One for express, one for local.. Los Angeles could and should reintroduce both the Yellow and Red networks as much as possible!
I think that you have a too static view of the culture of the USA. There is a real possibility that people will appreciate public transport more in the future once they have gotten used to it.
Exactly. USA's car culture has mostly happened since the 1950's. It's insane to think that it will never change. For the majority of the USA's history, it has NOT been a car centric hellhole.
The average trip on public transportation takes about twice the time as in a car. Why would anyone pay more to ride on public transportation than in a robotaxi if it takes 2x as long? What would be their motivation?
@@juliahello6673 I agree with this, I also find public transportation in the U.S. to be dirty and uncomfortable. I've been downright scared at times riding BART for example in the bay area. I don't think I'd want more of that.
@@juliahello6673I also completely agree with this. Living in the Los Angeles sprawl, with the mix of cities' and counties' public buses and rail lines, makes cars my first choice. To get to LAX from my house, I'd have to take two different buses from different bus systems to reach the Green Line, and then still take another bus or shuttle from the other end to actually get to the airport. It would take half a day. Plus, those systems don't operate at night. They cannot get me to the airport for a morning flight. Or... I just get a car/driver to pick me up at my door and drop me off at the terminal in an average of 45 minutes, day or night. If that car is a robotaxi, it'd be the safest & least expensive option.
Transport is SUPPOSED to run at loss. The point is that the economy over all becomes more profitable as a result of people's increased mobility. It's not supposed to be directly profitable. That kind of thinking it what keeps people held back.
@@christopherchurch9874 Taxpayers like always. Who picks up the same for America's failing infrastructure? Same as always? How about abandoned oil and gas wells? Same as always.. And it goes on this like... Want to make roads pay for themselves? Good luck with that! Its a never ending cycle of money in never out...
@@christopherchurch9874 well there IS the federal Mint, not to mention all the money that is digitally created out of thin air by Congress or banks, so I mean it doesn't come from taxpayers. where does all the printed money come from in the first place!? I think it was all dropped here by a money fairy it had to be created somewhere, it's called congress. Ever read the constitution, Congress holds the power of the purse. They choose what to spend on federally. A large they literally allocate funds that have nothing to do with anyone's taxes. The federal mint prints of money literally every second of the day, as for digital money I don't know the inner workings of that, I just know that weather by the big Banks of congress, huge amounts are literally created out of thin air AKA digitally, the electronic means. So Congress can choose to literally fund anything at almost any level, if it's so chooses. Nothing has to come from taxpayers endless local, county, state or federal lawmakers decide it will. Capisce?? K?? Come on man you are idiots get on my nerves. You think everything has to come from taxes. You do know that Congress literally can fund everything out of thin air, between digital forms of currency and the mint, they create new money literally all the fkg time. Okay? F... Everyone out here feels like a smooth brain. God damn are you still in high school?? The "how we're going to pay for it!?!??" crap is literally one of the greatest testaments to public ignorance found online. Amazing. Nobody fkg knows job one of how Congress or the federal government actually works, I guess this is what happens when they take civics out of the schools.
@@christopherchurch9874 if there's a deficit it's because the local or state governing authority refuses to tax at the top from the mega rich and wealthy business class. That's THEIR failure as corrupt officials, not a failure of the system. The money is always there, somewhere! the only question is WILL government officials take it from the right place and apply it TO the right place?!? CAPICE?? The money is always there at the top, and it's regional government's job to tax most aggressively from the top because that's where the vast majority of the excess money is of course; and when it comes to Congress they can choose to fund whatever they want. If they don't it's because they don't WANT to. This is basic common sense and you don't need any special class to understand this.
Ricky, I feel as if you started from the conclusion you wanted to reach: New high-speed lines have nothing to do with the current poor excuse for the railway network in the US. American rails are mostly privately owned - that's correct; but the Interstate highway system, as well as most other highways, is taxpayer financed. High-speed rail is a whole new mode of transportation (for Americans) with the purpose that initial interstates had; it is only logical to build it the same way. A mistake mad a century ago does not mean you need to stick to it forever. In Europe railways used to be a patchwork of privately built and owned short lines; as they consolidated, they tended to go into public/government ownership. The current trend, and I thing it will stick, is that the tracks and signaling are government-owned, maintained, and operated by a government agency or government-owned non-profit. Passenger traffic is a mixture of private operators and regional and municipal agencies (for urban and suburban needs); freight traffic is solely commercial, on a pan-European basis.
The real reason we prioritize cars over trains is because private industry saw big profits - especially since government pays for the roads. I can’t help but wonder if this video wasn’t funded by “the car lobby”.
@@johnkesich8696 I will give Ricky the benefit of doubt and allow that he might simply be a car enthusiast. But his videos are usually much better thought through.
@@bazoo513 Nope I've noticed a pattern of cut corners and lady illogical scripts. Either AI is writing this shit or an army of resentful poorly paid Journalism majors... Either way it's inexcusable trash from a channel that we come to expect better from! This is a betrayal of epic proportions!
@@stickynorth I meant this regarding "wonder if this video wasn’t funded by 'the car lobby'" in the post above. I did notice that I watch _Two Bit da Vinci_ far less than I used to.
Yes, self-driving can solve congestion. There was research a few years ago that found that if only one in twenty cars were autonomous congestion is improved. If all cars are robotaxis then the speed could be much higher and the distance between cars could be minimal because safety would not be a concern. The cars would be connected to each other. Envision basically a bunch of train cars driving together, not physically connected but still moving as a unit and not taking up more space than a typically loaded train would.
@rioriggs3568 If you’re hoping that Tesla fails either robotaxis, let me give you some figures. Robotaxis would mean 80% fewer cars. Since the embodied carbon of an EV is a third of its emissions, the carbon emissions reduction would be astronomical. Also, according to the Department of Transportation autonomous vehicles will mean a 90% reduction in traffic deaths. That’s as many lives saved as the number of people the Nazis killed in WW2. So if you are hoping that robotaxis will fail because of your hatred of one man, YOU are the bad guy, not Elon.
Here is something else to consider. Population decline and car affordability will decrease the car culture. Teens i have met within the past few years dont want to drive. Many have realized that car ownership is going to keep them from retirement. So car culture is going to decline.
Parking for cars also squeezes available real estate, particularly commercial real estate with large stores required by zoning to have acres of parking.
Transportation Planner here! You really got to stick with what you know and stop imparting so much of your personal bias (windshield perspective) into videos outside of your expertise. I took regular Amtrak to LA from Sacramento last year. It was as quick as driving, cost only $50 and I got to sleep on the train to Bakersfield (it’s like time travel!!). From there it was a bus to Union Station and short walk to my destination Downtown. If I needed to go elsewhere, you seem to forget that LA does have an ever better Metro and superb bus system that will get you to many other destinations. San Francisco’s Metro services are even better!! Also, you think traffic is bad on the 101 today?? Wait till it’s filled with robocars running empty to go pick up a hack!!
you are the worst planner i have came across. You should get fired. You know nothing. trains are antiquated and robocars will reduce traffic. go back to school son.
Tesla bootlicking never stops on this channel. That company has yet to follow through with any of it's proposed claims. And comparing local robo-taxi to trains on short to medium haul flight distances for train travel is ridiculous. I would fly to DC to meet with company I design for and we'd take the train to NYC from there for trade shows, and it was an exponentially better experience taking the longer train trip than flying from DC to NYC. The down time in the airport and time in traffic going to and from NYC from the airport made me realize that the train was a more efficient and comfortable use of time even though the trip was longer. But I do agree that LA to SD should have been the initial phase of HSR in CA.
The only issue with high speed rail in the US is excessive red tape and NIMBYism. Public high speed rails DO NOT NEED TO MAKE A PROFIT, IN FACT NO PUBLIC TRANSPORT OR PUBLIC SERVICE NEEDS TO MAKE A PROFIT. Our roads do not make a profit, in fact we constantly lose and dump money onto them, it's not like we are charging tolls anytime somone uses any road. But instead we justify it for two reasons because we determined the social and economic benefits outweigh the costs, and the tax revenue that is INDIRECTLY made by enabling faster transport of goods and services (via sales tax, income tax, etc) is greater than the cost it took to build and maintain it. But even this ISN'T always true, many towns and cities are and suburbs are going broke because it turns out sprawl isn't profitable and maintaining roads and sewage and water infrastructure to sprawl is super expensive, and often suburbs are highly subsidized by people who live in the city because usually their property tax rates aren't actually high enough to meet all future maintainance costs. We should not expect public high speed rail or public transport I general to make a profit on sales when we don't expect roads to make a profit when we don't even charge tolls for them. If you want high speed rail to be profitable then advocate for all roads to be toll roads. Also the only reason NYC public transport isn't profitable is because of city corruption and mismanagement from not ensuring their metros and busses are properly maintained and upgraded on a routine basis.
Yes, HSR can’t compete with robotaxis for short range travel. Metro subway lines are the right comparison for this. HSR’s true value is for long distance commutes where road travel take 2 hours or more with longer distances favoring rail especially as comparisons to air travel comes into the picture. This argument is already well proven in other countries. People will gravitate toward the cheaper, faster and more convenient transport option offered to them
So you demand subways must be run profitably, but roads don't have to run profitably? I like roads, but even I think this argument is a little asinine.
Subways need to run profitably, but the government can pay for building and maintaining the tracks. Imagine of bus companies needed to build their own roads, and nobody else can use their roads. We need a similar model for rail. There was a time when AT&T wouldn't allow anybody to plug in unapproved telephone sets onto their precious network. We need a protocol to allow third party companies and individuals who don't own the tracks to use them safely without collision. Solving that seems far simpler than FSD.
Rail and subway is extremely expensive per mile. The cost that riders pay is a lot, and it can’t rise more or nobody could afford it. Plus it’s highly subsidized - most of the cost is paid by taxes, not riders. If robotaxis are a cheaper, more carbon efficient solution then there is no reason to sink money into future public transportation projects.
@juliahello6673 I think it really comes down to a case-by-case decision. A robotaxi will be great for my local connections around the Los Angeles sprawl, but not to travel all the way to Las Vegas or San Diego. Driving and parking inside Las Vegas and San Diego frustrates me, so I'd want a robotaxi when there. I don't want a high speed rail to get across town, and I don't want a robotaxi to drive across country. However, I do want both of those when and where it's appropriate to my purpose. Once construction is completed on mass transit, it is less polluting and less expensive than personal vehicles while operating. Each system has to be built where appropriate. I don't think there's a 'one size fits all'; not even flying cars.
It's amusing to me that this is posted in the same month a congestion charge was introduced in lower Manhattan which has reduced gridlock and increased subway ridership, showing how vital it is to the functioning economy of the city. The congestion charge will be used to invest in public transportation to fix and upgrade the service, which is governments job, not the private sector. Also Stong Towns shows how suburbs are not financially sustainable long term and dense urban areas are profitable with a higher tax take. So long term mixed use neighborhoods and trains will gradually begin to replace the sprawl.
They created congestion in Manhattan by eliminating traffic lanes they eliminated 2.5 lanes on 8th Ave and dropped one lane plus on every ave in the city . They created the condition to get the tax and to this point it has not decreased traffic . I drive in Manhattan everyday.
Don't think so, the people who like the sprawl will want to live in it. Not everyone wants to live in mid rises, I personally love having some land and space. That's what we've built here in the U.S. and robotaxis would address most of that. No need for parking, and much higher utilization rates. It's very interesting to think about, I'd love to chat with you some point, cheers!
@@TwoBitDaVinci Wasn't expecting that request, I'm just another opinionated idiot on the Internet, but I tend towards the idea that the material reality wins over culture given enough time. People who want to live in more urban multi use places have far fewer options than those who want to live in the suburbs and as Strong Towns shows many suburbs are going bankrupt because it costs more to pay for all the utility upkeep after thirty years. You're better off having a debate with them, since they have a deeper knowledge on the subject.
We need high speed rail service. Between Dc and Chicago. Cross California, Texas, Florida. Driving or flying across those states are painful. You make excellent points. We must change as a country. Change is not impossible. The largest problem with high speed rail is bureaucracy and political discourse.
The answer is ditch high speed rail. Privatization created the most efficient markets in the world. If private companies can't see it working, government is guaranteed to screw it up.
@@lsh3rd Yes and Japan Railways (JR) Group needs additional revenue from real estate, shopping centres, and other non-transportation services to make the JR Group profitable...and travelling in Japan is expensive by rail.
The UK has for about 30 years and still can't get it to work, the government had to take up parts of the network out of privatisation because of the mess they had made of it.
Our interstate highway system is federal, begun by Eisenhower during the cold war. It was for defensive purposes to move war materiel and troops from coast to coast. Otherwise it would be a mish mash of poorly maintained roads. Local high speed trains are going to fail in most cases. A national program is needed with same high priority. Difficult to get because WWII is no longer a model for war.
High speed rail in the US doesn't compete with robo-taxies or cars. They compete with short haul flights and traditional rail. It's a viable business model as long as the experience is comfortable and safe. Easier said than done I know but the US has the best engineers in the world we'll figure it out.
About the maintenance issue and making a loss: roads make a loss all the time... And you will pay for it and no one will ever make profit with them. A train is infrastructure and not a huge profit market. But in the US I see a lot of problems, too. Especially you need infrastructure to get to the train station. For example I take the bus near my village home to the next train station, than take the train to the main station, switch there on a highspeed train to Berlin, and in Berlin I take the U-Bahn (Underground) or a bus to my hotel. In the US all of this is missing
After riding the Shinkansen I can say that it isn’t as “luxurious” as you implied. It is largely a work horse asset, I felt it was more like riding an airplane than anything else. they are very frequent and easy to take advantage of. That may be the largest factor behind its success.
