Ask Lemmy

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Man, that is a loaded question, and it's already been answered extremely well in the comments. I'll just add this to the discussion.

Years ago, there were plans to build the world's largest particle accelerator in Texas. Construction had already begun, and the project had secured its funding. Then local politicians learned about it and immediately started working against it, citing reasons like, "We can't make any money off of this," or claiming it was costing too much money for no practical benefit.

It's a very unfortunate aspect of our culture that projects like this can be derailed for those kinds of reasons. I often find myself apologizing for my fellow Americans when we behave this way.

In a word: Republicans.

Because musk stole billions that were 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/

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"

You can't roll coal with an electric train.

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.

NIMBY, greed, and government stupidity.

The US is actually a collection of 50 warring countries in a trench coat with the one understanding that no one outside of the country can ever know, so the federal government was invented to talk to the rest of the world. It is a fucking miracle that we have the interstate highway system, and I suspect in a few more years of decline we won't even have that anymore, not really. You can already see significant changes in the quality and maintenance of the roads as you cross state lines.

If they'd have built high-speed rail, the bickering over who maintains it and how or when to maintain it would have caused it to be non-functional by now anyway. The few trains we do have derail an awful lot as it is, which is why mostly we just put shit in trucks and people in cars^1^.

^1^ - By cars I of course mean trucks, but not the same trucks we put shit in. We have ^REALLY^ BIG ~FUCK~ ~OFF~ trucks that we typically put people in but rarely put stuff in; then we have ^MEGA^ FUCKING HUGE ~BADONKADONK~ trucks that pull trailers full of our shit all over the place.

It's the one thing bullet related we don't fuck with

Other answers are good.

I expect there's a lot of racism, too. A lot of people don't want those people to have nice things, even if it means personally suffering.

If you build a nice train system, you might have to see those people on your day to day. In a car, you're isolated and feel safe.

But mostly I expect it's because of the massive highway system that was built without corresponding passenger rail.

Because the US generally doesn't use passenger trains as transport in the first place, as people use cars or other road vehicles. Those provide some benefits that rail doesn't: the road network is much more extensive than the rail network, so it can provide transport more-or-less directly to a door.

The US rail network is designed around freight transport rather than passenger transport, stuff where the time value of transporting the cargo is lower. Slow maximum speeds, supports heavy cars and axle weights, long maximum train lengths. FWIW, the US moves more freight per capita by rail than do Japan or China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usage#Tonne-kilometres_of_rail_transport_per_year

The measurement years vary a bit, but it should be about right. In absolute terms, for 2020, the US moved 2,105 billion metric ton-kilometers. China in 2025 moved 3,687 metric ton-kilometers. For 2014, Japan moved 21 billion metric ton-kilometers (I'd guess, without looking at Japan's modal breakdown, that given that Japan is an archipelago, it's probably like Europe, which is a bunch of peninsulas, and doesn't use freight rail for as high a percentage of its freight traffic as the US, with a lot of the difference being made up by relying on ship with road freight covering the last bit).

So in per capita terms, grabbing the current population numbers, annual freight rail usage is about 6.17 gigatonne-km/million people for the US, 2.62 gigatonne-km/million people for China, and 0.17 gigatonne-km/million people for Japan.

For perspective, the EU is also listed there for 2014; it'll move about 0.58 gigatonne-km/million people in freight rail.

It's the US - bullets are for guns

Unfortunately it is entirely because of corruption. The government is plundered at every turn by oligarchs, and oligarchs just fly private jets. And currently they actually vehemently dislike the public unless they are a source of financial extraction.

It’s not impossible. I think it’s inevitable but it can happen so so much sooner and faster than people realize it’s just hard to dream about right now when people can’t afford homes or healthy bodies

Americans are too stupid to know that they need it and too corrupt to do anything about it.

They love to fearmonger about falling behind China and the rest of the world, but clearly not when it comes to transportation, urban development, healthcare, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U

might be relevant

It's pretty shit on passenger trains in general, and that's just a very expensive, very hard to lay out passenger train.

Population density is definitely part of it - the only places where it would make sense is on the coasts, and that land is already in use.

If you could get past the land-use issues, where would they run? Boston to Miami is 1500 miles. If a train was built there (again, assuming land use wasn't an issue) - where would it stop? How long could it maintain those speeds?

Anywhere it didn't stop, why would those towns/cities/states support their tax dollars going to such an investment?

Then there's the Final Mile problem - how would people get around once they got somewhere?

I've ridden trains in Europe - they work there for multiple reasons. One is density, but there's also that Europe infrastructure either didn't exist prior to WWII or what did exist got heavily damaged. They had to invest in trains, country by country post-WWII. It wasn't like there was a Grand Europe Train Plan as many countries were still antagonistic at the time, and the train system incompatibilities that still exist reflect this.

What Europe has today is a result of a long, slow development of infrastructure and political relationships.

There's lots more involved, but even these things show how different Europe is from the US - it takes sixteen OECD countries to equal the landmass of the US, divided between 50 states.

Imagine trying to build the Western Europe rail system(s) today if it didn't exist, and much of that land was currently in use for manufacturing or farming.

Apples and oranges.

is the Acela a bullet train?

Generally the US is pretty anti-climate, especially currently, and pretty anti public transportation. There's been a lot of talk about how the US looks exactly like what you'd get if the car industry did a shit ton of lobbying, like pedestrian-unfriendly urban design, jaywalking laws and that sort of shit. Exact prices and landscapes and such don't particularly matter if nobody ever has any incentive to do the thing.

Tracks are owned buy companies that are moving goods, not people. Goods that mostly don’t need to be anywhere in a hurry as long as a lot get delivered. So you get mile long trains.

The US is big and populations aren’t concentrated. Trains wouldn’t stop where people need to go.

The us had coasts and inland waterways so moving things along the water was cheaper than rail.

The US is young compared to other countries and don’t develop rail for moving people like Europe and Russia.

We built an interstate road system, and had cheap gas and vehicles. No need for rail.

Do we need bullet trains? Yes. But labor is too expensive now. Linking the west coast cities together and getting to Chicago and the Gulf of Mexico somehow makes the most sense. We need a big push from the feds to make it happen though.

If it were me as pres I would make it a matter of natl security and have the military do most of the work.