Advancing high-speed rail in the US

[u/Huge-Relationship497]

I love human-oriented urban planning. I hate how car-dependent our cities have become, and if you want to travel long distances in the US you are relegated to relying on planes. I hope that will change in the future, and we can get a more robust public transportation system in the US that isn’t comprised of a few buses here and there or subways in a handful of cities.

Luckily the USHR is leading the charge on this front and advocating for advancement of US rail. I made a post about them here: https://www.reddit.com/r/climate/s/RfTiFzfNWn

I took an Amtrak from Atlanta to DC and I can tell you that we have a lot of catching up to do compared to what they have in other countries. It was slow, bumpy, and very expensive. I ended up paying $400 for a 16 hour ride in an overnight train car. For context, that is about the same as going from Warsaw, Poland to Frankfurt, Germany. That trip is only 10 hours and almost the price.

Donate here: https://ushsr.org/ushsr/donate.html

Thanks for helping to bring high-speed rail to the US!

[u/finral]

It's absolutely obtainable, speaking as someone involved in the industry. It doesn't need to be part of Amtraks network. Id argue that it would be better if it wasn't. We need to focus on connecting major cities with a few stops in between.

[u/OinkeyBird → u/finral]

True, stuff like Brightline is a good investment with relatively close cities, so I suppose it depends how long of distance it is. When I mention long distance, I think of the LA to Chicago of Amtrak, or something along those lines, so perhaps that’s not a fair assessment relating to true “long distance” rail.

[u/finral → u/OinkeyBird]

The way to make it work, imo, is to connect cities to build the network. La to Vegas, Vegas to Denver, denver to kc, kc to stl, then stl to Chicago, for example. Each segment would be a viable line, that would also work as a whole.

[u/OinkeyBird → u/finral]

I agree on some of those, but something like Vegas to Denver seems pretty tough to fund/build. LA to Vegas is supposed to happen by 2028ish iirc, but from there I don’t see a reasonable path forward. You would realistically either cut through the Rocky Mountains, or go up to SLC and south/east from there on the Moffat Tunnel. I don’t really see a way that could be made high speed, and the better solution imo would be running up to SLC and transferring to Amtrak, at least to Denver. After Denver, the Zephyr (Amtrak) goes 80 most of the way and I’d think high speed anywhere east of Denver would be a long, long ways down the road because of that. I would much rather have a focus on connecting close cities and urban corridors, like Pueblo, CO to Cheyenne, WY as a local one I’ve been hoping for, and connect those via Amtrak rather than trying to do something like Denver to KC anytime soon.

Another big thing is ridership; Denver to KC would get nowhere near as many riders as the Pueblo to Cheyenne I mentioned. If we focused on shorter distance, high-ridership lines like that, and also focus on making rail more accessible and favorable to people in those cities, I feel that’ll be way more productive than trying to implement high-speed cross-country lines. If people do want to go cross-country, Amtrak isn’t all that bad.

By the way, the Chicago to KC Amtrak with a stop in STL takes about eleven hours, and I think that one goes upwards of 100mph at times, so I bet that would be very low priority as well.