Just the additional space even for economy is an upgrade. For Green car it's def more comfortable than a plane's first class. Also getting off and on from city center to city center is a luxury with no lines for security and no additional (car) travel needed
the airline lobby approves of this video high speed trains run on a separate track and there are NO road crossings and the derailments happen because of BAD MAINTENANCE AND DEREGULATION
I have a rule, if I can drive there in less than 7 hours, I drive. I can do better driving than all the hassle of flying. High-speed rail absolutely could and would work in the US. I mean, Acella, for business city-to-city and proper high-speed, over greater distances, for the casual traveler.
Can't say something has failed when we haven't had it ever, right? And where HIGHER speed rail exists, it's doing gangbusters numbers.. I.e. Northeast Corridor and Florida... Even with those train accidents which are 100% the fault of anyone trying to beat a train, MILLIONS of passengers have already ridden these lines safely and efficiently, lines which let us remind everyone EXISTED before the cars did. So who's zooming who here?
You can take the Blue Line from O'Hare Airport to downtown Chicago and be in the heart of the city in under an hour. Your views on public transport are almost entirely biased on your bad experiences in California.
lol, there are a lot of factors ... starting with environmental studies, lawsuits over land rights ... but my biggest concern is that the ridership level will not be what people think it will. And it will require constant additional tax payer funding... but its interesting to think about!
@@TwoBitDaVinci Why didn't you just compare Brightline West vs California HSR has a direct Apples to Apples project comparison. That's much fairer and apt than this hot mess swinging for the fences GOP CHUD FUD you just generated which just made me lose both my respect for you and your channel. HARD PASS + UNSUBSCRIBE!...
if the railway station is faw away from the city center there's really no point, and prioritizing certain regions for ideological questions is chosing to make it difficult unnecessarily. maintenance is shit everywhere. a will to beat china might maybe create political will to make this the next moon landing: the us beaten at every step, but finally getting one win.
Heavy vehicles are ruining the streets they are falling apart try riding bike say here in San Diego terrible to bad Huntington trolly was torn up in Los Angeles 1,000 miles for the stupid car that spreads tire pollution
My wife and I traveled RT Orlando to Miami at Christmas. Even with TSA pre-check door-to-door travel time the flight from MCO to MIA was about 4 hours. Coming back we did Brightline in about the same amount of time but much more pleasant with short walks at the stations, roomier seats, ability to walk around and spacious WC.
That's what I'm hoping for in San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Fresno (hey, I have family in the area and they're good farmers. Don't be prejudiced! haha), and San Francisco. All these connections are far & polluting to drive, too time consuming to fly (because of TSA and airport congestion), and could be just right for high speed rail.
9:28 "Some of those fatalities have come from people being on the rail lines when they shouldn't be." Some??? Does the train sometimes jump off the tracks and run people down in the streets or something?
Interesting. I thought the mention of the Robo Taxi was going to be leveraged to address the "last mile" concern of the likelihood that our high speed rail solution would still dump you off hours from your intended destination. Yet, and maybe it's just me, I "think" I heard that Robo Taxi would be a suitable alternative. Sooo more cars on your already congested roads is the answer?
Tesla isn't even close to offering robot cabs. It's a fugazzi to inflate the share price. At the current rate of improvement, they could be decades away.
Back in the 1950s when I was young, my mother and I would take a train trip one weekend each month here in Texas. At the time, trains ran downtown to downtown and things were not as spread out as they are now. We would get off the train, catch a short taxi ride to our hotel, then visit the town/city we were in. Now, however, cities are built for cars. You MIGHT end up downtown, but many times in an area you wouldn't want to be in. I would love to use trains now, but I would still need to rent a car to see things.
And even then most Texas and American cities HAD extensive tram networks. Just because they were abandoned then on a whim or at GM/Firestone and Exxon's pressure doesn't make them a bad idea.. In fact every city that had them should rebuild them for the very reasons they succeeded in the first place...
Man, thinking changing the entire flit of cars for autonomous ones is cheaper and easier than building modern train infrastructure is the most American thing I've heard hahahahaha. The US and cars are just too in love to be real...
Not to mention building any expectation or price comparison on Musk claiming a cost point per km for his "robotaxi" (which is not too likely to ever even get on the road in this form) when 1. his estimates are most often rather optimistic (as is his timeline), 2. he acts as if it will be Tesla defining the price (either they will be and will be milking the heck out of the market if they get a monopoly, or it will be investors running the company again, milking customers for what they can get because there won't be an alternative). I see no good reason and many reasons why to expect robo taxis to not be cheaper, and instead being potentially a LOT higher.
well its true, our costs to build per mile is insanely high. No government needs to fund robotaxis either, fleets will be incentivized, and will be profitable.
Saying something is American haha is not an argument. If autonomous vehicles are faster, safer, cheaper, lower emissions, then that’s what they are. Just because public transportation solved problems in the past does not mean that they are the best solution in the future. Don’t fall in love with a solution, try to solve the problem with whatever the latest technology is.
@LogistiQbunnik Waymo has similar predictions for the cost of robotaxis in the future. It’s not difficult math. Take the cost of the car, amortized over the life of the vehicle (which is a lot for EVs). Add electricity cost per mile. Add charging infrastructure costs per mile. Add company overhead for software etc. add cleaning, maintenance. Then you’ve got your final cost. If you haven’t done this then I suggest you do it and then you will have an opinion based on actual numbers.
@@TwoBitDaVinci If if's and but's were candy and nuts we'd all have a merry Christmas. The rest of us exist outside your little flakey bubble and know the real economics of cars.. UNSUSTAINABLE MONEY PITS!
So let me ask you this- why should I be forced to sit in a cramped ass car for 4 hours when I could easily be sitting in a spacious train for two? Does not compute.
I live in Seattle, and the only places that I could/would realistically go on a high speed train would be either Portland or Vancouver. I'd still prefer to drive since that would allow me to have a car in either destination. Otherwise I'd need to rent one or take taxies/rideshares.
@@pepperonish When you live in civilization, you take the metro or tram to the railway station (say, in Paris), ride in luxury in a high-speed train to, say, London, Amsterdam, Bruxelles,, Madrid, and switch to mass transit there again. I tried both a car and mass transit in Paris, Vienna, and Amsterdam - the latter beats the former hand down.
There will unfortunately be no breakthroughs in electric flights. Physics cannot be changed to make more energy density available in so small volume. I am from Europe, and it is possible to make trains financially viable. It is just a mindset change and accepting to reduce margins to invest in maintenance…
Right of way costs are the single largest cost of any rail system here in the US. So unless governments start using eminent domain in a big way, and trigger a revolution in the process, I don't see it happening. As to the accident rate on the Florida high speed line, when trains travel at grade, people will get themselves killed because they can't be bothered to look out for themselves.
The solution to the problem is found in his Apples to Pineapples comparison. Brightline East reused existing rails the company already owned that helped to create modern Florida as we know it. Wikipedia Henry Flagler and Miami and the Florida Railways to see why the line exists where it is... Brightline West reused existing FREE MEDIAN RIGHTS OF WAY on the Interstate.. Piggybacking off of existing FREE to use rights of way for 96% of the line. Why is Ricky not reporting that???
100% America is now a failed nation state of its own making who spends all of its time and effort putting tariffs on its allies and alienating everyone around it.. Electric cars? Tariffed. Solar panels? Tariffed? Food from Canada? Tariffed? Oil from Canada? Tariffed? Tik Tok? On life support because a bloated orange hag determines it to be...
Brightline Florida is mostly on shared tracks with grade level crossings. Brightline West will be on its own tracks and build elevated viaducts to avoid grade level crossings. The safety difference should be phenomenal.
Brightline used its existing OWN infrastructure to start because there was no passenger use of its line for decades. The nerve of anyone to blame a trainline that founded Florida is moronic and juvenile... And clearly the direction of this channel and the USA pandering it morons under T-RUMP.. HARD PASS!
Exactly, once Brightline leaves the FEC main line and heads west to Orlando, the speed increases, and I am sure they have never hit anything besides higher speeds on that new section.
This is one of the most embarrassing displays of car brain I've ever heard, and having it come from someone who claims to be an engineer makes it doubly embarrassing. Have a look at the excellent videos Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns, and many others have made which absolutely destroy more or less every one of the bad assumptions you've started from. The most important thing to realise is that a road full of driverless cars is just as clogged as a road full of people driving cars, the only difference is not all the driverless cars will even have people in them, so there's every chance there will be more traffic rather than less if self driving vaporware ever actually becomes a real thing. Driverless cars will not be able to go faster in the urban situations you're recommending for them unless the US further doubles down on making every other form of transport even more of a dystopian hell by fencing the roads off completely so that only cars can access them, so pedestrians, cyclists, wheelchairs, dog walkers and everyone else not in a car need to take massive detours to cross the road so they won't interfere with traffic. Also driverless cars have not been shown to work - the Waymo ones still need remote assistance from human operators multiple times an hour, driving in geofenced areas that they have carefully mapped, and that level of useless is the state of the art. Cars are the problem - electric cars and driverless cars are to save the car industry, not to improve the environment, and certainly not to improve society.
Robotaxis and high-speed rail are complementary. It's not an either/or. High-speed rail is for long distances and is a competitor to air travel, not robotaxis. It makes sense to me for short-haul flight corridors that see a lot of travelers, like LA to Las Vegas.
We could have had highspeed rail in this country decades ago - and should have - but a small, but loud anti-tax movement killed each proposal as it came up one after the other. "Great idea, but are you telling me that we have to PAY for this?" Doing it now is still possible... _IF_ you can get the public on your side. It seems the national pride we used to have is no longer there. Now it's just short-sighted selfishness and perpetual complaining about the traffic on I-4.
My county always votes down any public transportation initiative. I used to wonder why ... I'd love to take the train to work. That was until I started using the Light Rail when spending more time in the city (away from my Exurbs area). I hate to say it, but now I mostly see public transportation as a conduit for the homeless and drug distribution. You often see addicts using needles on the trains when it gets cold out. Many get free passes while regular folks pay $5.50 for a day pass. I have to drive 12 miles round trip to get TO and FROM the nearest station just to join these fine folks. I can drive my EV directly to town and back for a $1.40 in electrons when I charge at home plus ~$10 for parking (but I choose where and when I go). It's unfortunate - but the US public transportation dreams disappeared when the US entered WWII. A lot of local tracks were ripped up for the steel towards the war effort, and after the war ... surplus military equipment was melted down for automobiles to move people in-and-out of the newly built suburbs. Where I'm from in Europe ... public transportation (busses, trolleys, metros) are always busy and run late into the night. But there, the cities weren't built with high density traffic and parking in mind - so it makes perfect sense.
@12:47 I don't see how the price per mile is less than what I would pay to drive my own car that's paid off. I currently spend about $0.49CND per 1KM (includes maintenance, gas, insurance, registration, and drivers license). Even with an EV the cost just to buy a new one is about 0.44$ USD per Mile on average ($55.5k average EV price for driven an average of 125k miles). Where's this Robotaxi math? They would have to Robotaxi used VIN Fast (EV) and drive them for 300k miles or something before they would turn any profit (they have the additional costs of storing the cars and running a business that I don't with my personal car).
Robo taxi and HSR are not competing. They are complementary. Robo taxi could be one more reason to build HSR. Second, I can't emphasize enough that public transit doesn't need to make a profit. Cost of electric cars + road will still cost more.
The more well maintained trains and highspeed train there are, the more car people can enjoy cars. The more motorcycles/scooter rider, the more space for car people.
All car lovers should be train lovers first and foremost since it's gets traffic out of your way and frees up the road for you. Why are they so stupid not to get it? Honestly I'd love to know!
@@sirobin171 True, but Brightline will probably have to take some action to protect drivers from selves. These types of accidents have been happening before Brightline. UA-cam is filled with these types of videos.
Yes, they should have done the potentially busiest route, which would have driven enthusiasm for expanding the high speed rail network. As for robo-taxi for the whole route, it would be quicker to take robo-taxi from home to station, then rail for the longer distance, and finally robo-taxi to the destination. While some people drive in to London, the vast majority take the train, and then underground, bus or taxi to their destination.
@@UberSprite The cost of highways is not mentioned, especially as ridership increases. The time getting through security for an electric plane is ignored, plus airports are usually at the edge of town whereas I can travel from downtown London to downtown Paris by train.
@@nathanbanks2354 Those are excellent points. I only picked up on the cost of roads & highways maintenance being sidelined. This definitely skews the comparisons. [] Brightline West seems to have end stations in very close proximity to the Las Vegas Strip, and a (45-minute drive/ride from my home) location in Rancho Cucamonga. I'm looking forward to this HSR possibly expanding my somewhat-local entertainment/vacation options.
A better approach might be to keep the lines in public ownership, but train operators remain private and pay for each train mile on those lines. It's sort of how the UK works where the individual franchises are auctioned off to train operating companies. I think high speed intercity trains would make a lot of sense. Any journey that can be flown in under two hours should have a train option.
European open model is ideal. Public unified rail networks with non-exclusive open slots for operators to bid on like airports now do in the USA for gates! That allows budget operators and luxury planes and trains in Europe to use the same terminals! And allowing open competition for all budgets and economic classes from fares under $10 Euro on Ouigo to full line luxury HSR on any number of other operators...
