A big factor in favor of using a car to travel between cities within a half-day drive is that you often need a car at your destination (car rental adds expense and is often time-consuming). The fact that most visitors to Vegas, NYC, and DC do not need a car favors high speed trains to those cities.
Yeah, it really seems like the northeast corridor has everything in its favor for a ton of high speed rail investment. Dense, walkable cities, large economies, a straight path, lots of travel demand, etc
@@CityNerd That's because so many from SD/LA and Phoenix drive there. If you aren't hopping on a plane you drive there, park your car at your hotel, and don't touch it until you're heading back home.
@@CityNerd it seems if a person doesn’t use a car when they’re in Vegas, then they’re wasting their money to have a car there. I’m talking in general but not necessarily you.
I really think that you need to include foreign cities that are already highly connected to US cities in your analysis. The Portland-Seattle-Vancouver BC corridor for example. There is already a lot of travel between these three cities but the car is not ideal because they all have pretty bad rush hour traffic. Plus train routes to/from Vancouver would have a huge advantage if customs could be done en-route which would save a huge amount of time as border waits can easily be a half hour to an hour during the busiest times. The other missing piece is whether the very existence of high-speed rail might radically increase trips between city pairs. We love to go from Seattle to Vancouver for example but the 3 to 3 1/2 hour drive each way doesn't make it very practical for day trips. Get that under 2 hours each way though and we might go from 1-2 trips a year to 1 a month, why not?
Good points. I do think research shows (and it's intuitive, too) that the addition of a HSR connection that offers shorter travel times than any existing mode has an induced demand effect...the GOOD kind of induced demand! I personally think Seattle-Vancouver should be built, especially if you can solve the customs/border security issue, but as far as my analysis, the SEA-VAN pair doesn't really rate differently from SEA-PDX, and that one didn't make the top ten. As far as PDX-VAN...I would probably take it for fun, but it is REALLY hard to beat the quick flight from PDX to YVR with the SkyTrain connection they have (and the MAX on the Portland end...I guess). More on that in my next video, by the way, due out this weekend. Thanks for the great comment!
The biggest issues are the suburbs and Portland, OR. Portland in particular has fought off infrastructure - not just road, but even rail. (Look at Cascades Service - which already serves this area.) International border cities - see Seattle/Vancouver or even Detroit/Toronto, and San Diego/Tijuana, Mexico. Most folks looking at the hunger for HSR in Europe is due to intra-European air travel is bad/bad/bad - despite that it (air travel) is almost as subsidized as rail travel is. Further, liberals DEMONIZED passenger rail in the post-WW II era in the US - and it has taken over fifty years to get rid of that - and two decades since the end of the Vietnam War. Lastly, the rail network in Europe was bombed to dustbunnies during World Wars I and II - the US was untouched by war on the other hand. (It's easier to NOT invest in infrastructure than to invest in infrastructure.) SEPTA - the Southeastern Pennsylvania Passenger Transportation Authority - inherited multiple rail lines largely built by two companies - the Reading Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad - both based in Philadelphia ; both were founded before the Civil War. (Both were primarily freight railroads.) Intra-European passenger rail travel is - literally - the alternative to intra-European air travel - which is not just a mess, but pricey, pricey, pricey - despite it ALSO being as subsidized as rail travel is. The distances are comparable to intra-US (interstate) air travel - which is NOT subsidized in the US that it is in Europe. The top five European air carriers are ALL government-owned and operated, even though two (Emirates and QATAR Airways) - are not based in Europe. And blaming Big Oil - do you belong to a union, work for the government, or are a retiree from either? Take a big swig of Pepto - you are, in fact, part of the problem - most stock in the top US petrochemical companies is owned by pension plans - with those of unions and government employees leading the way. (And that is BEFORE Kemp-Roth and the Thrift Savings Plan brought US government employees and retirees into the mix.)
I personally know multiple cross border families here in Seattle that probably would use HST as they do use the current train usually for a kid that cannot yet drive and I personally could see myself using HST for a quick weekend visit to stay at a hotel, eat at some nice restaurants but overall the issue is that to fund HST you need proper work week travelers and not just weekend leisure travelers like us. Also, I think you traveled during a holiday weekend which would match your description but if you travel to Vancouver during a work week or on a non holiday weekend or not during summer break it is usually pretty fast and traffic free 2.5 hour drive. I do have the NEXUS card so I do not even stop at the border just go right through. Also, many people that travel from Seattle are going on to other areas, up to the mountains, to Whistler to ski and they are just not going to be taking a train. Even myself I have gone with an RV and you can't exchange that for a train obviously. Overall it would be nice to have HST and doing it today would save the cost of doing it in the future if not be impossible but it is complicated for sure.
@A. Selim Katar You don't have to show passports at the US-Canada border if you have the NEXUS card like I have. I just drive through, it scans the card, and I keep driving. It is like a toll system but instead for money it is for Identity.
My wife and I took the TGV from Turin to Paris a few years ago. My first "real" train trip. I will never forget the experience of getting off near the front of the train (first class) and walking to the exit no more than 200' away and stepping out into downtown Paris. No taxi or shuttle required. I am looking forward very much to the completion of Brightline West in the next few years. The drive from Vegas to the basin is ridiculous. 90 mph and often bumper to bumper, or 0 mph out in the middle of nowhere stopped for reasons unknown. Crazy.
I've taken the TGV from Paris to Amsterdam and back a few times. It was a revelation. From central Paris to central Amsterdam in 3.5 hours. Just show up at the station about 20 minutes before the train departs - no messing around with all the airline craziness.
I will contrast that to my experience on Amtrak from Chicago to LA. Took two days. We were stuck in our compartment because the entire train smelled of dense cigarette smoke coming from one quarter of one car. Couldn’t stand to sit in the lounge or the dome car. Rude is the only way to characterize the service in the dining car. Made me an Amtrak hater.
This video needs more love. The US has maybe 6 separate geographic regions that could support an HSR network. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that just because the networks make sense on their own therefore connecting them together also makes sense. It doesn't. Unfortunately, discussion of an unnecessary and kinda silly coast to coast network steals oxygen from discussions about the actually needed and eminently feasible regional HSR networks that should be the focus. Which is sad.
You've kind of nailed the thesis of this video! When people talk about HSR, they often talk about "network effects," as if the more stuff you connect to it, the more value it has, as if it was a social media brand or a ride hailing app -- or a city transit network. I don't think HSR works like this. I think HSR has to primarily be about connecting high demand city pairs that are in a sweet spot of distance where HSR is clearly competitive -- or event dominant -- compared to the other possible travel choices. That's the backbone, and then if you want to have tradeoff discussions about intermediate stops or extensions to smaller cities, then it's a second level of analysis. I also think there's a natural human tendency to want to "connect the dots," which is why you see all the ridiculous maps floating around that connect, like, LA to Chicago through Denver. Resist!
@@pmickeyny6002 True but that doesn't mean you can't start somewhere. Who's to say Dallas and Houston won't build extensive subways one day despite their city lay out. It is still possible.
@@CityNerd So, as a middle ground between these networkists and those who think HSR should only be where it's competitive, would building an entire network, but only selling tickets between the city pairs be an even remotely viable solution?
@@pmickeyny6002 You'd have a parking lot or a car rental place at the station, just like how airports work. HSR is typically used by business travelers, not tourists, since it's generally more expensive than planes (which is why it has to be faster in order to make sense)
@@CityNerd HSR is to local public transit as the UCI World Tour is to the domestic road racing scene, sort of. World Tour races have had trouble sustaining themselves in the US because we haven't bothered to build up a really robust domestic road racing scene, so there isn't the interest, either from fans or local sponsors. Similarly, HSR won't reach its full potential until it can connect really good local public transport networks. Of course, part of the reason we don't have a really robust domestic racing scene is because not enough people bike, and the reason for that has a lot to do with car-dependent infrastructure. So I guess in a way it's all connected.
Chicago (10 million people) to Minneapolis-St. Paul (4.1 million people in the CSA but the fastest growing major city in the Midwest BY FAR and the 2nd largest economy in the Midwest even as Metro Detroit has more people) needs to happen. There are several medium-sized metro areas in between Minneapolis and Chicago, notably Madison, WI and Milwaukee with quick branches off the route that would make sense (especially Rochester, MN due to the Mayo Clinic, which is an international destination for health tourism and biomedical research). Amtrak does have plans to introduce higher-speed rail between Minneapolis and Rochester for this reason, and the (woefully inadequate) $787 billion stimulus package passed in 2009 did actually allocate money to build high-speed rail between Minneapolis and Chicago, as it has been a priority route for intercity rail improvement for decades, but the right-wing extremist former governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, used his gubernatorial power to stop any sort of high-speed rail construction from taking place through Wisconsin, which is the only way such a route would ever make sense. Considering the massive amount of intracity transit infrastructure and walkable neighborhoods in Chicago, and the rapidly expanding public transportation network in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area combined with a greater level of walkability in the Twin Cities urban core as compared with most other large Midwestern cities, once a passenger steps off the high-speed train, it would be quite easy to go to other destinations without car rental or taxi. Obviously the Northeast Corridor should be the #1 priority by a mile, but there are certain corridors which for various reasons just make a lot of sense to construct. Minneapolis-Chicago HSR is one of those both in terms of economic connections, travel demand, and the urban landscape within these respective metropolitan areas.
The Twin Cities is likely a location to benefit more from regional rail, connecting more places, but at a slower speed with more stops in county centers between areas of a decent population: Fargo, Sioux Falls, Des Moines, Duluth, Madison, etc. The challenge with anyone traveling out of the TC’s is how to get around once you arrive. A car is almost all but required unless you are visiting the central part of the town/city. I really would like to see something for the region, having grown up there and traveling between the TC’s and Fargo for school for 6 years, but it’s going to take a different solution; probably more like the regional airport subsidy program by a hub passenger fee. Denver, my current city, is fairly similar, except that it would be passed through between LA and Chicago, which isn’t really the most likely connection, being so far, but connecting the intermediate cities is why the route makes sense. The Twin Cities suffer from being isolated despite being a major regional center.
As a Milwaukean I agree with the need for a high speed rail route for Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison and Minneapolis. Let’s call it the Milwaukee Road ;). We may not have as well developed public transit as Minneapolis, but we do have one of the densest and most walkable urban cores in the country in addition to the most used rail corridor in the Midwest (the Hiawatha.) The potential here is huge.
As someone going to visit Madison for the first time, I noticed, while planning my trip via air that HSR would be a great option to have. I'd like to make a combined trip to Minneapolis (already done Chicago) without a car.
Rochester MN also especially makes sense because of the high number of patients traveling to the Mayo Clinic (3 million per year, apparently), many of whom would not have cars, and would benefit a lot from being able to take a train (especially from an international airport like Minneapolis)
I'm especially fond of the Chicago (hometown) to Detroit (birthplace) connection; my heritage, but I would never think to route it via Toledo which would miss the two really popular intermediate stations - Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor. Big college crowds use this service.
Yeah, point taken -- the routing question is a bit tricky, of course, because you want to be able to branch to Cleveland efficiently. Totally beyond the scope of what I wanted to look at here, but super interesting.
@@CityNerd I’d suggest a different route if you go through Toledo. There is a really straight long stretch of existing rail ROW (single-tracked, but that can be fixed) between Gary and Fort Wayne Indiana that would help enable a comfortable speedy rail route. You can connect from Fort Wayne to Toledo. Plus, such a route not only allows you to branch out to Cleveland, but also have a branch going from Fort Wayne to Columbus (connecting Columbus and Chicago)z
1. I would point out that this train line through Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo already exists it just isn't high speed, but they are working on changing it to moderate speed like 150 or so. 2. You also have to consider the political requirements. Indiana and Ohio have to sign off on it going through Toledo. Indiana would own part of the rail no matter what. 3. Michigan needs north south lines in general. All the passenger lines are east west lines to and from Chicago. A Detroit to Toledo line is needed high speed or not. 4. The Midwest in general could use a lot of connections.
Yeah, and then in the future Detroit could be connected to the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, which is probably the best candidate for HSR in Canada. The VIA Rail service is already pretty good, but it could be sped up quite a bit and better integrated with US rail. There's no easy way to cross the border without a car.
As a Floridian I happen to think Brightline will do well if they keep their Ticket prices within reason. There is a lot of daily traffic between Orlando & Miami. The traffic on I-95 in Southeast Florida is a absolute nightmare nowadays. As for the street crossings Brightline has the right of way and of course a grade separated track would be optimal.
My top 5 suggestions would be Atlanta to Charlotte with a possible extension to Raleigh/Durham in the east and to Birmingham in the west. This would be vital due to rapid population growth in the Sun Belt. Secondly, Milwaukee to Nashville in sections and stations in Chicago, Lafayette, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Bowling Green. It would make a branch to Ohio (Cincinnati and Columbus) an obvious future option. Thirdly, Phoenix to Tucson. Fourth would be the Dallas-Fort Worth-Waco-Austin-San Antonio line with the branch to Houston via College Station as an obvious future expansion. And finally the fifth. Washington DC or Philadelphia to Cleveland via Pittsburgh. I personally prefer the latter one because it would allow stations at Harrisburg, State College, Altoona, and Youngstown OH being built.
@@CityNerd Thanks. I think some details should copied from China, Taiwan and Europe where lines don't only link two or three cities but many. All passengers don't travel all the way from Milwaukee to Nashville but take a train between Louisville and Indianapolis only. There are very long lines in Germany for instance that connect several cities between Hamburg and Munich. In a long run these lines could be easily linked with each other to make a proper network: Atlanta to Nasville via Chattanooga, Raleigh to Washington DC via Richmond and so on.
I’m from Youngstown. The problem with providing rail service is that the existing Amtrak line between Cleveland and Pittsburgh stops in Alliance, OH, which is a 45 minute drive from downtown. This can be fixed by building a station in Youngstown along the NS line run through the city, but I doubt politicians would like the cost of building station in a declining area
I would expand your Piedmont corridor to go all the way from Atlanta to Washington, connecting Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Richmond along the way. ATL>CLT is 226. CLT>GSO is 83 GSO>RAL is 67. RDU>RIC is 139 and RIC>WDC is 96. Anchored by 2, 6M+ metros on either end, the corridor has two very rapidly growing 2-3M metros in Charlotte and Raleigh, and 2 growing metros between 1-2M in Greensboro/Winston-Salem and Richmond. Pinpointing the two very rapidly growing metros along the total route breaks up the corridor into 3 more rail length segments of 226, 150, and 238 miles. By the time that this could reasonably be expected to be complete, both Charlotte and Raleigh will likely anchor combined metros that are closer to 3-4 million people. By that time, this corridor will really make sense.
Yep. Problem is, the first leg for this needs to be Seattle to Alaska. Another option to move soldiers and equipment to an easily-invadable region quickly needs addressed.
@@xoxxobob61 Think about it. Russia and/or China could invade Alaska and go after the oil there. If they shut off the Big Inch, we're screwed. A fast way to get troops and equipment to Alaska is critical. Current rail to Alaska is slow, boat isn't faster and air risk reprisals.
Because HSR stations are typically built in a central location they typically can’t accommodate a lot of parking like an airport does, and nor is it the goal to have everyone drive to it as that would defeat the goal of reducing traffic. So how big the existing public transit system is in a given city should be taken into account as well as how densely packed the city is within a couple mile radius around the station to account for pedestrians and bike riders. So using CSA figures is a bit of a stretch, and their current public transit ridership share should definitely be taken into account. So some of these sound great until you realize only like 5% of people in just the city of Dallas commute by public transit. Whereas a much smaller city like Seattle has a much higher ridership at 20%. Of course the concept “build it and they will come” comes into play, but HSR will really only make sense if the local infrastructure deals with the last mile trip as in the NE corridor.
You have raised some excellent points for consideration in a city such as Dallas or Houston. Both cities need to expand mass transit for access to the HSR stations. This means city planning that is far less accommodating for cars such as separated and protected large bicycle lanes, separate mass transit lanes for busses or separate protected right of ways for electric trams, higher costs for owning a car in the city. If everyone is using a car then there will always be traffic jams. No matter how many more roads or how wide that are constructed they are not enough for all the vehicle traffic.
You can build "park and ride" stations on the freeway on the outside of a city. People can then use it to commute into the city or travel to the next city.
The issue with park-and-ride is that your car is parked at the source, so you have no car at the destination no matter how big the parking lot is there. Whatever the traveler intends to do at the destination city needs to be feasible without a car if you want significant ridership. Las Vegas, for example, is low hanging fruit for HSR, not because it has great public transportation but because the vast majority of the travelers do not need a car for their intended activities. LA to Vegas should absolutely be the first US implementation because it would actually be profitable. Phoenix to Vegas would also be a good project because there is no interstate to compete with,
Tourists would probably use rideshare or rent a car while the public transportation network builds up. As for Las Vegas, you might not need a car if you stay on The Strip, but a lot of people would be interested in the surrounding area such as the national/state parks, Hoover Dam, etc. so those people will want a car anyway. It's easy to use a car in Vegas because the Strip properties all have some kind of free parking garage or lot.
Kansas City - St. Louis 248 miles St. Louis - Nashville 309 miles Nashville - Atlanta 248 miles Atlanta - Charlotte 245 miles Cincinnati - Cleveland 249 miles Cincinnati - Pittsburgh 289 miles Pittsburgh - Buffalo 219 miles Minneapolis - Milwaukee 337 miles So much untapped rail corridor potential. Love your channel, going back and binging your content from before I found your channel.
As an LA resident, a high speed rail line to Phoenix would be even more useful than the current SF one being built. Lots of business travelers fly to Phoenix since it's such an important hub. A high speed rail line would greatly reduce plane trips and allow the smaller regional airports (Santa Ana, Burbank, Ontario, Long Beach, Lancaster) to have more flights to further destinations that would be impractical to have high speed rail to (Denver, Salt Lake, Portland, Dallas). Regarding high speed rail to Vegas, the rail would need to terminate at LA Union Station. If not, it'll be impractical and unconnected. The current plan for a high speed rail between Apple Valley and Vegas is dumb. No one but the most diehard train fans will drive 1/3 of the way to Vegas only to hop onto a train. The current proposed high speed rail line would probably work better as a high speed freight line, like in Italy.
They're talking about extending it down to Ontario (well, Rancho Cucamonga at least) now, which would be a heck of a lot more useful than ending it in Victorville, but still not great. And just as with the state's project they're way too optimistic on costs. I'm sure the price tag will at least double.
