rolling high-speed rail thread

there should be one, I think

http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-10-can-mad-men-sell-the-country-on-high-speed-rail

kartheiser is a bro

need smoking cars imo

seriously -- if we had high-speed rail from SF to LA that had smoking cars, I would be so stoked.

this is california, not france

soon it will be illegal to even think about smoking

maybe that is part of the appeal of Mad Men.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/12/us/12rail.html?_r=1&hpw

a sad reminder of where we are as a country

it's sad but I was never really sold on Orlando-Miami

http://capntransit.blogspot.com/2011/03/nationwide-rail-strategy.html

this sorta spells it out

I guess the problem is we need bipartisan support for rail in the future so even if right now it's not a 'bad thing' that the money is being allocated more practically thanks to the GOP, the fight for $ in the future is gonna be brutal

I'm surprise that none of the politicians have stated the obvious: high-speed rail is the means of keeping inter-metro passenger transport cheap after peak-oil export knocks-out half of the aviation fuel supply over the next two decades. Japan's bullet trains and France's TGV run on nuclear power.

Its clear that Obama has gotten the peak oil lecture from the CIA in the first year, and he can't stoke a panic (the gasoline distribution infrastructure would be emptied if the public simply filled up their tanks). But electric-powered high speed rail is a national economic security issue.

an orlando-tampa rail makes no sense but the lesson is that rick scott is a major asshole

so re FL where do high speed rails make the most sense?

(i'm marooned in Jacksonville for the next 2 weeks for work. i do not like it here)

haha ok Orlando-Tampa makes a little more sense I guess

so re FL where do high speed rails make the most sense?

from miami to anywhere

a high speed rail from miami to orlando w/ lines from there to tampa, jax & also tally, gainesville etc would be huge

or spend the money on mass-transit in miami

or that

yeah i haven't been to florida in a while (flying into orlando on friday tho and getting DRIVEN to gainesville ugh) but from what i've gathered seems like it might be better to improve intracity transit first in a lot of those places

http://transportationnation.org/2011/03/15/ne-corridor-officially-designated-a-hsr-corridor-pols-begin-to-organize/

http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/ is pretty informative on this topic

yeah that site is pretty great

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_16/b4224062391848.htm

But this group also proved especially averse to the idea of a bus depot. For them and others, a street-side stop transformed the bus into an entirely different mode of travel. "Would I want my daughter or my wife in a bus terminal by themselves? I'd say no," Moser says. "We're creating new bus customers and a different demographic."

anecdotal but I find this idea interesting

Megabus, and National Express are still fairly cheap here (England), but I find it a bit crap that the book-ahead model is ever more prevalent. Busses and trains shouldn't be much more expensive on the day of travel IMO.

that doesn't make them any different from planes. people buying last minute are going to have less flexibility and the people offering the services know that. other side of this coin - you can get great deals by buying far in advance. (megabus' $1 deals, ryanair's super cheap flights etc.)

Well yeah I don't like the airline model. It's mainly a problem for trains I suppose, standard last minute ticket prices are becoming extortionate for longer journeys.

were you to even out and standardize the fares, I think the net effect wouldn't be great. last minute ticket prices are extortionate = planning ahead makes travel more affordable for people on a budget. but I usually associate extortionate last-minute plane/train fares w/ business travel, people who can/should be paying for last-minute convenience. I guess that probably isn't the case so much with budget buses.

(which is probably a reason why the price gap isn't nearly as huge.)

i think vasco is talking about train travel in the uk, where the difference if you can plan ahead vs. the walkup fare is sometimes a factor of like 5-10, which does seem like price gouging, especially when the advance fair is < £10. i mean capitalism is great and i love it as much as the next guy, and if the demand will support is then good for them, but that big a discrepancy is, well, annoying. and it results in recreational outrage daily mail headlines like "a ticket from london to birmingham is £200" (which it probably is if you turn up at euston at 8am).

the advance/day-of difference for air travel is perceived to be much less. admittedly that is because about half of the price of a plane ticket leaving the UK goes on taxes, which are unaffected by how late you book, but that's not the perception.

this isn't really the right thread, but man am i excited about the central corridor going up in mpls-st paul

midway/frogtown = hipster nabes by 2020 easy

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/05/09/northeast-corridor-the-midwest-and-california-say-%E2%80%9Cthanks-florida%E2%80%9D/

thanks dudes

(xpost) My neighborhood newspaper (Highland Villager) seems to print nothing but negative editorials and whining letters re: central corridor, to the point that one reader finally had to ask "would it kill you to actually have ANY enthusiasm and forward thinking about this project?" Of course it's going to mess up traffic and some businesses are going to be impacted in the short-term, but people who claim there will be no long-term benefit really have their head in the sand imo.

Still, even some high-speed rail supporters are skeptical. “This allocation is another defeat for a true high-speed rail approach and a victory for incrementalism,” said Scott Thomasson, economic and domestic policy director for the Progressive Policy Institute. “The funding for it so thin that we can’t build that critical first line to show it can work in the U.S.”

Kinda my gut instinct. Hopefully Ed will come along and school us about this, but the difference-maker is AVERAGE speed. Going from 135-160mph "on critical segments" is good but the slowest sections of the journey will continue to drag this down. Nobody gives a shit what speed you top out at if it still takes too long to get to Boston.

Or, you know, get AWAY from it.

Having given up on the idea of the US ever putting the $ into the tracks and the $$$$ into the real estate for true high speed in the Northeast Corridor, I'll take whatever incremental upgrades we can get.

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/07/15/house-votes-to-strip-high-speed-rail-funding/

not that this would pass, but god I hate these people

this would be so great
http://articles.philly.com/2012-07-10/news/32602302_1_amtrak-president-joseph-boardman-acela-express-northeast-corridor

37 minutes from philly to NY