"Socialism" from Philadelphia to New York in 37 minutes
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"Socialism" from Philadelphia to New York in 37 minutes
How cool would it be to travel from Philadelphia to New York in 37 minutes? I don't know. Truth is, we may never know. I would put high-speed rail -- the subject of an interesting multi-part series that began in the Inquirer today -- near the top of the great ideas of 2008 that is surely getting lost in the kill-all-government-spending-except-the-Bush-and-Obama-wars-and-Bush-tax-cuts-for-the-rich frenzy of 2010.
As I'm sure Glenn Beck will say sometime in the near future, show me one place where the Founding Fathers said anything about high-speed rail!!!
Here's the crux:
Want to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in two hours, 40 minutes? Or from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in 21/2 hours? Or from Philadelphia to New York in 37 minutes?
Want to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 71 percent per passenger-mile compared with car travel, or 76 percent compared with air travel?
Want to cut travel fatalities to zero? That's how many people have died in high-speed train accidents in France or Spain or Japan.
Want to escape airport security lines? Want to get out of seat belts? Want to elude traffic gridlock?
Want to spend $10 billion a year?
To the Tea Party crowd, you lost them at $10 billion. What a shame. This is a program that would create literally thousands of manufacturing jobs in the private sector in the United States, as contracts are awarded, and then would create thousands more jobs for mechanics to maintain the trains and the tracks, and for people to operate the system once it is running. Frankly, the global warming and traffic and safety benefits, while importantly, are tangential to the jobs right now. But it doesn't really matter because America has lost its nerve, especially our leaders.
One other quote from the article stuck with me:
"This is what the rest of the world is doing," said Robert Yaro, an urban planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the Regional Plan Association, a New York-area research group. "We're behind not only France and Spain and the U.K. and Japan and China and Korea, but now Morocco and India and Vietnam are building high-speed rail. This is what we have to do.
The rest of the world isn't paralyzed by fear.
Comments (85)
///General - What you're saying is that National Airport is more accessible because you can get to it on the Red Line or Amtrak/VRE, and that makes it better then Union Station because that is only accessible by ... wait for it ... the Red Line, Amtrak, VRE, and MARC.//// Uh, no, reread my post. Here's what I wrote: "That actually makes [it] as much, if not more convenient than going to Union Station to catch the Acela." Meaning, it makes flying just as convenient, more so since the Acela only leaves 10 times a day versus more than 70 direct flights. ///What about Dulles, where you have to deal with a long congested drive on the toll road/// I've been on that toll road tons of times. The only time I've ever seen it congested is in the heart of rush hour, no different than trying to drive to a train station. And seeing as how a "frigging ton" of people in the DC area live outside of DC, especially in Northern Virginia (Fairfax, Alexandria, Manassas, Vienna, etc) that actually makes Dulles even more convenient to drive to, instead of having to slog into the city to catch a train. You just actually proved my point.- //And I have no idea how PATH plays in to flying out of Newark, that would involve 3 different transfers from midtown to the airport, vs 1 if you took a train out of penn station/// Not really. It takes the same train route from midtown. If you're at NYC Penn (MSG), you take the NJ PATH to the EWR stop (Newark International). They have a monorail, drops you right off at the airport. Is that a little less convenient than hopping on a high-speed rail right at NYC/Penn? Sure. But not by much, especially when you factor the Acela is 3 hours to DC, @ $135 a ticket, versus half that time for a flight at around the same cost. A new high speed rail isn't going to change that time much unless they build a specific rail line for it (cost prohibitive), and it certainly won't reduce that cost. ///and if you're going to boston or dc, why not just make it 0 transfers and get on the train at penn?/// Because once you're on the train, the trip is twice as long. ////JFK is not 15 minutes from midtown at 3am, let alone during the day./// The longest non-rush hour drive I've ever had to/from JFK and midtown is 30 minutes. If I hop on the LIRR to Penn Station, it takes about 30 minutes. ////LGA has no transit access, good luck./// LGA has about a half-dozen bus routes, so so much for it having "no transit acccess." Hop on the M60, hop off at the subway line to get you where you need to go. It's just as easy to get to LGA or JFK as it is to get to Penn Station, depending on where you are in Manhattan at the time, of course.
- ///but I'd gladly pay that to turn my 7 hour drive into 3 hours by train/// I'm not sure what you starting point was, but Philly to Boston via Acela is usually 5-6 hours @$150-$180. Philly to Boston on Southwest? An Hour and a half, @ $101 for the ticket.
Pelti - why not just fly Southwest from Philly to Logan in about 1h 20m? Priced about the same as Amtrak or car and much faster.— bird11- //Pelti - why not just fly Southwest from Philly to Logan in about 1h 20m? Priced about the same as Amtrak or car and much faster./// Great minds think alike.