How is Phoenix an important business hub? And with the rail link between Vegas and LA, I wonder if Brightline has plans to eventually extend it to LA Union Station.
@@grahamturner2640 It's a major airport hub. Those trying to get to DC or Dallas or NYC from the regional airports in Southern California (Long Beach, Burbank, OC (John Wayne), Ontario, Palmdale) often transfer in Phoenix. High speed rail has the potential to remove some of those airport trips and have people take a train to Phoenix instead. Phoenix is seeing lots of job and population growth, so expect travel demand between LA and Phoenix to grow. I also think it makes sense from a geography standpoint. LA and Phoenix are in the distance good enough for high ridership high speed rail, while SF to LA is a bit too far.
The reason why they are saying from Victorville to Las Vegas, it is to start to eventually take it to Los Angeles. There is too much city infrastructure and legal issues. Between Victorville and Vegas you only have to worry about Barstow and Baker, but mostly desert and clear sight lines. Tje plan is do it between Victorville and Vegas first, then do a line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Cities like Rancho Cucamonga are down the Cajon Pass which would make the completion longer, ore expensive, and less likely.
I wonder how a Pittsburgh-DC or Pittsburgh-Philidelphia route would do. It would be nice to have that connection... but because of the mountains, HSR may be quite difficult here. But if Japan could connect Tohoku and Hokkaido to Tokyo through mountains, it is possible in the US.
Japan's new HSR line, the Central Shinkansen, is a maglev line blasting right through the central mountains of Honshu with 90% of its route tunneled. And they are planning to begin commercial service between Tokyo and Nagoya by 2027. If they can do it, the Appalachian Range of the eastern US shouldn't be a problem.
One thing about that though, it's hella expensive to make it below the ground and it'll take a lot longer time to build too. That's why the new Chuo Line for the Maglev Shinkansen is taking a lot longer time to get built than normal. Cuz it's pretty much almost all of them are tunnels.
So the geology isn't actually that bad. The Ridge-&-Valley Applachians are all individually only a mile or 2 wide at the base, & so if you pick the spot right you could cross them in a straight shot while climbing up to the elevation of the Allegheny Plateau with 8-12 total tunnels, each less than 2 miles long, & w/ grades less than 3%. The tricky part is you'd probably need some significant earthworks once you get into the Allegheny Plateau b/c the topography's so irregular, & you might need a base tunnel to cross the escarpment b/w the Plateau & the Ridge-&-Valley province. But honestly, land acquisition will probably be a bigger cost barrier than the tunneling. Also for a tiny additional marginal cost you could totally build a short spur from wherever the easternmost tunnel starts to turn northeast & connect to Harrisburg, so trains from NYC & Philly could still run over the Keystone Corridor & get all the benefits of the new high-speed connection through the mountains to Pittsburgh.
Zurich-Milan is a similar distance with the Alps in between. The train stops 7 times and the total travel duration is 3hr 17 min. The Alps were already tunneled by train in 1882. A new high speed rail tunnel operates since 2016.
Already have a rails to trails bike trail connecting pgh and Dc. It’s antidotal but lots of ppl from Pittsburgh moved to DC in the 70s and 80s: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Allegheny_Passage
As a Detroiter, I'm glad you mentioned the Chicago to Detroit corridor. The Wolverine is already mostly owned by MDOT and Amtrak, and substantial improvements are being made, albeit slowly. However, I wouldn't draw out your map to include Toledo since that's not how the corridor is, and it's very doubtful that it would be realigned. BUT I could see a Toledo to Detroit (or Dearborn) service, where you could then connect to the Wolverine. And then connect to Ohio cities. I absolutely love taking that train, and they're about to put their new Venture cars into service. It will pretty much mimic Brightline, which is neat. And the line is already mostly 110mph. I just wish they would speed up the double-tracking. And would it kill them to electrify it and have a few less stops??
The stops on the Wolverine make a mockery of high speed. I mean, how often do people really want to go to Niles? But the stops are in place for political, not economic reasons, dating back to the 19th Century. Dropping 19th Century rules makes sense economically, but do you think there is a strong enough political movement to do so?
Loved this video! You have a new subscriber. I used your method to calculate the score for the existing high speed rail lines in Spain, and the results were... surprising. The highest score was Madrid to Barcelona with 3.22, followed by Valencia to Barcelona with 3.11 (this line is still under construction though), then Madrid to Valencia with 2.06 and Madrid to Seville with 1.10. Only these 4 routes have a score higher than 1, and all of them would've failed to make it to the top 10 in USA. The rest all have lower than 1, with some routes very close to zero (for example, Córdoba to Cádiz with 0.07 points, along with many more). This is surprising, because these scores would mean that building high speed rail lines in Spain wouldn't make much economical sense. But the reality is the opposite: all 3 of the operative lines that have a score above 1 that I mentioned (the ones I've tried) usually run full of people, and run more than 10 trains per day each direction. They're incredibly successful. Also, Spain has the 2nd longest HSR network in the world and is planning to expand it by a lot, so that obviously means that high speed rail works here. For reference: all of these lines operate at 300-310km/h, and prices usually range from 30€-90€ in normal days. The line from Madrid to Barcelona now has Ouigo trains which start at just 5€ and also run at 300km/h, so the demand has increased a lot and they plan on expanding to other lines soon: trains are only going to get better from here since there's finally competition. This (together with the fact that Paris-Lyon had a score of 3.8 despite being one of the most popular routes in France) raises the question, did you put the bar too high when selecting a "minimum" score for the video, and are all of these American routes incredibly good choices? (And there are a lot of other routes that would make sense that have a score far below 4?) Or is the European situation so different than in the US that, for whatever reason, building and operating high speed rail is much less worth it? Either because of subsidies, taxes, the general public's conception of trains or that people might move less from certain cities to others. For example, a city of 300k in Spain is about as important to the country as a city of 1M in the USA, so maybe that has something to do with it. There's also the argument that the formula you used, as you said, it's simple and not perfect, leaving a lot of aspects without consideration, so that obviously has an impact... but how big? Please don't take this as criticism or anything - as I said I loved this content - it's just a question that I'm asking myself and that I think would be interesting to see other, more qualified people's take on this.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! If you watch my Canada (Toronto to Montreal) high speed rail race, you'll see I actually spent a bit of time analyzing the Madrid -Barcelona AVE service as a comparison. I don't actually have a "threshold score" where I believe HSR should be built or not -- there are so many other variables, like cost (terrain between cities, for example), transit connections to city center, etc. Mostly, I wanted to make a Top 10 for the US, and demonstrate that there are even city pairs beyond the top ten that may have even more ridership potential than Paris-Lyon, which is widely regarded as a city pair with a long track record of commercially successful service. It's not at all to say that city pairs that score even lower can't also be successful! Spain has been really exceptional in how it's building out a network to serve the entire country. I don't think that's politically feasible in the US, but I at least wanted to list out the city pairs I think we should start with! Thanks again for the fantastic thoughtful comment.
What to me would be more important than "high speed" rail would be frequent, reliable service. If Amtrak could provide twice daily service on most of these corridors with priority over freight trains, that would be ideal.
@@LoveToday8 high speed PASSENGER rail would allow the class 1 freighters to run faster OR at least on better trackage and if we electrify then the cost savings to the class 1s BUT that requires the CLASS 1 to be "second class" on there own trackage and the SH$% service they run would be called in question
I heard in many places Amtrak doesn't own their own track, but in the Northeast corridor they do so it's successful. I think from another video there's a bridge that's a choke point that needs replacement there.
I completely agree on the need for a DC -> Pittsburgh high speed rail with bicycle access. The Amtrak took me 8 hours between these two cities, whereas driving is 4 hours. Its especially important since the two cities are connected by one of the best bike trails in the nation (C&O Canal and Great Allegheny Passage); having quick rail would really facilitate more use of that trail.
Easiest way to look for potential high speed rail: look for congested road/air corridors; sadly, I don’t have enough time to figure out how to do that right now… Frankly, though, the US should get back into public transport and see which lines get hopelessly overcrowded with express services and take those lines and build dedicated high speed express tracks like the initial Tokaido Shinkansen, iirc. and most successful network approaches since. If you just slap a „railport“ in the middle of the city, you likely won’t be seen as a real alternative to driving, but rather a slower airplane. If you want to get to the low end market, you’ll probably need a good feeder network in form of public transport in the cities to speed up the time to/from the station and be seen as a convenient enough yet fast alternative to the car…
I've actually analyzed the FAA data (publicly available from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics). It's a huge data set, so you need a fairly powerful tool for the analysis. Maybe I'll share some findings in a future video. Thanks for the comment!
I’m in favor of more extensive high speed rail in the NEC. They already have regional rail in the major cities: DC, Newark/Jersey City/Hoboken, NYC, New Haven, Boston. People there are used to train travel and would be more receptive to using high speed rail. These states are also high density areas so IMO a better chance at being profitable
I started flying in the early 70’s (the end of the gold age, I suppose?) and I would take a train over a flight if at all possible. I’m a bit of a train nerd anyway and love the comfort and ease of movement on a train. Also, having experienced wonderful European trains also tips train travel in its favor.
I'd love a SacramentoPortlandSeattleVancouver line! Was bummed to see it mocked in the intro. It makes sense as part of an eventual San Diego to Vancouver West coast line. Obviously it would make sense to get the LA to SF part done first, but there's no reason to stop at that. There will be more overall support for high speed rail if more metro areas are included.
Too many mountains + not large enough population centers + too far a distance. Vancouver to Seattle to Portland and possibly Eugene makes sense but the terrain in southern Oregon is just too rough and the travel time from Sacramento to Seattle wouldn't be competitive with air.
@@ZRodTW Tokyo has a population bigger than California, and the distance it had to travel to Osaka, with other major stops along the way, is much shorter than this proposed route. The economics of it are entirely different.
@@ZRodTW also Norway doesn't have high speed rail, Switzerland has a base tunnel but it's on a route that is absolutely tiny compared to this proposed Sacramento > Seattle route. London and Paris is also miniscule in comparison to the size of Seattle to Sacramento. These are all amazing achievements of engineering you're pointing out but Sacramento to Seattle is just another magnitude of difficulty, and it could be achieved but you would need the economic incentive to do so, which isn't there right now.
@@ZRodTW English channel and Japan are both much smaller distances and serve way more people. Yes tunnels exist, but it matters how far they go and how many people they serve.
Border lines definitely shouldn't be ignored. The most obvious high speed rail route in NA imo is Portland-Seattle-Vancouver. Vancouver is far more connected to seattle and Portland than the rest of canada and same can be said the other way around.
I live in Phoenix, so naturally Phoenix to Vegas, Phoenix is to LA, and Phoenix to San Diego is the dream. Obviously I think Phoenix to LA to San Diego is probably a more used route, it would still be a joy to use high speed rail and would probably amount to me taking more trips out there.
I visited LA from Detroit a few years back and thought it was insane when my dad told me it'd be cheapest for us to fly into Vegas and then rent a car. The waste inherent in it all is just so plain to see.
I saw a lot of comments on the importance of public transit in the cities in question, so I did some rough number crunching using city public transit usership instead of city population. Here are the routes I came up with: 1. Boston-New York-Newark-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington DC 2. San Francisco-San Jose-LA 3. New York-Rochester-Buffalo 4. New York-Stamford-Bridgeport-New Haven-Hartford-Providence-Boston 5. Twin Cities-Chicago 6. Chicago-Milwaukee 7. Chicago-St. Louis 8. Washington-Pittsburgh 9. New York-Cleveland This one surprised me. If they did make that line I think they should extend it through Toledo to Chicago. 10 would have been Philadelphia-Pittsburgh, but I feel like they wouldn't make that one if they already had DC-Pittsburgh LA had fairly low ridership, but three of the runners-up would have included LA (destinations being San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas)
One thing about line 3, the geographic natural path is more like: NYC - Albany - Syracuse - Rochester - Buffalo. (And at this point you may as well extend to Boston and pick up Springfield and Worcester) So maybe it would inspire Syracuse and Albany to get better public transit. I feel like this is definitely an ideal corridor/network to flesh out, especially as once the natural path is taken you get even more cities in the mix. (Natural path being not crossing mountains and instead following the valleys the Thruway takes)
LA to Las Vegas is a route I have driven many times and my kid did their undergrad thesis on why the death rate on the Barstow to Primm segment has a higher than expected death rate per lane mile than most other interstates. The problem I was told when I lived in the greater Los Angeles was getting a right of way from Victorville into central LA. Especially through the Cajon pass. Several times a Victorville to Las Vegas route was proposed and they would worry about getting into LA later. The problem being that there is almost no traffic to originate from Victorville. And by the time I drive from say my place in Orange County to Victorville, I had may as well just keep driving the rest of the way to Las Vegas. Because then I will still have the use of my car in Las Vegas. There is no way to make it pay unless they can build it initially with a huge park and ride in San Bernardino at first but eventually going out of Union Station or maybe Pasadena. Though it would likely be OK if speed was below 100 MPH until Victorville then 250MPH+ from there to Las Vegas. A big problem though is that the Cajon pass has the San Andreas pass going right through it. I know. I have stood right next to it. This makes any sort of tunneling or elevated line out of the question. But with the Union Pacific is already there with a multi track main line. One already bursting at the seams for the huge amount of traffic it carries from the port of LA/Long Beach. This limitation of geography seems to be insoluble for getting high speed fail through there. The whole LA region only has about 5 or 6 useful entrances/exits and they all have narrow choke points which are already heavily exploited.
When considering *any* pair that includes NYC, you have to factor in the issues of the bridge and tunnel choke points that make driving in or out of NYC such a pain. I kept a car in Manhattan for over 20 years, so I have a lot of experience with this. In 2019 I was a road warrior working off-site in a Baltimore suburb and driving was just awful. Approaching the city on Fridays was like playing Russian Roulette. Yes, there are lots of ways to get into Manhattan, but on any given trip, any one of them could clog up long after the choice was made (which had to be made on the New Jersey Turnpaike, surely the eighth circle of hell). In the end, I left my car in the hotel parking lot over the weekends, took an uber to where I could catch the bus and, at least, could sleep or read my way through the traffic nightmare.
I like the idea of a "Super Corridor". Take Washington to Boston as the starting point. Then add a southern HSR that is Washington-Richmond-Raleigh-Charlotte-Greenville-Atlanta-Birmignham. Have great airport connections for DCA (Washington), RDU (Raleigh), CLT (Charlotte) and ATL (Atlanta). The Brightline in Florida is already going to have an MCO (Orlando) station. Now, you have an intermodal HSR/air network that really works. I also like a Philadelphia-Harrisburg (or DC) - Pittsburgh-Cleveland-Detroit-Chicago link as well to tie in.
A little late to the video, but it definitely makes sense why the Dallas-Houston connection was farther down the list even though it hit the optimal criteria. I really hope that high-speed rail system finally gets built as those cities are expected to grow much more in the future.
Atlanta to Nashville by way of Chattanooga. If they designed it well with underground segments that emerged to parking garages close to the Atlanta and Nashville downtowns and easy access to the train for a stop in Chattanooga, then I think it would work better than expected. They could earn bonus points for ensuring access to a future stop in Murfreesboro. The CSAs along this route are 6.9 million, 1 million, and 2.1 million respectively.
Atlanta to Nashville has been proposed as a HSR line for years, but there are engineering difficulties with crossing the mountains that would make it time competitive with driving. The state of North Carolina is interested in extending the Piedmont to Asheville (and Wilmington), but the mountains decrease the efficiency of a train to Asheville.
ALL of these make sense. I used to live in Camas, WA - in a semi-rural house, basically across the river from Portland and up into the hills. Super car dependent. I’ve driven to/from Seattle (taxing). I’ve flown from PDX to SeaTac (expensive and inefficient, with significant drives on each end.) And I’ve taken the Amtrack Cascades line. It might take more time, but it’s inexpensive and like a vacation, compared to the other options. It’s okay that it takes more time, when the time is enjoyable. That said, for a Seahawks game with multiple people, it doesn’t pencil out. My wife and I did it for an anniversary, including an overnight in a nice hotel. Wonderful trip! But with a less intimate group, driving, parking near the airport (for free) and taking light rail downtown is the way to go. I’ve also done WDC to NYC (well, Newark), Tokyo to Osaka, and Tokyo to Utsunomiya. I feel that a lot of people in the US are clueless about the vacation feeling in a train. We need to build the LA/LV high speed rail and brand it as a party train. The vacation doesn’t start when you arrive in Vegas. It starts the moment the train leaves the platform!
toss in Vancouver and better yet add Whistler as a "cap" even if the whistler LEG is slower I grew up in Victoria and took the "CAT" to Seattle and "loved" to say I lived in a city with PUBLIC TRANSIT to 3 cities in 2 countries !! (transit to ferries that are public run and transit on other side )
I routinely drive from the outskirts of LA to Pheonix... it's is a massive pain, so I'm glad you gave it a mention. Where I am it's ~5 hr drive and like $40 in gas. Which blows the ~6hr and $120 from Ontario to PHX. There is a train (antrak, sunset limited) out here that instead takes ~8h and only has outbound trains a couple days a week. Despite that, it's nearly packed every time I look at it.
One thing that's unaddressed in this video -- future growth. Everything in the video is based on 2020 populations, but we'll be lucky to see ANY HSR come online before like 2040. LA and PHX are growing metro areas, and I'd expect that pair to eclipse others that are currently in front of it in the next 20 years.
Its not just $40 in gas - its $40 in wear and tear and $15 or so in insurance cost as well not to mention food along the way, water, coffee etc. That trip easily cost you $100 each way but you pay for the gas upfront and the rest over time.
I'm not used to such distances. I live in Czech Republic, it has some 500x300 km. There is probably about one domestic commercial flight available, between Prague and Ostrava. Other than that, you can cover pretty much everything with trains, altough we don't have a single kilometer of high speed railway. Max supported speed is 100 mph AFAIK. But one is planned.
