Tuesday, March 18All That Matters

Let’s Replace Planes with Bullet Trains! The 10 Busiest Short-Hop Air Routes In the United States

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Let’s Replace Planes with Bullet Trains! The 10 Busiest Short-Hop Air Routes In the United States


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View Reddit by hoyhoyy29View Source

35 Comments

  • Does anyone know the estimate operating costs to operate high speed rail? Assuming you’d get 188 people per plane, the Orlando to Atlanta route would only net 1.6M passengers per year. If people paid $200 per ticket (per way), you’d only generate $320 million in Revenue. That doesn’t seem like enough money.

    Is that enough revenue to keep the route viable, or are there ways to pick up additional passenger load?

  • let’s say we live in a world where public money and will exists to build these trains, mostly through populated urban areas. we’re ready to eminent domain people and the whole bit.

    in that fantasy world, why do trains have to be “competitive” with air? we’re already pretending we have some benevolent dictator, or someone brainwashed the entire US legislature.

    instead, just use your mystical superpowers to say “we are taxing the hell out of airplanes to build our trains, to plant forests, subsidize kelp farms, and to research nuclear fusion”. all of a sudden the train looks a lot more appealing than a $1500 plane ticket.

  • And who is going to get all the land for the rail right of way? That’s the exact problem California is having now with it’s high speed rail. Instead, how about you fly over it all instead in this new fangled machine known as an aeroplane.

  • Let’s talk about costs, for instance Honolulu. Estimated full funded grant cost 5.5 billion 2012, then 2018 new cost 8.9 billion now projected cost at 12 billion all for about 20 miles…20 miles. Oh and maybe will be complete by 2031…eleven years late. No reason to think building high speed rail would be any different. I’m a huge fan of high speed rail, rode all over Europe but I’m skeptical that we could pull it off with the state of the economy and labor. It really sucks it wasn’t started years ago. Probably doesn’t have anything to do with oil companies right

  • I like the sound of this, and then I think about that rail project in California. How long overdue and over budget is that debacle, now? Good luck trying to build a high speed rail of any distance in the modern litigious world we live in.

  • This new trend to build new trains is brought to you by the same people who conned everyone to build freeways in the 40s and 50s.

    The cool thing about planes over trains is that planes don’t need thousands of kilometres of track to be used. Buses are better than trains because they aren’t on tracks. They have the ability to turn corners.

    Developers are maxed out now on building suburbs. Their new thing is urban infill projects. If you build trains, you get to expropriate the land, gentrify poor communities, and sell overpriced condos to young people wanting that new urban lifestyle.

    Planes are horrible for the environment but all the construction and resources used to build these fancy new train projects is massive and not really any better.

    I’d love to see airships take off. They need to find something better than helium and hydrogen though.

    https://youtu.be/_phicOPoQT8

  • He hints at this, but these are mostly connecting flights. No one ever flies from Providence to NYC. It’s faster to drive, and we already have pretty good (if slow and overpriced) train service. The busiest time at our airport is 6 AM, so you can get to Newark for an 8 AM to somewhere you actually want to go. Better train service doesn’t fix this unless it goes to the airport and has combined ticketing etc.

  • I already do this in Canada. I travel to client sites in downtown Toronto from Ottawa and to Montreal. I always take the train. It’s roughly a 4 hour trip to downtown Toronto. At the airport, I have to be there an hour to an hour 30 minutes to clear security and board. The flight is an hour provided I don’t get stuck on the tarmac or de-ice the plane n the winter. Then you have winter storms and cancellations to contend with. You have the commute downtown on the UP train. Easily 3-3.5 hours vs 4.

    The bonus of the train is I can travel business class for 1/2 the price of the plane, have a meal and as much coffee as I want and work the entire way if I like.

    I have NEVER had the train cancelled due to weather.

  • Being from Japan, you only want to use bullet trains if you have a good local train network. Walk out your door, take a clean bus to the local train and hop on an express train to a bullet train hub. From there you are only going to a major city and Not travelling more than 4hours.

  • The problem in the US is passenger and coal trains share the same set of tracks. Passenger trains can never exceed 70 mph because the tracks are not capable without falling apart. Adding a new set of tracks that can handle 200 mph trains is far too expensive especially with the distances in the US.

  • I live in North Carolina but travel to Ohio to visit family a few times a year. If I fly, it’s roughly a 2 hour flight that I have to arrive 2 hours early for. I then have to drive 2 hours from the airport to my family’s area. I’d rather fly than drive the 9 hours, but I usually drive because I also have a wife and 2 kids. So economically, it makes sense to drive. If I could hop on a train and get there in 6 hours, for a reasonable price, I would be ecstatic.

  • An actual person on YouTube with a degree/experience in the field they are talking about… a rare and a beautiful sight to behold. We need more of this.