I have 3 comments. 1. My wife cannot fly because she is wheelchair bound. (Try to imagine someone who can’t walk using an airplane bathroom.) But we have taken a coast to coast train trip. 2. I wish that Amtrak had established the Auto Train from east to west. It is very popular going north to south. 3. I live in the D.C. area. My brother lives in San Francisco. A robotaxi won’t get me to see him.
I spent 1973-1974 backpacking around europe and north africa. Had a eurail pass for long distances. More important than speed are convenience and reliability, and most european trains excelled. Amtrack fails - sometimes hours late often due to freight train interference, track repairs or slowdown orders. I still enjoy train rides.
@@stickynorth freight rail companies just make their trains so long that they don't fit into sidings (or the sidings too short, which has the same effect), so "unfortunately" the only available option is to make the passenger train wait...
I have family that works on the railroad in the Midwest. To blank statement that our railroad is not properly maintained is a slap in the face. The issue here with derailed trains is not the maintenance it is the railroad companies overloading the system to gain more profit. Also you used a metric of people killed per railroad KM... most of our rail is for shipping of freight and they share the same tracks as passengers in most cases.
Perhaps high-speed rail should connect major airport hubs to augment traveler options. I live a few miles from proposed (and contentious) Brightline station. I'm at a loss as to how often I would benefit from getting to another town without my own transportation at the destination.
The stops all make sense when you realize Brightline is a real estate play as much as a railway. All the station sites were picked to make money as real estate Transit Oriented Developments... In Japan and Hong Kong they are vertical ones... Here they are suburban lifestyle centre ones because you people don't like skyscrapers...
Las Vegas and Rancho will be huge sprawling retail, hotel office and residential districts and they will make their investments back here. Ditto for Hesperia and Victor Valley, the last one is out of town since that's where the OEM/train barns will be built and just north of the future Palmdale connector. Makes perfect sense to me!
This video clearly dropped in advance of tomorrow and the orange turd returning. This seems like a "Kiss the Ring" video if I ever saw one... Like TYT or MSNBC's Morning Show from Mar-A-Lago... really gross
To find the best routes for high speed rail you need to look at cities that are somewhat close (lets say less than 200 miles) where there are lots of daily flights. That 200 miles is the sweet spot where it would be faster for high speed rail.
What bothers me most about your perspective is the acceptance of the USA's utter failure to maintain its infrastructure. That, there, is the primary attitude that will continue to be the degradation of this country. You hit the nail square on the head. Japan has true pride in their HSR and all public works systems. The USA lost that true pride a long time ago. Sadly, it was sold for profit by corporate America and outside investors who want to see the one time giant fall. Yes. The US needs intra and interstate high-speed rail. There is every reason to have it and give all citizens, residents, and visitors the simple opportunity to freely travel the country.
The gov't controls and manages the air traffic infrastructure. Gov't should own and manage the tracks, too; it's a national concern. All the accidents are because private enterprise isn't adequately investing and maintaining tracks.
Mentioning the Chinese rail system without context of how it was all built on debt, where thousands of miles of lines are basically never used because there's not even remotely close to enough passengers, and how it was all built to boost GDP, is so intellectually dishonest.
Ditto for the US INTERSTATE... How was it paid for? And what it for? Moving military equipment in case of war and cars in the mean time. And it was and remains the most heavily subsidized project in US history... And never made $1 in profit...
@ You are correct, but there are still thousands of miles of track that do not meet the minimum number of passengers to be economically viable. Some of the tracks are used very frequently and are a solid investment, but because China only cares about GDP and keeping people employed, they kept building new rail lines to effectively no where. Don’t even get me started on the Xiong'an New Area train station. It’s a colossal train station located in a ghost city. Everything China builds is a scam.
A high speed rail with level crossings is insane. The Las Vegas line has the right idea. Follow the highway. Less private landowners to extort money out of the project and drivers get a constant reminder of how much faster it is. Maintain the rail in parallel with the same management and budget as the highway. California politics is brain dead because they tried to please everyone along an arcane route after it got pulled in all sorts of directions by special interests that will mean it gets nowhere and ends up a total waste.
The Brightline section with level crossings isn't even close to "high speed rail". Trains are only running at 80-100 mph there. Everywhere else in the world crossings with 100 mph lines work perfectly fine.
I think it breaks down to where the US has lots of rail lines and where it doesn't. The abandonments of the deregulation area in the1970s to the 1990s went far beyond any reason, and left us with too much traffic chasing too little track, but this is very uneven around the country. In the west there's another thing going on, not a whole lot of track built in the first place. California makes sense for HSR because its rail network is tiny for its land area and population, it has grown enormously since it stopped adding rail lines in about the 1910s, and transport is severely congested there as a result. Conversely many parts of the Midwest could reopen routes closed during and after deregulation, and either use them for passenger rail or shift freight to those lines and use passenger separately. Another feature of US rail is how wide the rights of way often are; there's room to lay extra tracks. Yet another feature of US rail is how old-fashioned railroading practices are here in terms of integrating different types of train; modernizing these practices would add capacity. In the end, while California really does need additional new rail routes, it makes the most sense in most places to add and develop from what we have. Hit singles now, instead of trying to build political support for a home run that never arrives. Also it's kind of ironic how most of the highway stock footage is from other countries to illustrate a point about US car culture. Car culture is global. It's a weak excuse for not doing rail. And the video of decrepit rail at 8:00 is old footage of a branch line in Ohio that was recently completely rebuilt by state and federal grants, so you're missing some points there too.
Car salesmen aren't bad to talk to when you have the money to pay 😂 if you have to haggle it's out of ur price range. Avg car being $60,000 doesn't help
In the US we have built an anti train culture with AMTRAK. Ironic and sad that the plan that was supposed to save passenger rail now is responsible for the low opinion and adoption rate. Most people in the US think of the poor substandard service of AMTRAK and never consider it over flying or driving. One trip to Europe and I now wish for high speed rail to NYC.
And yet Acela vs long distance is like comparing a Bentley and a Smart car and saying that they are the same. Nope. They have different purposes and designs...
Amtrak was designed to bail out the railroads losses on passenger rail. Politicians expected it to fail and be eliminated within a few years. The Northeast Corridor between NYC and DC carries more passengers than airplanes on the route. Acela is popular and overbooked due to limits on the number of daily trains that can travel through the tunnel to Manhattan.
JR Shinkansen yearly travel volume give or take is around 100 billion passenger-kilometers. Chinese HSR yearly volume is over 1.6 trillion passenger-kilometers.
My thougts are, not that anyone asked, is to valuate a coast to coast hight speed rail system. I live in the southeast. I would certainly use a HSRS if it were connected say from Miami, to Atlanta, Birmingham, Dallas, Las Cruces, Phoneix, San Diego. Add an East Coast line to NYC. Connect the line running north south in California, in time add a northen line to connect NYC to Seattle, then you have something. HSRS only make sense if it would connect the coasts and the major cities in between. It does not make sense for a urban commuter rail system. Add freight to the system and now you are cooking with gas, or a lack of using gas (diesel). Trucking freight coast to coast takes about a week and is getting expensive. HSRS would be a boom for coast to coast freight adding cities in between. The boom in construction, maintenence systems, technology advancements, less highway deaths, makes sense to me. However, it would take an Apollo program like effort with federal and state goverments aligning. The US needs a major project like this to stimulate our national construction and transpostation technologies!
Disagree when you say high speed rail will not work because once you get to your destination, you still have to commute to your desired destination. Any time you travel, unless you take your own personal vehicle, you have to arrange additional transportation. So, that is not anything different. The success of high-speed rail will come down to cost and convenience. If I can take high speed rail without all the additional fees airlines charge, I would take rail if possible.
One important fact to note is that at one time there were trains running in the US with average speeds of 80 mph or more. These services were pulled by steam locomotives.
@blackhole9961 Oh there were roads too and even the beginnings of highways. There was also being able to walk to a train station because towns were built to be much more walkable. There was a balance of options for getting around. Rather than being wholly dependent on the automobile as we are now. It worked before, it can work again. It's just a choice the US has to make. Do we want to sit in traffic for ages or do we want to fly by it all at 150 mph or more.
@ It was a different time and era before circa 1950s. Cities/metropolitan areas in America aren't like that anymore as the bulk of them grew post ww2 with the car. They are too incredibly spread out and designed differently to make it feasible. American cities/metropolitan areas would quite literally have to double or triple their populations for them to actually be dense enough to support such systems. Imagine the Houston area with a population similar to shanghai instead of roughly 7 million. Back then, yes, it was possible because cities were MUCH smaller and more compact because you HAD to get to places on foot, horse carriage, and trolley. Cars were practically in their infancy, and you had to be extremely rich to ride on a plane.
@blackhole9961 I agree with that. It was a different era back then. As we have the benefit of examining history we can pick and choose what worked well and maybe try a new spin on it. For example, people were able to get around without the car for centuries because their cities were built in such a way that that was possible. The automobile and highways and roads definitely have their place, but they shouldnt be the only option for traveling. Neither should flying. The more options the merrier because if one goes in a particular region people can still get around. It so happens that building railway lines and stations happens to result in an increase in density around those stations. And that's because of the convenience that a rail connection can afford to people. Also there are certain distances between which neither flying nor driving make much sense. By the time a person goes through security they could've been halfway there. Or, the drive is crazy long to where a person has to drive basically for a day to get there (say 10 to 12 hours) Meanwhile a train has no long security line and can bring you exactly to the heart of where you need to go. Passenger rail can work again in the US. It just requires some planning and thought to get back to that. Not as a wholesale replacement to driving Just as another option.
We share freight with amtrak, no one else does. You are thinking about the US with a California Centric view(6 yr backlog to get a solar grid connect permit & won't in Dallas/Houston). The population dense northeast is ripe. Amtrak makes money on that route as bad as they are. London Paris costs way more than a flight! NY trains and subway are the lifeblood, used by hundreds of thousands every day and we keep the prices so everyone can use them. So does London and Tokyo. Do you want to be in a self driving car San Diego to San Francisco? Has nothing to do with trains.
Having traveled on HSR in Europe, I can tell you all that the infrastructure is entirely different from what we have. Most of the lines have zero crossings with roads. Either the rail is on an overpass or road traffic is. So the trains can travel virtually without consequence of collision. Here in the USA virtually all lines run through crossings with road traffic, and we can see how smart that people are about that, with hundreds if not thousands of videos of cars, trucks and trains smashing each other up. The idea would be dead before it truly lives, and it wd be another slam against big government.
This also gives credence to the Ironlev idea and how it makes much more sense in Europe/Japan than it does in the US. The conventional rail infrastructure present is train-optimised. The solution in a car-culture country would be specially tailored to their infrastructure and concerns. Putting Ironlev high-speed trains on existing high-speed rail would be an interesting best of both worlds, whoever put it together creatively, maintenance being the other variable not discussed yet. Europe, S. Korea and Japan seem consistently motivated with that type of long-term investment though.
The solution is very simple but nobody wants to finance it. UPGRADE the intersections to FRA LEVEL 7 STATUS which means 125 mph/200 km/h service with impenetrable barriers... France uses them on its secondary TGV routes that run at 200-240 km/h. Same TGV Duplex rolling stock, just running on slower local lines... That would be the same equivalent as the existing Brighline Florida line which in fact was what founded Miami and Florida if anyone bothered to read Wikipedia for 5 minutes before complaining about the dang railway... Not the commenters like you or I but this deranged GOP tilting host!
We need more high speed rail, not less. It isn't great everywhere, but the North East corridor, the Texas Triangle, California/Las Vegas, the Northwest, Florida. All of these make lots of sense. I know Two Bit Da Vinci would rather focus on the high volume areas first in California, but California needs to spread out its people from the super dense and pricy LA / SF / SD areas. I agree that the US has not invested on infrastructure outside of the IRA bill. Yes, the rail has ongoing costs. But of course so do roads. Roads don't pay for themselves either...
FIRST we need to stop building in la NyC chicago... Then we need to find all the rail towns put the tracks back (- not the haunted ones).. How, same way we did last time Call China
Basically Capitalism is why we can’t have nice things. Just say that. Why we have more deaths in train transport….capitalism. Our health care system sucks….capitalism. Why our local transit systems suck….capitalism bought them all out after WW2 to make us a car centric culture. Combine Capitalism with a huge part of our government…..GOP…..trying harder to privatize everything….capitalism……we can’t get anything right by only looking 3 months ahead and giving CEOs millions and billions for that short term thinking Combine that with an already built up areas that we want to install it and all those jurisdictions. What high speed rail in Japan has as many road crossing gates…..from regular roads….crossing the high speed rail.? Not something we usually see. It’s usually lifted up and out of that situation. All in an highly earthquake infested area.
The real issue is that we assume we need vehicles that weigh tons to move people that weigh 1 tenth or less. The ratio is similar for personal vehicles and shared vehicles. The reason the high speed trains are safe is that they largely eliminate any potential for human error, either by the driver or any third parties. A system that could provide door to door trip time inside cities average close to 2 miles per minutes is possible, and could be built by 2030. For anywhere in LA to anywhere in Vegas the trip would take less than 90 minutes, door to door, and cost less than $10. It could be in place by 2030. The question is do we want to build it, not if it can be built.
