As the crow flies, Chicago to New York is similar to Beijing to Shanghai, which is a long-ish high-speed-rail journey of 4.5 hours. If you have to fight lots of traffic to get to the airport that's not too bad. Probably not enough to drive demand for every ten minutes.
The real value of such a network would be an intermediate trip. If Cleveland or Pittsburgh are both two hours away from New York and Chicago and the trip is downtown to downtown, demand for air travel from these mid-size cities to the larger ones would pretty much dry up save for connecting flights. And the strength of rail is that you could have some trains stop multiple times within a metropolitan area, so that you don't have to drive to a centrally located transportation hub the way you have to do with an airport. And if you add rail stops to the airport you don't even need the connecting flights anymore.
You probably wouldn't get the high-speed rail to Bradford OH directly though. The closest you'd get is Dayton OH, but thankfully that's a more doable 30+ mile Lyft ride.
LGA to ORD is 3 million passengers per year. Beijing to Shanghai is 7 million by air, plus 180 million by train (including intermediate stops). Total US air travel between all destinations is only 750 million per year. The ability of the Chinese to recoup their capital investment through ridership is massive compared to what you could expect in the US.
It's worth noting that at least some of that 180 million is travel induced by the availability of the train in the first place. There are plenty of city pairs that people don't travel between because
* plane travel is too much of a hassle for such a short trip, and usually expensive
Rail passengers to Denver, CO, in 1869, numbered nil. Construction of the 100 mile Denver Pacific spur line to the transcontinental railroad route in Cheyenne not only increased that somewhat, but saw Denver's population grow from 4,700 th over 35,000 within ten years.
You can only induce as much travel demand as there are people to potentially travel. No amount of induced demand will let US travel infrastructure transport the number of people that Chinese travel infrastructure does.
the number of people that Chinese travel infrastructure does
... and that's not my argument. But lowered real costs -- not merely price, but time, convenience, flexibility, time-sharing (work/eat/sleep in transit), predictability, safety, baggage allownce, efficiency gains, and more -- should increase effective utility and utilisation.
The biggest pitfalls of rail have been right-of-way acquisition in mature economic regimes (high induced land values, themselves a result in large part of improved transport, impede further transport development), transfers and mode-transitions (especially rail-to-local endpoint travel), and technological lock-in and stagnation.
China has the benefits of late adoption, relatively low economic development, and critically, a regime of weak real (land) property rights. All enable it to adopt recent and advanced technologies, and to plan and acquire rights of way at low cost.
Even in parts of the United States where China's other, and more usually noted advantage, exceedingly high population density, is more closely matched, the US is hugely hampered by built rail infrastructure and extant technologies, high land values, and an increasingly oppressive private land ownership tradition.
> The biggest pitfalls of rail have been right-of-way acquisition in mature economic regimes (high induced land values, themselves a result in large part of improved transport, impede further transport development), transfers and mode-transitions (especially rail-to-local endpoint travel), and technological lock-in and stagnation.
Rail is more expensive than roads in the US even where the right of way already exists. The Silver Line was built along an existing right of way and still cost $250 million per mile. (There is tons of excess freeway median in the US that could cost rail.) The problem is actually the high cost of skilled labor in the US. I don’t suppose you’d consider US labor rights to be “oppressive.”
Boston's 'Big Dig" urban centre highway construction created 2 miles of roadbed at. costs of $15 - $24 billion, (up to $12 billion/mi), carrying 536,000 vehicles/day. At an average of 1.55 occupancy rating, about 830,000 passengers/day. Two miles.
DC Metro's Silver Line is 29.6 miles long, has 26 stations, and cost $6.8 billion, or $229 million/mi, roughly one tenth the cost of Boston's freeway project.
Peak capacity at 26 8-car trains of 120 passenger earch per hour is just under 25,000 passengers/hr. Over nearly 30 miles. Or roughly 750,000 passenger miles per hour, as compared with 70,000 passenger-miles/hr sustained for the Gig Dig.
Note that, yes, I'm comparing Metro peak with Boston daily average. The >10x advantage remains. "More than 70% of rail ridership occurs during the morning and evening rush hours, and 43% of these commuters ride Metro in a one-hour time period' (WMATA Core Capacity study).
This gives us about 3,200 passenger-mile/$billion for urban highway, versus 110,000 passenger-mile/$billion for DC Metro.
Metro wins handily. Rail is 34x more cost effective than highway.
> Note that, yes, I'm comparing Metro peak with Boston daily average. The >10x advantage remains. "More than 70% of rail ridership occurs during the morning and evening rush hours, and 43% of these commuters ride Metro in a one-hour time period"
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. It looks like you want to draw a comparison between carrying capacity for a road and carrying capacity for a railroad. OK.
What does "the >10x advantage remains" mean? Remains after making what adjustment? The quote you provide immediately after that sentence severely undermines your implicit claim that rail is efficient by pointing out that, although the Silver Line's capacity is high, that capacity is worthless because almost all of it goes unused.