Here's a tip traveling between Philly and NYC. I live in Philly and avoid Amtrak if going to NYC. I take Septa's Cornwell Heights Station "free parking, can leave the car for days" to Trenton $5.00, switch to NJTransit NEC line $17.00, total trip Philly to NYC $22.00. I've done this about a dozen times, never had a timing problem. Amtrak can cost anywhere from as low as $38.00 into the hundreds for the same trip, plus parking is crazy $$$$ at 30th St Station, especially if parking for multiple days. Although Amtrak straight through is usually 1hr15min, the Septa/NJTransit trip can be about 2hr15min if you can time it right. The addtl time seems worth it for the cost savings and convenience of not having to park at 30th St Station. Depending on where you live in Philly it can even make more sense to drive to Trenton and skip Septa altogether. I have taken Amtrak many times all along the NEC. Boston, Baltimore, DC. I've driven to all of these places as well. Much nicer to take the train. High Speed rail is a no brainer, someone needs to get it done.
Don't forget that the LGV-Sud Est was not built to connect Paris with Lyon, so much as to cut travel time to Marseille, Nice, and also Genoa and Geneva. The Tokaido Shinkansen connects dozens of cities in its 320 miles, not just Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka; it has stimulated development of many smaller cities over the last 40 years.
I think the Pittsburgh to DC line has promise. It doesn't appear to have the problem of dealing with building through "urban sprawl" like you cited was the plague of the Acela corridor. Ultimately, a big factor that is overlooked in your formula is the attraction of the city. As you point out when assessing LA to Las Vegas, Vegas is a very luring city. That seems key. I always thought linking Las Vegas to Anaheim (Disneyland) with a connection to Ontario Airport was a good high speed rail pairing.
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, a "problem" with DC to Pittsburgh is the topography in between, which would necessitate lots of bridges and tunnels that would (probably) make the line a lot more expensive per mile than, say, Chicago to Indianapolis. (Never mind that the Frecciarossa between Milan and Rome has tons of elevation change, not to mentionany number of Chinese lines, and Spain to an extent.) I definitely think my approach here underrates Vegas a bit, and I think the same of Orlando. Given how many connecting flights run between ATL and Orlando, you wonder how successful a nonstop high speed line could be if you ran it directly from Hartsfield (after a stop in downtown ATL, of course!). Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I know the cities are smaller, but I expected some variation of Memphis/Nashville/St. Louis because they all right in that 250-mile sweet spot. Or Nashville/Atlanta (though Atlanta is not small). A Memphis-Raleigh line via Nashville-Chattanooga-Atlanta-Upstate SC-Charlotte would be quite busy.
Kansas City to St Louis with a halfway stop in Columbia seems ideal since it’s 260 miles apart. It also connects Missouri’s two equal major cities that are otherwise set on opposite borders.
There has been official discussion in MO and KS legislatures that has looked at HSR between STL and KC - with extensions to Topeka and then on to Wichita. HSR could put KC and STL within 90 minutes of each other....possibly 60 minutes with an express line? Suddenly, you have a commutable distance that would help both cities. The question would be on of ridership volume to pay for the endeavor.
Worth doing a version of this for Mexico and Canada. Mexico in particular could be - with a ton of subsidization, since there's a disconnect between typical HSR fares and typical economic means for Mexican citizens - exceptionally well-served by HSR. You'd need to blast through some mountains, but CDMX is a near ideal hub for routes to Guadalajara (through Morelia), Léon (through Santiago de Querétaro), San Luis Potosí (also through Querétaro), and Oaxaca.
Montreal -> Toronto is a "famous" corridor and used to RUN turbine trains and the "400 series IS THE WORLDS largest hiway network and Detroit / upstate NY is a southern terminus with the NY ACELA corridor a "quick add on" that would bring tourists to Niagara falls
I think you car travel times are optimistic. For a shorter journey, 60 mph is probably good. But once you factor in stops, which many people do after 2 hours or so, the average drops a lot. Also, unless you are in a major hub city like Chicago, MSP, or Atlanta, direct flights don't happen. Plus it might take 2 or more hours to just get to any city with airline service. A lot of America could be served by a combination of standard rail and high speed rail. If you have a sweet spot of 300 miles, I think then the line should be longer to allow for a few intermediate stops. Like London Brussels Amsterdam or Paris. A route you missed is Chicago to STL, via Springfield, the state capital. Currently there is a LOT of Chicago to Springfield travel because of that. If you're building to Springfield, extending a bit to St Louis makes sense.
Car travel is hard to predict as on thr interstate you can go upto 80 and be mostly fine, you have to account for stops which some people might just power through (if you don't drink water you use the bathroom less, or you might eat things while driving instead of sitting down. Ironically on a shorter trip your more likely to "smell the roses" vs just get these 5hrs over with already) And of course the dreded traffic jam can make being near any city suddenly take an extra 30min-1hr. (Or crashes) parking lot interstates are painful. This is actually a win for the train in that if it has priority for all conflicts it will be a lot more consistent than a car trip. Although i notice that on "low roads" like the US Routes which are 1lane each way and 60 i almost never have slowdowns even if the road itself is noticably slower than the interstate, but that could just be that i don't drive on them near cities. I also believe trains are the most resistant to weather related issues of the 3.
I do think you overlooked Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison. Chicago-Milwaukee already received some of Amtrak’s highest ridership. Madison might not be large, but it’d be a much bigger draw than some larger cities for a number of reasons. A big reason is that it is a college town. One of the biggest obstacles to rail adaption is a population’s habitual use of other means of transit. College towns have the benefit of having a large group of part time residents (college students) that are new to the city, and therefore do not have any preexisting travel habits. I theorize that this means that college students are far more able to be persuaded to take the train than longtime residents of a city. Another reason is that Madison is a tourist destination. Another reason is that it is a capital city. A connection between Wisconsin’s capita and its business hub would be huge. But if you look at it, many of the Midwest’s most used Amtrak stations are in cities of Madison’s mold. Similarly sized college cities of similar distance (in some cases greater) from their most significant city pair. Madison compares favorably to relatively heavily-used midwestern stations such as Bloomington-Normal, Champaign-Urbana, Ann Arbor, and Carbondale. Also note that Albany-Rensselaer (a small city that is a state capital, like Madison, and home to some colleges) is the ninth most-used Amtrak station. New Haven (a city on the Northeast Corridor that is a college town and smaller than Madison in population) is the tenth most-used station.
I’m wondering how feasible a STL to Nashville, much less Nashville to Atlanta route would be. If not even further southeastward to Florida (with an initial eastward intermediate stop with Savannah). Given the HEAVY tourist volumes that will use I-24 & I-75 that particular area alone, much less how increasingly behind Tennessee is falling in terms of improving their highways. Bear in mind if anyone from the Eastern Great Plains or the parts of the Midwest that’re west of Indiana has the nerve to drive to Florida & vice versa (much less weekends in Tennessee or Atlanta), that’s the area they will take.
A few thoughts/whestions I have from this: - What would be the top option for a faster technology like Maglev? I imagine that would mean a significant increase in the viable/optimal distances. - What would the rating look like for something longer, like a New York/Chicago line? And would it become viable with Maglev speeds? This line is interesting because it could be made from several reasonable pieces (NY-PHI-PITT-CLE-CHI must all be at least close to working).
I’m somewhat shocked that Chicago-Milwaukee wouldn’t be higher. Obviously they’re on the closer end but it seems like there would be a lot of demand between the two (unless they’re counted as a single statistical area?) Plus as a Seattleite I have to be shocked that something along the Cascades corridor didn’t make it lol
Chicago-Milwaukee distance is too short, given my approach. You'd get *some* ridership, but it's a relatively short drive, so unless you're going center-to-center, just the time it takes to access and egress from each station would eat up whatever you saved in travel time. I think you'd definitely have a Milwaukee stop on a Chicago-Madison-Twin Cities line, of course. Native Seattleite here as well! I actually really like the existing service (have probably ridden the Cascades 100+ times) and would love any and all upgrades. I just don't think it's a high national priority -- funding is going to have to happen regionally. I think MSFT has put money into it already?
@@CityNerd Yeah I’m not entirely sure what’s happening with it but some sort of Brightline-comparable service with 125ish mph speeds would probably be most viable.
There's good right of way for high speed rail on this route existing, would expect good commuter demand with the difference in living costs between the two cities. Passenger rail on this corridor used to be some of the fastest in the world back in the 1930s and 40s
@@CityNerd isn't this supposed to be about getting people out of cars and having more transit options for citizens? Idc if I can stand outside and see the nearest city, as long as I had the option to get there by high speed rail, it would all be worth it to me.
In March 1982, I rode the train from Newport News, Virginia to Penn Station in New York City. Somewhere in Delaware, the train tracks run alongside an interstate highway. The train I was on, which was a local train instead of an express train, was passing the cars on the highway as if the cars were standing still. Two days later on a Sunday, when I returned to Newport News on the train, I remember that there were no empty seats on this train from New York City all of the way to Philadelphia. After this train left Philadelphia, there were a few empty seats.
I think that a high-speed rail triangle connecting Las Vegas, Phoenix, and LA would make a whole lot of sense. Phoenix could and should also connect to Tucson, and Las Vegas could and should connect with Reno, while Reno should also be connected to Sacramento, which in turn should be connected to LA through that current California HSR project that is currently being built through the Central Valley. The city pairs theory is great, but the reality is that in enough parts of the US, there are city pairs upon city pairs upon city pairs that can be found that would end up making an interconnecting network.
The thing about Lyon to Paris is that it's also the last leg of the SNCF from Barcelona to Paris. It's quite fast - no stopping when you cross the border.
What do you think? Would you have analyzed this differently? Are there any city pairs you thought would be on the list but weren't? I mean...I was really hoping for Seattle to Portland, but it rates lower than every city pair mentioned in the video, and others that didn't even make the cut, like Atlanta-Charlotte! 😢
Loved this vid! I'm such a purist about HSR that I'd be super interested to what the us would look like if we had the level of completeness that Europe does. There have to be smaller active HSR corridors than Paris to Lyon that are still quite active and maybe not as financially viable on their own but as part of a more developed network totally fit and deserve to be there, like the Chicago to indianapolis line also having cinci to indy, columbus, cleveland, maybe even louisville and STL and nashville KC etc etc. I'm also interested in your thoughts about the feasibility of trains succeeding in this country by filling a niche centered more around luxury and personal space (free wifi and good food, lots of lugagge space) than pure speed. Longer overnight trips across country that dont fuck you up like a red eye, long scenic relaxing day trip train rides from seattle to LA or SF, NYC to Charlotte or atlanta, etc etc (Gym cars, or upper floors. Nice showers! not that much more money, so much nicer for our (shrinking but growing when i become president) middle class
@@aldenthompsonvought Love the vision! I do think one of the difficult-to-quantify advantages of train travel is the space to work, or relax, or get up and walk around, as well as the better food and drink options. But travel time and frequency are so much easier to measure!
@@CityNerd That's certainly a point I think u shld have mentioned. The ever shrinking seat in basic economy is almost laughable at this point. Which is even weirder when u realize that on average Americans are getting bigger and bigger. And I say this as a morbidly obese person. Then again maybe airlines have noticed and thus the shrinking economy seat is just a way for them to push first/business class? (Side Note: I don't blame airlines for my obesity it's a food addiction that I must conquer or die from it)
@@aldenthompsonvought I like what you said about baggage! All the budget airlines charge extra even if you just have one bag of luggage now. !!! So a train would be a plus with that
1 corridor (or pair of corridors) i would like is what i call the NY cross, basically run a line from Boston to Buffalo (with obvious stops) and a line from NYC to Montreal (with obvious stops). And of course have crossovers in Albany. This would be the first non-linear extension of the NE corridor making it more of a mesh network.
Just watched this one and as a former Pittsburgher who now lives in Richmond VA i have a couple thoughts: • First off - love your channel - especially the video on urban aqueducts. I look forward to future videos! • Thoughts on a train line from Pittsburgh to DC - To me it seems like that would be a *massive* undertaking to get a new high speed rail line through the appalachians. There’s a railroad museum in Altoona that details the first attempts at it. And driving and flying between those two cities is super easy. There have been efforts to widen the PA Turnpike between Pgh and Breezewood for as long as I can remember, and with the exception of weather challenges in the Laurel Highlands, traffic is (relatively) light along the I-76, 70, and 270 route. • I think more feasible would be if the Acela corridor were extended to the whole East Coast along I-95/I-4. There’s a substantial bottleneck just north of Richmond, and sometimes it takes me three hours to drive to Fredericksburg, 47 miles away. And I-4 is a nightmare. DC-RVA-Raleigh-Savanna-JAX-Disney-Tampa high speed train service would probably be very popular as all of those cities grow over the next few decades.
The time and hassle in getting to the station is a bigger deal though. Let's say I took the train from LA to San Francisco. Like most ppl I live outside LA the city so that's a 0.3 hr drive then 1.2 hour on our commuter rail. Followed by 2.6 hrs on HSR. Add another .5 hour for last mile transit and you see the problem. That's 4.6 hrs and we still haven't factored in scheduling, security lines, etc. All of which can easily add over 1hr, pushing the ease of having your car with you vs the .5 hrs saved.
Right now, we spend a ton to expand airports (and sometimes we can't.) That's because a ton of air travel is done with short-haul "commuter" flights. The result is that airports run at nearly full capacity, which means that tiny problems with weather or a mechanical problem with a plane taxiing on a taxiway or others can jam up one major airport, and that jam ripples through the entire national system. Airports need some "wiggle room" in their capacity and scheduling to reduce the constant delays. Shifting this traffic off of these flights and onto rail spokes radiating out from major airports like Chicago (ORD and MDW) and allowing passengers to buy a single ticket and transfer directly from a plane to a train at the airport would work great. Rail is safer and less sensitive to weather delays, plus generally more pleasant than being stuck inside a plane.
A great city pair for HSR would be Phoenix - Vegas mainly because there is no interstate to compete with. And because most travelers to Vegas would not need a car for their intended activities.
It does have to compete much more with airplanes though, especially if it uses the same HSR terminal in Vegas that is currently planned and FURTHER away from the city center/strip than the airport
I was just going to say this. Phoenix is growing and Phoenix to LA and Vegas would be very profitable routes. There’s no “good” interstate to take to Vegas and no one really flies to LA. It’s easier to just drive. As a Phoenix resident, I’ve even personally considered driving to LA or Vegas to fly out of the country because Sky Harbor Airport is just too small to have cheap flights to popular destinations like Hawaii and Atlanta. If I could ride the HSR to Vegas or LA I’d do it undoubtedly.
@@kabouterwesley83 The difference is that an HSR router between Phoenix and Las Vegas can go as the crow flies, whereas that is not feasible to San Francisco. An HSR route to SF would also go almost all the way to LA. In practice, it would just tie into the eventual HSR between LA and SF.
Since I have no math brain, and therefore never look at math to figure things out, your charts and calculations really interested me. But in return, let me offer this incalculable: the regional sense of identification. You mentioned Cleveland-Cincinnati, my own most needed route, but the reason isn't math, it's family ties, cross-market advertising, probably business connections, and an incalculable sense of being part of one place. North America is so much larger than Europe or Japan, that what they would call inter-regional is for us intra-regional. It looks like several of your proposed pairs are indeed what I would call intra-regional. In any case, the Northeast Corridor shows that if you build it, run it often enough, and keep it clean, then yes, they will use it readily.
Since when is the government concerned with profit? I think high speed rail is a must, it's greener, takes congestion off the freeway, and I think it's sorely needed.
Love this. Nuanced as it may seem, Paris - Lyon/Paris - Bordeaux/ Paris - Lille are all profitable lines. While the tourists heavy lines like Paris - Nice or the new Paris - Barcelona are not. So lines that look like they make sense in the US, such as LA - Vegas, night not. I don’t know, it’s so nuanced. For example, LA - SD would be a very popular line if you look are the travel time by car, despite the fact the distance is just shy of 100 miles. Great stuff!
Having lived in Europe and Asia, I think the biggest difference is that wherever I take a train, there is a local public transportation network of buses and subway to get me to where I want to go. In the United States, if I go to NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, then I have a pretty developed local public transportation network. But anywhere else I go in the United States that isn't true. You need a car to get around. For example, I lived near the airport in Dallas, one of the biggest cities in the US. I took the bus to the airport as an experiment, and it took me 1 hour. By car it would be 15 minutes. The bus network in Dallas does not enable you to go sideways from neighborhood to neighborhood. It just serves commuters coming in and out of the downtown. The whole city of Dallas is designed for cars with a million service roads, strip malls, and massive parking lots making a real bus/subway network impractical due to all the space devoted to tarmac throughout the city and inability to just walk around. I think the same thing is true for most parts of the United States outside of a few cities like NYC and San Francisco. As a result you really need a car and can't rely on public transportation to get around. There is now Uber available, so perhaps that has finally made arriving at a destination car-less in the United States tenable, but I still think the necessity of just getting around in your car in the US, even if you want to just hop over to a convenience store, makes all the difference compared to the rest of the world. US cities are simply not designed for public transportation with the exception of a few. Unlike Europe and Asia, the US enjoys plenty of open space, and cities have developed accordingly to make use of all that space. In Europe or Asia, you can just wake up and decide to go somewhere without a car, making decisions as you go. In the United States you need to plan your transportation for the place you are going or you will be stuck at the airport or train station. The costs of taxis and uber are higher than the costs of public transportation elsewhere in the world. As a result you are excluding a lot of casual travel at low cost which exists elsewhere in the world. My guess would be that the only routes that actually will make a profit like routes in France or Japan are the routes that include cities with well-developed public transportation networks where people can live without owning a car in the downtown. I don't think LA qualifies. The Texas cities don't qualify. The only profitable routes are along that Eastern route from Boston to DC. Unless Napoleon III brutally bulldozes the other cities in the US and forcibly rebuilds them as walkable cities with greater population density and less space committed to parking and driving everywhere, I don't see high speed rail becoming practical in the US as it is in other parts of the world.
Even SF doesn't have very good public transit. Muni and Bart together don't even come close to having good coverage over the city, which itself is not very big. The bus system is very good for the US, but still has a decent number of gaps in service, especially outside the city center.
Probably right, but I think a line from Chicago to Pittsburg ( Pittsburgh public transport might be lacking a bit but it certainly is more walkable than many US cities.) And then maybe connecting that to DC as mentioned might be realistic. It might cross international borders but a Chicago-Detroit-Toronto-Ottowa-Montreal HSR probably would make a lot of sense. So would New York to Montreal.
Brightline is at-grade up the coast, using the former Florida East Coast, and then uses a new grade-separated rail line across Florida to Orlando, and ultimately Tampa.
Interesting analysis. Something missing in the comparison between train, air and car is the added time needed to get from the airport/train station to your desired location in the destination city. Considering train stations are more centrally located than mega-airports, this may improve the competitiveness of trains over planes.
