I mean, does the population density in the US support bullet trains? I know that both Japan & China for example have large population density within each city (whether you live in Osaka heading for Kobe or from Shanghai to Beijing, you get the picture) plus the governments of both countries invest heavily on the infrastructure including maintenance.
Distance is another factor between destinations, like from Nagoya to Kyoto it’s only 130km (80mi) and the commute by bullet train is 33 minutes while from New York to DC it’s 226mi taking you 4 hours by car but via bullet train, the commute time is less than it would be from driving alone. The cities in Japan are closer to each other by comparison.
China is a large country (not big as let’s say like Russia in terms of land size) alongside varying topography and climates (they can still install tracks in uneven terrain but adjusting how they are installed), although their population is larger than the US (they have about more than 1.4 billion people as a country while the US is about 348 million).
The taxes work differently across countries, like in both Japan & China: they have the funds gathered from taxation allowing them to maintain constant upkeep or make further improvements. Well, what does the US government spend their taxes on? That in itself also lies the question whether the taxes citizens are already paying are worth it.
Taxes exist in all countries regardless, as governments need funding to maintain and improve infrastructure, roads, schools, hospitals, etc. The real question is: how is the government using that money? For example, in Japan the reason why public transport is considered reliable is due to their government using people’s taxes for upkeep & bullet trains.
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Nice essay but why do you use the ask comms to post your answers?
Car.
Tire.
Gas.
the automotive lobby.
Capitalism.
Corruption.
There are a few different reasons why.
- The US already built up its rail network around low speed trains. Those tracks aren’t suitable for high speed operations, and can’t be modified easily for high speed operations. It’s not just the tracks themselves, it’s the actual paths and bridges and road crossings. If a turn is too sharp, it can’t be taken at high speeds, and the actual curves in the path didn’t anticipate that one day trains would be fast enough to need more gradual turns. So any new rail would have to buy up the land rights with any new pathway, and that is going to be inherently expensive in the corridors dense enough to where there might be demand for passenger rail.
- Rail crossings have to be designed for high speed rail, as well. There are safety and congestion concerns, so many high speed rail projects are required to build more grade separated crossings (bridges and tunnels), which significantly increases construction costs.
- Rail has to compete with air travel and highway travel, in a country rich enough to have lots of people who can afford to fly, and where car-based highway systems are convenient and cheap. Basically, there’s a sweet spot of around 200-400 miles (300-600 km) between cities where it’s far enough that a car is inconvenient and close enough to where trains are competitive with buses or airplanes.
- Along those lines, the US actually has pretty cheap intercity buses that use the existing highways.
- Unfortunately, the city pairs that would have the highest intercity passenger demand also tend to pass through a lot of other cities. If you’re going from DC to New York, the most popular rail line in America, you’ll pass through Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Trenton, each with their own powerful politicians who would push to make sure the train actually stops for them. This is part of why the Acela, our fastest passenger train, takes 190 minutes to travel 226 miles between DC and New York, averaging only 70 mph (115 km/h) despite being capable of reaching top speeds of 160 mph (255 km/h).
- Most rail in the United States is owned by freight/cargo train lines. The passenger network has to lease spots and is lower priority than freight. This leads to scheduling issues, including unscheduled delays.
- Americans are just really bad at constructing big public works projects. Our dams, bridges, tall buildings, rail, highways, roads, power plants, and all sorts of other big projects are almost always behind schedule and over budget.
- The less populated areas where it’s cheaper to acquire land rights also tend to be more environmentally pristine, which means there are environmental concerns around projects like these. In our political system, Republicans are much more likely to ignore those environmental concerns, but they use that political clout to build highways and oil pipelines, not passenger rail. Advocates for passenger rail tend to also be more environmentally conscious, so the environmental concerns do tend to slow down any proposed rail project.
There is high speed rail called Brightline in Florida between Miami and Orlando, with the longest segment operating at 125 mph (200 km/h), and some of the more populous segments operating at 110 mph/180 km/h or 80 mph/130 km/h. It tries to manage those tradeoffs on all new track dedicated to it. But the company is struggling to make money.
There’s a whole saga in California in that the proposed high speed rail project is decades behind and still bogged down, and has examples of all of these problems. The route it takes to connect the two largest cities on the coast (Los Angeles and San Francisco) goes through the inland central valley, to service a bunch of other cities in between. Bizarrely, phase 1 of the project will only serve the relatively low density, low population cities in the Central Valley, without connecting either San Francisco or Los Angeles. Some segments are to share rail usage with lower speed trains, complicating scheduling and risking delays. The environmental debates have slowed things down, as well.
Watch what happens in Texas with its proposed high speed line (bogged down in political infighting), Florida (see above, already built and operational, but facing serious financial concerns about its ability to continue), and California (see above).
I think we’ll eventually see some projects push through, especially if jet fuel gets more expensive than electrical grid power. But for now, America is uniquely hostile to passenger rail, and increasing high speed offerings isn’t necessarily going to induce enough demand for these projects to become economically competitive with other forms of intercity transportation.
Property. High speed rail requires property. And while an easement for standard rail is easy enough to negotiate or eminent domain, the impact to land is much less. The grade separation required for high-speed rail makes it effectively like building a river across people’s land.
Car brain.
