Ask Lemmy

Because we are slaves to the petrodollar and are arrogant and stupid. We also built our country and entire way of life around cars thanks to our stupidity and the oil and auto industry insidious influence/control.

Oh yeah and racism and poverty hatred.

For people who want an in depth exploration of what bureaucratic bullshit has been keeping trains from being used for people in the US, I submit Climate Town's very funny and educational video.

Tldw: we got trains but it's for stuff not people

Can I ask a grammatical question? What does “as a country” communicate in the sentence that wouldn’t be communicated if it wasn’t there?

the automotive lobby.

Nice essay but why do you use the ask comms to post your answers?

Car.

Tire.

Gas.

Corruption.

Capitalism.

There are a few different reasons why.

• The US already built up its rail network around low speed trains. Those tracks aren't suitable for high speed operations, and can't be modified easily for high speed operations. It's not just the tracks themselves, it's the actual paths and bridges and road crossings. If a turn is too sharp, it can't be taken at high speeds, and the actual curves in the path didn't anticipate that one day trains would be fast enough to need more gradual turns. So any new rail would have to buy up the land rights with any new pathway, and that is going to be inherently expensive in the corridors dense enough to where there might be demand for passenger rail.
• Rail crossings have to be designed for high speed rail, as well. There are safety and congestion concerns, so many high speed rail projects are required to build more grade separated crossings (bridges and tunnels), which significantly increases construction costs.
• Rail has to compete with air travel and highway travel, in a country rich enough to have lots of people who can afford to fly, and where car-based highway systems are convenient and cheap. Basically, there's a sweet spot of around 200-400 miles (300-600 km) between cities where it's far enough that a car is inconvenient and close enough to where trains are competitive with buses or airplanes.
• Along those lines, the US actually has pretty cheap intercity buses that use the existing highways.
• Unfortunately, the city pairs that would have the highest intercity passenger demand also tend to pass through a lot of other cities. If you're going from DC to New York, the most popular rail line in America, you'll pass through Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Trenton, each with their own powerful politicians who would push to make sure the train actually stops for them. This is part of why the Acela, our fastest passenger train, takes 190 minutes to travel 226 miles between DC and New York, averaging only 70 mph (115 km/h) despite being capable of reaching top speeds of 160 mph (255 km/h).
• Most rail in the United States is owned by freight/cargo train lines. The passenger network has to lease spots and is lower priority than freight. This leads to scheduling issues, including unscheduled delays.
• Americans are just really bad at constructing big public works projects. Our dams, bridges, tall buildings, rail, highways, roads, power plants, and all sorts of other big projects are almost always behind schedule and over budget.
• The less populated areas where it's cheaper to acquire land rights also tend to be more environmentally pristine, which means there are environmental concerns around projects like these. In our political system, Republicans are much more likely to ignore those environmental concerns, but they use that political clout to build highways and oil pipelines, not passenger rail. Advocates for passenger rail tend to also be more environmentally conscious, so the environmental concerns do tend to slow down any proposed rail project.

There is high speed rail called Brightline in Florida between Miami and Orlando, with the longest segment operating at 125 mph (200 km/h), and some of the more populous segments operating at 110 mph/180 km/h or 80 mph/130 km/h. It tries to manage those tradeoffs on all new track dedicated to it. But the company is struggling to make money.

There's a whole saga in California in that the proposed high speed rail project is decades behind and still bogged down, and has examples of all of these problems. The route it takes to connect the two largest cities on the coast (Los Angeles and San Francisco) goes through the inland central valley, to service a bunch of other cities in between. Bizarrely, phase 1 of the project will only serve the relatively low density, low population cities in the Central Valley, without connecting either San Francisco or Los Angeles. Some segments are to share rail usage with lower speed trains, complicating scheduling and risking delays. The environmental debates have slowed things down, as well.

Watch what happens in Texas with its proposed high speed line (bogged down in political infighting), Florida (see above, already built and operational, but facing serious financial concerns about its ability to continue), and California (see above).

I think we'll eventually see some projects push through, especially if jet fuel gets more expensive than electrical grid power. But for now, America is uniquely hostile to passenger rail, and increasing high speed offerings isn't necessarily going to induce enough demand for these projects to become economically competitive with other forms of intercity transportation.

Car brain.

2/3rds of all Bullet trains are in China. Why are you just asking about the US?

The US does have “high speed’ rail. We call it Acela and it is just such bullshit. The Acela trains aren’t any significantly faster than regular trains.

I routinely take the train from Washington DC to New York City and the Acela train just isn’t worth the cost and hassle. It is 20 minutes faster.

Americans are weird about public transportation. Trains and busses and my go to for any sort of travel. I love the DC metro and I hate highway driving, though I have to drive more on the highway than I want.

People are posting about the auto industry lobby and I agree with that, but we Americans are strange about public transportation.