Great video! So glad I found this channel and that someone with real knowledge actually addressed that magical "Utopian US" rail map. Given that the top spots all belong to the Northeast/Acela corridor, I'm curious what isn't working with the Acela/Northeast Regional lines as it stands. I know from experience the fares can be ridiculous...to the point where I've flown from DC to NYC because it was considerably cheaper (which is a horrendous notion). But is the problem for most people just the speed?
A big part of the problem is that unlike just about every other rail system in the world, Amtrak is expected to be profitable, and the Acela is very much a cash cow for them.
A big problem is def the speed. Acela is only abt a half an hour to an hour quicker than the Northwest Regional (which is far cheaper). I think some of the speed issues cld be do to the track design plus freight trains.
Thanks for walking us through your graph. As a parent of young kids I think the destination really does need to be more than 8+ hours away by car before flying looks good. Getting kids through an airport is challenging. Connecting flights just adds to an already long day.
What about a high-speed rail line of Miami-Orlando-Jacksonville-Atlanta with a branch line to Tampa? This would connect the metropolitan areas in Florida with over 1 million population, with each of the sections around the 300-mile sweet spot and the maximum length right about 600 miles.
I think these are all viable. I also think CAHSR should extend to San Diego...AND Tijuana. Phoenix - El Paso/Juarez has some potential, especially the way they're growing.
I think the rail infrastructure just needs to be drastically improved. I don't think a HSR is needed between some of the shorter distances if you can get an express train that is direct between the two cities.
The Rail Runner service between Albuquerque and Santa Fe is, to me, a great example of this. There are tons of short-distance city pairs out there that are larger than those two cities but don't have anywhere near as good a service.
Nice video. Some additional thoughts: 1. Right of way issues are removed if you have a raised monorail track in the median of existing highways. Cost to build a mile of track should be no more than a mile of one lane of a highway. 2. Tech is there for one car in a train to decouple and slow down while another speeds up from a station. Trains slows to maybe 70MPH (instead of stopping), and passengers asked to go to the last car if they are taking an interim stop. Imagine a train from Chicago to NYC that has stops for Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Philly with an average speed even with the slowdowns of 220MPH. The one car goes up to a 1/2 hour on its own to the final destination. 3. Toronto should really be included in this map with high speed rail service between 3 of the top 5 cities in the US/Canada.
I think the "Southern Triangle" should be considered: high-speed trains connecting Atlanta, Charlotte and Nashville could be very popular. Atlanta to Birmingham might be as well. Elsewhere, Seattle to Portland should be considered, along with Charlotte to Raleigh. I suppose that Chicago to Milwaukee falls into the same category as New York to Philadelphia, but it still should be considered.
Travel by car must take into consideration not only fuel costs but the fatigue of the driver and time to rest and stop for meals if one is driving a 600 miles or more distance. High speed rail is the best for relaxation and space to do work on computer.
One of the biggest advantages to travelling by car is that you have transportation when you arrive (you don't need to rent a car). This would be negated in cities with centralized mass transit like NYC and Boston but would be extremely relevant to Dallas and Houston. You have to buy meals on the train too so I'm not persuaded by that point.
@@paulkieran2308 you have shown that apart from the older cities of the northeast or the upper Midwest such as Chicago with mass transit the younger cities such as Dallas and Houston to cite just two examples are car dependent cities. The solution is new city planning that is no longer built exclusively for motor vehicles. This means dedicated lanes or lines for mass transit and extra costs for motor vehicle use in the cities with of course the exception of emergency vehicles.
@@Hastdupech8509 You are correct. I misunderstood R. Placer's comparison of car and rail travel. He said you have to allow time to stop driving to get meals and I didn't realize at first that he was talking about the time cost not money cost.
@@paulkieran2308 Yeah, it's what we may call "the human factor", you're more relaxed and can even watch a film (if the connection is decent, but usually HS train companies offer a bunch of movies on specific sites to watch) or work
This might be my Pennsylvania bias coming in, but a good idea for a line system would be connecting Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg-York-Lancaster, Allentown, Philly and from there to the Acela corridor.
Excellent video! I will definitely be watching more on your channel. Dallas to Houston being the top pick outside of the Northeast corridor doesn't surprise me. I think it's very clear that the ridership will be high enough to justify the line based on the high flight volume between the two cities (almost none of which are connecting flights, because both cities already have flights to everywhere that the other one does). Being that the train stations will be more convenient than the airports, and that trains are more comfortable to ride in, it should be obvious that the train will at the barest minimum capture half the flight market, which is plenty to justify the train. And it will very likely capture much more than that, to say nothing of the car market. If anything, the fact that Southwest Airlines fought the train tooth and nail--probably setting back HSR in the US as a whole at least a decade--should be good indication that it will severely damage the flight market.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I'm kinda bullish on Texas HSR, and I've got a video on the docket (next couple weeks) to do a deeper dive similar to the recent one I did on California HSR. The proposed Houston station location is not very central...but then a lot of stuff in Houston isn't very central! It should play out quite a bit differently than CAHSR, for a lot of reasons: distance, topography, political realities, etc.
@@CityNerd The proposed Houston station is perfectly located. The Galleria/Uptown area (roughly 610 from I-69 to I-10) is a mini/2nd downtown and I-10 West from Bwy 8 to Hwy 6 is called the Energy Corridor due to the density of energy companies headquartered there. The proposed rail station almost perfectly splits the middle of all 3 of those major areas. Now if they could only get some light rail to connect them...
@@rclmwing What about BRT? I know Houston had a fairly recent bus system redesign. Light rail would take longer to build vs BRT. Perhaps light rail construction could begin alongside BRT implementation? Either way, the knowledge that such short flights like Dallas and Houston are so common is soul crushing as an environmentalist.
I think another thing about Lyon is that it's near the french alps so you can connect there to go to another tourist destinaion, or you can take the Paris to Chambery train which uses like 90% of the paris to lyon track.
It will always be more difficult to get the ridership HSR gets in Europe, China or Japan, because of the lack of underlying public transport. Especially when you want to compete with car driving, it does not help you when the most convenient way to get from your house to any destination in you r metro area, including the HSR-trainstation, is by car. In Europe, a lot of people in big metro area's live quite close to a subwaystation, tramstop or regional railstation where connections to the high speed railstations are available. In the USA, only the northeast comes close. Another issue: geography. It is nice that 2 cities are 250 mile apart, but if there is a big mountainrange, or a swampy area is in between the cities, things get more difficult.
This is why inner city public transportation is so important. But many US cities, including the one I live in gives zero priority to public transportation
I like the analysis of these 10. I admit I don't know if I fully understand the math behind the results. I like the map that is tweeted at least once a year because it shows expansion options for a lot of the stations. Denver to Albuquerque to El Paso makes sense regionally (though it is longer than your 250 mile requirement) because i25 is very busy and there can easily be stops on Las Cruces, Santa Fe, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and potentially extend to Fort Collins and Cheyenne. I currently live in Denver but grew up in El Paso, Texas. Lots of Texans and Northern Mexicans go to these cities for tourism.
I think an important consideration is what areas 50-100km away from a city can be brought into the metro areas of a city. Might be a real lifeline for some areas
@@fehzorz HSR can't stop very often or it's not HSR, so while it could fill some niche O-D pairs, is isn't going to provide any comprehensive transit coverage within a metro area
@@alquinn8576 What I'm thinking about is that it could make a place 50-100km away seem very close to the city centre. Not imagining lots of stops in between.
17:12 It amazes me how Baltimore is always left out when talking about the NEC and Boston is somehow forced into the conversation despite being a smallish city all the way up in New England. It would be a mistake on America's part not have an Express lane stop at Baltimore if a new system was ever built. It's typical to look over what isn't attractive now but could be if it was given a chance.
Your criteria basically involves the travel time sweet spot and population size at both ends - underpinned in large part by getting cars off the road and planes out of the air. All good for a study that boils down to whether cities can support high speed rail. Perhaps equally important is whether and where rail can support cities and longer-term economic growth and population distribution into secondary markets. While it would be an entirely different/broader study focus, scoring corridors based on what high speed rail could facilitate if it linked together a chain of secondary MSAs connected to a major one. E.g., Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Harrisburg, York, Baltimore/DC. And/Or the first four to NYC. The resulting access to alternative sites, markets, human capital and ideas to and from both the larger and smaller MSAs could be transformative. It would promote greater economic activity for the large and small locations and utilization of the underutilized smaller cities, all of which have lost population over decades, while relieving overcrowding and cost of living inflation in the larger. It would also serve the goal of reducing auto mileage along routes that presently carry significant daily traffic to/from the smaller cities to each other and to the major cities at the end of the lines. Routes long ago abandoned by railroads - leaving cars or planes (pick your poison) as the only options.
It should be mentioned that the graph at 8:00 is pretty biased toward US-conditions. I try to weaken the 75 miles number with an example. Where I live in Vienna, I can simply go to the western train station within about 5-10 minutes (2 km, I go by bike or escooter) and take the hourly connection to a town 35 km nearby. I go one station by high speed rail, wait ten minutes for the S-Bahn and I'm at the city center _faster_ than I would have in a car (the trip is ~50 minutes on a direct route and ~45 minutes on the tolled motorway). Total trip time if I hurry - 5 minutes to the train station - 30 seconds to buy the ÖBB ticket on the phone (can do it at the traffic light or on the escalator) - 1 minute to go to the platform and board the train - 12 minutes one station highspeed rail (only ca 33 kilometers) - 11 minutes waiting time for the next train - 3 minutes to the destination town center (town with ~15000 people) In total the trip takes me 27 minutes on the train and a few extra minutes to get to the train station. I leave my flat ~10 Minutes before the train goes to have some buffer time. It's just an example that rail (especially in combination with folding bikes or scooters) can beat cars way below the distance of 75 miles (= 120 km!)
Yes, this video doesn't cover the cost side of the equation at all. Make sure you don't tell Italy they're not supposed to build HSR through mountains though!
@@jasonriddell also US has cost-disease regarding subway construction and CA is proving this extends to HSR as well. IIRC, subways cost 3x more to build per mile in the US compared to Europe and I think CA HSR is coming out with a similar factor
So what happens if you add a layer of complexity to the model, by treating any group of city pairs that could be chained together by a single line as a single project, & then summing the gravities of all possible trip pairs along that route? I'd expect routes like CAHSR would see their scores boosted by intermediate cities e.g. Bakersfield. Perhaps the NEC as a whole might still be on top but by less of a margin than the next-best non-NEC route? But also I suspect that analysis might require looking at MSA data instead of CSA data to get enough resolution.
@@CityNerd makes sense; I guess what I'm saying is I'm curious what criteria determine if a particular city will be a major ridership generator even if it's not big enough to anchor one end of a corridor. Like what makes a place merit direct service like Wilmington, DC or Bakersfield, CA as opposed to a bypass station like College Station, TX? Maybe a future video could rank the top intermediate cities along plausible HSR corridors, by their ability to boost the corridor?
i think the miami orlando route is pretty interesting. you have broward and palm beach in between. the problem is how do you get around once you get off the train
Digging it. I like the Houston to Dallas rail line. The TX triangle makes sense since something like 85%of the states population lives along in Houston- San Anronio-Dallas (Austin, Killeen-Temple,Waco being tossed in on the San Antonio to Dallas leg) . That is going to take many more years to convince unfortunatly.
Great list! Los Angeles to San Francisco easily has the highest air traffic between major metropolitan areas in the United States outside of Los Angeles to New York City, and there is not even a somewhat high speed rail option. California’s location on the Pacific Rim, status as a major tourist location, and an economy larger than Italy might be good reason to move it past Dallas-Houston on the list, even though the route is longer. Geography wise, the Central Valley is very flat. Although, Los Angeles certainly needs to improve the regional transportation too. A Sacramento-San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego route in California is comparable to a Milan-Bologna-Florence-Rome-Naples-Salerno route in Italy.
I've always said that if the USA can manage to get us to the moon, they should be able to figure out how to get people from Miami to Boston by rail in 4hrs or less (and that's including all the relevant stops).
America is incredibly huge. The distance between Miami and Boston in a straight line is larger than the distance from Morocco to Northern Ireland. Those cities are far too distant for a rail connection to take 4 hours. 9-10 hours would be the absolute minimum.
I enjoy trains too!! And although I can drive well I don’t enjoy driving in stressful major cities with inattentive drivers or drivers that weave etc., I’d rather take the train and I am looking forward when the train goes from southern Florida to Orlando!!! I will be one of the first to take it. Also I’d like to see if the train going up from Orlando to Jacksonville as well as what they’re planning to do Orlando to Disney and on into Tampa. I think a good idea also is Chicago to Cincinnati but maybe that’s too long of a distance. I noticed on the website Brightline they have their own transport vehicles to go from your hotel or other place within 5 miles in a circle to get to the station. So that can solve some of the problems if you’re just staying in a certain area to go to the beach or to go to Disney and you’re going to stay at some area or convention center. And some cities in Florida are walkable like Fort Lauderdale or have water taxis.
Respect the video but feel like a Chicago to Milwaukee high speed route would be pretty spectacular. The Hiawatha is the most used route in the Midwest and 9th most used in the United States. In addition, it has higher ridership per mile than every other route except the Northwest Regional and the Capitol Corridor.
Perhaps a train line that has not yet been built could be a mug or tee for merch purposes. I feel like it would inspire good conversation ("Oh, this hasn't been built yet, but wouldn't it be cool if it was?") and it strikes the balance of nerd and positive vibes.
Your methodology has several flaws. While high-speed rail captures majority market share from cars and planes at distances of 100 to 600 miles or so, the future travel demand depends not just on population sizes but also on the presence of Creative Class industries, on affluence, and on business activity. Connecting Anaheim and Los Angeles (the second-largest city in the U.S.) with San Jose and San Francisco is a no-brainer. Existing short-haul aviation demand along the corridor is already enormous. Moreover, much depends also on the extensiveness of the dedicated-guideway transportation network at each station site and on the arrangement of the population and the jobs, as well as the development potential, around the high-speed rail stations and the stations of the lower-order transit network. Walking distances have to be within about a half-mile radius. Bicycling distances have be within a 1- to 3-mile radius. And, Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (N.E.V.) driving has to be within a 10-mile radius. Taxis, including the self-driving kind and the kind using ride-hailing apps, can expand the catchment areas further, but planners have to be extremely careful not to build park-and-ride facilities for conventional cars. The utterly asinine Texas plan is almost entirely built around car parking!
Nice analysis. What would I like to see? Bangor, Maine to Boston. We had a fast train on this route, called the Flying Yankee, until 1957. It was a stainless steel, diesel electric that made the 235-mile run in 4 hours. Then we junked it and stuffed people into buses and cars. Brilliant.
Maaan we need to get that cold war competition mindset back! Damn the cost! If China can build it we can build it better! Give me that high speed rail between Denver and Albuquerque! Haha (or at least I'll settle for the full CHSR built as well as LA to Vegas)
Haha, thanks. It took me months to make the first video -- I had to teach myself to do everything, I didn't have any sense of what the workflow was, and I shot the footage kind of thinking I'd just use the audio. I've got a lot of that stuff more dialed in now...but there's still a lot of room for improvement!
A big factor in favor of using a car to travel between cities within a half-day drive is that you often need a car at your destination (car rental adds expense and is often time-consuming). The fact that most visitors to Vegas, NYC, and DC do not need a car favors high speed trains to those cities.
Yeah, it really seems like the northeast corridor has everything in its favor for a ton of high speed rail investment. Dense, walkable cities, large economies, a straight path, lots of travel demand, etc
I mean, I personally never use a car when I'm in Vegas but have you seen the size of the parking garages at those resorts? Frickin monolithic.
@@CityNerd That's because so many from SD/LA and Phoenix drive there. If you aren't hopping on a plane you drive there, park your car at your hotel, and don't touch it until you're heading back home.
@@CityNerd it seems if a person doesn’t use a car when they’re in Vegas, then they’re wasting their money to have a car there. I’m talking in general but not necessarily you.
Yeah, it seems like a good idea to build high speed rail between cities that already have good public transit.
I really think that you need to include foreign cities that are already highly connected to US cities in your analysis. The Portland-Seattle-Vancouver BC corridor for example. There is already a lot of travel between these three cities but the car is not ideal because they all have pretty bad rush hour traffic. Plus train routes to/from Vancouver would have a huge advantage if customs could be done en-route which would save a huge amount of time as border waits can easily be a half hour to an hour during the busiest times. The other missing piece is whether the very existence of high-speed rail might radically increase trips between city pairs. We love to go from Seattle to Vancouver for example but the 3 to 3 1/2 hour drive each way doesn't make it very practical for day trips. Get that under 2 hours each way though and we might go from 1-2 trips a year to 1 a month, why not?
Good points. I do think research shows (and it's intuitive, too) that the addition of a HSR connection that offers shorter travel times than any existing mode has an induced demand effect...the GOOD kind of induced demand!
I personally think Seattle-Vancouver should be built, especially if you can solve the customs/border security issue, but as far as my analysis, the SEA-VAN pair doesn't really rate differently from SEA-PDX, and that one didn't make the top ten. As far as PDX-VAN...I would probably take it for fun, but it is REALLY hard to beat the quick flight from PDX to YVR with the SkyTrain connection they have (and the MAX on the Portland end...I guess). More on that in my next video, by the way, due out this weekend.
Thanks for the great comment!
The biggest issues are the suburbs and Portland, OR. Portland in particular has fought off infrastructure - not just road, but even rail. (Look at Cascades Service - which already serves this area.) International border cities - see Seattle/Vancouver or even Detroit/Toronto, and San Diego/Tijuana, Mexico. Most folks looking at the hunger for HSR in Europe is due to intra-European air travel is bad/bad/bad - despite that it (air travel) is almost as subsidized as rail travel is. Further, liberals DEMONIZED passenger rail in the post-WW II era in the US - and it has taken over fifty years to get rid of that - and two decades since the end of the Vietnam War. Lastly, the rail network in Europe was bombed to dustbunnies during World Wars I and II - the US was untouched by war on the other hand. (It's easier to NOT invest in infrastructure than to invest in infrastructure.) SEPTA - the Southeastern Pennsylvania Passenger Transportation Authority - inherited multiple rail lines largely built by two companies - the Reading Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad - both based in Philadelphia ; both were founded before the Civil War. (Both were primarily freight railroads.) Intra-European passenger rail travel is - literally - the alternative to intra-European air travel - which is not just a mess, but pricey, pricey, pricey - despite it ALSO being as subsidized as rail travel is. The distances are comparable to intra-US (interstate) air travel - which is NOT subsidized in the US that it is in Europe. The top five European air carriers are ALL government-owned and operated, even though two (Emirates and QATAR Airways) - are not based in Europe. And blaming Big Oil - do you belong to a union, work for the government, or are a retiree from either? Take a big swig of Pepto - you are, in fact, part of the problem - most stock in the top US petrochemical companies is owned by pension plans - with those of unions and government employees leading the way. (And that is BEFORE Kemp-Roth and the Thrift Savings Plan brought US government employees and retirees into the mix.)
