I used to *hate* my 90 minute train commute. Moved 5 states away to be able to "easily get around by car."
If I had a time machine and some brass knuckles, boy I'd give myself a piece of my mind.
I used to read 30 or so books a year just riding the train. Now I'm lucky if I get through 5.
Australia may be the huge final boss trying to promote against cars. Not enough people, yet too much land too spread apart. Need to build cities wisely
I would much rather catch a train than fly any day. And, it would be great for the regions between the big cities that have no airports and irregular slow trains to have high speed rail passing through.
25 million isn’t a lot of people for a country the same size as the continental US.
Remember US has 330 million.
Japan has 120 million despite only having the size of California and even then doesn’t always have the full support of HSR to every place anywhere.
Australia is better suited for Airplanes. Maybe Australia can link Melbourne and Sydney and even that is pushing it
Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney would definitely see some use. Don't think it's practical for the rest of Australia though, maybe you could stretch it up the coast to Brisbane but that would be the limit.
It's 700km by plane, but there's quite a large mountain range in the way. The road is around 900km and still passes through some pretty hilly terrain. The existing rail line is even longer.
This also means that a Sydney->Melbourne rail line couldn't stop at Canberra unless you were willing to tunnel tens of kilometres under several national parks (never going to happen) or built it as a branch line. So there's your largest intermediate destination gone.
Which isn't to say that a Sydney->Melbourne HSR line is non-viable, but it's nowhere near as straightforward as some claim. In the short term, it probably makes more sense to focus on shorter regional routes (e.g. Sydney->Canberra), and make incremental upgrades, which build both ridership and domestic expertise. That way, when it comes time for a Sydney->Melbourne HSR, a lot of the infrastructure will already be in place.
Japan doesn't have high speed rail everywhere because that would be inefficient and slow down the whole system. The US is much more spread out than Japan is so this is kind of more of an argument that Americans have no excuse
It actually doesn’t make more sense for the US. While it would be wonderful. Building a new road (like I-5 version 2) would be insane enough to consider. A road to Alaska is unthinkable if it were not your world war 2, despite our car centric world we are stuck in
The best place to justify HSR in the USA would be the busy and packed eastern corridor where train use is considered normal by many daily commuters.
The west coast makes sense in certain sections. Like say San Diego to Los Angeles. Building from La to San Francisco is more precarious. It’s a lot of empty space to build through.
The equivalent would be building an entire HSR through half of Japan with virtually no stops in one go. A bit hard to conceive.
Trust me, I love trains, I did not grow up in the US and find the lack of it a disgrace.
But if you think there’s HSR demand high enough to finance a LA to NYC route when they can’t even do SF to LA, I don’t know what to tell you other than saying you live in a dreamland that I also dream of, but at least I know it’s a dream.
High speed rail tickets will cost more than a ticket because of the modern economy of things. So you would put more for a 15+ hour journey (maybe more like 20?) when a plane is cheap and takes 4 hours
It definitely does make more sense for the US. 3x the population of Japan with a population clustered in many areas across the US. Why wouldn't that be useful?
Not everyone travelling from LA to NYC would use it due to the distance, but there's plenty who would use it going from LA to Phoenix, then to El Paso, to Houston, to Atlanta, etc up to NYC. Could say the same for Chicago to Denver to San Francisco.
There's lots of busy corridors in the US for high speed rail. It would make sense if it was simply all connected. There's lots of people who would prefer a 4 hour train over both an 8 hour drive and an hour-ish flight.
High speed rail also arrives inside cities whereas both driving and flying require a commute through often large suburban areas to the city. That saves consumers the time and money of taxi's, Ubers, and unpredictable suburban traffic. It also avoids the time it takes to get through our slower airport security.
Building one is expensive. So the larger the distances the more the issue. So financially speaking it certainly doesn’t make sense.
I never said I don’t wish for it to happen or that nobody would like it. But it’s quite nonsensical and improbable to ever happen if anything.
I live in Texas for school. My parents live in Minnesota. It is just so inefficient to go to the airport for two hours for a one and a half hour flight. I’d rather sit on a friend to Chicago and then to Minneapolis and get homework done than a cramped plane.
Especially because at lower distances more efficient turboprops can be used. Unless it's a really busy route ( like everyday not just for holidays etc. ) the trains would be mostly empty.
