Cato Institute reminds everyone that it is stupid and ignorant

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Airports are also sited away from major cities and as such, require extra transportation to get between destinations. Train stations aren’t, being located right in the center of cities. You can get a far more direct journey on a train as opposed to a plane, which minimizes total travel time that eats into planes’ speed advantage.

Trains cannot travel 200mph through developed areas unless we want to demolish existing housing/infrastructure to acquire the huge right-of-ways required to make such high-speed corridors safe. 

Planes are becoming more efficient, thus enabling economical point-to-point travel.  The future will be airlines abandoning the hub-and-spoke model in favor of smaller planes flying directly between smaller cities, not multi-trillion dollar, environmentally- and socially-disastrous investments in HSR.

This is a dense and disingenuous argument. We already have bypasses for interstates. You don’t think there wouldn’t be a bypass track for trains just going by a city?

As you said yourself, train stations are in city centers.  If you're using HSR to connect high-density downtowns in megaregions you're going to have to pass through already highly-developed areas.  The permanent infrastructure HSR would require in these areas would be massively disruptive. 

That isn't particularly true. First off, trains would probably operate around 120 MPH through urban cores and plenty of approaches already exist. At these speeds, a minimum curve radius of about 1.25 MPH would be necessary.

What does this actually mean in big cities? In San Francisco, the existing Caltrain ROW is acceptable--it just needs a few curved modified, quad tracking, and the short tunnel to the Transbay Transit Center. This is no big deal. In Los Angeles, the existing Metrolink ROW from Burbank is good enough--Union Station and it's approaches just need to be rebuilt. In New York, the biggest problem is capacity--for everything. A new tunnel eventually needs to be built from Secaucus to Hells Gate--which needs to happen otherwise. Otherwise, the NEC north and south is good enough, provided a few curves in the suburbs are adjusted. In DC, the NEC from Baltimore is just fine. Going south, the ROW to Franconia is poor but that can be fixed with a few miles of tunnels and some curve-improvements. You can go on and on for most cities--freight and freeway ROWs with some small takings/tunnels will basically get the job done. Sure, it probably costs ~$15b or so, but that's a bargain compared to much less useful infrastructure. In the case of New York in particular, a new HSR ROW is incredibly useful because it opens up lots of new capacity for NJT and MNR.

[Battista Minola 1616]

Remember when George Will declared that liberals like trains because they hate freedom?

"The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism."

[lfromnj]

When California can actually build its HSR without wasting billions of dollars then I can believe in HSR.

[Yoda]

Living in the midwest, I can't emphasize strongly enough how much I have wished my entire adult life that anytime I wanted to go somewhere in the region for the weekend - Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, etc - that high-speed rail was an option. Driving and finding parking suuuucks, especially when going to Chicago, and the current train you can take there is slow and unreliable. Last time I was supposed to take the train the damn thing derailed in PA. There's no good reason we can't have a nationwide network of high-speed rail, and it would lead to an explosion of domestic travel.

[lfromnj]

Living in the midwest, I can't emphasize strongly enough how much I have wished my entire adult life that anytime I wanted to go somewhere in the region for the weekend - Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, etc - that high-speed rail was an option. Driving and finding parking suuuucks, especially when going to Chicago, and the current train you can take there is slow and unreliable. Last time I was supposed to take the train the damn thing derailed in PA. There's no good reason we can't have a nationwide network of high-speed rail, and it would lead to an explosion of domestic travel.

Because the government shouldn't be subsidizing your desire for a vacation and so far it has cost way too much in California without any results to show?

[Yoda]

Living in the midwest, I can't emphasize strongly enough how much I have wished my entire adult life that anytime I wanted to go somewhere in the region for the weekend - Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, etc - that high-speed rail was an option. Driving and finding parking suuuucks, especially when going to Chicago, and the current train you can take there is slow and unreliable. Last time I was supposed to take the train the damn thing derailed in PA. There's no good reason we can't have a nationwide network of high-speed rail, and it would lead to an explosion of domestic travel.

Because the government shouldn't be subsidizing your desire for a vacation and so far it has cost way too much in California without any results to show?

lol, "subsidizing".....god bless you

Does the government "subsidize" the highway system? Do they "subsidize" the private airline industry? Yes and yes. Every mode of public and private transportation in the country was and/or is subsidized at some point, and for good reason.

[IceAgeComing]

The main issue with High Speed Rail compared to conventional railways is the signalling system more than anything else.  Traditional signalling (lights at railside; not only does each country have their own system but there are multiple different systems in each individual country but the principles are the same in that the track is divided into blocks each with a signal at the start and end which indicates whether that block is clear for the train to travel through or not with some indication of the following couple of blocks as well depending on distance between signals and line speeds) aren't safe above a certain speed.  Germany have a limit on 160km/h (100mph) on all trains that run on their traditional system and that's with very advanced and complicated safety systems and their High Speed Trains have two other signalling standards which allows those trains to run with in-cab signalling and basically drive themselves.  In the UK the reason why the West and East Coast Main Lines are limited to 125mph isn't because the tracks can't handle more (there are large sections designed to support up to 140mph) but because that is the safest speed that traditional signalling can safely handle: and the High Speed Lines have to use in-cab signalling.  Those systems are inherently more sophisticated and complicated than traditional signalling: the German one is basically self-driving with the driver there to make sure things are safe and to drive the train in any sections that aren't designed and set up for High Speed operation: the UK system is set up to basically change the line speed and report that to the driver in cab to make sure that they keep moving but in a way where they can stop before any obstruction.  There are bits of the US system set up like this (some of the lines in the North East I believe?) but those bits are very much not designed for high speed operation.

That's the primary barrier to High Speed operation: and that's why alternative alignments are often pursued over upgrades since the upgrade work would necessitate closing large portions of your railways to set up the new signalling which would cause mass disruption - plus also you have to consider where freight trains go: I don't think there are any High Speed freight trains and normally (including in the US) freight operates at lower speed limits anyway: so a situation where you'd need paths for freight between high speed passenger services would be untenable since any delays would snowball massively very quickly.  There's also the fact that in-cab signalling is fraught with possible technical issues that could massively delay introduction of services and only increase disruption - one of the main factors in London's Crossrail project being, what, three years behind schedule now is that its taken them a significantly long time to troubleshoot bugs with the signalling system in the core and the transitions from it to traditional signalling.

The US should support its railways more: its one of very few developed countries that do not subsidise them to any massive extent and a big lesson of recent history is that passenger railways are not something to be seen as a profit making enterprise but instead a service provided to support the wider economy.  While HIGH SPEED RAIL sounds cool and there are some routes where it might be viable in the US its probably more realistic to look at connections within cities or between towns and cities that are a short distance apart but where there's no alternative to driving and where a connection might also let you link up rural communities with big towns.  Its less exciting and interesting but probably a more useful service: and its generally easier and quicker to add new services on already existing lines (perhaps with a station or two added) over trying to transform a railway with massive investment to start.  Ideally you'd do a full on report into the viability of certain schemes and the positive economic impact relative to costs in order to work out where you want to focus and invest in those ones first but the issue in the US is that realistically you only ever have a couple of years to work on these things before the other party grabs a bit of Congress so they don't have the time for that.