I personally know multiple cross border families here in Seattle that probably would use HST as they do use the current train usually for a kid that cannot yet drive and I personally could see myself using HST for a quick weekend visit to stay at a hotel, eat at some nice restaurants but overall the issue is that to fund HST you need proper work week travelers and not just weekend leisure travelers like us. Also, I think you traveled during a holiday weekend which would match your description but if you travel to Vancouver during a work week or on a non holiday weekend or not during summer break it is usually pretty fast and traffic free 2.5 hour drive. I do have the NEXUS card so I do not even stop at the border just go right through. Also, many people that travel from Seattle are going on to other areas, up to the mountains, to Whistler to ski and they are just not going to be taking a train. Even myself I have gone with an RV and you can't exchange that for a train obviously. Overall it would be nice to have HST and doing it today would save the cost of doing it in the future if not be impossible but it is complicated for sure.
@A. Selim Katar You don't have to show passports at the US-Canada border if you have the NEXUS card like I have. I just drive through, it scans the card, and I keep driving. It is like a toll system but instead for money it is for Identity.
But what about the NIMBYs? They come out of the forest and undergrowth whenever infrastructure comes up for discussion.
My wife and I took the TGV from Turin to Paris a few years ago. My first "real" train trip. I will never forget the experience of getting off near the front of the train (first class) and walking to the exit no more than 200' away and stepping out into downtown Paris. No taxi or shuttle required. I am looking forward very much to the completion of Brightline West in the next few years. The drive from Vegas to the basin is ridiculous. 90 mph and often bumper to bumper, or 0 mph out in the middle of nowhere stopped for reasons unknown. Crazy.
I've taken the TGV from Paris to Amsterdam and back a few times. It was a revelation. From central Paris to central Amsterdam in 3.5 hours. Just show up at the station about 20 minutes before the train departs - no messing around with all the airline craziness.
I will contrast that to my experience on Amtrak from Chicago to LA. Took two days. We were stuck in our compartment because the entire train smelled of dense cigarette smoke coming from one quarter of one car. Couldn’t stand to sit in the lounge or the dome car. Rude is the only way to characterize the service in the dining car. Made me an Amtrak hater.
That's a real shame. I know that many people ride the Chief, Zephyr and Empire and have a great experience. @@christianlibertarian5488
This video needs more love. The US has maybe 6 separate geographic regions that could support an HSR network. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that just because the networks make sense on their own therefore connecting them together also makes sense. It doesn't.
Unfortunately, discussion of an unnecessary and kinda silly coast to coast network steals oxygen from discussions about the actually needed and eminently feasible regional HSR networks that should be the focus. Which is sad.
You've kind of nailed the thesis of this video! When people talk about HSR, they often talk about "network effects," as if the more stuff you connect to it, the more value it has, as if it was a social media brand or a ride hailing app -- or a city transit network.
I don't think HSR works like this. I think HSR has to primarily be about connecting high demand city pairs that are in a sweet spot of distance where HSR is clearly competitive -- or event dominant -- compared to the other possible travel choices.
That's the backbone, and then if you want to have tradeoff discussions about intermediate stops or extensions to smaller cities, then it's a second level of analysis.
I also think there's a natural human tendency to want to "connect the dots," which is why you see all the ridiculous maps floating around that connect, like, LA to Chicago through Denver. Resist!
@@pmickeyny6002 True but that doesn't mean you can't start somewhere. Who's to say Dallas and Houston won't build extensive subways one day despite their city lay out. It is still possible.
@@CityNerd So, as a middle ground between these networkists and those who think HSR should only be where it's competitive, would building an entire network, but only selling tickets between the city pairs be an even remotely viable solution?
@@pmickeyny6002 You'd have a parking lot or a car rental place at the station, just like how airports work. HSR is typically used by business travelers, not tourists, since it's generally more expensive than planes (which is why it has to be faster in order to make sense)
@@CityNerd HSR is to local public transit as the UCI World Tour is to the domestic road racing scene, sort of. World Tour races have had trouble sustaining themselves in the US because we haven't bothered to build up a really robust domestic road racing scene, so there isn't the interest, either from fans or local sponsors. Similarly, HSR won't reach its full potential until it can connect really good local public transport networks.
Of course, part of the reason we don't have a really robust domestic racing scene is because not enough people bike, and the reason for that has a lot to do with car-dependent infrastructure. So I guess in a way it's all connected.
Chicago (10 million people) to Minneapolis-St. Paul (4.1 million people in the CSA but the fastest growing major city in the Midwest BY FAR and the 2nd largest economy in the Midwest even as Metro Detroit has more people) needs to happen. There are several medium-sized metro areas in between Minneapolis and Chicago, notably Madison, WI and Milwaukee with quick branches off the route that would make sense (especially Rochester, MN due to the Mayo Clinic, which is an international destination for health tourism and biomedical research). Amtrak does have plans to introduce higher-speed rail between Minneapolis and Rochester for this reason, and the (woefully inadequate) $787 billion stimulus package passed in 2009 did actually allocate money to build high-speed rail between Minneapolis and Chicago, as it has been a priority route for intercity rail improvement for decades, but the right-wing extremist former governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, used his gubernatorial power to stop any sort of high-speed rail construction from taking place through Wisconsin, which is the only way such a route would ever make sense. Considering the massive amount of intracity transit infrastructure and walkable neighborhoods in Chicago, and the rapidly expanding public transportation network in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area combined with a greater level of walkability in the Twin Cities urban core as compared with most other large Midwestern cities, once a passenger steps off the high-speed train, it would be quite easy to go to other destinations without car rental or taxi. Obviously the Northeast Corridor should be the #1 priority by a mile, but there are certain corridors which for various reasons just make a lot of sense to construct. Minneapolis-Chicago HSR is one of those both in terms of economic connections, travel demand, and the urban landscape within these respective metropolitan areas.
The Twin Cities is likely a location to benefit more from regional rail, connecting more places, but at a slower speed with more stops in county centers between areas of a decent population: Fargo, Sioux Falls, Des Moines, Duluth, Madison, etc. The challenge with anyone traveling out of the TC’s is how to get around once you arrive. A car is almost all but required unless you are visiting the central part of the town/city. I really would like to see something for the region, having grown up there and traveling between the TC’s and Fargo for school for 6 years, but it’s going to take a different solution; probably more like the regional airport subsidy program by a hub passenger fee. Denver, my current city, is fairly similar, except that it would be passed through between LA and Chicago, which isn’t really the most likely connection, being so far, but connecting the intermediate cities is why the route makes sense. The Twin Cities suffer from being isolated despite being a major regional center.
As a Milwaukean I agree with the need for a high speed rail route for Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison and Minneapolis. Let’s call it the Milwaukee Road ;). We may not have as well developed public transit as Minneapolis, but we do have one of the densest and most walkable urban cores in the country in addition to the most used rail corridor in the Midwest (the Hiawatha.) The potential here is huge.
As someone going to visit Madison for the first time, I noticed, while planning my trip via air that HSR would be a great option to have. I'd like to make a combined trip to Minneapolis (already done Chicago) without a car.
Rochester MN also especially makes sense because of the high number of patients traveling to the Mayo Clinic (3 million per year, apparently), many of whom would not have cars, and would benefit a lot from being able to take a train (especially from an international airport like Minneapolis)
This a great comment
I'm especially fond of the Chicago (hometown) to Detroit (birthplace) connection; my heritage, but I would never think to route it via Toledo which would miss the two really popular intermediate stations - Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor. Big college crowds use this service.
Yeah, point taken -- the routing question is a bit tricky, of course, because you want to be able to branch to Cleveland efficiently. Totally beyond the scope of what I wanted to look at here, but super interesting.
@@CityNerd I’d suggest a different route if you go through Toledo. There is a really straight long stretch of existing rail ROW (single-tracked, but that can be fixed) between Gary and Fort Wayne Indiana that would help enable a comfortable speedy rail route. You can connect from Fort Wayne to Toledo.
Plus, such a route not only allows you to branch out to Cleveland, but also have a branch going from Fort Wayne to Columbus (connecting Columbus and Chicago)z
1. I would point out that this train line through Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo already exists it just isn't high speed, but they are working on changing it to moderate speed like 150 or so.
2. You also have to consider the political requirements. Indiana and Ohio have to sign off on it going through Toledo. Indiana would own part of the rail no matter what.
3. Michigan needs north south lines in general. All the passenger lines are east west lines to and from Chicago. A Detroit to Toledo line is needed high speed or not.
4. The Midwest in general could use a lot of connections.
@@tylerkochman1007 Firstly, you'd have to go through Gary. That town is never even going to approach the level of say East St. Louis.
Yeah, and then in the future Detroit could be connected to the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, which is probably the best candidate for HSR in Canada. The VIA Rail service is already pretty good, but it could be sped up quite a bit and better integrated with US rail. There's no easy way to cross the border without a car.
As a Floridian I happen to think Brightline will do well if they keep their Ticket prices within reason. There is a lot of daily traffic between Orlando & Miami. The traffic on I-95 in Southeast Florida is a absolute nightmare nowadays. As for the street crossings Brightline has the right of way and of course a grade separated track would be optimal.
Hopefully the Tampa to Orlando section gets built and it's actual high speed rail.
@GN Well that section between WPB & Miami is already double tracked.
The Brightline is the best train I’ve taken in the USA!
I think that line will do well for vacationers and tourists who don't wanna take that drive.
@@utterbullspit I and my relatives and my friends plan to take Brightline when it’s built from Orlando to South Florida!!!
My top 5 suggestions would be Atlanta to Charlotte with a possible extension to Raleigh/Durham in the east and to Birmingham in the west. This would be vital due to rapid population growth in the Sun Belt. Secondly, Milwaukee to Nashville in sections and stations in Chicago, Lafayette, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Bowling Green. It would make a branch to Ohio (Cincinnati and Columbus) an obvious future option. Thirdly, Phoenix to Tucson. Fourth would be the Dallas-Fort Worth-Waco-Austin-San Antonio line with the branch to Houston via College Station as an obvious future expansion. And finally the fifth. Washington DC or Philadelphia to Cleveland via Pittsburgh. I personally prefer the latter one because it would allow stations at Harrisburg, State College, Altoona, and Youngstown OH being built.
Like your thinking here. It's very funny to me that there's a legit rail service between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but not Phoenix and Tucson.
@@CityNerd Thanks. I think some details should copied from China, Taiwan and Europe where lines don't only link two or three cities but many. All passengers don't travel all the way from Milwaukee to Nashville but take a train between Louisville and Indianapolis only. There are very long lines in Germany for instance that connect several cities between Hamburg and Munich. In a long run these lines could be easily linked with each other to make a proper network: Atlanta to Nasville via Chattanooga, Raleigh to Washington DC via Richmond and so on.
Great recommendations and adding the Detroit-Toledo-Lima-Dayton/Cincinnati-Louisville-Lexington-Knoxville-Atlanta would be awesome as well!!!🙏🏽
I’m from Youngstown. The problem with providing rail service is that the existing Amtrak line between Cleveland and Pittsburgh stops in Alliance, OH, which is a 45 minute drive from downtown. This can be fixed by building a station in Youngstown along the NS line run through the city, but I doubt politicians would like the cost of building station in a declining area
I would expand your Piedmont corridor to go all the way from Atlanta to Washington, connecting Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Richmond along the way. ATL>CLT is 226. CLT>GSO is 83 GSO>RAL is 67. RDU>RIC is 139 and RIC>WDC is 96. Anchored by 2, 6M+ metros on either end, the corridor has two very rapidly growing 2-3M metros in Charlotte and Raleigh, and 2 growing metros between 1-2M in Greensboro/Winston-Salem and Richmond. Pinpointing the two very rapidly growing metros along the total route breaks up the corridor into 3 more rail length segments of 226, 150, and 238 miles. By the time that this could reasonably be expected to be complete, both Charlotte and Raleigh will likely anchor combined metros that are closer to 3-4 million people. By that time, this corridor will really make sense.
The only way you will ever get high speed rail in USA is if it is funded by the Department of Defence and used for rapid troop transportation!
Yes, a time-tested funding mechanism for building US transportation networks, no doubt!
Yep. Problem is, the first leg for this needs to be Seattle to Alaska. Another option to move soldiers and equipment to an easily-invadable region quickly needs addressed.
Working for the DoD, can definitely confirm. This is the way.
@@mattvermillion6062 Seattle to Alaska? WTF?
@@xoxxobob61 Think about it. Russia and/or China could invade Alaska and go after the oil there. If they shut off the Big Inch, we're screwed. A fast way to get troops and equipment to Alaska is critical. Current rail to Alaska is slow, boat isn't faster and air risk reprisals.
Considering this vid is only 2 years old, it's crazy how fast and how much the quality of your editing and presentation improved.
Because HSR stations are typically built in a central location they typically can’t accommodate a lot of parking like an airport does, and nor is it the goal to have everyone drive to it as that would defeat the goal of reducing traffic. So how big the existing public transit system is in a given city should be taken into account as well as how densely packed the city is within a couple mile radius around the station to account for pedestrians and bike riders. So using CSA figures is a bit of a stretch, and their current public transit ridership share should definitely be taken into account. So some of these sound great until you realize only like 5% of people in just the city of Dallas commute by public transit. Whereas a much smaller city like Seattle has a much higher ridership at 20%. Of course the concept “build it and they will come” comes into play, but HSR will really only make sense if the local infrastructure deals with the last mile trip as in the NE corridor.
You have raised some excellent points for consideration in a city such as Dallas or Houston. Both cities need to expand mass transit for access to the HSR stations. This means city planning that is far less accommodating for cars such as separated and protected large bicycle lanes, separate mass transit lanes for busses or separate protected right of ways for electric trams, higher costs for owning a car in the city. If everyone is using a car then there will always be traffic jams. No matter how many more roads or how wide that are constructed they are not enough for all the vehicle traffic.
You can build "park and ride" stations on the freeway on the outside of a city. People can then use it to commute into the city or travel to the next city.
The issue with park-and-ride is that your car is parked at the source, so you have no car at the destination no matter how big the parking lot is there. Whatever the traveler intends to do at the destination city needs to be feasible without a car if you want significant ridership. Las Vegas, for example, is low hanging fruit for HSR, not because it has great public transportation but because the vast majority of the travelers do not need a car for their intended activities. LA to Vegas should absolutely be the first US implementation because it would actually be profitable. Phoenix to Vegas would also be a good project because there is no interstate to compete with,
@@stevengordon3271 I would imagine that the HSR station hubs would attract taxi cabs and ride share app drivers.
Tourists would probably use rideshare or rent a car while the public transportation network builds up.
As for Las Vegas, you might not need a car if you stay on The Strip, but a lot of people would be interested in the surrounding area such as the national/state parks, Hoover Dam, etc. so those people will want a car anyway. It's easy to use a car in Vegas because the Strip properties all have some kind of free parking garage or lot.
Kansas City - St. Louis 248 miles
St. Louis - Nashville 309 miles
Nashville - Atlanta 248 miles
Atlanta - Charlotte 245 miles
Cincinnati - Cleveland 249 miles
Cincinnati - Pittsburgh 289 miles
Pittsburgh - Buffalo 219 miles
Minneapolis - Milwaukee 337 miles
So much untapped rail corridor potential. Love your channel, going back and binging your content from before I found your channel.
As an LA resident, a high speed rail line to Phoenix would be even more useful than the current SF one being built. Lots of business travelers fly to Phoenix since it's such an important hub. A high speed rail line would greatly reduce plane trips and allow the smaller regional airports (Santa Ana, Burbank, Ontario, Long Beach, Lancaster) to have more flights to further destinations that would be impractical to have high speed rail to (Denver, Salt Lake, Portland, Dallas).
Regarding high speed rail to Vegas, the rail would need to terminate at LA Union Station. If not, it'll be impractical and unconnected. The current plan for a high speed rail between Apple Valley and Vegas is dumb. No one but the most diehard train fans will drive 1/3 of the way to Vegas only to hop onto a train. The current proposed high speed rail line would probably work better as a high speed freight line, like in Italy.
They're talking about extending it down to Ontario (well, Rancho Cucamonga at least) now, which would be a heck of a lot more useful than ending it in Victorville, but still not great. And just as with the state's project they're way too optimistic on costs. I'm sure the price tag will at least double.
@@tim1724 I don't want to leave my car in Victorville :(
How is Phoenix an important business hub? And with the rail link between Vegas and LA, I wonder if Brightline has plans to eventually extend it to LA Union Station.
@@grahamturner2640 It's a major airport hub. Those trying to get to DC or Dallas or NYC from the regional airports in Southern California (Long Beach, Burbank, OC (John Wayne), Ontario, Palmdale) often transfer in Phoenix. High speed rail has the potential to remove some of those airport trips and have people take a train to Phoenix instead.
Phoenix is seeing lots of job and population growth, so expect travel demand between LA and Phoenix to grow. I also think it makes sense from a geography standpoint. LA and Phoenix are in the distance good enough for high ridership high speed rail, while SF to LA is a bit too far.
The reason why they are saying from Victorville to Las Vegas, it is to start to eventually take it to Los Angeles. There is too much city infrastructure and legal issues. Between Victorville and Vegas you only have to worry about Barstow and Baker, but mostly desert and clear sight lines. Tje plan is do it between Victorville and Vegas first, then do a line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Cities like Rancho Cucamonga are down the Cajon Pass which would make the completion longer, ore expensive, and less likely.
I wonder how a Pittsburgh-DC or Pittsburgh-Philidelphia route would do. It would be nice to have that connection... but because of the mountains, HSR may be quite difficult here. But if Japan could connect Tohoku and Hokkaido to Tokyo through mountains, it is possible in the US.