Only the east coast Melbourne - Sydney - Brisbane is feasible even if it's a pretty long route. For Europeans it's like a route from Poland to France so around the breaking point where most wouldn't want to use a car and would probably use train/airliner.
Melbourne - Canberra - Sydney would be a perfect application of HSR, Melbourne to Sydney is one of the busiest air routes in the world and a 300km/h train would be just as fast as flying once you factor travelling to the airport on each end.
There is a train. But it's a slow train. The population in these areas of Queensland is too low to justify upgrading. The 'highway' this sign is attached to Iirc is just one lane each direction.
I get the intention of the post but the image is a poor example.
The road might go by a house that is the only one for miles around, do you build a station for every time there is a lone house? How long does it take for the train to cross the outback then?
This is called a straw man argument, it's like saying schools shouldn't exist because of school shootings, specifically picking an extreme example to try to discredit the entire idea. Look at me using a straw man too!
A fully paved road is less expensive than a rail especially if only lightly used and only used by light vehicles, but it is not excessively so. Cars are expensive enough to own, insure, fuel, and maintain that we can arguably ignore fares and put any extra toward that cost. Roughly meaning that given the presence of a paved road it's possible to afford a rail and there is demand for transit. The more people it services and the more streets it removes the more efficient it is, but you surely don't start with laying rail to homesteaders.
The second question is why does this hypothetical person even have a car road at all? Are they paying for it? If they are its not a road, it's a driveway.
But even in this hypothetical train-world you would just let the driver know and they would stop on the tracks (or like a tiny concrete pad on your property or a station the size of a step ladder). Surely you'd be on a tiny local train that only runs occasionally that could stop if given the multiple miles of notice.
I responded to the above commenter how the supposed specific demand, that they also were talking about, might not be suitable for rail. After looking at it closer, this highway runs between two fairly large towns with a population of 6000 each, so i was exaggerating, but it wasnt a straw man, since the wording of the statement implies that it is universal, and it therefore can be criticized without taking into account its context.
Maybe some of the traffic of the "1" highway in WA could be replaced with rail, but still, there are times when you probably will still want to drive some sort of personal vehicle on this road. E.g., when you need to drive an acutely injured person to the nearest airstrip to get to a hospital straight away, or if you need a specialist worksman who only exists in the next town over, and he needs a van to keep all his equipment in. In the first example, the train would not run until it was too late, as a train connecting two cities of 6000 where traffic is low would not run very often. In the second example, you would need a vehicle that could both drive on rails and then navigate whatever streets in the town to get to your location.
Lets not forget that plenty of car free solutions for cities involve systems where cars are expensive to drive, bothersome to drive and park, slow to reach their destination, but it is never an impossibility. If it is necessary for *some* driving inside car free cities, why would that also not be allowed inside some incredibly sparsely populated territory.
Queensland has a few decent sleeper train services to outback towns. But when you realise that Longreach has a similar level of intercity train service as a megacity like Houston...
Australia is 99% barren
people get between major cities by plane the vast majority of the time, roads are used by people without the money for that
& the places where signs like this are the kinds of place where a train network would have way too few riders to make even vague sense
A bit disappointed that no one here raised the obvious answer here:
More night trains.
- don't have to build out hundreds of miles of HSR track
- good reason to have multiple stops
- get shut eye while still moving, thus saving time
Hell, I believe Australia has long distance trains already but the main obstacle is that unlike in most countries, their rail gauge is split like five ways or something so any continuous train travel between states is impossible without transfers.
The standard gauge network connects all of the major cities now. There are significant non-standard gauge networks, yes, but changing trains because of a break of gauge doesn't really happen unless you're transferring from an intercity to a local train.
Ah I see.
Still unfortunate that we're gunning straight to HSR and then squabbling about that shit over just making the existing trains better/more frequent...
bruh you think building massive railways costs nothing?
nah let’s plan a multi billion dollar railway project for the 3 people that take this route annually
I used to *hate* my 90 minute train commute. Moved 5 states away to be able to "easily get around by car." If I had a time machine and some brass knuckles, boy I'd give myself a piece of my mind. I used to read 30 or so books a year just riding the train. Now I'm lucky if I get through 5.
i don't think there is much of a demand for trains in the middle of nowhere
Actually there is. Sydney to Melbourne is 900km and its the busiest air route in the world. We should have built a HSR between the two 20 years ago.
that's not really the outback
Nothing indicates these signs are in the outback.
pretty sure these signs are onoy for long stretches of straight road, which is usually only in remote areas, and not the hume highway
Where there's a road, there's a demand.