High-speed rail makes sense when you have large cities close together, and especially if they are lined up, as in the North-East corridor, or to a lesser extent, in California. High-speed rail requires special tracks that are completely grade-separated and fenced-off if they are at ground level. You are forgetting that almost all roads are publicly funded, and when comparing subsidies given to different modes of transport, you need to include the public funding of roads as a subsidy to car and truck transport. One of the major advantages of rail, over cars and planes, is that it's the mode of transportation that deals best with the problem of congestion. As population increases and the economy grows, you need to build more lanes on highways, and expand airports by adding more terminals, and at some point it's no longer possible and congestion becomes a serious problem. In the case of trains, however, an increase in passengers is often beneficial, because it means you can increase the frequency of service, which is an upgrade. In brief, in the case of road or air traffic, an increase in users worsens the quality of service, but in the case of rail, an increase in the number of users can improve the quality of service. That is why high-speed rail is the future of transport, especially in corridors where you have multi-million population cities within 200 to 600 km of each other.
8:58 Brightline, and U.S. rail in general, has the liability of at-grade crossings, leading to drivers w/bad judgment, pedestrian trespassers, some intentional deaths😕 Oh, and freight rail not yielding priority
Especially Brightline Florida since that line is why Miami exists in the first place. Did he not know this? That's like blaming indigenous-American's tipi's blocking the Oregon trail. One was clearly here first!
In every other country in the world level crossings at 100 mph lines (like the fastest sections of Brightline that have crossings) work perfectly fine...
Even getting the slow train from New York to Boston a couple of years ago was a lovely experience. As a tourist I got an air conditioned seat with wifi and leg room - didn’t have to worry about insurance, navigation, parking, vehicle return. Bloody awesome. Dropped me a 10 min walk from the hotel. Cheap for a family of four as well. Same problems here in Australia btw missed the boat 50 years ago to put rail in. Just too expensive now.
High speed rail would still beat flights anytime. If the cost per mile is too great china or japan can do it. Induced demand reversal from roads to trains will definitely increase ridership for towns with even 10k people. Robo taxis will be a private initiative and don't expect that the prices will ever go down. There are trains for cars and trucks too so you can then roll out from a station. The only thing stopping this is lack of political will. You won't need government spending for paying partially for your ticket like the airlines instead the ticket of the train will be much cheaper and the will still be profitable.
Today's private freight rail system is actually very well maintained.The clickety-clack has been replaced by welded rail, busy stretches are double and triple tracked for efficiency, etc. Look into it.
Love our cars is a real stretch for many people. It is a necessity when you have two people in a household that both need to work, then they both need to car to get to work in many areas. I would love to take the bus to work, but the service just isn't there.
Culture can change quickly. I don’t think that is an issue. I took a job a few years ago in a city with pretty good public transportation. I do not miss driving at all. I do not even own a car. The issue that Ricky raises with serious implications is the city design and planning one. This is an issue not only for transportation, but also for many other urgent environmental concerns, be it fire, water, or climate change-change related problems. I have used Amtrak successfully for some travel, but it is slow and has zero coverage for this large country. It is much less stressful than air travel, when one can use it.
Love how he makes the N700 8 car train example but Japan runs 14 to 16 car trains on the busiest lines which basically doubles the stat that he presented
Yes, Obama invested $2.4 billion in high speed rail in the form of a true high speed train between Tampa and Orlando a.k.a. the I4 corridor, the most dangerous interstate highway in America. The feds were paying 100% of this rail system and any operating costs for the next 20 years. I happen to go to the event in Tampa when Obama came to town to announce it. But then our governor, the brilliant Rick Scott decided to reject the funds and the rail project. The reason Florida might be on the hook for cost after the 20 year period is up lol. What he really wanted to do is give Obama a big FU just after he just won the election in 2008! So sad it now takes hours to get just down the road to Orlando and so many people are killed every year on I4 between Tampa and Orlando.
one approach might be to first of all focus upon creating good metro systems within cities - weaning people off cars and enabling better connectivity for future high speed rail systems. Like a hub and spoke model.
America CAN build HSR and your excuses were just that. Barely 20 years ago China had ZERO HSR so your upload is an indictment of America's capacity to improve a second class rail network.
There are more train stations than airports, so HSR is easier to get to than our airports here in Japan. I‘m 20 mins from a Shinkansen station, 80 mins from an airport, so much prefer the no-stress train trip. Reporting from Kyoto.
@@remakeit2628 JR went bankrupt building out the Shinkansen network. The government transferred all the debts to the public books, split up JR into regional railway companies, and privatized the lot. That is why Japan's HSR stopped bleeding red ink. Their government paid for building the lines with public debt. We have a choice. Do we spend hundreds of billions building a new rail network? Or do we need 9 more supercarriers to go threaten China and force them to do what we want.
Checkout Roborock's Latest Products! bit.ly/40rqnUR
BOOOOOO
@TwoBitDaVinci Tesla 😆 Where is the roadster and hyper loop. Don't take them secretly.
Traffic is so bad we need massive public transportation. Everyone can't drive everywhere.
NYC has already passed congestion prices and other cities will follow.
USA traffic is safe ?
40000 killed in traffic - germany is much much safer: 2760 killed where the population is about 1/4th, same about.
11.000 would be killed in germany if we use factor 4 to get to the american population.
And germany has even the autobahn with unlimited speeds and a 4 times lower risk.
I guess it is time to put things into perspective at least as an industrial power which is killing itself - in car crashes, fires or mass shootings.
no thanks; no interest in having a product that can (at the very least) both map my floorplan and recognize objects send all that data to a tyrannical regime currently engaged in cold war with the West. Let alone one that has claws and can manipulate objects in my house. :o
Easily your worst video yet. Why did you turn FUD CHUD, dude? This video can easily be shredded apart by actual evidence especially when you are comparing Apples and Oranges and Bananas and calling it the same. It's not. This is one of your worst videos ever and I hope you yank it down ASAP lest you see your audience turn on you... Where is your video on the $1 TRILLION DOLLAR BILL leftover from abandoned oil and gas wells across the USA that are putting out more pollution via leaks than the entire US car fleet is now? Or how about comparing good HSR vs bad HSR because that's a much more productive video. Or how does the rest of the world make HSR work and the USA can't or won't? Brightline West holds one key... Using existing free public infrastructure like highway medians... Canada is going to do the same with its Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal line but via Hydro lines which again have tangent designs... Just a lazy video that is clearly just licking the boots and other body parts of Musk... So gross!
You’re missing a key advantage of high speed rail. That is inter-city high speed travel. Traveling from Washington to New York, Boston or Philly is perfect for high speed rail.
Cars aren’t very fast. Autonomous EVs will be. The only reason why EVs aren’t faster now is that it isn’t safe for a human to drive that fast. An autonomous vehicle driving with other autonomous vehicles will be safe because it is software connected with the other vehicles.
@@juliahello6673 That is several generations away unless it is decided that only autonomous vehicles are allowed on some highways. Think about how a large portion of the US population will react to that idea.
Correct. City Nerd does a great job breaking this down based on time, cost, ease, etc.
@@juliahello6673 Most freeways in the US aren't really designed to go faster than 80 mph. Even in rural areas, you'd have to rebuild all the curves to make them have larger curve radii in order to handle higher speeds.
@@juliahello6673 BS high speed trains LONG DISTANCE and HIGH SPEED + 300 kph (in China high speed trains 400 kph) and MINIMUM 500 km i will see your robo car compete with that
Once again, the issue is that we prioritize cars over every other mode of transit.
If we keep every alternative to driving a worse experience, of course people will “love” cars.
You mean planes. No one takes train when planes will get there 10 times (or 100 times) quicker.
@yootoobvyooer - until you realize there’s no weird baggage fees, security checkpoints, you don’t have to arrive like 2 hours before your flight leaves, the tickets are a tiny fraction of the price, etc
@@yootoobvyooer Depending on where you're coming from, where you're going, and how much you're willing to pay, I'd argue flying isn't that much better. For example, I live in NH, which isn't exactly a popular destination. I have a friend who sometimes visits me from AR, a state that's perhaps even less popular of a destination.
To fly, I have to drive 45 minutes to MHT (even longer if I have to go to BOS) while he has to drive close to 4 hours to LIT. You're advised to get there a couple hours before your flight. Dealing with baggage and security is a PITA, parking can be expensive, the planes are cramped and stuffy, the air pressure differences are uncomfortable, and most of the flight there's nothing to see and not a whole lot you can do to entertain yourself. Then, since we have undesirable destinations, there's going to be at least 1 layover, potentially wasting several hours. It's no fun leaving the airport since then you have to deal with security again when you walk back in. No matter what destination you have, if you're flying, you've wasted most of a day.
Now, compare that to Amtrak, where it's a 10 minute drive for me and a 1 hour drive for him. It takes very little effort to get on the train, you're not met with surprise fees, you get a lot more space, it's quieter, lots of scenery to look at, you can opt to walk around for a bit during your layovers, etc. It takes most of another day to travel but the trip is so much more pleasant.
So yeah, the flight itself may be faster but in terms of how much time you actually get to do what you want, it doesn't really add up.
@@yootoobvyooer Have you lost your mind?
Plane is the absolute last alternative for me, not just because it's an absolute nightmare just getting on/off one, but also because it has a carbon footprint from hell.
The US govt does the bidding of auto and oil industry, resulting in our forced "car culture". "Car culture" is a euphemism for culture of corruption and culture of wasteful stupidity.
Seems like you might be ignoring the cost of maintaining roads? And how well are we doing that? Thanks for the video…
I know, not sure how he managed to gloss over that entire issue. Coming from someone living in San Diego with their infamously bad streets, you think that would have occurred to him.
Well add in the fact oil is also heavily subsidized and the massive impact to climate change car culture has (EV or not) and we begin to have problems. Pretty stupid video if you ask me.
He complains about the nearly empty trains, but never complains about all of the time that six or more lane roads are nearly empty. There is no mention of all that space used for storing cars that much of the day are also nearly empty.
Road are different, and maintained by local gov't and all that implies. Private rail will have a ROI and is for profit. Roads are not for profit, other than tollways that are just income for the local slush fund.
@@wakannnai1 imagine subsidizing such a morally disgusting and profitable industry. Shouldn't it be the reverse??? Especially considering the incalculable damage they've done to people and this planet since they've been around in modern form??
Sorry, you are better than this. Love your work but this is the worst thought out and twisted facts mixed trains with airports with self driving cars makes zero transportation logic. This is a mixed up 10 different discussions with no value and factually convoluted costs.
Bingo! WTF is happening to this channel and creator? Pandering to Trump much?
@@stickynorth Bias much?
Why did you donate money then?
Do you live in California? Because I do and the high speed rail is a disaster. It started in 2008 with a budget of 33b and completion date of 2020. It's 2025 now and there is zero track laid and the cost is now 128b and 2033 completion date. It will be the slowest and most expensive high speed rail project in the world if it ever gets finished.
@@joebuslife9275 I live in California, but honestly that doesn't give me nor you any more authority on this subject over someone else. To say "it started in 2008" is very much a lie, it was approved by voters to obligate bonds for about 10 billion in 2008. Then a massive f*ckton of special interests and lawyers (including one Elon Musk) put together plans to derail the whole thing ... and largely they succeeded.
One of the other big problems is politicians too, all putting their grubby little hands in the project (read: special interests) which made it balloon out of control. It was similar to the Bay Bridge rebuild, there was a cheap option of about 400M, and a much more grand option of 1.5B, welp politicians in Oakland mostly, wanted the grand testament to their side of the bay... and yeah that ballooned out of budget too costing around 6B by the time everything was done.... hey 4x the cost... just about what is shown here.
Public transit isn’t meant to make a profit. It is subsidized so more people can use it. Otherwise you have a lot of problems with the low wage workforce not being able to get from where they can afford to live, to work. Transit also means less cars congesting the streets, so the people in cars actually get where they are going. If you got rid of the subway system in New York the city would cease to function.
You may not realize that LA has six train lines. Two are subways and a third is grade separated. The other three are a mix of at grade and separate. The subway was built with earthquakes in mind.
The reason Brightline in Florida has so many accidents is because it’s at grade level which no other high speed rail line is. All of them are grade separated, so road traffic doesn’t interfere.
Here in Washington there is a turn near Olympia, or Dupont which has a 15mph speed limit. One Amtrak engineer didn’t slow down and the train ended up on I-5 and a bunch of people died.
I think there is a bridge on the east coast that every north south train passes over that is a massive infrastructure choke point.
Not to mention infrastructure like the highway bridge in Baltimore that was knocked down by the ship has become a political football.
more people on the trains less cars on the roads. More trains between cities less flights. Big lobby groups would be against this but over the longer time horizon much better for every one. people over profits
OK, you've looked at the subsidy structure supporting our mass transit.
Now look at the subsidy structure supporting our streets, roads, and highways.
All forms of transportation are very heavily subsidized. Without exception. In most places, Interstate highways only get about 30% of their funding from fuel and road use taxes and fees. Arterial roads get about half of that. Residential streets are supported almost entirely by subsidy. This is especially true in sprawling, car dependent suburbs.
Those of us who advocate for improved mass transit and high speed rail aren't asking for much, all we're really asking for is a level of subsidy already devoted to car dependent infrastructure.
Much less the oil and gas industry in both ongoing active tax breaks BUT ALSO THE $1 TRILLION worth of ABANDONED AND LEAKING wells and pipelines across the USA.. Where is that video??? PBS has done it but that reach is limited to a very niche audience.. This channel has REACH!
Train lines are built for a long long time, most of our tunnels in Switzerland are older than 100 years and are still really useful and important (of course also have to be maintained). Yes, there are higher priorities in California and I understand the conclusion. At the other hand without being able to think one or two generations ahead, especially in infrastructure, itˋs just impossible to create something great. I think it‘s a huge mistake only to think short term, especially the long term thinking had shaped all the great countries!
I don't buy his maintenance argument.
You know what needs a lot more maintenance then trains? Roads!