Japan's new HSR line, the Central Shinkansen, is a maglev line blasting right through the central mountains of Honshu with 90% of its route tunneled. And they are planning to begin commercial service between Tokyo and Nagoya by 2027.
If they can do it, the Appalachian Range of the eastern US shouldn't be a problem.
One thing about that though, it's hella expensive to make it below the ground and it'll take a lot longer time to build too. That's why the new Chuo Line for the Maglev Shinkansen is taking a lot longer time to get built than normal. Cuz it's pretty much almost all of them are tunnels.
So the geology isn't actually that bad. The Ridge-&-Valley Applachians are all individually only a mile or 2 wide at the base, & so if you pick the spot right you could cross them in a straight shot while climbing up to the elevation of the Allegheny Plateau with 8-12 total tunnels, each less than 2 miles long, & w/ grades less than 3%. The tricky part is you'd probably need some significant earthworks once you get into the Allegheny Plateau b/c the topography's so irregular, & you might need a base tunnel to cross the escarpment b/w the Plateau & the Ridge-&-Valley province. But honestly, land acquisition will probably be a bigger cost barrier than the tunneling. Also for a tiny additional marginal cost you could totally build a short spur from wherever the easternmost tunnel starts to turn northeast & connect to Harrisburg, so trains from NYC & Philly could still run over the Keystone Corridor & get all the benefits of the new high-speed connection through the mountains to Pittsburgh.
Zurich-Milan is a similar distance with the Alps in between. The train stops 7 times and the total travel duration is 3hr 17 min.
The Alps were already tunneled by train in 1882. A new high speed rail tunnel operates since 2016.
Already have a rails to trails bike trail connecting pgh and Dc. It’s antidotal but lots of ppl from Pittsburgh moved to DC in the 70s and 80s: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Allegheny_Passage
As a Detroiter, I'm glad you mentioned the Chicago to Detroit corridor. The Wolverine is already mostly owned by MDOT and Amtrak, and substantial improvements are being made, albeit slowly. However, I wouldn't draw out your map to include Toledo since that's not how the corridor is, and it's very doubtful that it would be realigned. BUT I could see a Toledo to Detroit (or Dearborn) service, where you could then connect to the Wolverine. And then connect to Ohio cities. I absolutely love taking that train, and they're about to put their new Venture cars into service. It will pretty much mimic Brightline, which is neat. And the line is already mostly 110mph. I just wish they would speed up the double-tracking. And would it kill them to electrify it and have a few less stops??
The stops on the Wolverine make a mockery of high speed. I mean, how often do people really want to go to Niles? But the stops are in place for political, not economic reasons, dating back to the 19th Century. Dropping 19th Century rules makes sense economically, but do you think there is a strong enough political movement to do so?
It's crazy how fast You evolved and grew in a year or even a few months. Your visual and vocal quality now (July 2022) is so much higher!
Loved this video! You have a new subscriber. I used your method to calculate the score for the existing high speed rail lines in Spain, and the results were... surprising. The highest score was Madrid to Barcelona with 3.22, followed by Valencia to Barcelona with 3.11 (this line is still under construction though), then Madrid to Valencia with 2.06 and Madrid to Seville with 1.10. Only these 4 routes have a score higher than 1, and all of them would've failed to make it to the top 10 in USA. The rest all have lower than 1, with some routes very close to zero (for example, Córdoba to Cádiz with 0.07 points, along with many more).
This is surprising, because these scores would mean that building high speed rail lines in Spain wouldn't make much economical sense. But the reality is the opposite: all 3 of the operative lines that have a score above 1 that I mentioned (the ones I've tried) usually run full of people, and run more than 10 trains per day each direction. They're incredibly successful. Also, Spain has the 2nd longest HSR network in the world and is planning to expand it by a lot, so that obviously means that high speed rail works here.
For reference: all of these lines operate at 300-310km/h, and prices usually range from 30€-90€ in normal days. The line from Madrid to Barcelona now has Ouigo trains which start at just 5€ and also run at 300km/h, so the demand has increased a lot and they plan on expanding to other lines soon: trains are only going to get better from here since there's finally competition.
This (together with the fact that Paris-Lyon had a score of 3.8 despite being one of the most popular routes in France) raises the question, did you put the bar too high when selecting a "minimum" score for the video, and are all of these American routes incredibly good choices? (And there are a lot of other routes that would make sense that have a score far below 4?) Or is the European situation so different than in the US that, for whatever reason, building and operating high speed rail is much less worth it? Either because of subsidies, taxes, the general public's conception of trains or that people might move less from certain cities to others. For example, a city of 300k in Spain is about as important to the country as a city of 1M in the USA, so maybe that has something to do with it.
There's also the argument that the formula you used, as you said, it's simple and not perfect, leaving a lot of aspects without consideration, so that obviously has an impact... but how big?
Please don't take this as criticism or anything - as I said I loved this content - it's just a question that I'm asking myself and that I think would be interesting to see other, more qualified people's take on this.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! If you watch my Canada (Toronto to Montreal) high speed rail race, you'll see I actually spent a bit of time analyzing the Madrid -Barcelona AVE service as a comparison.
I don't actually have a "threshold score" where I believe HSR should be built or not -- there are so many other variables, like cost (terrain between cities, for example), transit connections to city center, etc. Mostly, I wanted to make a Top 10 for the US, and demonstrate that there are even city pairs beyond the top ten that may have even more ridership potential than Paris-Lyon, which is widely regarded as a city pair with a long track record of commercially successful service. It's not at all to say that city pairs that score even lower can't also be successful!
Spain has been really exceptional in how it's building out a network to serve the entire country. I don't think that's politically feasible in the US, but I at least wanted to list out the city pairs I think we should start with! Thanks again for the fantastic thoughtful comment.
What to me would be more important than "high speed" rail would be frequent, reliable service. If Amtrak could provide twice daily service on most of these corridors with priority over freight trains, that would be ideal.
There’s no reason why we can’t have speed, frequency, and reliability like other countries.
@@LoveToday8 The challenge is there is significant distance between major population centers. With significant geographic diversity.
@@LoveToday8 high speed PASSENGER rail would allow the class 1 freighters to run faster OR at least on better trackage and if we electrify then the cost savings to the class 1s BUT that requires the CLASS 1 to be "second class" on there own trackage and the SH$% service they run would be called in question
@@LoveToday8 yeah, but at the same time if I could only have one I'd choose reliability
I heard in many places Amtrak doesn't own their own track, but in the Northeast corridor they do so it's successful. I think from another video there's a bridge that's a choke point that needs replacement there.
I completely agree on the need for a DC -> Pittsburgh high speed rail with bicycle access. The Amtrak took me 8 hours between these two cities, whereas driving is 4 hours. Its especially important since the two cities are connected by one of the best bike trails in the nation (C&O Canal and Great Allegheny Passage); having quick rail would really facilitate more use of that trail.
Easiest way to look for potential high speed rail: look for congested road/air corridors; sadly, I don’t have enough time to figure out how to do that right now…
Frankly, though, the US should get back into public transport and see which lines get hopelessly overcrowded with express services and take those lines and build dedicated high speed express tracks like the initial Tokaido Shinkansen, iirc. and most successful network approaches since. If you just slap a „railport“ in the middle of the city, you likely won’t be seen as a real alternative to driving, but rather a slower airplane.
If you want to get to the low end market, you’ll probably need a good feeder network in form of public transport in the cities to speed up the time to/from the station and be seen as a convenient enough yet fast alternative to the car…
I've actually analyzed the FAA data (publicly available from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics). It's a huge data set, so you need a fairly powerful tool for the analysis. Maybe I'll share some findings in a future video. Thanks for the comment!
@@CityNerd yeah, no way my crummy mac would help me do decent research in such a set. I think I‘d really appreciate such a video
A good feeder network is absolutely necessary, yes.
I’m in favor of more extensive high speed rail in the NEC. They already have regional rail in the major cities: DC, Newark/Jersey City/Hoboken, NYC, New Haven, Boston. People there are used to train travel and would be more receptive to using high speed rail. These states are also high density areas so IMO a better chance at being profitable
It makes sense for so many reasons.
I started flying in the early 70’s (the end of the gold age, I suppose?) and I would take a train over a flight if at all possible. I’m a bit of a train nerd anyway and love the comfort and ease of movement on a train. Also, having experienced wonderful European trains also tips train travel in its favor.
I'd love a SacramentoPortlandSeattleVancouver line! Was bummed to see it mocked in the intro. It makes sense as part of an eventual San Diego to Vancouver West coast line. Obviously it would make sense to get the LA to SF part done first, but there's no reason to stop at that. There will be more overall support for high speed rail if more metro areas are included.
Too many mountains + not large enough population centers + too far a distance. Vancouver to Seattle to Portland and possibly Eugene makes sense but the terrain in southern Oregon is just too rough and the travel time from Sacramento to Seattle wouldn't be competitive with air.
@@ZRodTW Tokyo has a population bigger than California, and the distance it had to travel to Osaka, with other major stops along the way, is much shorter than this proposed route. The economics of it are entirely different.
@@ZRodTW also Norway doesn't have high speed rail, Switzerland has a base tunnel but it's on a route that is absolutely tiny compared to this proposed Sacramento > Seattle route. London and Paris is also miniscule in comparison to the size of Seattle to Sacramento. These are all amazing achievements of engineering you're pointing out but Sacramento to Seattle is just another magnitude of difficulty, and it could be achieved but you would need the economic incentive to do so, which isn't there right now.
@@ZRodTW English channel and Japan are both much smaller distances and serve way more people. Yes tunnels exist, but it matters how far they go and how many people they serve.
that line has bean "dug up" for 30+ years and sometimes includes Whistler as its final
Border lines definitely shouldn't be ignored. The most obvious high speed rail route in NA imo is Portland-Seattle-Vancouver. Vancouver is far more connected to seattle and Portland than the rest of canada and same can be said the other way around.
I live in Phoenix, so naturally Phoenix to Vegas, Phoenix is to LA, and Phoenix to San Diego is the dream. Obviously I think Phoenix to LA to San Diego is probably a more used route, it would still be a joy to use high speed rail and would probably amount to me taking more trips out there.
I visited LA from Detroit a few years back and thought it was insane when my dad told me it'd be cheapest for us to fly into Vegas and then rent a car. The waste inherent in it all is just so plain to see.
I saw a lot of comments on the importance of public transit in the cities in question, so I did some rough number crunching using city public transit usership instead of city population. Here are the routes I came up with:
1. Boston-New York-Newark-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington DC
2. San Francisco-San Jose-LA
3. New York-Rochester-Buffalo
4. New York-Stamford-Bridgeport-New Haven-Hartford-Providence-Boston
5. Twin Cities-Chicago
6. Chicago-Milwaukee
7. Chicago-St. Louis
8. Washington-Pittsburgh
9. New York-Cleveland
This one surprised me. If they did make that line I think they should extend it through Toledo to Chicago.
10 would have been Philadelphia-Pittsburgh, but I feel like they wouldn't make that one if they already had DC-Pittsburgh
LA had fairly low ridership, but three of the runners-up would have included LA (destinations being San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas)
One thing about line 3, the geographic natural path is more like:
NYC - Albany - Syracuse - Rochester - Buffalo. (And at this point you may as well extend to Boston and pick up Springfield and Worcester)
So maybe it would inspire Syracuse and Albany to get better public transit.
I feel like this is definitely an ideal corridor/network to flesh out, especially as once the natural path is taken you get even more cities in the mix. (Natural path being not crossing mountains and instead following the valleys the Thruway takes)
LA to Las Vegas is a route I have driven many times and my kid did their undergrad thesis on why the death rate on the Barstow to Primm segment has a higher than expected death rate per lane mile than most other interstates. The problem I was told when I lived in the greater Los Angeles was getting a right of way from Victorville into central LA. Especially through the Cajon pass. Several times a Victorville to Las Vegas route was proposed and they would worry about getting into LA later.
The problem being that there is almost no traffic to originate from Victorville. And by the time I drive from say my place in Orange County to Victorville, I had may as well just keep driving the rest of the way to Las Vegas. Because then I will still have the use of my car in Las Vegas. There is no way to make it pay unless they can build it initially with a huge park and ride in San Bernardino at first but eventually going out of Union Station or maybe Pasadena. Though it would likely be OK if speed was below 100 MPH until Victorville then 250MPH+ from there to Las Vegas.
A big problem though is that the Cajon pass has the San Andreas pass going right through it. I know. I have stood right next to it. This makes any sort of tunneling or elevated line out of the question. But with the Union Pacific is already there with a multi track main line. One already bursting at the seams for the huge amount of traffic it carries from the port of LA/Long Beach. This limitation of geography seems to be insoluble for getting high speed fail through there.
The whole LA region only has about 5 or 6 useful entrances/exits and they all have narrow choke points which are already heavily exploited.
When considering *any* pair that includes NYC, you have to factor in the issues of the bridge and tunnel choke points that make driving in or out of NYC such a pain. I kept a car in Manhattan for over 20 years, so I have a lot of experience with this. In 2019 I was a road warrior working off-site in a Baltimore suburb and driving was just awful. Approaching the city on Fridays was like playing Russian Roulette. Yes, there are lots of ways to get into Manhattan, but on any given trip, any one of them could clog up long after the choice was made (which had to be made on the New Jersey Turnpaike, surely the eighth circle of hell). In the end, I left my car in the hotel parking lot over the weekends, took an uber to where I could catch the bus and, at least, could sleep or read my way through the traffic nightmare.
got family out in JAMAICA and they have a car "stashed" in NEW JERSEY
I like the idea of a "Super Corridor". Take Washington to Boston as the starting point. Then add a southern HSR that is Washington-Richmond-Raleigh-Charlotte-Greenville-Atlanta-Birmignham. Have great airport connections for DCA (Washington), RDU (Raleigh), CLT (Charlotte) and ATL (Atlanta). The Brightline in Florida is already going to have an MCO (Orlando) station. Now, you have an intermodal HSR/air network that really works.
I also like a Philadelphia-Harrisburg (or DC) - Pittsburgh-Cleveland-Detroit-Chicago link as well to tie in.
sorta like the "CASCADIA" line talked about up the west coast from San Diego to Whistler BC Canada
A little late to the video, but it definitely makes sense why the Dallas-Houston connection was farther down the list even though it hit the optimal criteria. I really hope that high-speed rail system finally gets built as those cities are expected to grow much more in the future.
Atlanta to Nashville by way of Chattanooga. If they designed it well with underground segments that emerged to parking garages close to the Atlanta and Nashville downtowns and easy access to the train for a stop in Chattanooga, then I think it would work better than expected. They could earn bonus points for ensuring access to a future stop in Murfreesboro. The CSAs along this route are 6.9 million, 1 million, and 2.1 million respectively.
Atlanta to Nashville has been proposed as a HSR line for years, but there are engineering difficulties with crossing the mountains that would make it time competitive with driving. The state of North Carolina is interested in extending the Piedmont to Asheville (and Wilmington), but the mountains decrease the efficiency of a train to Asheville.
ALL of these make sense. I used to live in Camas, WA - in a semi-rural house, basically across the river from Portland and up into the hills. Super car dependent. I’ve driven to/from Seattle (taxing). I’ve flown from PDX to SeaTac (expensive and inefficient, with significant drives on each end.) And I’ve taken the Amtrack Cascades line. It might take more time, but it’s inexpensive and like a vacation, compared to the other options. It’s okay that it takes more time, when the time is enjoyable.
That said, for a Seahawks game with multiple people, it doesn’t pencil out. My wife and I did it for an anniversary, including an overnight in a nice hotel. Wonderful trip! But with a less intimate group, driving, parking near the airport (for free) and taking light rail downtown is the way to go. I’ve also done WDC to NYC (well, Newark), Tokyo to Osaka, and Tokyo to Utsunomiya. I feel that a lot of people in the US are clueless about the vacation feeling in a train.
We need to build the LA/LV high speed rail and brand it as a party train. The vacation doesn’t start when you arrive in Vegas. It starts the moment the train leaves the platform!
I'd love San Diego to LA, but really San Diego to Seattle is my dream high-speed stretch.
I'd ride it.
toss in Vancouver and better yet add Whistler as a "cap" even if the whistler LEG is slower
I grew up in Victoria and took the "CAT" to Seattle and "loved" to say I lived in a city with PUBLIC TRANSIT to 3 cities in 2 countries !! (transit to ferries that are public run and transit on other side )
I routinely drive from the outskirts of LA to Pheonix... it's is a massive pain, so I'm glad you gave it a mention. Where I am it's ~5 hr drive and like $40 in gas. Which blows the ~6hr and $120 from Ontario to PHX. There is a train (antrak, sunset limited) out here that instead takes ~8h and only has outbound trains a couple days a week. Despite that, it's nearly packed every time I look at it.
One thing that's unaddressed in this video -- future growth. Everything in the video is based on 2020 populations, but we'll be lucky to see ANY HSR come online before like 2040. LA and PHX are growing metro areas, and I'd expect that pair to eclipse others that are currently in front of it in the next 20 years.
Its not just $40 in gas - its $40 in wear and tear and $15 or so in insurance cost as well not to mention food along the way, water, coffee etc. That trip easily cost you $100 each way but you pay for the gas upfront and the rest over time.
I'm not used to such distances. I live in Czech Republic, it has some 500x300 km. There is probably about one domestic commercial flight available, between Prague and Ostrava. Other than that, you can cover pretty much everything with trains, altough we don't have a single kilometer of high speed railway. Max supported speed is 100 mph AFAIK. But one is planned.
Apparently *5* HSR routes are being planned in Czechia. The new max speed on them will be 320 kmh (200 mph).
Here's a tip traveling between Philly and NYC. I live in Philly and avoid Amtrak if going to NYC. I take Septa's Cornwell Heights Station "free parking, can leave the car for days" to Trenton $5.00, switch to NJTransit NEC line $17.00, total trip Philly to NYC $22.00. I've done this about a dozen times, never had a timing problem. Amtrak can cost anywhere from as low as $38.00 into the hundreds for the same trip, plus parking is crazy $$$$ at 30th St Station, especially if parking for multiple days. Although Amtrak straight through is usually 1hr15min, the Septa/NJTransit trip can be about 2hr15min if you can time it right. The addtl time seems worth it for the cost savings and convenience of not having to park at 30th St Station. Depending on where you live in Philly it can even make more sense to drive to Trenton and skip Septa altogether. I have taken Amtrak many times all along the NEC. Boston, Baltimore, DC. I've driven to all of these places as well. Much nicer to take the train. High Speed rail is a no brainer, someone needs to get it done.