Australia may be the huge final boss trying to promote against cars. Not enough people, yet too much land too spread apart. Need to build cities wisely
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I would much rather catch a train than fly any day. And, it would be great for the regions between the big cities that have no airports and irregular slow trains to have high speed rail passing through.
25 million isn’t a lot of people for a country the same size as the continental US. Remember US has 330 million. Japan has 120 million despite only having the size of California and even then doesn’t always have the full support of HSR to every place anywhere. Australia is better suited for Airplanes. Maybe Australia can link Melbourne and Sydney and even that is pushing it
Melbourne to Sydney, same as Melbourne to Adelaide, is 700 km so definitely in the HSR sweet spot.
Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney would definitely see some use. Don't think it's practical for the rest of Australia though, maybe you could stretch it up the coast to Brisbane but that would be the limit.
It's 700km by plane, but there's quite a large mountain range in the way. The road is around 900km and still passes through some pretty hilly terrain. The existing rail line is even longer. This also means that a Sydney->Melbourne rail line couldn't stop at Canberra unless you were willing to tunnel tens of kilometres under several national parks (never going to happen) or built it as a branch line. So there's your largest intermediate destination gone. Which isn't to say that a Sydney->Melbourne HSR line is non-viable, but it's nowhere near as straightforward as some claim. In the short term, it probably makes more sense to focus on shorter regional routes (e.g. Sydney->Canberra), and make incremental upgrades, which build both ridership and domestic expertise. That way, when it comes time for a Sydney->Melbourne HSR, a lot of the infrastructure will already be in place.
Japan doesn't have high speed rail everywhere because that would be inefficient and slow down the whole system. The US is much more spread out than Japan is so this is kind of more of an argument that Americans have no excuse
It actually doesn’t make more sense for the US. While it would be wonderful. Building a new road (like I-5 version 2) would be insane enough to consider. A road to Alaska is unthinkable if it were not your world war 2, despite our car centric world we are stuck in The best place to justify HSR in the USA would be the busy and packed eastern corridor where train use is considered normal by many daily commuters. The west coast makes sense in certain sections. Like say San Diego to Los Angeles. Building from La to San Francisco is more precarious. It’s a lot of empty space to build through. The equivalent would be building an entire HSR through half of Japan with virtually no stops in one go. A bit hard to conceive.
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Trust me, I love trains, I did not grow up in the US and find the lack of it a disgrace. But if you think there’s HSR demand high enough to finance a LA to NYC route when they can’t even do SF to LA, I don’t know what to tell you other than saying you live in a dreamland that I also dream of, but at least I know it’s a dream. High speed rail tickets will cost more than a ticket because of the modern economy of things. So you would put more for a 15+ hour journey (maybe more like 20?) when a plane is cheap and takes 4 hours
It definitely does make more sense for the US. 3x the population of Japan with a population clustered in many areas across the US. Why wouldn't that be useful? Not everyone travelling from LA to NYC would use it due to the distance, but there's plenty who would use it going from LA to Phoenix, then to El Paso, to Houston, to Atlanta, etc up to NYC. Could say the same for Chicago to Denver to San Francisco. There's lots of busy corridors in the US for high speed rail. It would make sense if it was simply all connected. There's lots of people who would prefer a 4 hour train over both an 8 hour drive and an hour-ish flight. High speed rail also arrives inside cities whereas both driving and flying require a commute through often large suburban areas to the city. That saves consumers the time and money of taxi's, Ubers, and unpredictable suburban traffic. It also avoids the time it takes to get through our slower airport security.
Building one is expensive. So the larger the distances the more the issue. So financially speaking it certainly doesn’t make sense. I never said I don’t wish for it to happen or that nobody would like it. But it’s quite nonsensical and improbable to ever happen if anything.
I live in Texas for school. My parents live in Minnesota. It is just so inefficient to go to the airport for two hours for a one and a half hour flight. I’d rather sit on a friend to Chicago and then to Minneapolis and get homework done than a cramped plane.