I love the duality of man on display here where @sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip spent what was probably a lot of time crafting a thoughtful and intuitive explanation for all the actual, tangible reasons why in all their nuance, and then there’s @harmbugler@piefed.social who is almost certainly not from the United States if I were to take a guess, and whose contribution is consequently just “AmErIcAnS lIke CaRs”
where @sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip spent what was probably a lot of time crafting a thoughtful and intuitive explanation for all the actual, tangible reasons why in all their nuance
Only 5 minutes to write the comment, but 20 years obsessing over this shit so that it’s ready to go when people ask.
This is why I can’t with FuckCars anymore. No nuance, no analysis or even acknowledgement of the analysis, just anger and slogans.
Yep. Every possible use for a personal car magically evaporates if you just get a bike and restructure your entire life.
2/3rds of all Bullet trains are in China. Why are you just asking about the US?
The US does have “high speed’ rail. We call it Acela and it is just such bullshit. The Acela trains aren’t any significantly faster than regular trains.
I routinely take the train from Washington DC to New York City and the Acela train just isn’t worth the cost and hassle. It is 20 minutes faster.
Americans are weird about public transportation. Trains and busses and my go to for any sort of travel. I love the DC metro and I hate highway driving, though I have to drive more on the highway than I want.
People are posting about the auto industry lobby and I agree with that, but we Americans are strange about public transportation.
that’s because trains make you weak and gay.
big car make you strong and dominant.
/eyeroll
roll your eyes all you want. it’s the dominant belief in american culture.
my dad lived walking distance to a train station and commuted by car for 10 years, because the train would make him gay. and he was a MAN so he drove his large SUV 120 miles a day.
Everywhere I went in America seemed like lots of men liked trains. Some even had them in the basement as a hobby. Some men worked on the real ones
I don’t remeber any of the older men thinking it would make them gay to ride the train.
I got the distinct impression young and old alike that riding public transportation was for the poors though. Also somehow public transportation was against their “freedom”.
But never once gay.
/eyeroll
Essentially because of the focus on petty bourgeois lifestyles, large houses, cars, and atomizing society. Big car manufacturers lobbied the state into pressuring against more communal infrastructure at scale, which protects the auto industry from competing with public transit. It has roots in both late-stage capitalism and settler-colonialism.
We reserve our bullets for …other purposes.
Schoolkids
The auto companies successfully lobbied the government to abandon passenger trains and build highways instead, basically. (That way we’d all be forced to buy their products thanks to the transportation ecosystem.)
Lots of cities are getting commuter trains though. Mine just built two expansions to our rail line. It’s a slow process, but essential.
This, right here.
US cities used to have terrific streetcar systems. Just look at San Francisco in 1940:
https://ani.social/post/13225809
Los Angeles’ legendary streetcars’ demise was the plot of the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
In fact, LA’s streetcars were bought by a conglomerate of automobile companies in order to destroy them
A similar story is in the history of US intercity passenger rail, which is in Amtrak’s wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak
Which starts with:
In 1916, 98% of all commercial intercity travelers in the United States moved by rail, and the remaining 2% moved by inland waterways.[9] Nearly 42 million passengers used railways as primary transportation
Ok, but this was the only choice because neither highways nor passenger planes did exist yet
My point is that the US used to have a lot of rail infrastructure, both inside cities and for intercity travel, but scrapped most of it, and neglected what was left, mostly in favor of building freeways for automobiles.
Therefore, as relevant to this subject, we don’t have bullet trains.
Rampant corruption redirects almost all federal resources to contractors and corporations.
This. Other countries build trains as public infrastructure. US and UK try to build bullet trains as scheme to pump public money into private construction companies. The money gets stolen and nothing is built.
Because high speed passenger rail requires three things that don’t exist in the United States.
1.) Long-term planning 2.) Coordination among different communities 3.) A desire to invest in people’s wellbeing
We are in the ‘pieces are starting to visibly fall off this thing’ phase of societal collapse. That means that, while we’re still rolling down the road, there is a largely un-acknowledged awareness that the car isn’t making it all the way to the destination. As a result, people and institutions are all acting in their own short-term self interest.
Short-term self-interest. The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.
Short-term self-interest. The cause of
and solution toall of life’s problems.You’re absolutely correct, but they were referencing the simpsons.
what you’re not appreciating here is how extremely dynamic the situation in the US is. in china, you have cities which have existed for 2000 years with rather stable population, so you can map out a city and know where the streets are, and build public transport there. in the US, cities can rise and fall within 20 years (check out the rust belt cities). so it doesn’t make sense to build infrastructure “for the ages”, because you can’t plan ahead that far. so we end up with short-term planning, which is why the housing is cardboard and the mode of transport is cars.
Lobbying by corporate interests, the Auto industry and fossil fuel industry in particular.
It’s not like big businesses have no political influence in Japan. If anything, there’s historically more cross-over, but, they have plenty of bullet trains.
Train lobbies exist in both Japan and America. Americas car lobby was particularly successful, in large part because of how much everyone hated the train companies. Train companies in Japan simply didnt get as much hate as in America.
There are other factors, the Car was first made in America, and had a huge amount of popularity post WWII, given the economic boom post WWII in America, and the rapid rise of conspicuous consumption, not having to share a train car with other people was seen as a huge status symbol (and was made affordable by assembly line tech).
See, now that sounds like the full story.
Auto industry.