We reserve our bullets for ...other purposes.

Essentially because of the focus on petty bourgeois lifestyles, large houses, cars, and atomizing society. Big car manufacturers lobbied the state into pressuring against more communal infrastructure at scale, which protects the auto industry from competing with public transit. It has roots in both late-stage capitalism and settler-colonialism.

The auto companies successfully lobbied the government to abandon passenger trains and build highways instead, basically. (That way we'd all be forced to buy their products thanks to the transportation ecosystem.)

Lots of cities are getting commuter trains though. Mine just built two expansions to our rail line. It's a slow process, but essential.

Because high speed passenger rail requires three things that don’t exist in the United States.

1.) Long-term planning 2.) Coordination among different communities 3.) A desire to invest in people’s wellbeing

We are in the ‘pieces are starting to visibly fall off this thing’ phase of societal collapse. That means that, while we’re still rolling down the road, there is a largely un-acknowledged awareness that the car isn’t making it all the way to the destination. As a result, people and institutions are all acting in their own short-term self interest.

Rampant corruption redirects almost all federal resources to contractors and corporations.

Lobbying by corporate interests, the Auto industry and fossil fuel industry in particular.

Auto industry.

People generally don't notice that the plot of who killed Roger rabbit was actually about the dismantling of USA public transportation.

Ford and GM have been destroying it since the beginning.

the situation in the US is multi-layered.

• for one, china has bullet trains but whether they're economical is a whole other question. china often does things just to provide jobs to people, so it doesn't have to pay off. i'm not sure whether it actually does pay off economically but in the US these things are probably looked at more profit-oriented.
• in the US you have a very strong car lobby which in turn is backed by fossil fuel lobby. why do you have such a strong fossil fuel lobby? because historically, it was the only significant source of power (apart nuclear which was shunned for other reasons) so obviously they're a natural monopoly. this is changing today but only slowly.
• cars provide individualism and more "GDP per person". why? because it is more expensive to make 1 car for everyone than to make enough trains for the whole area. because if more people own private stuff, obviously they pay car companies more, which make car company shares go up more and also pays wages to the car factory workers. this is politically more popular than go for the less-expensive public-transport in cities+suburb option.
• also "individual freedom" (rugged individualism) is a american core value due to the political ideology that was brought over from the english people back in 1618 ("nobody should be able to tell you what to do, and you don't have to adhere to state-wide policies"). the consequence is, instead of everyone using 1 subway system, everyone "chooses" to own their own car.

Because musk stole billions that was given to him by California instead of building it and we don’t enforce laws on the pedophile parasite class so womp womp. China would have executed him.

https://techcentral.co.za/elon-musk-hyperloop-sucked-up-billions-delivered-nothing/279294/

In USA we have decided to avoid that "public works" middleman and just give the money directly to corporations.

The US has a single coast-to-coast train called "The Zephyr." It is wildly expensive, and takes multiple days to go from one coast to the other.

If we had bullet trains, our corporate-owned government would still make them unaffordable.

It runs by my back yard. It is a laughably small train, as the only people that ride it do it as a "holiday"

Around the time that the Shinkansen was being built, President Johnson included a provision for a high speed rail line to be built in the Northeast Corridor, a location that makes sense with density and distance. It went ok, in part because the line was relatively straight already and we got what later became the Acela. In the interim, the railroad that owned the tracks went bankrupt.

Part of the issue was that, while other countries were developing high speed rail, passenger rail was owned by private companies and in freefall given the subsidies going to highways. The rail companies didn't want to build high speed rail and most governments didn't really have any experience building rail at all.

Another part of the issue is that early highway construction trampled on the rights of a lot of people and the process of design and construction became heavily regulated. These same regulations apply to high speed rail even though high speed rail is far more environmentally friendly. Part of what was slowing down California's high speed rail project was the permitting process.

In essence, the organizations who could build it mostly went away and the process to build it became incredibly harder. Also, there likely wouldn't be a single system of high speed rail. Instead, there would be multiple seeds in which high speed rail grew from, with some seeds likely not connecting to create an overall network. For instance, Cascadia and CA+NV+AZ would likely be their own networks while Texas+ would likely take a while before it connected to the rest of the Eastern network.

In a word: Republicans.

Because it’s a 3rd world country

A lot of people have pointed out the auto industry lobby, but even if it were removed, getting high speed rail in place would still be a tough sell because of the settlement patterns that the postwar car + suburb boom created. Boston to DC is easily dense enough to support high speed rail, but huge swathes of that corridor (especially Connecticut and New Jersey) are so thoroughly suburbanized that getting to the train in the first place is a non-trivial drive, which renders the train much less attractive. New Jersey is the densest state in the country but The Acela, which serves that corridor, only has stops at either side around New York and Philadelphia because Jersey’s density is spread fairly evenly across a functionally infinite suburbia.