I agree! But train might not be the best thing long term. As i mentioned our record of maintenance is horrible. And if we have zero carbon shorter flight airplanes and robo-taxis coming... it would really make recouping costs difficult. Thank you for your comment, and I def admire European rail, and I wish we had that here!
@@TwoBitDaVinci dont be dafft play Dirty ! If there's one thing we know is roads cooked not built
@@TwoBitDaVinci Robotaxis won't solve the problem of congestion. Sure, the first robotaxis will be cool, but if you have a situation where you have thousands of rob-taxis driving from LA to San Francisco every hour on publicly funded and congested highways, maybe it would make sense to force them onto dedicated roads that they pay for. Then if you have enough robotaxis you could perhaps save money and energy by replacing the road with tracks, connecting them together and scrapping all the expensive AI, that you won't need because they are on tracks. You see where I'm going here...
@@TwoBitDaVinci Sure, we wait for zero carbon planes and robotaxis. Those will take 25 or 30 years. And robotaxis are not for long distances.
High speed rail is not comparable to robotaxis, completely different use cases. Taxis/Uber are for relatively short range trips but high speed rail is for longer trips and would compete with air travel in most cases. Your other points are more valid but that comparison was not.
Build it and they will come. Growth will center around the efficient point to point transportation trains have vs what, an airport?
I think he's saying robo taxis complement trains
You don’t give reasons for why high speed rail is for long trips and robotaxis are for short trips. Remember, when you make a comment 1) State your claim 2) Give an argument 3) Give evidence for your argument. I have to guess that you think robotaxis wouldn’t be fast enough. EVs have the capacity to be much faster than they are. They are generally software constrained to a certain speed. On long distance travel on freeways they could move much faster than they do now, since safety concerns would be minimal. Fences could prevent animals and the software would prevent collisions with other tobotaxis.
Note that robotaxis operate on roads which are very heavily subsidized.
I would like to see a calculation of energy usage for both modes of transportation. The infrastructure energy cost should be considered for both as well as the energy cost of manufacturing the vehicles.
As a Lakers fan, I enjoy taking the train from Santa Monica to Crytpo. It’s not high speed but it’s $1.75 each way vs being stuck in traffic for 2 hours and paying $40 for parking. The part the gets sketchy is homeless people end up riding it for free and start yelling to themselves on the trains. It doesn’t make me stop riding the train but it makes the experience less pleasant.
that last aspect does stop most ppl from enjoying the mass transit systems that they pay for with tax dollars
How are the homeless people riding it for free? Is there no ticket enforcement?
@@adrianthoroughgood1191 ARE YOU THAT STUPID???
MAINLY THE BLACK PEOPLE MAKE IT SKETCHY... CRACKHEADS AND BUMS
Saying that New York Metro runs at a loss (while true) is just silly. It is a public service, not a for profit company. Did you know the US military runs at a loss!? Did you know the US Parks service runs at a loss!? The Interstate Highway System... you guessed it, runs at a loss! Shut it down!!
Any road in the world runs at a loss
Saying that it's a "public service" is not a wild card that leftists can use to get whatever they want. If it runs at a loss then everyone else is forced to pay for it and that is not right.
@@jasonk125 if there're private alternatives to all those services that are profitable, I agree, shut them down. But there's plenty of alternatives to Metro that are profitable.
Nonsense. Metro has competition in other modes of transportation that makes money. There is no alternative to military or forest service.
@@yootoobvyooer No, really, public transport systems are literally supposed to run at a loss, because the benefit is increased mobility for everyday people and thus the economy functions better. The money you pay to ride the metro, or HSR, is just enough to lesson the loss, it's never designed to make a profit. Systems that are designed that way universally suck - and they are only run that way when privatised. The UK and Germany both had excellent rail services before they were privatised, and now they are among the worst in the developed world, simply because the companies running them have been chasing profit and not actually focusing on providing a net benefit to the country (though the US is still far worse than either).
You don't need a better taxi system to get from the HSR station to your destination. You need a good metro system.
@@CJLloyd lost me as well. Honestly just lost all respect for two-bit davinci. This whole video with made with the assumption that all of these issues aren’t solvable. As an engineer I thought he would understand that. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a MAGA supporter at this point. He’s been getting super clickbaity as well. He has a fundamental misunderstanding of how cities and transportation works.
@@kylebrown5803 most tech bros chew up the BS without much thinking, or just one phase thinking.
CAHSR is not the norm, it's the red tape that jamming it up, not the plan. You need good medium distance city pairs to make effective HSL.
@@kylebrown5803Well, explain how they work to us. Don't leave me hanging. I'm listening to you.
Exactly - adding cars to roads full of cars is not the solution. Mass transit is the solution to free up the freeways and to reduce intra-city travel time. And for high speed train safety you must remove crossings between tracks and roads. Build bridges. And high speed train center to center is much faster than flight up to certain distance. You have to travel to air port in a rush, safety checks, boarding and on destination travelling.
Streetcars and subways should be the the standard... One for express, one for local.. Los Angeles could and should reintroduce both the Yellow and Red networks as much as possible!
I think that you have a too static view of the culture of the USA. There is a real possibility that people will appreciate public transport more in the future once they have gotten used to it.
Exactly. USA's car culture has mostly happened since the 1950's. It's insane to think that it will never change. For the majority of the USA's history, it has NOT been a car centric hellhole.
The average trip on public transportation takes about twice the time as in a car. Why would anyone pay more to ride on public transportation than in a robotaxi if it takes 2x as long? What would be their motivation?
@@juliahello6673 I agree with this, I also find public transportation in the U.S. to be dirty and uncomfortable. I've been downright scared at times riding BART for example in the bay area. I don't think I'd want more of that.
@@juliahello6673I also completely agree with this. Living in the Los Angeles sprawl, with the mix of cities' and counties' public buses and rail lines, makes cars my first choice.
To get to LAX from my house, I'd have to take two different buses from different bus systems to reach the Green Line, and then still take another bus or shuttle from the other end to actually get to the airport. It would take half a day. Plus, those systems don't operate at night. They cannot get me to the airport for a morning flight.
Or... I just get a car/driver to pick me up at my door and drop me off at the terminal in an average of 45 minutes, day or night. If that car is a robotaxi, it'd be the safest & least expensive option.
HELL YAH car brain people will rue the Day
Transport is SUPPOSED to run at loss. The point is that the economy over all becomes more profitable as a result of people's increased mobility. It's not supposed to be directly profitable. That kind of thinking it what keeps people held back.
Who will cover the loss? We're already running huge deficits, where does this money come from?
Dont be logical If you logical The King is poor
@@christopherchurch9874 Taxpayers like always. Who picks up the same for America's failing infrastructure? Same as always? How about abandoned oil and gas wells? Same as always.. And it goes on this like... Want to make roads pay for themselves? Good luck with that! Its a never ending cycle of money in never out...
@@christopherchurch9874 well there IS the federal Mint, not to mention all the money that is digitally created out of thin air by Congress or banks, so I mean it doesn't come from taxpayers. where does all the printed money come from in the first place!? I think it was all dropped here by a money fairy it had to be created somewhere, it's called congress. Ever read the constitution, Congress holds the power of the purse. They choose what to spend on federally. A large they literally allocate funds that have nothing to do with anyone's taxes.
The federal mint prints of money literally every second of the day, as for digital money I don't know the inner workings of that, I just know that weather by the big Banks of congress, huge amounts are literally created out of thin air AKA digitally, the electronic means.
So Congress can choose to literally fund anything at almost any level, if it's so chooses. Nothing has to come from taxpayers endless local, county, state or federal lawmakers decide it will. Capisce?? K??
Come on man you are idiots get on my nerves. You think everything has to come from taxes. You do know that Congress literally can fund everything out of thin air, between digital forms of currency and the mint, they create new money literally all the fkg time. Okay? F... Everyone out here feels like a smooth brain.
God damn are you still in high school?? The "how we're going to pay for it!?!??" crap is literally one of the greatest testaments to public ignorance found online. Amazing.
Nobody fkg knows job one of how Congress or the federal government actually works, I guess this is what happens when they take civics out of the schools.
@@christopherchurch9874 if there's a deficit it's because the local or state governing authority refuses to tax at the top from the mega rich and wealthy business class. That's THEIR failure as corrupt officials, not a failure of the system. The money is always there, somewhere! the only question is WILL government officials take it from the right place and apply it TO the right place?!? CAPICE?? The money is always there at the top, and it's regional government's job to tax most aggressively from the top because that's where the vast majority of the excess money is of course; and when it comes to Congress they can choose to fund whatever they want. If they don't it's because they don't WANT to. This is basic common sense and you don't need any special class to understand this.
Ricky, I feel as if you started from the conclusion you wanted to reach:
New high-speed lines have nothing to do with the current poor excuse for the railway network in the US. American rails are mostly privately owned - that's correct; but the Interstate highway system, as well as most other highways, is taxpayer financed. High-speed rail is a whole new mode of transportation (for Americans) with the purpose that initial interstates had; it is only logical to build it the same way. A mistake mad a century ago does not mean you need to stick to it forever.
In Europe railways used to be a patchwork of privately built and owned short lines; as they consolidated, they tended to go into public/government ownership. The current trend, and I thing it will stick, is that the tracks and signaling are government-owned, maintained, and operated by a government agency or government-owned non-profit. Passenger traffic is a mixture of private operators and regional and municipal agencies (for urban and suburban needs); freight traffic is solely commercial, on a pan-European basis.
The real reason we prioritize cars over trains is because private industry saw big profits - especially since government pays for the roads.
I can’t help but wonder if this video wasn’t funded by “the car lobby”.
@@johnkesich8696 I will give Ricky the benefit of doubt and allow that he might simply be a car enthusiast. But his videos are usually much better thought through.
BINGO! FUD fueling GOP clickbait! He turned to the dark side like TYT! Puke city!
@@bazoo513 Nope I've noticed a pattern of cut corners and lady illogical scripts. Either AI is writing this shit or an army of resentful poorly paid Journalism majors... Either way it's inexcusable trash from a channel that we come to expect better from! This is a betrayal of epic proportions!
@@stickynorth I meant this regarding "wonder if this video wasn’t funded by 'the car lobby'" in the post above. I did notice that I watch _Two Bit da Vinci_ far less than I used to.
love your channel dude but this seems like "we cant cause we cant" situation so what's next? can self driving solve congestion?
Seeing this right after Rob Robinson’s latest video really shows the contrast.
Ricky: it would be too hard, so we can’t
Rob: we _need_ to do better
Tesla's self driving is not even close to the goal despite Elon's lies year after year.
Yes, self-driving can solve congestion. There was research a few years ago that found that if only one in twenty cars were autonomous congestion is improved. If all cars are robotaxis then the speed could be much higher and the distance between cars could be minimal because safety would not be a concern. The cars would be connected to each other. Envision basically a bunch of train cars driving together, not physically connected but still moving as a unit and not taking up more space than a typically loaded train would.
@ We will all be dead before that happens
@rioriggs3568 If you’re hoping that Tesla fails either robotaxis, let me give you some figures. Robotaxis would mean 80% fewer cars. Since the embodied carbon of an EV is a third of its emissions, the carbon emissions reduction would be astronomical. Also, according to the Department of Transportation autonomous vehicles will mean a 90% reduction in traffic deaths. That’s as many lives saved as the number of people the Nazis killed in WW2. So if you are hoping that robotaxis will fail because of your hatred of one man, YOU are the bad guy, not Elon.
Here is something else to consider. Population decline and car affordability will decrease the car culture. Teens i have met within the past few years dont want to drive. Many have realized that car ownership is going to keep them from retirement. So car culture is going to decline.
Pop decline is a myth, unless the wef gets really successful in their plans
Unless the Steve Bannon types win, the US won't have a problem with population decline any time soon... we have immigration.
Boo
True, most car people are 50 or so years old.
Parking for cars also squeezes available real estate, particularly commercial real estate with large stores required by zoning to have acres of parking.
Transportation Planner here! You really got to stick with what you know and stop imparting so much of your personal bias (windshield perspective) into videos outside of your expertise.
I took regular Amtrak to LA from Sacramento last year. It was as quick as driving, cost only $50 and I got to sleep on the train to Bakersfield (it’s like time travel!!). From there it was a bus to Union Station and short walk to my destination Downtown. If I needed to go elsewhere, you seem to forget that LA does have an ever better Metro and superb bus system that will get you to many other destinations. San Francisco’s Metro services are even better!!
Also, you think traffic is bad on the 101 today?? Wait till it’s filled with robocars running empty to go pick up a hack!!
That said, California would have been better served improving performance, and extending passenger service on its regular speed rail network
you are the worst planner i have came across. You should get fired. You know nothing. trains are antiquated and robocars will reduce traffic. go back to school son.
Tesla bootlicking never stops on this channel. That company has yet to follow through with any of it's proposed claims. And comparing local robo-taxi to trains on short to medium haul flight distances for train travel is ridiculous. I would fly to DC to meet with company I design for and we'd take the train to NYC from there for trade shows, and it was an exponentially better experience taking the longer train trip than flying from DC to NYC. The down time in the airport and time in traffic going to and from NYC from the airport made me realize that the train was a more efficient and comfortable use of time even though the trip was longer. But I do agree that LA to SD should have been the initial phase of HSR in CA.