Also, you're not doing the passenger-miles-per-hour math correctly. To get maximum possible passenger-miles-per-hour, multiply 25,000 passengers by the average speed of the trains, yielding an answer in units of passenger-miles-per-hour. You multiplied 25,000 passengers by 30 miles, yielding 750,000 passenger-miles (not per-hour). (As it happens, the average speed is 33 mph, so you slightly underestimated peak capacity... except that, of course, peak capacity in reality is much, much lower, unless you'd like to force people onto the Metro.)
You're at least attacking the weakest point of my argument, admitted in my comment you're replying to. Yes, the actual throughput is lower than the max, but the comparison still seems to favour rail.
Rayiner had tossed out the example of DC's Silver Line, though without bothering to state just what his argument was. I pulled Boston's BD project and ran with what numbers I could find (surprisigly scarce) to try to come up with some kind of metric for comparing total ridership capacity provided. Utility in daily trips served matters far more than cost-per-mile. And I hazily recollect that short-headway rail (DC Metro manages ... 6 minutes, by one statement, 26 trains/hr, or 2 minute headways (possibly bidirectional?) by another) does far better than a controlled-access highway.
My interest in doing unpaid, unreciprocated consulting for rayiner, esq., is rapidly diminishing, so I left off with some hazy numbers, but at least signalled that they are in fact hazy.
A USDoT source gives a maximum capacity of 2300 vph for a highway in good weather at 65mph.
And another sorce provided a 1.55 passengers/car loading factor, US average.
The WMATA source given earlier gives 26 trains/hr, 6 cars/train (actual in service, 8 cars possible), and 120 passengers/car (162% of seated load) as maximum capacity.
Multiplication gives 18,720 passengers/hr peak throughput, a bit over 12,000 passenger vehicles, or 5.25 lanes of highway capacity. I'd counted mileage to account for the difference in project lengths: Silver == 30 miles, Big Dig less than two. Point being that the spend of the two projects delivers very different total travel utility.
WMATA's Estimated average daily ridership, all lines, 2020: 1 million. Better than the Big Dig total.
As for rail and efficiency: unlike highways, rail (through traffic coordination and limiteds) can achieve both higher throughput and shorter trip times (balanced by less frequent service to a given destination) than highways. Trip times are overall more predictable. Safety and other factors, to both users and pedestrians, tends to be better than highways also.
Further factor are that rail service (which may or may not be bundled in project costs) includes rolling stock and maintenance facilities, as well as fuel/power, and maintenance, all provided by users of highways. Rolling stock lifetimes are generally measured in decades vs. years for autos.
On the cost side, you’re comparing apples and oranges: building through downtown Boston in a tunnel compared to building through exurban Virginia above ground on an existing right of way.
A better point of comparison to the Silver Line is the inter-county connector in MD. Both built in the 2010s. $127 million per mile, which includes land acquisition costs because it wasn’t built along an existing right of way like the Silver Line.
You’re also completely off on the ridership side. Because rail only takes you on inflexible routes, actual ridership is low except in dense downtown cores. The Silver Line operates nowhere near capacity. Silver Line ridership is under 17,000 passengers per day. The inter county connector averages 30-40,000. So more than double the ridership for half the per mile cost.
You claimed that land acquisition was the cost driver. I used the silver line as an example of because it’s a relatively rare situation where the land acquisition cost was low because it is carried in a freeway median that was originally designed to host a metro extension.
I don’t see how you go from that to a comparison against literally the most expensive road tunnel in US history, especially given that the whole point of the silver line example is that it runs through the exurbs on an existing freeway median.
I used the silver line as an example of because it’s a relatively rare situation where the land acquisition cost was low because it is carried in a freeway median
I'm not intimately familiar with the project (and had to ask you which specifically you'd meant), and you failed to adequately develop your argument between sly ad homs.
I'm proposing that land aquisition, as a net factor -- fighting NIMBY battles, as an example, would be a component -- is one of at least three factors disadvantaging rail vs highway construction in the US.
And yet despite this, your own cherry-picked example comes out far ahead, even allowing for what I'd noted were rough and likely advantageous numbers, than a contemporaneous urban highway project. You've not presented much by way of numbers or cites yourself.
If you don't mind a personal observation: you come across, repeatedly and not only with me, as so bent on burying your counterparties that you constantly shift burdens of proof, fail to construct or support your arguments sufficiently, or care to accidentally learn anything along the way. I honestly didn'y know how the Silver vs. Dig comparison would turn out. I simply followed the maths to their conclusion.
It doesn’t matter. Pretty much every place that has enough people going in the same direction to fill a rail line already has one. Meanwhile, rail outside those downtown cores is vastly underutilized. The I-270/I-495 interchange (which connects the DC Beltway to the inner suburb of Montgomery county) carries 760,000 vehicles per day, more than the entire ridership of the DC Metro, and double that of the LA Metro.
As a less extreme example, Paris - Lyon was the first TGV line in 1980. In 1980 they were about the same size as Chicago and Cleveland today, except there’s a lot more built up between Chicago and Cleveland to serve.
Note that even with that exceptional HSR, most fly between Beijing and Shanghai. And that's with the ridiculous Chinese rules that prevent you from using your phone during all flights. And Chicago/New York would be more like 5.5 hours.
You probably wouldn't get the high-speed rail to Bradford OH directly though. The closest you'd get is Dayton OH, but thankfully that's a more doable 30+ mile Lyft ride.