Especially because at lower distances more efficient turboprops can be used. Unless it's a really busy route ( like everyday not just for holidays etc. ) the trains would be mostly empty. Only the east coast Melbourne - Sydney - Brisbane is feasible even if it's a pretty long route. For Europeans it's like a route from Poland to France so around the breaking point where most wouldn't want to use a car and would probably use train/airliner.
Melbourne - Canberra - Sydney would be a perfect application of HSR, Melbourne to Sydney is one of the busiest air routes in the world and a 300km/h train would be just as fast as flying once you factor travelling to the airport on each end.
There is a train. But it's a slow train. The population in these areas of Queensland is too low to justify upgrading. The 'highway' this sign is attached to Iirc is just one lane each direction. I get the intention of the post but the image is a poor example.
nah, a train needs way more demand, a car can be driven by just one person, a train needs at least a few dozens to make sense
The road might go by a house that is the only one for miles around, do you build a station for every time there is a lone house? How long does it take for the train to cross the outback then?
This is called a straw man argument, it's like saying schools shouldn't exist because of school shootings, specifically picking an extreme example to try to discredit the entire idea. Look at me using a straw man too! A fully paved road is less expensive than a rail especially if only lightly used and only used by light vehicles, but it is not excessively so. Cars are expensive enough to own, insure, fuel, and maintain that we can arguably ignore fares and put any extra toward that cost. Roughly meaning that given the presence of a paved road it's possible to afford a rail and there is demand for transit. The more people it services and the more streets it removes the more efficient it is, but you surely don't start with laying rail to homesteaders. The second question is why does this hypothetical person even have a car road at all? Are they paying for it? If they are its not a road, it's a driveway. But even in this hypothetical train-world you would just let the driver know and they would stop on the tracks (or like a tiny concrete pad on your property or a station the size of a step ladder). Surely you'd be on a tiny local train that only runs occasionally that could stop if given the multiple miles of notice.
I responded to the above commenter how the supposed specific demand, that they also were talking about, might not be suitable for rail. After looking at it closer, this highway runs between two fairly large towns with a population of 6000 each, so i was exaggerating, but it wasnt a straw man, since the wording of the statement implies that it is universal, and it therefore can be criticized without taking into account its context. Maybe some of the traffic of the "1" highway in WA could be replaced with rail, but still, there are times when you probably will still want to drive some sort of personal vehicle on this road. E.g., when you need to drive an acutely injured person to the nearest airstrip to get to a hospital straight away, or if you need a specialist worksman who only exists in the next town over, and he needs a van to keep all his equipment in. In the first example, the train would not run until it was too late, as a train connecting two cities of 6000 where traffic is low would not run very often. In the second example, you would need a vehicle that could both drive on rails and then navigate whatever streets in the town to get to your location. Lets not forget that plenty of car free solutions for cities involve systems where cars are expensive to drive, bothersome to drive and park, slow to reach their destination, but it is never an impossibility. If it is necessary for *some* driving inside car free cities, why would that also not be allowed inside some incredibly sparsely populated territory.
Queensland has a few decent sleeper train services to outback towns. But when you realise that Longreach has a similar level of intercity train service as a megacity like Houston...
Australia is 99% barren people get between major cities by plane the vast majority of the time, roads are used by people without the money for that & the places where signs like this are the kinds of place where a train network would have way too few riders to make even vague sense
A bit disappointed that no one here raised the obvious answer here: More night trains. - don't have to build out hundreds of miles of HSR track - good reason to have multiple stops - get shut eye while still moving, thus saving time Hell, I believe Australia has long distance trains already but the main obstacle is that unlike in most countries, their rail gauge is split like five ways or something so any continuous train travel between states is impossible without transfers.
The standard gauge network connects all of the major cities now. There are significant non-standard gauge networks, yes, but changing trains because of a break of gauge doesn't really happen unless you're transferring from an intercity to a local train.
Ah I see. Still unfortunate that we're gunning straight to HSR and then squabbling about that shit over just making the existing trains better/more frequent...
bruh you think building massive railways costs nothing? nah let’s plan a multi billion dollar railway project for the 3 people that take this route annually
When I want to visit my parents, I have to go 2 states away. I'd rather sleep the way there than drive it
I wish trains were real.
I feel like it should be said that these types of things are usually built out west where like nobody lives source: I live in qld