High-Speed Trains in the US?

demondawn asks: "Countries around the world are researching and adopting high-speed rail systems, but the U.S. seems to be behind the bandwagon. How do Americans feel about the adoption of a high-speed rail system in the U.S.? How do people in nations that have already adopted high-speed rail feel about their services? And how about tourists who have travelled either to or from the U.S. feel about public transportation around the world?"

Comments

beating the dead horse

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to RTFA. Americans love the independence their automobiles give them.

They don't care.

[Pig Hogger]

For more than 50 years, the average american has been brainwashed by car and petroleum companies into believing that their car-centric "life" is the best thing since industrial bakeries have invented sliced bread.

They are very happy squandering more and more money into bigger and bigger trucks so any proposition to do otherwise is viewed as communist. Also, there is an anglo-saxon cultural trait that sees the city as something sinful, bad, evil that should be fled at all cost, hence the popularity of suburbia.

In the same vein, here is a very good explanation of the whole idea of having livable cities.

Re:They don't care.

[Murphy Murph]

For more than 50 years, the average american has been brainwashed by car and petroleum companies into believing that their car-centric "life" is the best thing since industrial bakeries have invented sliced bread.

I call bull.

The United States has an average population density of 31 people per square km.
Japan averages 337.
England 243.
Italy 193.
Switzerland 181.

Ireland has 57, Brazil has 22. Their experiences with mass transit (including rail) would provide a much more reasonable basis for discussion than the way this thread is heading.

Two Big Reasons

[fm6]

One reason the U.S. has such an outdated rail system: it's been 140 years since a major war was fought on our turf. Living in a battlezone is a drag -- but it does destroy all your rail infrastructure, forcing you to rebuild with modern equipment. Whatever his other faults, Adolf Hitler was a blessing to the European rail system.

The other problem is plain old ideology. Or maybe culture is a better word. I'm not sure you can separate the two concepts when it comes to American transportation. Which means cars. Cars are our symbols of individuality, our favorite hobby, our main form of self-expression. Cars are the ultimate anti-socialist hyper-libertarian thing: they allow you to go where you want, when you want. None of those commie-fascist train schedules!

So no transportation system that would take money away from cars has a chance of more than token funding. Too bad the cost of this is obscene: freeways that cost millions per mile, traffic casualties that make a world war look like a stubbed toe, and huge payments to overseas oil vendors that are destroying our currency. Not to mention that a good chunk of that oil money gets diverted to the very terrorists we spend billions fighting.

I don't expect these facts to change, or ever for a lot of people to admit that we have a problem. (Car addicts, like any other, are good at denial.) I just couldn't resist a chance to point out that we do have a problem.

Re:Trains are best for medium distances

[lindsayt]

We had trains and they simply could not compete with the plane and the car. Planes are much faster and more flexible for travel across the country but the automobile, however, is the ultimate train killer. Nothing else beats it's flexibility, convenience, price, autonomy and privacy.

Actually, you're almost right but not quite. The automobile wasn't the train killer, General Motors was the train killer. Most people don't know that in the 1950s General Motors corporation actually asked and received the right from the US government to buy and destroy rail corridors, which they paid the US government for the right to do. They intentionally destroyed millions of miles of railroad track in this country.

Ever wonder why it is that in the 1900s railroad barons controlled the US and yet today there isn't any infrastructure for trains? It's because General Motors tore it up to make sure that trains wouldn't be practical and that they would have no competition. This was combined with a massive advertisement campaign to convince Americans that automobiles were the wave of the future, and that to be modern and advanced, one needed a car. Nobody talked about the rail getting ripped up by GM workers.

Now that's a reason to be outraged, and it rather undermines the argument that cars won out in the US because they were simply more adapted for the US problems. Remember that in the 1940s the US had a very extensive rail network but no freeways and very few good highways - have you seen pictures of Route 66? And that was the best highway in the country at the time. Cars were horribly impractical and slow compared to trains in the 1940s; but by the 1960s that problem was solved by General Motors' capitalistic, monopolistic decision.

Purposely and maliciously destroying national infrastructure is what conquering armies do to the vanquished as a way of making sure they never rise up again; and in war it's now considered a war crime to do such an act needlessly. And yet General Motors was rewarded with a 30-year near-monopoly of the US transportation markets...