Don't forget that the LGV-Sud Est was not built to connect Paris with Lyon, so much as to cut travel time to Marseille, Nice, and also Genoa and Geneva. The Tokaido Shinkansen connects dozens of cities in its 320 miles, not just Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka; it has stimulated development of many smaller cities over the last 40 years.
BUT you have to "sell" the idea and a city pair that sells itself THEN build out to the harder to sell cities as the "traffic is already there"
Just took the Italian Frecciarossa between Rome to Bologna (via Florence) and it was amazing. Speeds were 160mph
I think the Pittsburgh to DC line has promise. It doesn't appear to have the problem of dealing with building through "urban sprawl" like you cited was the plague of the Acela corridor.
Ultimately, a big factor that is overlooked in your formula is the attraction of the city. As you point out when assessing LA to Las Vegas, Vegas is a very luring city. That seems key.
I always thought linking Las Vegas to Anaheim (Disneyland) with a connection to Ontario Airport was a good high speed rail pairing.
As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, a "problem" with DC to Pittsburgh is the topography in between, which would necessitate lots of bridges and tunnels that would (probably) make the line a lot more expensive per mile than, say, Chicago to Indianapolis. (Never mind that the Frecciarossa between Milan and Rome has tons of elevation change, not to mentionany number of Chinese lines, and Spain to an extent.)
I definitely think my approach here underrates Vegas a bit, and I think the same of Orlando. Given how many connecting flights run between ATL and Orlando, you wonder how successful a nonstop high speed line could be if you ran it directly from Hartsfield (after a stop in downtown ATL, of course!). Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
@@CityNerdThey already have an Amtrak line (Capitol Limited) from DC through West Virginia to Pittsburgh and on to Cleveland, Toledo and Chicago.
I know the cities are smaller, but I expected some variation of Memphis/Nashville/St. Louis because they all right in that 250-mile sweet spot. Or Nashville/Atlanta (though Atlanta is not small). A Memphis-Raleigh line via Nashville-Chattanooga-Atlanta-Upstate SC-Charlotte would be quite busy.
Tourism to some of these cities would probably pay for most of these lines. I'd like HSR connecting most major cities in the U.S.
I 100% agree with you. But Tennessee is so anti public transportation that I don't even have much hope in getting regular passengers rail here 😭
Kansas City to St Louis with a halfway stop in Columbia seems ideal since it’s 260 miles apart. It also connects Missouri’s two equal major cities that are otherwise set on opposite borders.
I'm in KC and I'd love to have HSR to STL, Chicago, and Austin. I don't know the feasibility, but damn would it be nice.
There has been official discussion in MO and KS legislatures that has looked at HSR between STL and KC - with extensions to Topeka and then on to Wichita. HSR could put KC and STL within 90 minutes of each other....possibly 60 minutes with an express line? Suddenly, you have a commutable distance that would help both cities. The question would be on of ridership volume to pay for the endeavor.
Worth doing a version of this for Mexico and Canada. Mexico in particular could be - with a ton of subsidization, since there's a disconnect between typical HSR fares and typical economic means for Mexican citizens - exceptionally well-served by HSR. You'd need to blast through some mountains, but CDMX is a near ideal hub for routes to Guadalajara (through Morelia), Léon (through Santiago de Querétaro), San Luis Potosí (also through Querétaro), and Oaxaca.
I talk a bit more about Mexico HSR in the "Key Stations" video, and the Mexico-Queretaro HSR race video too.
Montreal -> Toronto is a "famous" corridor and used to RUN turbine trains and the "400 series IS THE WORLDS largest hiway network and Detroit / upstate NY is a southern terminus with the NY ACELA corridor a "quick add on" that would bring tourists to Niagara falls
I think you car travel times are optimistic. For a shorter journey, 60 mph is probably good. But once you factor in stops, which many people do after 2 hours or so, the average drops a lot. Also, unless you are in a major hub city like Chicago, MSP, or Atlanta, direct flights don't happen. Plus it might take 2 or more hours to just get to any city with airline service. A lot of America could be served by a combination of standard rail and high speed rail.
If you have a sweet spot of 300 miles, I think then the line should be longer to allow for a few intermediate stops. Like London Brussels Amsterdam or Paris.
A route you missed is Chicago to STL, via Springfield, the state capital. Currently there is a LOT of Chicago to Springfield travel because of that. If you're building to Springfield, extending a bit to St Louis makes sense.
Car travel is hard to predict as on thr interstate you can go upto 80 and be mostly fine, you have to account for stops which some people might just power through (if you don't drink water you use the bathroom less, or you might eat things while driving instead of sitting down. Ironically on a shorter trip your more likely to "smell the roses" vs just get these 5hrs over with already)
And of course the dreded traffic jam can make being near any city suddenly take an extra 30min-1hr. (Or crashes) parking lot interstates are painful. This is actually a win for the train in that if it has priority for all conflicts it will be a lot more consistent than a car trip. Although i notice that on "low roads" like the US Routes which are 1lane each way and 60 i almost never have slowdowns even if the road itself is noticably slower than the interstate, but that could just be that i don't drive on them near cities.
I also believe trains are the most resistant to weather related issues of the 3.
I do think you overlooked Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison.
Chicago-Milwaukee already received some of Amtrak’s highest ridership.
Madison might not be large, but it’d be a much bigger draw than some larger cities for a number of reasons.
A big reason is that it is a college town. One of the biggest obstacles to rail adaption is a population’s habitual use of other means of transit. College towns have the benefit of having a large group of part time residents (college students) that are new to the city, and therefore do not have any preexisting travel habits. I theorize that this means that college students are far more able to be persuaded to take the train than longtime residents of a city.
Another reason is that Madison is a tourist destination.
Another reason is that it is a capital city. A connection between Wisconsin’s capita and its business hub would be huge.
But if you look at it, many of the Midwest’s most used Amtrak stations are in cities of Madison’s mold. Similarly sized college cities of similar distance (in some cases greater) from their most significant city pair. Madison compares favorably to relatively heavily-used midwestern stations such as Bloomington-Normal, Champaign-Urbana, Ann Arbor, and Carbondale.
Also note that Albany-Rensselaer (a small city that is a state capital, like Madison, and home to some colleges) is the ninth most-used Amtrak station. New Haven (a city on the Northeast Corridor that is a college town and smaller than Madison in population) is the tenth most-used station.
I’m wondering how feasible a STL to Nashville, much less Nashville to Atlanta route would be. If not even further southeastward to Florida (with an initial eastward intermediate stop with Savannah). Given the HEAVY tourist volumes that will use I-24 & I-75 that particular area alone, much less how increasingly behind Tennessee is falling in terms of improving their highways.
Bear in mind if anyone from the Eastern Great Plains or the parts of the Midwest that’re west of Indiana has the nerve to drive to Florida & vice versa (much less weekends in Tennessee or Atlanta), that’s the area they will take.
A few thoughts/whestions I have from this:
- What would be the top option for a faster technology like Maglev? I imagine that would mean a significant increase in the viable/optimal distances.
- What would the rating look like for something longer, like a New York/Chicago line? And would it become viable with Maglev speeds? This line is interesting because it could be made from several reasonable pieces (NY-PHI-PITT-CLE-CHI must all be at least close to working).
I’m somewhat shocked that Chicago-Milwaukee wouldn’t be higher. Obviously they’re on the closer end but it seems like there would be a lot of demand between the two (unless they’re counted as a single statistical area?)
Plus as a Seattleite I have to be shocked that something along the Cascades corridor didn’t make it lol
Chicago-Milwaukee distance is too short, given my approach. You'd get *some* ridership, but it's a relatively short drive, so unless you're going center-to-center, just the time it takes to access and egress from each station would eat up whatever you saved in travel time. I think you'd definitely have a Milwaukee stop on a Chicago-Madison-Twin Cities line, of course.
Native Seattleite here as well! I actually really like the existing service (have probably ridden the Cascades 100+ times) and would love any and all upgrades. I just don't think it's a high national priority -- funding is going to have to happen regionally. I think MSFT has put money into it already?
@@CityNerd Yeah I’m not entirely sure what’s happening with it but some sort of Brightline-comparable service with 125ish mph speeds would probably be most viable.
There's good right of way for high speed rail on this route existing, would expect good commuter demand with the difference in living costs between the two cities. Passenger rail on this corridor used to be some of the fastest in the world back in the 1930s and 40s
I think there are 9 Amtrak trains a day between Chicago and Milwaukee the journey is about an hour and 1/2
@@CityNerd isn't this supposed to be about getting people out of cars and having more transit options for citizens? Idc if I can stand outside and see the nearest city, as long as I had the option to get there by high speed rail, it would all be worth it to me.
In March 1982, I rode the train from Newport News, Virginia to Penn Station in New York City. Somewhere in Delaware, the train tracks run alongside an interstate highway. The train I was on, which was a local train instead of an express train, was passing the cars on the highway as if the cars were standing still. Two days later on a Sunday, when I returned to Newport News on the train, I remember that there were no empty seats on this train from New York City all of the way to Philadelphia. After this train left Philadelphia, there were a few empty seats.
I think that a high-speed rail triangle connecting Las Vegas, Phoenix, and LA would make a whole lot of sense. Phoenix could and should also connect to Tucson, and Las Vegas could and should connect with Reno, while Reno should also be connected to Sacramento, which in turn should be connected to LA through that current California HSR project that is currently being built through the Central Valley.
The city pairs theory is great, but the reality is that in enough parts of the US, there are city pairs upon city pairs upon city pairs that can be found that would end up making an interconnecting network.
that's pretty good two cities you forgot to mention connecting to are san Diego and salt lake city one of the growing cities in the west
@@averymoore509 San Diego I could 100% see, but SLC is pretty remote and does not have the population to support HSR
The thing about Lyon to Paris is that it's also the last leg of the SNCF from Barcelona to Paris. It's quite fast - no stopping when you cross the border.
Love it
What do you think? Would you have analyzed this differently? Are there any city pairs you thought would be on the list but weren't? I mean...I was really hoping for Seattle to Portland, but it rates lower than every city pair mentioned in the video, and others that didn't even make the cut, like Atlanta-Charlotte! 😢
Loved this vid! I'm such a purist about HSR that I'd be super interested to what the us would look like if we had the level of completeness that Europe does. There have to be smaller active HSR corridors than Paris to Lyon that are still quite active and maybe not as financially viable on their own but as part of a more developed network totally fit and deserve to be there, like the Chicago to indianapolis line also having cinci to indy, columbus, cleveland, maybe even louisville and STL and nashville KC etc etc. I'm also interested in your thoughts about the feasibility of trains succeeding in this country by filling a niche centered more around luxury and personal space (free wifi and good food, lots of lugagge space) than pure speed. Longer overnight trips across country that dont fuck you up like a red eye, long scenic relaxing day trip train rides from seattle to LA or SF, NYC to Charlotte or atlanta, etc etc (Gym cars, or upper floors. Nice showers! not that much more money, so much nicer for our (shrinking but growing when i become president) middle class
@@aldenthompsonvought Love the vision! I do think one of the difficult-to-quantify advantages of train travel is the space to work, or relax, or get up and walk around, as well as the better food and drink options. But travel time and frequency are so much easier to measure!
@@CityNerd
That's certainly a point I think u shld have mentioned. The ever shrinking seat in basic economy is almost laughable at this point. Which is even weirder when u realize that on average Americans are getting bigger and bigger. And I say this as a morbidly obese person. Then again maybe airlines have noticed and thus the shrinking economy seat is just a way for them to push first/business class?
(Side Note: I don't blame airlines for my obesity it's a food addiction that I must conquer or die from it)
@@aldenthompsonvought I like what you said about baggage! All the budget airlines charge extra even if you just have one bag of luggage now. !!! So a train would be a plus with that
1 corridor (or pair of corridors) i would like is what i call the NY cross, basically run a line from Boston to Buffalo (with obvious stops) and a line from NYC to Montreal (with obvious stops). And of course have crossovers in Albany. This would be the first non-linear extension of the NE corridor making it more of a mesh network.
Just watched this one and as a former Pittsburgher who now lives in Richmond VA i have a couple thoughts:
• First off - love your channel - especially the video on urban aqueducts. I look forward to future videos!
• Thoughts on a train line from Pittsburgh to DC - To me it seems like that would be a *massive* undertaking to get a new high speed rail line through the appalachians. There’s a railroad museum in Altoona that details the first attempts at it. And driving and flying between those two cities is super easy. There have been efforts to widen the PA Turnpike between Pgh and Breezewood for as long as I can remember, and with the exception of weather challenges in the Laurel Highlands, traffic is (relatively) light along the I-76, 70, and 270 route.
• I think more feasible would be if the Acela corridor were extended to the whole East Coast along I-95/I-4. There’s a substantial bottleneck just north of Richmond, and sometimes it takes me three hours to drive to Fredericksburg, 47 miles away. And I-4 is a nightmare. DC-RVA-Raleigh-Savanna-JAX-Disney-Tampa high speed train service would probably be very popular as all of those cities grow over the next few decades.
The time and hassle in getting to the station is a bigger deal though. Let's say I took the train from LA to San Francisco.
Like most ppl I live outside LA the city so that's a 0.3 hr drive then 1.2 hour on our commuter rail. Followed by 2.6 hrs on HSR. Add another .5 hour for last mile transit and you see the problem. That's 4.6 hrs and we still haven't factored in scheduling, security lines, etc. All of which can easily add over 1hr, pushing the ease of having your car with you vs the .5 hrs saved.
Right now, we spend a ton to expand airports (and sometimes we can't.) That's because a ton of air travel is done with short-haul "commuter" flights. The result is that airports run at nearly full capacity, which means that tiny problems with weather or a mechanical problem with a plane taxiing on a taxiway or others can jam up one major airport, and that jam ripples through the entire national system. Airports need some "wiggle room" in their capacity and scheduling to reduce the constant delays. Shifting this traffic off of these flights and onto rail spokes radiating out from major airports like Chicago (ORD and MDW) and allowing passengers to buy a single ticket and transfer directly from a plane to a train at the airport would work great. Rail is safer and less sensitive to weather delays, plus generally more pleasant than being stuck inside a plane.
Japan has huge "extreme short haul" and actually "mileage out" airplanes from take off landing cycles NOT flight hours
A great city pair for HSR would be Phoenix - Vegas mainly because there is no interstate to compete with. And because most travelers to Vegas would not need a car for their intended activities.
It does have to compete much more with airplanes though, especially if it uses the same HSR terminal in Vegas that is currently planned and FURTHER away from the city center/strip than the airport
I was just going to say this. Phoenix is growing and Phoenix to LA and Vegas would be very profitable routes. There’s no “good” interstate to take to Vegas and no one really flies to LA. It’s easier to just drive. As a Phoenix resident, I’ve even personally considered driving to LA or Vegas to fly out of the country because Sky Harbor Airport is just too small to have cheap flights to popular destinations like Hawaii and Atlanta. If I could ride the HSR to Vegas or LA I’d do it undoubtedly.
same goes for San Francisco - Las Vegas. in both cases you have to drive amost all the way to LA.
@@kabouterwesley83 The difference is that an HSR router between Phoenix and Las Vegas can go as the crow flies, whereas that is not feasible to San Francisco. An HSR route to SF would also go almost all the way to LA. In practice, it would just tie into the eventual HSR between LA and SF.
Since I have no math brain, and therefore never look at math to figure things out, your charts and calculations really interested me. But in return, let me offer this incalculable: the regional sense of identification. You mentioned Cleveland-Cincinnati, my own most needed route, but the reason isn't math, it's family ties, cross-market advertising, probably business connections, and an incalculable sense of being part of one place. North America is so much larger than Europe or Japan, that what they would call inter-regional is for us intra-regional. It looks like several of your proposed pairs are indeed what I would call intra-regional. In any case, the Northeast Corridor shows that if you build it, run it often enough, and keep it clean, then yes, they will use it readily.
Since when is the government concerned with profit? I think high speed rail is a must, it's greener, takes congestion off the freeway, and I think it's sorely needed.
Love this. Nuanced as it may seem, Paris - Lyon/Paris - Bordeaux/ Paris - Lille are all profitable lines. While the tourists heavy lines like Paris - Nice or the new Paris - Barcelona are not.
So lines that look like they make sense in the US, such as LA - Vegas, night not.
I don’t know, it’s so nuanced.
For example, LA - SD would be a very popular line if you look are the travel time by car, despite the fact the distance is just shy of 100 miles.
Great stuff!
Having lived in Europe and Asia, I think the biggest difference is that wherever I take a train, there is a local public transportation network of buses and subway to get me to where I want to go.
In the United States, if I go to NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, then I have a pretty developed local public transportation network. But anywhere else I go in the United States that isn't true. You need a car to get around.
For example, I lived near the airport in Dallas, one of the biggest cities in the US. I took the bus to the airport as an experiment, and it took me 1 hour. By car it would be 15 minutes. The bus network in Dallas does not enable you to go sideways from neighborhood to neighborhood. It just serves commuters coming in and out of the downtown. The whole city of Dallas is designed for cars with a million service roads, strip malls, and massive parking lots making a real bus/subway network impractical due to all the space devoted to tarmac throughout the city and inability to just walk around.
I think the same thing is true for most parts of the United States outside of a few cities like NYC and San Francisco. As a result you really need a car and can't rely on public transportation to get around.
There is now Uber available, so perhaps that has finally made arriving at a destination car-less in the United States tenable, but I still think the necessity of just getting around in your car in the US, even if you want to just hop over to a convenience store, makes all the difference compared to the rest of the world. US cities are simply not designed for public transportation with the exception of a few. Unlike Europe and Asia, the US enjoys plenty of open space, and cities have developed accordingly to make use of all that space.
In Europe or Asia, you can just wake up and decide to go somewhere without a car, making decisions as you go. In the United States you need to plan your transportation for the place you are going or you will be stuck at the airport or train station. The costs of taxis and uber are higher than the costs of public transportation elsewhere in the world. As a result you are excluding a lot of casual travel at low cost which exists elsewhere in the world.
My guess would be that the only routes that actually will make a profit like routes in France or Japan are the routes that include cities with well-developed public transportation networks where people can live without owning a car in the downtown. I don't think LA qualifies. The Texas cities don't qualify. The only profitable routes are along that Eastern route from Boston to DC.