    ***rant:***

    I’m so sick of videos from YouTube playtime experts on advanced topics they have every answer to because they have an elementary understanding of how to use Google. Sure their presentation is like velvet cake because they mastered the arts of video editing, but if you use just a smidge of critical thinking such as questioning if you should trust a person without a degree/experience teach you about a topic they spent a week researching, you realize it’s most definitely just manure covered in whipped cream. Manure that sadly a lot of Redditors seem to gobble up when I see it get posted on here, specially when it falls in line with their biased opinions.

  • City Nerd’s the best Urbanist channel, been watching since the beginning. This video especially should hammer home the idea that a nation-wide US HSR network wouldn’t work. Too expensive to build and is outperformed by are extensive plane network. BUT, there are cooridors where HSR would outperform planes, most notably NE Cooridor, California + Vegas and Phoenix, and the Texas triangle.

    When High speed rail critics try to derail your arguments by saying things like “NYC to LA would still be 18 hours!!”, remind them that’s not the HSR we really want / need, its in these very densely populated regions.

  • I take a stupid number of flights that have ‘in air’ times of 30 minutes. (Flying into CLT or ATL) I’d love to have a train that would take me to either hub instead of mucking about with that. HST to a train terminal that ran a short line dedicated to the Airport terminal, that would be great.

  • Last month had a connection get cancelled at JFK and I looked for a train to Boston. wanted 300, f that flights half that. took a bus for $40 to get home rather than wait around all day and hope the sat night flight got off. Even from NH if i was going to NYC I am driving not fyling, needing to be at the airport(hour drive) 2 hours early combined with time to get from airport into the city 30-45 minutes I might as well just drive 4 4.5 hours. with parking fees slightly more expensive but i control the experience.

  • Cool.. however, have you ever tried to build any large public transportation in the north east? It’s an absolute nightmare acquiring the permits, and land. Highspeed rail also requires very straight, smooth, and level track to really start showing profitability. This is not something you will easily find in the north east. The hard unpopular truth here is that eminent domain is the only option and an expensive one at that. California has much more promise, but they can’t get anything done in that state without corruption and small ball politics bungling it all up. Not to mention having to lay lines into less then ideal routes and connecting small towns to the system just to get approval. The best chance highspeed rail has in this country will be a federal mandate with the legislation to back it up (good luck) and some strong buy in from the states such that it avoids becoming a states rights nightmare. The interstate highway system had the same exact issues, however 1950’s era US government was down to making this happen because they knew it was worth it. Highspeed rail is the same exact unlock here. We just need to have the collective willpower to do it.

  • It’s not that simple. You would need to eminent domain half the east coast to build capable rail. The east coast in particular is full of twisty track, and amtrak doesn’t even own a lot of it. I attended a planning meeting for east-west rail in MA a few years ago and they laid out why its basically impossible.

  • It would be cool to have a Phoenix to Vegas train. Even an LA to Vegas would work. Either of those would need to be an “express” type train. You get a bunch of stops and totally not worth it, never mind the cost they’d probably charge for it.

    But I doubt the Phoenix to Vegas train would ever get built. They’ve been working on just getting the roads fully built out for decades and the terrain would be tough to justify the expense. Oddly enough, flying from Phoenix to Vegas is pretty close to just driving even though it’s roughly an hour flight. The time you need to show up before your flight + time to get from the airport in Vegas to say the strip takes up a lot of time. And that’s w/out delays. You get a delay and it’s faster to just drive.

  • Milwaukee to Chicago airport is soooo stupid. Show up in MKE airport 2 hours early, fly, and your there in 3 hours, VS. drive @ 90 minutes. What’s more, there is a train, but its slow AF.

  • So, short of making tunnels under the oceans, which is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, how do you travel across the continents? I know this is probably more about “lets replace internal flights with trains” kind of argument but the title is really just replacing planes with something that requires land to travel..

  • If you’ve ever taken the bullet train (Thalys) from Amsterdam to Paris, the distance is almost identical to the LA to Vegas trajectory. It’s about 280 miles give or take.
    The A’dam to Paris ride is a breeze. It’s quiet and fast – about 3 hrs and 20 mins. You leave one city center and arrive in another city center. One way trips start at €35.
    I’d venture to say that if there was a bullet train from LA to Vegas, it’d near near full capacity on the reg. for sure.

  • Ugh i’m not going to watch video to know why this won’t work.

    Once again the USA can’t do mass transit because of just how crazy are landmass is. Its pretty evident just by going with Elon Musk drilling company and how that is going to see the problem.

    Money and politics are the culprit, it CAN be done, but at a cost so great it would not have money left to maintain it. I forget the numbers off hand, but in the early 2000s it was said it was like idk 20billion to St.Louis to Cape Girardeau. IN THE SAME STATE. Revised it ballooned to over 90 billion and 10 years.

    So why not just upgrade lines we already have you say? Politics. They are owned in such a way that no one would agree to the change, and towns/cities don’t want high speed tubs of death going through them. Seriously, a town rejected the idea of high speed train because it would make town look bad if accident happened.

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