Will your forgeting one teeny little problem, High speed lines are incredibly expensive to build and operate to such an extent its more expensive to go by train than it is to fly.— PAEnglish
If you're at NYP, and want to get to EWR, you have a few options. You said PATH. So I walk a block to 33rd street terminal on PATH. Take a 22 minute ride to Journal Square. Wait a few minutes for the WTC-Newark PATH. Take a 12 minute ride to NWK. Walk down and buy my NJ Transit ticket from NWK to EWR. Wait up to 20 minutes for the next train. Get to EWR. Take the monorail to the terminal. That could easily be over an hour. For my drive to boston, the 3 hours was based on a trip via true HSR. Even Amtrak Regional would have been under 6 hours, plus half an hour on either side from the station to the destination. 7 hours where I can read a book, or watch a movie on my laptop, instead of stare at the tailpipe in front of me. Compare that to southwest. I either get a ride to the airport, or take the R1. Probably takes me about half an hour to get there. Wait for check in, wait for security, wait to board, wait for takeoff, 90 minutes in the air, wait on tarmac, wait to reach gate, walk off plane, walk to baggage, wait for baggage, wait for baggage, pray baggage didn't go somewhere else, finally get baggage, go to blue line station, 15 minutes to boston, then half an hour to destination. 90 minutes in the air quickly turns into a 7 hour ordeal if you actually look at the door to door hassle.— Pelti
Pelti is right on as far as time required if you fly, especially if you live a ways from the airport. Even before 9/11 it was getting bad, but since 9/11 it has gotten ridiculous because you need to be at the airport so much in advance of your flight. The good old days when you could show up at the airport 15 minutes before your flight and still make it are gone for good. I am a bit more than an hour from either Newark or Philly, so any distance that is not greater than Washington or Boston just isn't worth it. To go to a meeting about a half-hour outside Boston one of my co-workers flew, while I drove. I beat him by a half-hour, and that was on a day with no weather delays. Given that the security requirements (which are the biggest part of the time delays) for HSTs would probably be the same as for planes, I don't see it being any different.— what is truth?- If everybody wants to argue that the country should invest in infrastructure, and that high speed rail should be part of that infrastructure, that's fine. But why wasn't the argument made 2 years ago when the nearly $1 trillion in stimulus money was being wasted on meaningless projects like curb cuts? I would be more understanding of mortgaging the future of our grandchildren if we had something to show for it. Now, we've spent a ton of money and have nothing to show for it, making it difficult to even begin considering the merits of high speed rail.— jfar86
- I guess you have not ridden Amtrak lately. Conductors treat you like animals and it is never on time. You want to build a high speed rail, let a private company, build and run.— hawk16
- Want to know a fun fact? Almost twice as many people (~30.5M) people ride SEPTA regional rail in a year as fly out of PHL (~15.5M). Which do you think gets a larger subsidy?— Pelti
- ///If you're at NYP, and want to get to EWR, you have a few options. You said PATH. So I walk a block to 33rd street terminal on PATH. //// This point is senseless from the get go. If you're at a train station to begin with, logically it is more convenient to hop on a train versus schlepping to an airport. Think about it from another perspective: If I'm in the Bronx, or in Queens, or in Herndon (Northern VA), it's easier to get to the airport, is it not?
- //You said PATH. So I walk a block to 33rd street terminal on PATH. Take a 22 minute ride to Journal Square. Wait a few minutes for the WTC-Newark PATH. /// Then instead of the PATH, you can take the NJ Transit from 33rd Street to EWR (Newark Airport). Total travel time is 23 minutes. Hop on the monorail and you're at the terminal in 10 minutes. I don't know where you get the 20 minute wait from, the most I have ever waited for a monorail is 5 minutes. And yeah, waiting for a flight can take a while, especially if checking bags and stuff. But then again, a high speed rail along that corridor would be built for business travel, not leisure, and business travelers rarely check bags on planes. You have to be early for your train, too (not as much as a flight, but still). I've left 33rd Street an hour before my flight out of Newark and still made it in time. That includes train, monorail, and security. Having done this leg (NYC to PHL, to DC, and vice versa) I can tell you that air travel is much easier. The only advantage to train, and the only time I have ever used it, is when I didn't need a reservation. And if you are going on a 90 minute flight and it takes you 7 hours door to door, then you're spending too much time in the airport, my friend.
- ///Want to know a fun fact? Almost twice as many people (~30.5M) people ride SEPTA regional rail in a year as fly out of PHL (~15.5M). Which do you think gets a larger subsidy?/// --- Pretty irrevant comparison, since Septa regional rail is just that -- regional. Flyiing out of PHL is obviously not regional. Complete apples versus oranges. Regional travel, a train is very convenient. If you want to have a more relevant comparison, compare how many Amtrak passengers use Amtrak out of Philly versus how many fly out of PHL.
- About 3.5 Mil on Amtrak in PHI. So about 20%. Considering that's mostly Northeast Corridor, it's not a good comparison. If you could isolate just the similar routes, how many people fly from Philly to NYC, or to DC, it might be a good comparison. -- The point of origin does matter, but that's a wash. If you live convenient to an airport, great, but for everyone else travel is required to either the train station or the airport. This country has spent trillions that have made air travel more convenient, shouldn't the same effort by put into rail? -- The fact that trains are great for regional is exactly the point. Air travel is very inefficient when you're in the air for under 2 hours, and have to spend more time in the airport than in the air, unless you want to risk missing your flight waiting to screen/checkin. HSR travel would replace the shorter hop flights, and let airports focus on longer flights, bigger planes. Ideally you'd try to route the HSR to major airports as well as city centers to stay with this. -- Another advantage of HSR is multiple stops. A DC - Boston train is also DC-Philly, Baltimore - NYC, and so on. Each train can take the place of multiple flights.— Pelti
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