The only issue with high speed rail in the US is excessive red tape and NIMBYism. Public high speed rails DO NOT NEED TO MAKE A PROFIT, IN FACT NO PUBLIC TRANSPORT OR PUBLIC SERVICE NEEDS TO MAKE A PROFIT. Our roads do not make a profit, in fact we constantly lose and dump money onto them, it's not like we are charging tolls anytime somone uses any road. But instead we justify it for two reasons because we determined the social and economic benefits outweigh the costs, and the tax revenue that is INDIRECTLY made by enabling faster transport of goods and services (via sales tax, income tax, etc) is greater than the cost it took to build and maintain it. But even this ISN'T always true, many towns and cities are and suburbs are going broke because it turns out sprawl isn't profitable and maintaining roads and sewage and water infrastructure to sprawl is super expensive, and often suburbs are highly subsidized by people who live in the city because usually their property tax rates aren't actually high enough to meet all future maintainance costs. We should not expect public high speed rail or public transport I general to make a profit on sales when we don't expect roads to make a profit when we don't even charge tolls for them. If you want high speed rail to be profitable then advocate for all roads to be toll roads. Also the only reason NYC public transport isn't profitable is because of city corruption and mismanagement from not ensuring their metros and busses are properly maintained and upgraded on a routine basis.
Yes, HSR can’t compete with robotaxis for short range travel. Metro subway lines are the right comparison for this. HSR’s true value is for long distance commutes where road travel take 2 hours or more with longer distances favoring rail especially as comparisons to air travel comes into the picture. This argument is already well proven in other countries. People will gravitate toward the cheaper, faster and more convenient transport option offered to them
Also the only reason people love cars is because all our policies favor them instead of trains and public transport
So you demand subways must be run profitably, but roads don't have to run profitably? I like roads, but even I think this argument is a little asinine.
Subways need to run profitably, but the government can pay for building and maintaining the tracks. Imagine of bus companies needed to build their own roads, and nobody else can use their roads.
We need a similar model for rail. There was a time when AT&T wouldn't allow anybody to plug in unapproved telephone sets onto their precious network. We need a protocol to allow third party companies and individuals who don't own the tracks to use them safely without collision. Solving that seems far simpler than FSD.
Rail and subway is extremely expensive per mile. The cost that riders pay is a lot, and it can’t rise more or nobody could afford it. Plus it’s highly subsidized - most of the cost is paid by taxes, not riders. If robotaxis are a cheaper, more carbon efficient solution then there is no reason to sink money into future public transportation projects.
@juliahello6673 I think it really comes down to a case-by-case decision. A robotaxi will be great for my local connections around the Los Angeles sprawl, but not to travel all the way to Las Vegas or San Diego. Driving and parking inside Las Vegas and San Diego frustrates me, so I'd want a robotaxi when there.
I don't want a high speed rail to get across town, and I don't want a robotaxi to drive across country. However, I do want both of those when and where it's appropriate to my purpose.
Once construction is completed on mass transit, it is less polluting and less expensive than personal vehicles while operating. Each system has to be built where appropriate. I don't think there's a 'one size fits all'; not even flying cars.
It's amusing to me that this is posted in the same month a congestion charge was introduced in lower Manhattan which has reduced gridlock and increased subway ridership, showing how vital it is to the functioning economy of the city. The congestion charge will be used to invest in public transportation to fix and upgrade the service, which is governments job, not the private sector.
Also Stong Towns shows how suburbs are not financially sustainable long term and dense urban areas are profitable with a higher tax take. So long term mixed use neighborhoods and trains will gradually begin to replace the sprawl.
Strong Towns mentioned!
Yeah I think the idea of HSR is to reduce reliance on cars and jets
They created congestion in Manhattan by eliminating traffic lanes they eliminated 2.5 lanes on 8th Ave and dropped one lane plus on every ave in the city . They created the condition to get the tax and to this point it has not decreased traffic . I drive in Manhattan everyday.
Traffic is the same I drive everyday . In fact the decreased the number of lanes to create the traffic
Don't think so, the people who like the sprawl will want to live in it. Not everyone wants to live in mid rises, I personally love having some land and space. That's what we've built here in the U.S. and robotaxis would address most of that. No need for parking, and much higher utilization rates. It's very interesting to think about, I'd love to chat with you some point, cheers!
@@TwoBitDaVinci Wasn't expecting that request, I'm just another opinionated idiot on the Internet, but I tend towards the idea that the material reality wins over culture given enough time. People who want to live in more urban multi use places have far fewer options than those who want to live in the suburbs and as Strong Towns shows many suburbs are going bankrupt because it costs more to pay for all the utility upkeep after thirty years. You're better off having a debate with them, since they have a deeper knowledge on the subject.
We need high speed rail service. Between Dc and Chicago. Cross California, Texas, Florida. Driving or flying across those states are painful.
You make excellent points. We must change as a country. Change is not impossible. The largest problem with high speed rail is bureaucracy and political discourse.
So the answer is to ditch the privatisation model. A mix of transportation systems is needed.
The answer is ditch high speed rail. Privatization created the most efficient markets in the world. If private companies can't see it working, government is guaranteed to screw it up.
Except that Japan did exactly the opposite.
@@lsh3rd Yes and Japan Railways (JR) Group needs additional revenue from real estate, shopping centres, and other non-transportation services to make the JR Group profitable...and travelling in Japan is expensive by rail.
The UK has for about 30 years and still can't get it to work, the government had to take up parts of the network out of privatisation because of the mess they had made of it.
100%
Our interstate highway system is federal, begun by Eisenhower during the cold war. It was for defensive purposes to move war materiel and troops from coast to coast. Otherwise it would be a mish mash of poorly maintained roads. Local high speed trains are going to fail in most cases. A national program is needed with same high priority. Difficult to get because WWII is no longer a model for war.
You are right on the culture. It's the culture that's wrong.
High speed rail in the US doesn't compete with robo-taxies or cars. They compete with short haul flights and traditional rail. It's a viable business model as long as the experience is comfortable and safe. Easier said than done I know but the US has the best engineers in the world we'll figure it out.
About the maintenance issue and making a loss: roads make a loss all the time... And you will pay for it and no one will ever make profit with them. A train is infrastructure and not a huge profit market.
But in the US I see a lot of problems, too. Especially you need infrastructure to get to the train station.
For example I take the bus near my village home to the next train station, than take the train to the main station, switch there on a highspeed train to Berlin, and in Berlin I take the U-Bahn (Underground) or a bus to my hotel.
In the US all of this is missing
Northeast Corridor *exists*
"Am I a joke to you?"
After riding the Shinkansen I can say that it isn’t as “luxurious” as you implied. It is largely a work horse asset, I felt it was more like riding an airplane than anything else.
they are very frequent and easy to take advantage of. That may be the largest factor behind its success.
Just the additional space even for economy is an upgrade. For Green car it's def more comfortable than a plane's first class. Also getting off and on from city center to city center is a luxury with no lines for security and no additional (car) travel needed
the airline lobby approves of this video high speed trains run on a separate track and there are NO road crossings and the derailments happen because of BAD MAINTENANCE AND DEREGULATION
I have a rule, if I can drive there in less than 7 hours, I drive. I can do better driving than all the hassle of flying. High-speed rail absolutely could and would work in the US. I mean, Acella, for business city-to-city and proper high-speed, over greater distances, for the casual traveler.
good to know How to Stop you
Can't say something has failed when we haven't had it ever, right? And where HIGHER speed rail exists, it's doing gangbusters numbers.. I.e. Northeast Corridor and Florida... Even with those train accidents which are 100% the fault of anyone trying to beat a train, MILLIONS of passengers have already ridden these lines safely and efficiently, lines which let us remind everyone EXISTED before the cars did. So who's zooming who here?
You can take the Blue Line from O'Hare Airport to downtown Chicago and be in the heart of the city in under an hour.
Your views on public transport are almost entirely biased on your bad experiences in California.
we chose to do those things not because they're good, but because they're easy!
lol, there are a lot of factors ... starting with environmental studies, lawsuits over land rights ... but my biggest concern is that the ridership level will not be what people think it will. And it will require constant additional tax payer funding... but its interesting to think about!
@@TwoBitDaVinci Why didn't you just compare Brightline West vs California HSR has a direct Apples to Apples project comparison. That's much fairer and apt than this hot mess swinging for the fences GOP CHUD FUD you just generated which just made me lose both my respect for you and your channel. HARD PASS + UNSUBSCRIBE!...
if the railway station is faw away from the city center there's really no point, and prioritizing certain regions for ideological questions is chosing to make it difficult unnecessarily. maintenance is shit everywhere.
a will to beat china might maybe create political will to make this the next moon landing: the us beaten at every step, but finally getting one win.
Heavy vehicles are ruining the streets they are falling apart try riding bike say here in San Diego terrible to bad Huntington trolly was torn up in Los Angeles 1,000 miles for the stupid car that spreads tire pollution
My wife and I traveled RT Orlando to Miami at Christmas. Even with TSA pre-check door-to-door travel time the flight from MCO to MIA was about 4 hours. Coming back we did Brightline in about the same amount of time but much more pleasant with short walks at the stations, roomier seats, ability to walk around and spacious WC.
That's what I'm hoping for in San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Fresno (hey, I have family in the area and they're good farmers. Don't be prejudiced! haha), and San Francisco. All these connections are far & polluting to drive, too time consuming to fly (because of TSA and airport congestion), and could be just right for high speed rail.
This problem isn't solved by electric planes.
Not to mention the smaller carbon footprint and the district lack of a DVT threat posed by trains!
9:28 "Some of those fatalities have come from people being on the rail lines when they shouldn't be."
Some??? Does the train sometimes jump off the tracks and run people down in the streets or something?
Interesting. I thought the mention of the Robo Taxi was going to be leveraged to address the "last mile" concern of the likelihood that our high speed rail solution would still dump you off hours from your intended destination. Yet, and maybe it's just me, I "think" I heard that Robo Taxi would be a suitable alternative. Sooo more cars on your already congested roads is the answer?
This is like bad dystopian AI content written by Muskbot's...
Tesla isn't even close to offering robot cabs. It's a fugazzi to inflate the share price. At the current rate of improvement, they could be decades away.
Back in the 1950s when I was young, my mother and I would take a train trip one weekend each month here in Texas. At the time, trains ran downtown to downtown and things were not as spread out as they are now. We would get off the train, catch a short taxi ride to our hotel, then visit the town/city we were in. Now, however, cities are built for cars. You MIGHT end up downtown, but many times in an area you wouldn't want to be in. I would love to use trains now, but I would still need to rent a car to see things.
And even then most Texas and American cities HAD extensive tram networks. Just because they were abandoned then on a whim or at GM/Firestone and Exxon's pressure doesn't make them a bad idea.. In fact every city that had them should rebuild them for the very reasons they succeeded in the first place...
Man, thinking changing the entire flit of cars for autonomous ones is cheaper and easier than building modern train infrastructure is the most American thing I've heard hahahahaha. The US and cars are just too in love to be real...
Not to mention building any expectation or price comparison on Musk claiming a cost point per km for his "robotaxi" (which is not too likely to ever even get on the road in this form) when 1. his estimates are most often rather optimistic (as is his timeline), 2. he acts as if it will be Tesla defining the price (either they will be and will be milking the heck out of the market if they get a monopoly, or it will be investors running the company again, milking customers for what they can get because there won't be an alternative). I see no good reason and many reasons why to expect robo taxis to not be cheaper, and instead being potentially a LOT higher.
well its true, our costs to build per mile is insanely high. No government needs to fund robotaxis either, fleets will be incentivized, and will be profitable.
Saying something is American haha is not an argument. If autonomous vehicles are faster, safer, cheaper, lower emissions, then that’s what they are. Just because public transportation solved problems in the past does not mean that they are the best solution in the future. Don’t fall in love with a solution, try to solve the problem with whatever the latest technology is.
@LogistiQbunnik Waymo has similar predictions for the cost of robotaxis in the future. It’s not difficult math. Take the cost of the car, amortized over the life of the vehicle (which is a lot for EVs). Add electricity cost per mile. Add charging infrastructure costs per mile. Add company overhead for software etc. add cleaning, maintenance. Then you’ve got your final cost. If you haven’t done this then I suggest you do it and then you will have an opinion based on actual numbers.
@@TwoBitDaVinci If if's and but's were candy and nuts we'd all have a merry Christmas. The rest of us exist outside your little flakey bubble and know the real economics of cars.. UNSUSTAINABLE MONEY PITS!
Sure, it works everywhere else, but never in the US.
Oh suuuure, yeeees.
To quote JFK "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
So let me ask you this- why should I be forced to sit in a cramped ass car for 4 hours when I could easily be sitting in a spacious train for two?
Does not compute.
I live in Seattle, and the only places that I could/would realistically go on a high speed train would be either Portland or Vancouver. I'd still prefer to drive since that would allow me to have a car in either destination. Otherwise I'd need to rent one or take taxies/rideshares.
because... FREEDOM! 😀
Because a train will only get you near where you want to go. A car will take you to the doorstep.
@@pepperonish When you live in civilization, you take the metro or tram to the railway station (say, in Paris), ride in luxury in a high-speed train to, say, London, Amsterdam, Bruxelles,, Madrid, and switch to mass transit there again. I tried both a car and mass transit in Paris, Vienna, and Amsterdam - the latter beats the former hand down.
@@xiaoka
That's just it though, nobody's forcing you to ride a train. Just like nobody should force ME to ride in a car.
There will unfortunately be no breakthroughs in electric flights. Physics cannot be changed to make more energy density available in so small volume.
I am from Europe, and it is possible to make trains financially viable. It is just a mindset change and accepting to reduce margins to invest in maintenance…
Right of way costs are the single largest cost of any rail system here in the US. So unless governments start using eminent domain in a big way, and trigger a revolution in the process, I don't see it happening.