Unless Napoleon III brutally bulldozes the other cities in the US and forcibly rebuilds them as walkable cities with greater population density and less space committed to parking and driving everywhere, I don't see high speed rail becoming practical in the US as it is in other parts of the world.
Even SF doesn't have very good public transit. Muni and Bart together don't even come close to having good coverage over the city, which itself is not very big. The bus system is very good for the US, but still has a decent number of gaps in service, especially outside the city center.
Probably right, but I think a line from Chicago to Pittsburg ( Pittsburgh public transport might be lacking a bit but it certainly is more walkable than many US cities.) And then maybe connecting that to DC as mentioned might be realistic. It might cross international borders but a Chicago-Detroit-Toronto-Ottowa-Montreal HSR probably would make a lot of sense. So would New York to Montreal.
Brightline is at-grade up the coast, using the former Florida East Coast, and then uses a new grade-separated rail line across Florida to Orlando, and ultimately Tampa.
Interesting analysis. Something missing in the comparison between train, air and car is the added time needed to get from the airport/train station to your desired location in the destination city. Considering train stations are more centrally located than mega-airports, this may improve the competitiveness of trains over planes.
That was in the graph
He did account for that lol
That WAS-PHI-NYC-BOS line seems like a no-brainer to me! But it would probably be eerily similar to HS2 in England if it were to go ahead proper.
Great video! So glad I found this channel and that someone with real knowledge actually addressed that magical "Utopian US" rail map. Given that the top spots all belong to the Northeast/Acela corridor, I'm curious what isn't working with the Acela/Northeast Regional lines as it stands. I know from experience the fares can be ridiculous...to the point where I've flown from DC to NYC because it was considerably cheaper (which is a horrendous notion). But is the problem for most people just the speed?
A big part of the problem is that unlike just about every other rail system in the world, Amtrak is expected to be profitable, and the Acela is very much a cash cow for them.
A big problem is def the speed. Acela is only abt a half an hour to an hour quicker than the Northwest Regional (which is far cheaper). I think some of the speed issues cld be do to the track design plus freight trains.
I'm going to do a video on NEC HSR in the near future to get into a bit more depth on it than I did in this video.
Thanks for walking us through your graph. As a parent of young kids I think the destination really does need to be more than 8+ hours away by car before flying looks good. Getting kids through an airport is challenging. Connecting flights just adds to an already long day.
What about a high-speed rail line of Miami-Orlando-Jacksonville-Atlanta with a branch line to Tampa? This would connect the metropolitan areas in Florida with over 1 million population, with each of the sections around the 300-mile sweet spot and the maximum length right about 600 miles.
International Pairings:
1) Vancouver Seattle (the most obvious pairing)
2) Detroit Toronto
3) Montreal Boston
4) San Antonio Monterrey
I think these are all viable. I also think CAHSR should extend to San Diego...AND Tijuana. Phoenix - El Paso/Juarez has some potential, especially the way they're growing.
I think the rail infrastructure just needs to be drastically improved. I don't think a HSR is needed between some of the shorter distances if you can get an express train that is direct between the two cities.
The Rail Runner service between Albuquerque and Santa Fe is, to me, a great example of this. There are tons of short-distance city pairs out there that are larger than those two cities but don't have anywhere near as good a service.
Nice video. Some additional thoughts:
1. Right of way issues are removed if you have a raised monorail track in the median of existing highways. Cost to build a mile of track should be no more than a mile of one lane of a highway.
2. Tech is there for one car in a train to decouple and slow down while another speeds up from a station. Trains slows to maybe 70MPH (instead of stopping), and passengers asked to go to the last car if they are taking an interim stop. Imagine a train from Chicago to NYC that has stops for Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Philly with an average speed even with the slowdowns of 220MPH. The one car goes up to a 1/2 hour on its own to the final destination.
3. Toronto should really be included in this map with high speed rail service between 3 of the top 5 cities in the US/Canada.
I think an LA to Phoenix line would be useful. There's a lot of people who commute weekly between the cities.
I think the "Southern Triangle" should be considered: high-speed trains connecting Atlanta, Charlotte and Nashville could be very popular. Atlanta to Birmingham might be as well. Elsewhere, Seattle to Portland should be considered, along with Charlotte to Raleigh. I suppose that Chicago to Milwaukee falls into the same category as New York to Philadelphia, but it still should be considered.
Travel by car must take into consideration not only fuel costs but the fatigue of the driver and time to rest and stop for meals if one is driving a 600 miles or more distance. High speed rail is the best for relaxation and space to do work on computer.
One of the biggest advantages to travelling by car is that you have transportation when you arrive (you don't need to rent a car). This would be negated in cities with centralized mass transit like NYC and Boston but would be extremely relevant to Dallas and Houston. You have to buy meals on the train too so I'm not persuaded by that point.
@@paulkieran2308 you have shown that apart from the older cities of the northeast or the upper Midwest such as Chicago with mass transit the younger cities such as Dallas and Houston to cite just two examples are car dependent cities. The solution is new city planning that is no longer built exclusively for motor vehicles. This means dedicated lanes or lines for mass transit and extra costs for motor vehicle use in the cities with of course the exception of emergency vehicles.
@@paulkieran2308 You don't have to buy food on the train, you can bring something from home. I mean, that's how it is in Italy at least
@@Hastdupech8509 You are correct. I misunderstood R. Placer's comparison of car and rail travel. He said you have to allow time to stop driving to get meals and I didn't realize at first that he was talking about the time cost not money cost.
@@paulkieran2308 Yeah, it's what we may call "the human factor", you're more relaxed and can even watch a film (if the connection is decent, but usually HS train companies offer a bunch of movies on specific sites to watch) or work
This might be my Pennsylvania bias coming in, but a good idea for a line system would be connecting Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg-York-Lancaster, Allentown, Philly and from there to the Acela corridor.
Excellent video! I will definitely be watching more on your channel. Dallas to Houston being the top pick outside of the Northeast corridor doesn't surprise me. I think it's very clear that the ridership will be high enough to justify the line based on the high flight volume between the two cities (almost none of which are connecting flights, because both cities already have flights to everywhere that the other one does). Being that the train stations will be more convenient than the airports, and that trains are more comfortable to ride in, it should be obvious that the train will at the barest minimum capture half the flight market, which is plenty to justify the train. And it will very likely capture much more than that, to say nothing of the car market. If anything, the fact that Southwest Airlines fought the train tooth and nail--probably setting back HSR in the US as a whole at least a decade--should be good indication that it will severely damage the flight market.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I'm kinda bullish on Texas HSR, and I've got a video on the docket (next couple weeks) to do a deeper dive similar to the recent one I did on California HSR. The proposed Houston station location is not very central...but then a lot of stuff in Houston isn't very central! It should play out quite a bit differently than CAHSR, for a lot of reasons: distance, topography, political realities, etc.
@@CityNerd The proposed Houston station is perfectly located. The Galleria/Uptown area (roughly 610 from I-69 to I-10) is a mini/2nd downtown and I-10 West from Bwy 8 to Hwy 6 is called the Energy Corridor due to the density of energy companies headquartered there. The proposed rail station almost perfectly splits the middle of all 3 of those major areas. Now if they could only get some light rail to connect them...
@@rclmwing What about BRT? I know Houston had a fairly recent bus system redesign. Light rail would take longer to build vs BRT. Perhaps light rail construction could begin alongside BRT implementation? Either way, the knowledge that such short flights like Dallas and Houston are so common is soul crushing as an environmentalist.
I think another thing about Lyon is that it's near the french alps so you can connect there to go to another tourist destinaion, or you can take the Paris to Chambery train which uses like 90% of the paris to lyon track.
It will always be more difficult to get the ridership HSR gets in Europe, China or Japan, because of the lack of underlying public transport. Especially when you want to compete with car driving, it does not help you when the most convenient way to get from your house to any destination in you r metro area, including the HSR-trainstation, is by car. In Europe, a lot of people in big metro area's live quite close to a subwaystation, tramstop or regional railstation where connections to the high speed railstations are available. In the USA, only the northeast comes close.
Another issue: geography. It is nice that 2 cities are 250 mile apart, but if there is a big mountainrange, or a swampy area is in between the cities, things get more difficult.
This is why inner city public transportation is so important. But many US cities, including the one I live in gives zero priority to public transportation
NY -> DC would be good as both have good transit and are CAR - UNFRIENDLY
I like the analysis of these 10. I admit I don't know if I fully understand the math behind the results. I like the map that is tweeted at least once a year because it shows expansion options for a lot of the stations. Denver to Albuquerque to El Paso makes sense regionally (though it is longer than your 250 mile requirement) because i25 is very busy and there can easily be stops on Las Cruces, Santa Fe, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and potentially extend to Fort Collins and Cheyenne. I currently live in Denver but grew up in El Paso, Texas. Lots of Texans and Northern Mexicans go to these cities for tourism.
I think an important consideration is what areas 50-100km away from a city can be brought into the metro areas of a city. Might be a real lifeline for some areas
That's more a job for regional rail than HSR though.
@@jasonkohl8033 it turns regional rail into commuter rail or even a metro.
@@fehzorz HSR can't stop very often or it's not HSR, so while it could fill some niche O-D pairs, is isn't going to provide any comprehensive transit coverage within a metro area
@@alquinn8576 What I'm thinking about is that it could make a place 50-100km away seem very close to the city centre. Not imagining lots of stops in between.
No lie, you're kind of my UA-cam crush. Good job.
17:12 It amazes me how Baltimore is always left out when talking about the NEC and Boston is somehow forced into the conversation despite being a smallish city all the way up in New England. It would be a mistake on America's part not have an Express lane stop at Baltimore if a new system was ever built. It's typical to look over what isn't attractive now but could be if it was given a chance.
Your criteria basically involves the travel time sweet spot and population size at both ends - underpinned in large part by getting cars off the road and planes out of the air. All good for a study that boils down to whether cities can support high speed rail. Perhaps equally important is whether and where rail can support cities and longer-term economic growth and population distribution into secondary markets. While it would be an entirely different/broader study focus, scoring corridors based on what high speed rail could facilitate if it linked together a chain of secondary MSAs connected to a major one. E.g., Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Harrisburg, York, Baltimore/DC. And/Or the first four to NYC. The resulting access to alternative sites, markets, human capital and ideas to and from both the larger and smaller MSAs could be transformative. It would promote greater economic activity for the large and small locations and utilization of the underutilized smaller cities, all of which have lost population over decades, while relieving overcrowding and cost of living inflation in the larger. It would also serve the goal of reducing auto mileage along routes that presently carry significant daily traffic to/from the smaller cities to each other and to the major cities at the end of the lines. Routes long ago abandoned by railroads - leaving cars or planes (pick your poison) as the only options.
Eventually, the map you showed at the start would be a great system, but you need to start small
It should be mentioned that the graph at 8:00 is pretty biased toward US-conditions. I try to weaken the 75 miles number with an example.
Where I live in Vienna, I can simply go to the western train station within about 5-10 minutes (2 km, I go by bike or escooter) and take the hourly connection to a town 35 km nearby. I go one station by high speed rail, wait ten minutes for the S-Bahn and I'm at the city center _faster_ than I would have in a car (the trip is ~50 minutes on a direct route and ~45 minutes on the tolled motorway). Total trip time if I hurry
- 5 minutes to the train station
- 30 seconds to buy the ÖBB ticket on the phone (can do it at the traffic light or on the escalator)
- 1 minute to go to the platform and board the train
- 12 minutes one station highspeed rail (only ca 33 kilometers)
- 11 minutes waiting time for the next train
- 3 minutes to the destination town center (town with ~15000 people)
In total the trip takes me 27 minutes on the train and a few extra minutes to get to the train station. I leave my flat ~10 Minutes before the train goes to have some buffer time.
It's just an example that rail (especially in combination with folding bikes or scooters) can beat cars way below the distance of 75 miles (= 120 km!)
i feel like topography needs to be taken into account too. many areas are more mountainous than others making it harder to build highspeed rail.
Yes, this video doesn't cover the cost side of the equation at all. Make sure you don't tell Italy they're not supposed to build HSR through mountains though!
@@CityNerd I think the COST is way bigger when it is an "unknown" like HSR is in the USA VS Italy that has "seen" HSR and jumped in
@@jasonriddell also US has cost-disease regarding subway construction and CA is proving this extends to HSR as well. IIRC, subways cost 3x more to build per mile in the US compared to Europe and I think CA HSR is coming out with a similar factor
Dallas/Houston/Austin/San Antonio was how Southwest Airlines started so it has some precedence for success.
So what happens if you add a layer of complexity to the model, by treating any group of city pairs that could be chained together by a single line as a single project, & then summing the gravities of all possible trip pairs along that route? I'd expect routes like CAHSR would see their scores boosted by intermediate cities e.g. Bakersfield. Perhaps the NEC as a whole might still be on top but by less of a margin than the next-best non-NEC route? But also I suspect that analysis might require looking at MSA data instead of CSA data to get enough resolution.
There's definitely a next level this kind of analysis needs to go to to refine a corridor, but the backbone has to be the big city pair.
@@CityNerd makes sense; I guess what I'm saying is I'm curious what criteria determine if a particular city will be a major ridership generator even if it's not big enough to anchor one end of a corridor. Like what makes a place merit direct service like Wilmington, DC or Bakersfield, CA as opposed to a bypass station like College Station, TX? Maybe a future video could rank the top intermediate cities along plausible HSR corridors, by their ability to boost the corridor?
i think the miami orlando route is pretty interesting. you have broward and palm beach in between. the problem is how do you get around once you get off the train
I'm surprised there were no pairings involving Atlanta
Charlotte is the strongest pairing I had for Atlanta (it would be #17 on this list), followed by Nashville.
Digging it. I like the Houston to Dallas rail line. The TX triangle makes sense since something like 85%of the states population lives along in Houston- San Anronio-Dallas (Austin, Killeen-Temple,Waco being tossed in on the San Antonio to Dallas leg) . That is going to take many more years to convince unfortunatly.
Also it was how Southwest Airlines started so it has a model of success.
Los Angeles to San diego?
Probably too short of a distance
Great list!
Los Angeles to San Francisco easily has the highest air traffic between major metropolitan areas in the United States outside of Los Angeles to New York City, and there is not even a somewhat high speed rail option. California’s location on the Pacific Rim, status as a major tourist location, and an economy larger than Italy might be good reason to move it past Dallas-Houston on the list, even though the route is longer. Geography wise, the Central Valley is very flat. Although, Los Angeles certainly needs to improve the regional transportation too.
A Sacramento-San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego route in California is comparable to a Milan-Bologna-Florence-Rome-Naples-Salerno route in Italy.
I've always said that if the USA can manage to get us to the moon, they should be able to figure out how to get people from Miami to Boston by rail in 4hrs or less (and that's including all the relevant stops).
America is incredibly huge. The distance between Miami and Boston in a straight line is larger than the distance from Morocco to Northern Ireland. Those cities are far too distant for a rail connection to take 4 hours. 9-10 hours would be the absolute minimum.
@@dylanhoward7668 Hyperbole.
I enjoy trains too!! And although I can drive well I don’t enjoy driving in stressful major cities with inattentive drivers or drivers that weave etc., I’d rather take the train and I am looking forward when the train goes from southern Florida to Orlando!!! I will be one of the first to take it.
Also I’d like to see if the train going up from Orlando to Jacksonville as well as what they’re planning to do Orlando to Disney and on into Tampa. I think a good idea also is Chicago to Cincinnati but maybe that’s too long of a distance. I noticed on the website Brightline they have their own transport vehicles to go from your hotel or other place within 5 miles in a circle to get to the station. So that can solve some of the problems if you’re just staying in a certain area to go to the beach or to go to Disney and you’re going to stay at some area or convention center. And some cities in Florida are walkable like Fort Lauderdale or have water taxis.
Respect the video but feel like a Chicago to Milwaukee high speed route would be pretty spectacular. The Hiawatha is the most used route in the Midwest and 9th most used in the United States. In addition, it has higher ridership per mile than every other route except the Northwest Regional and the Capitol Corridor.
It didn't make the top 10 but I do think CHI-MIN is a good city pair, and you would definitely route through Milwaukee and Madison.
This is was a fun watch, keep them coming!
Las Vegas to Salt Lake City would score a 4.5. let's get those sinners on a path to repentance!
Perhaps a train line that has not yet been built could be a mug or tee for merch purposes. I feel like it would inspire good conversation ("Oh, this hasn't been built yet, but wouldn't it be cool if it was?") and it strikes the balance of nerd and positive vibes.
Your methodology has several flaws. While high-speed rail captures majority market share from cars and planes at distances of 100 to 600 miles or so, the future travel demand depends not just on population sizes but also on the presence of Creative Class industries, on affluence, and on business activity.
Connecting Anaheim and Los Angeles (the second-largest city in the U.S.) with San Jose and San Francisco is a no-brainer. Existing short-haul aviation demand along the corridor is already enormous.
Moreover, much depends also on the extensiveness of the dedicated-guideway transportation network at each station site and on the arrangement of the population and the jobs, as well as the development potential, around the high-speed rail stations and the stations of the lower-order transit network.
Walking distances have to be within about a half-mile radius. Bicycling distances have be within a 1- to 3-mile radius. And, Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (N.E.V.) driving has to be within a 10-mile radius.
Taxis, including the self-driving kind and the kind using ride-hailing apps, can expand the catchment areas further, but planners have to be extremely careful not to build park-and-ride facilities for conventional cars.
The utterly asinine Texas plan is almost entirely built around car parking!
The best video to watch on this subject is the following lecture at U.S.C.: ua-cam.com/video/M-sO6IgPRPA/v-deo.htmlm9s
Nice analysis. What would I like to see? Bangor, Maine to Boston. We had a fast train on this route, called the Flying Yankee, until 1957. It was a stainless steel, diesel electric that made the 235-mile run in 4 hours. Then we junked it and stuffed people into buses and cars. Brilliant.
Maaan we need to get that cold war competition mindset back! Damn the cost! If China can build it we can build it better! Give me that high speed rail between Denver and Albuquerque! Haha
(or at least I'll settle for the full CHSR built as well as LA to Vegas)
Your presentation has improved dramatically!
Haha, thanks. It took me months to make the first video -- I had to teach myself to do everything, I didn't have any sense of what the workflow was, and I shot the footage kind of thinking I'd just use the audio. I've got a lot of that stuff more dialed in now...but there's still a lot of room for improvement!