Comment by jltsiren
11 days ago
The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.
If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effectively and finish the projects in time.
>The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.
This seems backwards to me tbh. Is this a feeling or backed by hard data?
As much as anti-american sentiment is right now, there are still great engineering feats pulled off all the time.
Construction is expensive because we value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted. Other countries not so much.
Infrastructure construction is more about administration than engineering. If the people in charge have not administered similar projects before, they will make mistakes.
Public insight, health, worker welfare, and environment are pretty universal values in developed countries. What may set the US apart is their particular version of the common law system. A lot of people have the standing to sue someone, causing unpredictable delays and cost overruns for an infrastructure project. In many other countries, most cases related to infrastructure projects are handled by administrative courts. They will determine narrowly whether all the relevant laws were followed, and do so cost-effectively and in a predictable time.
Experience with the decisions of the relevant courts in similar cases is a major component of basic competence in infrastructure projects. If you can predict what the courts are willing to approve, you can plan the project accordingly. If you can predict how much time and money the court process will take, you can include that in the plans. But if you don't have the experience or the courts are unpredictable, you are bound to make mistakes.
Railway construction in Spain and France is at least half the cost of the United States. Both "value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted".
I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.
Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it. Your trains should be faster than door-to-door flight time, so people would take that as well. Unfortunately that makes a lot of things more complicated in communities with high income disparity.
Yes, but with caveats.
Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains? In the same way outside (just as inside) the US there’s an age-old divide between farmers and city folk (see Denmark or France for the most recent protests).
In China, >66% of the population lives in urban areas. In the US, <30% live in proper urban areas (a vast majority, 60%, live in historically car-centric suburban areas mostly developed post WWII).
The issue is not that those areas that would benefit the most don’t support it, it’s that the areas that would benefit the most from it are surrounded by areas that currently have no viable alternatives (and thus knowledge that something else is possible) other than a car. They’re already driving >1hr to get to work or an airport. Therefore, of course they think anything that takes away resources from wider roads is a waste of their own time and tax money, as it does not benefit them.
The reason the California HSR, if ever finished, will actually mark a cultural shift is that it’s the only megaproject attempted since the 21st century that actually puts modern alternatives to the car in rural areas: vast amounts of money could’ve been saved by connecting LA to SF and SD by electrifying and tunneling on the current Amtrak route, but that would’ve left out about half the state.
Was it too ambitious? Maybe. But in 50 years, maybe everyone will be talking about how it changed California, and the US’s, entire attitude toward rail.
> Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains
No it’s not. Everyone in America goes to Disney World, which was made by a train nerd and you can’t even drive into the parks. Everyone goes there, rides around the trains and walkable areas, and then goes home to Ohio and drives around in their giant SUV.
It’s not because people don’t know about trains. It’s because they don’t value the things you do, and they value things you don’t, like having distance from strangers and being able to buy a lot of stuff and cart it around with them everywhere.
All my family is immigrants from Bangladesh. They’re not steeped in generations of American car culture. But, for some reason, car culture is the thing they assimilate into most easily. My cousin was living in Queens (where all the recent Bangladeshi immigrants are) and moved to Dallas. She’s thrilled about having all the space for her kids to run around, the apartment with a pool, etc. She doesn’t miss having to schlep her kids on the subway around aggressive homeless people, people singing to themselves, panhandlers, etc.
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Funny enough, Americans are usually happy to use public transportation when the travel in Europe or in Japan. Also most New Yorkers use the subway every day.
It's just their own public transit infrastructure they don't like, and I understand them.
I’ve heard a better idea.
“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland
> I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.
That's why America never layed any railroads in the 19th century, and everyone just rode by horse instead. Oh wait, that's not what happened at all.
You are ignoring major cultural shifts - people also lived tightly packed into tenements then too. The tolerance for such space sharing without common purpose has declined.
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> Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it.
These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving. And that just isn’t the solution. Mass transit has to be fast period. Not just faster than a bad alternative. And it needs to be safe, and 24x7.
> These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving.
The point is not hurting the alternative of driving, it's to ensure that drivers don't actively hurt the more space-efficient alternatives of biking and walking on foot. The people who still have a real need for driving actually have a far better experience as a result due to the reduced traffic.
I support all kinds of transportation. I think everyone should have access to trains, cars, bikes and etc. But I also think each has its own merits. Like the car ownership over here is huge, but most commute to work on trains because things aren’t really invisibly subsidized.
> The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.
The cost of passenger rail is high in America because America has 11% of the population (read: customer) density of Japan.
(For cities, NYC has 25% lower population density than Tokyo.)
Dividing population by total land area is a horribly misleading way to understand density. There are alternatives, like population-weighted density, that give you a better picture: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119965 Here's a blog post where somebody re-invented the concept and analyzed density in Europe: https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th...
The population-weighted density of the US is roughly similar to continental Europe.
There's this one neat trick where you only build the rail where the people go!