That whole project is a testament to American stupidity. Let’s all get into cars that drive themselves on a 3 mi underground track. It’s like Elon shits ideas from a toddler.

Passengers is the term you mean, not commuters. I read the first sentence and thought you were going to suggest something that is only open to people coming from and going to work.

But yes, we need passenger rail that’s exclusively passenger rail.

Tbh they don’t even prioritize the freight, that went away with psr

Trams for short distance, metro for medium, trains for long and high-speed for very long.

It’s trains all the way down.

maglev is the closest we can get to a portal network.

Reverse the polarity

Don’t worry, the cost inflation of HS2 could easily be achieved on any maglev project too.

Most industry nations around the world are running high speed trains by now. They’re doing petty fine I’d say. China threw a ton of money into German maglev tech and there isn’t really much to see still. There’s a reason most countries gave up on it.

“It seems like this experimental tech is going to be more reliable than the proven thing that’s existed since the 19th century.”

You sure about that, hoss?

In the end the maintenance cost for maglev vs bullet trains are about the same. Bullet trains focus more on mechanical maintenance of the track and wheels. While the maintenance of maglev is typically more technical, it requires constant recalibration of the electronics and constant monitoring for alignment.

Maglev is definitely more expensive to build and probably to run, but it seems like it’d be far more reliable? And also a much smoother experience for those on-board?

Traditional steel on rail is actually more reliable in practice. Theoretically the basic mechanics of maglev are more reliable, but in practice they tend to suffer from longer delays when they do fail. This is mostly because the repairs/maintenance for traditional rail can be done by just about anyone, where maglevs tend to be locked in by a single vendor contract.

Maglev has much greater theoretical speed limits than typical contact tracks, as, well, we basically remove the friction between the wheel and the track?

They are theoretically faster, but in practice the speed of trains are most often governed not by the limitations of the trains themselves, but instead are limited by the surrounding infrastructure and terrain.

The cruising speed of railed bullet trains are around 200mph, while the cruising speeds of maglev is around 265mph. Maglevs have gone significantly faster around 375mph, but thats not really a realistic expectation for daily operations.

Imo both are extremely cool, but traditional rail is just a lot more practical for a plethora of reasons. The most important being that the installation and operational cost are just a lot more realistic than maglev. There’s a reason there’s only a total of 37 miles of maglev in operation today compared to over 30k miles of high-speed rail.

Built to spec does do a lot of heavy lifting. American distances are larger than European distances. China has the advantage of a dictatorship which can be decisive.

But the Interstate system was expensive and had a crazy spec and was built and continues to be maintained at an extremely high cost.

Last I heard, maglev is mostly vaporware. Just build good tracks.

That’s because English. I’ve had very nice journeys where I’ve chatted with perfect strangers on Spanish trains, and to a lesser extent in other countries in Europe. You do want to understand the unspoken codes that signal “let’s talk” or “leave me the fuck alone”. Same happens in bars, for example. But yeah, my experiences in trains in Spain have been generally great, with the odd near horror story.

Yes, and it’s important to identify why that happens and how it functions, not satisfy ourselves with the certainty that it is bad, or unjust, or unreasonable; which many of these posts end up doing.

The US is the way it is because that is what settler-colonialism and capitalism require to continue. Even when there were periods of “reform,” such as the labour and state policies of the welfare liberal era in the 1930s-40s (which is how suburbanism and car dependency came about), or the civil rights movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century (which is how neoliberalism and the liberal appropriation of social justice was achieved), victories in reform are inevitably eroded by these fundamental imperatives.

you must have a job or you will die in the street

And here’s the punchline: no more jobs!

It’s the same everywhere. Not just American thing.

Honestly, things would be indeed way better if guys who are insecure of their dicks just got penis enhancement and sucked themselves off. The world would be much better off not having to deal with cars running over kids or people road-raging.

You calling me small, boy?! /s

Trains just don’t have the capacity for a 9/11

Not to bring down buildings, but in terms of terrorism they sure do.

Any modern 9/11 attempt will be made by cargo jet. So protection against aircraft bringing down buildings is provided by the US airforce, not the TSA.

A similar number of people would be injured/die from a plane explosion as a train explosion.

Your arguments against no security checks apply equally to trains and planes (and busses).

Username fits perfectly.

In fact, that is the norm.

Musk has openly admitted he propped Hyperloop for the sole purpose of stopping California to build a high speed train. He never intended to deliver anything.

And Elon has not produced a single workable anything, but sucked up billions in subsidies.

Hyperloop is incredibly stupid on the face of it for so many reasons, the two largest of which IMO actually being that it would be incredibly unsafe as escape would be impossible in case of an incident and that it’s literally physically impossible, as the material tolerances required are incompatible with the temperature shifts that happen everywhere on account of weather and seasons.

Yeahhh but chicago is several large cities away from new york so thats why im saying they would need a stop for each of them. You can of course have commuter trains that skip some of those and others that serve the less used ones of course, and shuttles as well but you also have to consider that chicago and ny are 1100kms away from each other in a straight line while tokyo and kyoto are 370kms from each other in a straight line for example and those are 2 hours by train(and i looked from the train stations which are not in the center of the city tho you could argue they are somewhat but these metropolitan areas are so large that they have multiple city centers) so that means if you just multiply it up you would get that the chicago-ny line would be a six hour journey. This is, of course, probably not correct. Im just trying to show how you cant just draw a straight line between two places and say “Train!”. Tho of course you also have to calculate with the fact that the us is much richer than both china and japan but once again that just complicates things again.

China seems to have figured it out in their mountainous regions. Some of the lines are 90% tunnel+raised rails. And as an American we should talk about how China is roughly the same size as America. The excuse well has run dry.

From a network perspective it wouldn’t make sense to build a Chicago - New York straight line with 0 stops… You’ld better link up Chicago to Cleveland, probably even do the Detroit detour and continue that in an expensive Appalachian tunnel to Washington DC. Then in a separate project build a high speed rail connecting the east coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington…

Also, if there’s a problem with a train, the whole rail goes down. If there’s a problem with an airplane, the other planes have a whole lot of sky they can still use.

That’s not how rail works.

There absolutely are passing places where a train can hop onto the left track and then back again, or just a long stretch of an extra track going parallel to the main route where either the faulty train can sit and wait for repairs, or the working trains can jump around the faulty one.

Source: living in a country that actually has a working passenger railway system.

Aviation is grounded way more often than rail corridors are blocked. You’d know if you’d ever had lived in a place with developed infrastructure.

Also, yes, HSR built on dedicated high speed infrastructure, like the TGV or Shinkansen, does run most of the time close to max speed.

you’d still have to board a plane unfortunately. Also there are flights from Chicago to Naples. 🤷

They walked right into it, huh?

I’ve had NY pizza and bagels, both are vastly overrated.

we have animal abuse at home

Sounds like a tasty dish. Dough with a tasty filling.

More expensive and slower?

I can buy not letting you have much spontaneity if your country/area doesn’t have an extensive network.

But trains are way cheaper than cars, and on almost every case, faster.

I commute to work by taking the train from one city to another, and then I take the metro to get to the office. I pay 10€/mo for this. It still takes me the same time it would take by car, without accounting for parking and taking the car out of the garage and any traffic at all.

I can also take high speed rail to go on vacation to almost anywhere, even in other countries. But just staying within my country, I can pay ~30€ to get to somewhere ~600km away, in just 3h.

I can also get a 30€/mo card, which allows me to take almost any train in the whole country during that month, with the only exception of most high speed lines.

I’m very much pro-train, but these are truths.