As to the accident rate on the Florida high speed line, when trains travel at grade, people will get themselves killed because they can't be bothered to look out for themselves.
The solution to the problem is found in his Apples to Pineapples comparison. Brightline East reused existing rails the company already owned that helped to create modern Florida as we know it. Wikipedia Henry Flagler and Miami and the Florida Railways to see why the line exists where it is... Brightline West reused existing FREE MEDIAN RIGHTS OF WAY on the Interstate.. Piggybacking off of existing FREE to use rights of way for 96% of the line. Why is Ricky not reporting that???
Shows we are on the decline that we aren't capable of keeping up with modern standards of infrastructure...
What does Pot holes are natueral
100% America is now a failed nation state of its own making who spends all of its time and effort putting tariffs on its allies and alienating everyone around it.. Electric cars? Tariffed. Solar panels? Tariffed? Food from Canada? Tariffed? Oil from Canada? Tariffed? Tik Tok? On life support because a bloated orange hag determines it to be...
Brightline Florida is mostly on shared tracks with grade level crossings. Brightline West will be on its own tracks and build elevated viaducts to avoid grade level crossings. The safety difference should be phenomenal.
Brightline used its existing OWN infrastructure to start because there was no passenger use of its line for decades. The nerve of anyone to blame a trainline that founded Florida is moronic and juvenile... And clearly the direction of this channel and the USA pandering it morons under T-RUMP.. HARD PASS!
Exactly, once Brightline leaves the FEC main line and heads west to Orlando, the speed increases, and I am sure they have never hit anything besides higher speeds on that new section.
This is one of the most embarrassing displays of car brain I've ever heard, and having it come from someone who claims to be an engineer makes it doubly embarrassing. Have a look at the excellent videos Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns, and many others have made which absolutely destroy more or less every one of the bad assumptions you've started from. The most important thing to realise is that a road full of driverless cars is just as clogged as a road full of people driving cars, the only difference is not all the driverless cars will even have people in them, so there's every chance there will be more traffic rather than less if self driving vaporware ever actually becomes a real thing.
Driverless cars will not be able to go faster in the urban situations you're recommending for them unless the US further doubles down on making every other form of transport even more of a dystopian hell by fencing the roads off completely so that only cars can access them, so pedestrians, cyclists, wheelchairs, dog walkers and everyone else not in a car need to take massive detours to cross the road so they won't interfere with traffic. Also driverless cars have not been shown to work - the Waymo ones still need remote assistance from human operators multiple times an hour, driving in geofenced areas that they have carefully mapped, and that level of useless is the state of the art.
Cars are the problem - electric cars and driverless cars are to save the car industry, not to improve the environment, and certainly not to improve society.
Robotaxis and high-speed rail are complementary. It's not an either/or. High-speed rail is for long distances and is a competitor to air travel, not robotaxis. It makes sense to me for short-haul flight corridors that see a lot of travelers, like LA to Las Vegas.
We could have had highspeed rail in this country decades ago - and should have - but a small, but loud anti-tax movement killed each proposal as it came up one after the other. "Great idea, but are you telling me that we have to PAY for this?" Doing it now is still possible... _IF_ you can get the public on your side. It seems the national pride we used to have is no longer there. Now it's just short-sighted selfishness and perpetual complaining about the traffic on I-4.
My county always votes down any public transportation initiative. I used to wonder why ... I'd love to take the train to work. That was until I started using the Light Rail when spending more time in the city (away from my Exurbs area). I hate to say it, but now I mostly see public transportation as a conduit for the homeless and drug distribution. You often see addicts using needles on the trains when it gets cold out. Many get free passes while regular folks pay $5.50 for a day pass. I have to drive 12 miles round trip to get TO and FROM the nearest station just to join these fine folks. I can drive my EV directly to town and back for a $1.40 in electrons when I charge at home plus ~$10 for parking (but I choose where and when I go). It's unfortunate - but the US public transportation dreams disappeared when the US entered WWII. A lot of local tracks were ripped up for the steel towards the war effort, and after the war ... surplus military equipment was melted down for automobiles to move people in-and-out of the newly built suburbs. Where I'm from in Europe ... public transportation (busses, trolleys, metros) are always busy and run late into the night. But there, the cities weren't built with high density traffic and parking in mind - so it makes perfect sense.
@12:47 I don't see how the price per mile is less than what I would pay to drive my own car that's paid off. I currently spend about $0.49CND per 1KM (includes maintenance, gas, insurance, registration, and drivers license). Even with an EV the cost just to buy a new one is about 0.44$ USD per Mile on average ($55.5k average EV price for driven an average of 125k miles).
Where's this Robotaxi math? They would have to Robotaxi used VIN Fast (EV) and drive them for 300k miles or something before they would turn any profit (they have the additional costs of storing the cars and running a business that I don't with my personal car).
Robo taxi and HSR are not competing. They are complementary. Robo taxi could be one more reason to build HSR. Second, I can't emphasize enough that public transit doesn't need to make a profit. Cost of electric cars + road will still cost more.
You are so correct on our maintenance and infrastructure problems. Greed rules the USA.
The more well maintained trains and highspeed train there are, the more car people can enjoy cars.
The more motorcycles/scooter rider, the more space for car people.
NO. We wil, Ban cars And only allow Elbow to elbow Cans.. HA HA HA HA HA HA. Ding ding All aborde...
All car lovers should be train lovers first and foremost since it's gets traffic out of your way and frees up the road for you. Why are they so stupid not to get it? Honestly I'd love to know!
Not defending Brightline but EVERY single fatality was some moron standing on the tracks. Trains don’t kill people.
@@sirobin171 True, but Brightline will probably have to take some action to protect drivers from selves. These types of accidents have been happening before Brightline. UA-cam is filled with these types of videos.
YOU MIGHT be Floridian Iff
@ Where you from Kentucky?
Especially since that line is what founded FLORIDA. It was laid down and then Miami grew from there. Do people not know that? WTF??
Yes, they should have done the potentially busiest route, which would have driven enthusiasm for expanding the high speed rail network.
As for robo-taxi for the whole route, it would be quicker to take robo-taxi from home to station, then rail for the longer distance, and finally robo-taxi to the destination.
While some people drive in to London, the vast majority take the train, and then underground, bus or taxi to their destination.
This is a hugely disappointing video
I'm thinking Drugs
In what way are you disappointed? How would you improve it?
@@UberSprite The cost of highways is not mentioned, especially as ridership increases. The time getting through security for an electric plane is ignored, plus airports are usually at the edge of town whereas I can travel from downtown London to downtown Paris by train.
@@nathanbanks2354 Those are excellent points. I only picked up on the cost of roads & highways maintenance being sidelined. This definitely skews the comparisons. [] Brightline West seems to have end stations in very close proximity to the Las Vegas Strip, and a (45-minute drive/ride from my home) location in Rancho Cucamonga. I'm looking forward to this HSR possibly expanding my somewhat-local entertainment/vacation options.
@@UberSpriteit is ill considered and thus pulp. if you fail to consider the cost of continuing as is, you failed intellectually.
A better approach might be to keep the lines in public ownership, but train operators remain private and pay for each train mile on those lines. It's sort of how the UK works where the individual franchises are auctioned off to train operating companies.
I think high speed intercity trains would make a lot of sense. Any journey that can be flown in under two hours should have a train option.
European open model is ideal. Public unified rail networks with non-exclusive open slots for operators to bid on like airports now do in the USA for gates! That allows budget operators and luxury planes and trains in Europe to use the same terminals! And allowing open competition for all budgets and economic classes from fares under $10 Euro on Ouigo to full line luxury HSR on any number of other operators...
I have 3 comments.
1. My wife cannot fly because she is wheelchair bound. (Try to imagine someone who can’t walk using an airplane bathroom.) But we have taken a coast to coast train trip.
2. I wish that Amtrak had established the Auto Train from east to west. It is very popular going north to south.
3. I live in the D.C. area. My brother lives in San Francisco. A robotaxi won’t get me to see him.
I spent 1973-1974 backpacking around europe and north africa. Had a eurail pass for long distances. More important than speed are convenience and reliability, and most european trains excelled. Amtrack fails - sometimes hours late often due to
freight train interference, track repairs or slowdown orders. I still enjoy train rides.
Ironic that Amtrak and US passenger trains have IN THEORY the right of way but in reality is never exercised...
@@stickynorth freight rail companies just make their trains so long that they don't fit into sidings (or the sidings too short, which has the same effect), so "unfortunately" the only available option is to make the passenger train wait...
I have family that works on the railroad in the Midwest. To blank statement that our railroad is not properly maintained is a slap in the face. The issue here with derailed trains is not the maintenance it is the railroad companies overloading the system to gain more profit. Also you used a metric of people killed per railroad KM... most of our rail is for shipping of freight and they share the same tracks as passengers in most cases.
Perhaps high-speed rail should connect major airport hubs to augment traveler options. I live a few miles from proposed (and contentious) Brightline station. I'm at a loss as to how often I would benefit from getting to another town without my own transportation at the destination.
The stops all make sense when you realize Brightline is a real estate play as much as a railway. All the station sites were picked to make money as real estate Transit Oriented Developments... In Japan and Hong Kong they are vertical ones... Here they are suburban lifestyle centre ones because you people don't like skyscrapers...
Las Vegas and Rancho will be huge sprawling retail, hotel office and residential districts and they will make their investments back here. Ditto for Hesperia and Victor Valley, the last one is out of town since that's where the OEM/train barns will be built and just north of the future Palmdale connector. Makes perfect sense to me!
What a coincidental timing of this video, day after I rode Al Boraq (fastest train in Africa, from Casablanca to Tangier Morocco, 199mph max speed)
This video clearly dropped in advance of tomorrow and the orange turd returning. This seems like a "Kiss the Ring" video if I ever saw one... Like TYT or MSNBC's Morning Show from Mar-A-Lago... really gross
A cultural failure to maintain while never investing beyond the next quarter for profitability. That can't be good for anything.
That is good for everything, that's what you owe all your prosperity to.
@@Fufu-o8i correction: every _US_ company (and probably not even that is true).
To find the best routes for high speed rail you need to look at cities that are somewhat close (lets say less than 200 miles) where there are lots of daily flights. That 200 miles is the sweet spot where it would be faster for high speed rail.
What bothers me most about your perspective is the acceptance of the USA's utter failure to maintain its infrastructure. That, there, is the primary attitude that will continue to be the degradation of this country. You hit the nail square on the head. Japan has true pride in their HSR and all public works systems. The USA lost that true pride a long time ago. Sadly, it was sold for profit by corporate America and outside investors who want to see the one time giant fall.
Yes. The US needs intra and interstate high-speed rail. There is every reason to have it and give all citizens, residents, and visitors the simple opportunity to freely travel the country.
The gov't controls and manages the air traffic infrastructure. Gov't should own and manage the tracks, too; it's a national concern. All the accidents are because private enterprise isn't adequately investing and maintaining tracks.
Mentioning the Chinese rail system without context of how it was all built on debt, where thousands of miles of lines are basically never used because there's not even remotely close to enough passengers, and how it was all built to boost GDP, is so intellectually dishonest.
Ditto for the US INTERSTATE... How was it paid for? And what it for? Moving military equipment in case of war and cars in the mean time. And it was and remains the most heavily subsidized project in US history... And never made $1 in profit...
That's just completely false, you have not been there so obviously have no idea. China does more train travel in a week than US do in a year..
@ You are correct, but there are still thousands of miles of track that do not meet the minimum number of passengers to be economically viable. Some of the tracks are used very frequently and are a solid investment, but because China only cares about GDP and keeping people employed, they kept building new rail lines to effectively no where. Don’t even get me started on the Xiong'an New Area train station. It’s a colossal train station located in a ghost city. Everything China builds is a scam.
12:15 yeah rail friendly… that was part losing a war. and a lot to rebuild.
A high speed rail with level crossings is insane. The Las Vegas line has the right idea. Follow the highway. Less private landowners to extort money out of the project and drivers get a constant reminder of how much faster it is. Maintain the rail in parallel with the same management and budget as the highway.
California politics is brain dead because they tried to please everyone along an arcane route after it got pulled in all sorts of directions by special interests that will mean it gets nowhere and ends up a total waste.
The Brightline section with level crossings isn't even close to "high speed rail". Trains are only running at 80-100 mph there. Everywhere else in the world crossings with 100 mph lines work perfectly fine.
I think it breaks down to where the US has lots of rail lines and where it doesn't. The abandonments of the deregulation area in the1970s to the 1990s went far beyond any reason, and left us with too much traffic chasing too little track, but this is very uneven around the country. In the west there's another thing going on, not a whole lot of track built in the first place. California makes sense for HSR because its rail network is tiny for its land area and population, it has grown enormously since it stopped adding rail lines in about the 1910s, and transport is severely congested there as a result. Conversely many parts of the Midwest could reopen routes closed during and after deregulation, and either use them for passenger rail or shift freight to those lines and use passenger separately. Another feature of US rail is how wide the rights of way often are; there's room to lay extra tracks. Yet another feature of US rail is how old-fashioned railroading practices are here in terms of integrating different types of train; modernizing these practices would add capacity. In the end, while California really does need additional new rail routes, it makes the most sense in most places to add and develop from what we have. Hit singles now, instead of trying to build political support for a home run that never arrives. Also it's kind of ironic how most of the highway stock footage is from other countries to illustrate a point about US car culture. Car culture is global. It's a weak excuse for not doing rail. And the video of decrepit rail at 8:00 is old footage of a branch line in Ohio that was recently completely rebuilt by state and federal grants, so you're missing some points there too.
