A news segment on improving the rail service from New York to Montreal.
• China needs around $118 billion to complete the 3,700 miles of HSR projects it has planned by 2012. Last year alone, the country used 20 million tons of steel and 120 million tons of cement for HSR lines.
• Michael Grunwald breaks down the current state of U.S. high speed rail — the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Time)
• In Israel, an HSR track from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is on schedule to be completed by 2017. (Haaretz)
• A press release by the California High-Speed Rail Authority has announced that the group will seek up to $1 billion in additional federal funding for the HSR project to be submitted next week.
• Over in Connecticut, Governor M. Jodi Rell says the state is nearing approval of $260 million in state funding to upgrade train service from New Haven to Springfield, Mass. (BusinessWeek)
• And nice news in Wisconsin: The state received another big chunk of the $810 million in stimulus funds that’ll go toward building the HSR line between Madison and Milwaukee. (BusinessWeek)
• In the U.K., a coroner has warned officials that more fatal rail crashes might occur in the point where a 2002 crash killed 70 people, unless repairs are made. (Reuters)
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Tags: California
Regarding the video.
1) Shouldn’t call these projects high speed rail. Call them rapid rail. Or just call them upgrades.
2) It isn’t necessarily about increasing top speed, but increasing the time you spend at top speed. Amtrak can already go 79 MPH, more in some places. The problem occurs when the train must slow down because of excessive curves or to pull into a siding to wait for a freight to pass. It’s important to straighten out curves, keep the rails in a state of good repair and double-track important lines.
3) All of these improvements won’t mean much if trains continue to be late. Reliability is key. If it’s not the infrastructure keeping trains from being on-time, perhaps it’s a culture of laziness among train operators. It might be that they are very comfortable with being late, as if because this is America everybody expects awful train service.
The HSR line between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem gets postponed once every few years; it’s unclear whether it’ll be finished at all.
high speed rail would be the final answer but must also eliminate stops, travel time would nearly match current plane travel but far less carbon fuel polution and expense, i know the methods all technolology exist elevated rail would be required to be built which would be a monumental expense, of course in the long haul it might be much less compared to the present fuel expense. no other country yet has it right
The HSR line SHOULD be postponed, to use an Israeli idiom, “until the Messiah arrives.” I can think of nothing so mind-warping as a quick hop between such radically different universes as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. That has got to make brains explode.
They’re also trying to build a subway-surface line connecting Bat Yam, Jaffa, South Tel Aviv, the Kirya, Ramat Gan, Bnei Brak, and Petah Tikva. This line won’t be finished, either, but it connects literally the entire demographic spectrum of the country.
Baby steps. Aside from making hundreds of small track repairs/realignments, the culture of Amtrak needs to change. As another poster said, “High Speed Rail” is also an inaccurate term and will wind up biting Amtrak in the end as freight cars slow down passenger trains. HSR is setting expectations way to high – especially for those who have actually ridden bullet trains in other countries.
High speed rail is not what major US cities need, it’s reliable and logical rail. I’m in Philadelphia and SEPTA is decades behind it’s European counterparts when it comes to rail service. It’s always late, the cars are ancient, and the rail paths were setup over 100 years ago and has not been adjusted since.
This has resulted in a very bizarre rail system that often confuses the local, and tourists have no hope at all. The rails were originally designed to funnel all from the surrounding area to the city center back in the 1800, that was fine then. Now the city has expanded and not all major parts are in the center, the only way to get to anyplace you might actually want to go is by bus, as the street cars are all but gone and the subway is only in the city major and only in cardinal directions.
What is needed is not only reliable and logical rail, but an argument for rail that will help win over conservatives and even libertarians. These factions have been the biggest stumbling block for rail in America, because they tend to think in terms of for-profit businesses engaging in a “market”, regardless of how friendly that market is for the customer. Libertarians say they like freedom, but apparently much of what they say gets in the way of freedom (such as the freedom to travel by rail, the right to enjoy services without being discriminated against, etc.) So someone ought to point that “forcing people behind the wheel” isn’t exactly ideal for liberty, especially when there are people who don’t want to be behind the wheel.
Reliable and logical rail, built at normal first-world cost with normal first-world results, would do a lot to woo over American conservatives. The US actually has a political advantage: at current US construction costs, many politicians balk at building transit, but in Europe and Japan, projects with the same costs as in the US get universally attacked and are usually canceled.