I would ride a train every day just to never have to talk to a car salesman again.
well, you just replied to a car salesman
Car salesmen aren't bad to talk to when you have the money to pay 😂 if you have to haggle it's out of ur price range. Avg car being $60,000 doesn't help
May 1000 Jordan Neelys greet you on your trips.
In the US we have built an anti train culture with AMTRAK. Ironic and sad that the plan that was supposed to save passenger rail now is responsible for the low opinion and adoption rate. Most people in the US think of the poor substandard service of AMTRAK and never consider it over flying or driving. One trip to Europe and I now wish for high speed rail to NYC.
And yet Acela vs long distance is like comparing a Bentley and a Smart car and saying that they are the same. Nope. They have different purposes and designs...
Amtrak was designed to bail out the railroads losses on passenger rail. Politicians expected it to fail and be eliminated within a few years. The Northeast Corridor between NYC and DC carries more passengers than airplanes on the route. Acela is popular and overbooked due to limits on the number of daily trains that can travel through the tunnel to Manhattan.
JR Shinkansen yearly travel volume give or take is around 100 billion passenger-kilometers.
Chinese HSR yearly volume is over 1.6 trillion passenger-kilometers.
My thougts are, not that anyone asked, is to valuate a coast to coast hight speed rail system. I live in the southeast. I would certainly use a HSRS if it were connected say from Miami, to Atlanta, Birmingham, Dallas, Las Cruces, Phoneix, San Diego. Add an East Coast line to NYC. Connect the line running north south in California, in time add a northen line to connect NYC to Seattle, then you have something. HSRS only make sense if it would connect the coasts and the major cities in between. It does not make sense for a urban commuter rail system. Add freight to the system and now you are cooking with gas, or a lack of using gas (diesel). Trucking freight coast to coast takes about a week and is getting expensive. HSRS would be a boom for coast to coast freight adding cities in between. The boom in construction, maintenence systems, technology advancements, less highway deaths, makes sense to me. However, it would take an Apollo program like effort with federal and state goverments aligning. The US needs a major project like this to stimulate our national construction and transpostation technologies!
Disagree when you say high speed rail will not work because once you get to your destination, you still have to commute to your desired destination. Any time you travel, unless you take your own personal vehicle, you have to arrange additional transportation. So, that is not anything different.
The success of high-speed rail will come down to cost and convenience. If I can take high speed rail without all the additional fees airlines charge, I would take rail if possible.
The sorry state of US rail is a testament to American stupidity and short term thinking.
I am very disappointed in your lack of foresight and research into this topic.
One important fact to note is that at one time there were trains running in the US with average speeds of 80 mph or more.
These services were pulled by steam locomotives.
THEN they Drove one right into a museum in Philidelphia
Ah yes, back during the time where the only other modes of transport was by foot, horse carriage, or by ship.
@blackhole9961 Oh there were roads too and even the beginnings of highways.
There was also being able to walk to a train station because towns were built to be much more walkable.
There was a balance of options for getting around.
Rather than being wholly dependent on the automobile as we are now.
It worked before, it can work again.
It's just a choice the US has to make.
Do we want to sit in traffic for ages or do we want to fly by it all at 150 mph or more.
@ It was a different time and era before circa 1950s.
Cities/metropolitan areas in America aren't like that anymore as the bulk of them grew post ww2 with the car. They are too incredibly spread out and designed differently to make it feasible. American cities/metropolitan areas would quite literally have to double or triple their populations for them to actually be dense enough to support such systems. Imagine the Houston area with a population similar to shanghai instead of roughly 7 million.
Back then, yes, it was possible because cities were MUCH smaller and more compact because you HAD to get to places on foot, horse carriage, and trolley. Cars were practically in their infancy, and you had to be extremely rich to ride on a plane.
@blackhole9961 I agree with that. It was a different era back then.
As we have the benefit of examining history we can pick and choose what worked well and maybe try a new spin on it.
For example, people were able to get around without the car for centuries because their cities were built in such a way that that was possible.
The automobile and highways and roads definitely have their place, but they shouldnt be the only option for traveling. Neither should flying. The more options the merrier because if one goes in a particular region people can still get around.
It so happens that building railway lines and stations happens to result in an increase in density around those stations. And that's because of the convenience that a rail connection can afford to people.
Also there are certain distances between which neither flying nor driving make much sense.
By the time a person goes through security they could've been halfway there. Or, the drive is crazy long to where a person has to drive basically for a day to get there (say 10 to 12 hours)
Meanwhile a train has no long security line and can bring you exactly to the heart of where you need to go.
Passenger rail can work again in the US. It just requires some planning and thought to get back to that.
Not as a wholesale replacement to driving
Just as another option.
We share freight with amtrak, no one else does. You are thinking about the US with a California Centric view(6 yr backlog to get a solar grid connect permit & won't in Dallas/Houston). The population dense northeast is ripe. Amtrak makes money on that route as bad as they are. London Paris costs way more than a flight! NY trains and subway are the lifeblood, used by hundreds of thousands every day and we keep the prices so everyone can use them. So does London and Tokyo. Do you want to be in a self driving car San Diego to San Francisco? Has nothing to do with trains.
Having traveled on HSR in Europe, I can tell you all that the infrastructure is entirely different from what we have. Most of the lines have zero crossings with roads. Either the rail is on an overpass or road traffic is. So the trains can travel virtually without consequence of collision. Here in the USA virtually all lines run through crossings with road traffic, and we can see how smart that people are about that, with hundreds if not thousands of videos of cars, trucks and trains smashing each other up. The idea would be dead before it truly lives, and it wd be another slam against big government.
This also gives credence to the Ironlev idea and how it makes much more sense in Europe/Japan than it does in the US. The conventional rail infrastructure present is train-optimised. The solution in a car-culture country would be specially tailored to their infrastructure and concerns. Putting Ironlev high-speed trains on existing high-speed rail would be an interesting best of both worlds, whoever put it together creatively, maintenance being the other variable not discussed yet. Europe, S. Korea and Japan seem consistently motivated with that type of long-term investment though.
The solution is very simple but nobody wants to finance it. UPGRADE the intersections to FRA LEVEL 7 STATUS which means 125 mph/200 km/h service with impenetrable barriers... France uses them on its secondary TGV routes that run at 200-240 km/h. Same TGV Duplex rolling stock, just running on slower local lines... That would be the same equivalent as the existing Brighline Florida line which in fact was what founded Miami and Florida if anyone bothered to read Wikipedia for 5 minutes before complaining about the dang railway... Not the commenters like you or I but this deranged GOP tilting host!
We need more high speed rail, not less. It isn't great everywhere, but the North East corridor, the Texas Triangle, California/Las Vegas, the Northwest, Florida. All of these make lots of sense.
I know Two Bit Da Vinci would rather focus on the high volume areas first in California, but California needs to spread out its people from the super dense and pricy LA / SF / SD areas.
I agree that the US has not invested on infrastructure outside of the IRA bill.
Yes, the rail has ongoing costs. But of course so do roads. Roads don't pay for themselves either...
Maybe two-bit wants a free Tesla?
We need more rail period in the West and Midwest. That's just as important, and more important than currently widening highways...
FIRST we need to stop building in la NyC chicago... Then we need to find all the rail towns put the tracks back (- not the haunted ones).. How, same way we did last time Call China
Basically Capitalism is why we can’t have nice things. Just say that. Why we have more deaths in train transport….capitalism.
Our health care system sucks….capitalism. Why our local transit systems suck….capitalism bought them all out after WW2 to make us a car centric culture.
Combine Capitalism with a huge part of our government…..GOP…..trying harder to privatize everything….capitalism……we can’t get anything right by only looking 3 months ahead and giving CEOs millions and billions for that short term thinking
Combine that with an already built up areas that we want to install it and all those jurisdictions.
What high speed rail in Japan has as many road crossing gates…..from regular roads….crossing the high speed rail.? Not something we usually see. It’s usually lifted up and out of that situation. All in an highly earthquake infested area.
The real issue is that we assume we need vehicles that weigh tons to move people that weigh 1 tenth or less. The ratio is similar for personal vehicles and shared vehicles. The reason the high speed trains are safe is that they largely eliminate any potential for human error, either by the driver or any third parties.
A system that could provide door to door trip time inside cities average close to 2 miles per minutes is possible, and could be built by 2030. For anywhere in LA to anywhere in Vegas the trip would take less than 90 minutes, door to door, and cost less than $10. It could be in place by 2030. The question is do we want to build it, not if it can be built.
High-speed rail makes sense when you have large cities close together, and especially if they are lined up, as in the North-East corridor, or to a lesser extent, in California. High-speed rail requires special tracks that are completely grade-separated and fenced-off if they are at ground level.
You are forgetting that almost all roads are publicly funded, and when comparing subsidies given to different modes of transport, you need to include the public funding of roads as a subsidy to car and truck transport.
One of the major advantages of rail, over cars and planes, is that it's the mode of transportation that deals best with the problem of congestion. As population increases and the economy grows, you need to build more lanes on highways, and expand airports by adding more terminals, and at some point it's no longer possible and congestion becomes a serious problem.
In the case of trains, however, an increase in passengers is often beneficial, because it means you can increase the frequency of service, which is an upgrade.
In brief, in the case of road or air traffic, an increase in users worsens the quality of service, but in the case of rail, an increase in the number of users can improve the quality of service. That is why high-speed rail is the future of transport, especially in corridors where you have multi-million population cities within 200 to 600 km of each other.
"There's gonna be some learning curves" shows video of someone plowing through the train barrier
8:58 Brightline, and U.S. rail in general, has the liability of at-grade crossings, leading to drivers w/bad judgment, pedestrian trespassers, some intentional deaths😕 Oh, and freight rail not yielding priority
Especially Brightline Florida since that line is why Miami exists in the first place. Did he not know this? That's like blaming indigenous-American's tipi's blocking the Oregon trail. One was clearly here first!
In every other country in the world level crossings at 100 mph lines (like the fastest sections of Brightline that have crossings) work perfectly fine...
Even getting the slow train from New York to Boston a couple of years ago was a lovely experience. As a tourist I got an air conditioned seat with wifi and leg room - didn’t have to worry about insurance, navigation, parking, vehicle return. Bloody awesome. Dropped me a 10 min walk from the hotel. Cheap for a family of four as well.
Same problems here in Australia btw missed the boat 50 years ago to put rail in. Just too expensive now.
High speed rail would still beat flights anytime. If the cost per mile is too great china or japan can do it. Induced demand reversal from roads to trains will definitely increase ridership for towns with even 10k people. Robo taxis will be a private initiative and don't expect that the prices will ever go down. There are trains for cars and trucks too so you can then roll out from a station.
The only thing stopping this is lack of political will. You won't need government spending for paying partially for your ticket like the airlines instead the ticket of the train will be much cheaper and the will still be profitable.
Today's private freight rail system is actually very well maintained.The clickety-clack has been replaced by welded rail, busy stretches are double and triple tracked for efficiency, etc. Look into it.
Love our cars is a real stretch for many people. It is a necessity when you have two people in a household that both need to work, then they both need to car to get to work in many areas. I would love to take the bus to work, but the service just isn't there.
Culture can change quickly. I don’t think that is an issue. I took a job a few years ago in a city with pretty good public transportation. I do not miss driving at all. I do not even own a car. The issue that Ricky raises with serious implications is the city design and planning one. This is an issue not only for transportation, but also for many other urgent environmental concerns, be it fire, water, or climate change-change related problems.
I have used Amtrak successfully for some travel, but it is slow and has zero coverage for this large country. It is much less stressful than air travel, when one can use it.
Love how he makes the N700 8 car train example but Japan runs 14 to 16 car trains on the busiest lines which basically doubles the stat that he presented
Yes, Obama invested $2.4 billion in high speed rail in the form of a true high speed train between Tampa and Orlando a.k.a. the I4 corridor, the most dangerous interstate highway in America. The feds were paying 100% of this rail system and any operating costs for the next 20 years. I happen to go to the event in Tampa when Obama came to town to announce it. But then our governor, the brilliant Rick Scott decided to reject the funds and the rail project. The reason Florida might be on the hook for cost after the 20 year period is up lol. What he really wanted to do is give Obama a big FU just after he just won the election in 2008! So sad it now takes hours to get just down the road to Orlando and so many people are killed every year on I4 between Tampa and Orlando.
one approach might be to first of all focus upon creating good metro systems within cities - weaning people off cars and enabling better connectivity for future high speed rail systems. Like a hub and spoke model.
America CAN build HSR and your excuses were just that. Barely 20 years ago China had ZERO HSR so your upload is an indictment of America's capacity to improve a second class rail network.
@@remakeit2628 it’s a question of economics. And it’s just not there.
@ultrastoat3298 Bullshit.
HSR in JAPAN is actually more expensive than flying AND slower. Yet Japan's HSR is promoted as the best.
There are more train stations than airports, so HSR is easier to get to than our airports here in Japan. I‘m 20 mins from a Shinkansen station, 80 mins from an airport, so much prefer the no-stress train trip. Reporting from Kyoto.
@@remakeit2628 JR went bankrupt building out the Shinkansen network. The government transferred all the debts to the public books, split up JR into regional railway companies, and privatized the lot. That is why Japan's HSR stopped bleeding red ink. Their government paid for building the lines with public debt.
We have a choice. Do we spend hundreds of billions building a new rail network? Or do we need 9 more supercarriers to go threaten China and force them to do what we want.
@@researchcooperative You made the case for trains that America could also adopt.