USA Will Invest in High-Speed Train to Fight Climate Change::The USA Will Invest in High-Speed Train to Fight Climate Change - US President Joe Biden announced in a speech on December 9, 2023 that they are carrying out the first high-speed train projects in US history. These projects are across America
I’ll believe it when I see it …
The US is extremely far behind the rest of the developed world and even much of the developing world at this point. It will take decades to catch up, let alone become a leader.
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empires falling, history on repeat
Who cares how long it’s going to take, it still needs to be done. And the only way to do it is to start.
This grant amount is enough to build 39 miles of HSR based on California’s project costs. That’s 39 miles of rail for the entire nation. I’m not sure you can qualify this as a ‘start’. More than likely, this money will be completely wasted as it isn’t enough to do anything especially when you spread it out over 50 different states, which would equate to 4,000 feet of track, or 3/4 mile, per state.
Even then it’ll probably just be from one town to another very close by thus really only useable for a small subset of people. We need trans continental high speed railways not puddle jumpers
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These projects are part of an $10 billion investment
California’s HSR system come in at $80 billion for 520 miles, or $154 million per mile. Amtrak estimates that it would cost $500 million per mile to turn its Northeast Corridor route into a true high-speed system. source
For $10 billion, we are talking an additional 20 to 65 miles of high speed rail to be built. This is basically nothing…
The worst part is that it usually follows well known cycle of:
- project is estimated at $10b, government assigns $10b
- private companies spend it on consultants and analysis, little gets built
- government agrees to invest another $5b but requires cuts to the initial scope
- with reduced scope projected passengers numbers drop, project is less attractive
- repeat until cost is 1000% of the initial estimate and usefulness is 0. cancel project
Most of this is to fund studies and the rest is probably to cover overruns. Is it political for election season? Yes, but still a step in a positive direction. We’re not talking infrastructure week here.
There’s ~$34 million in there to study new routes. The $3 billion of this going to CAHSR will:
- Fund six electric trains for testing and use
- Fund design and construction of trainset facilities
- Fund design and construction of the Fresno station
- Fund final design and right-of-way acquisition for the Merced and the Bakersfield extensions
- Fund construction in the Central Valley
The HSR going through the Central Valley of Cali is INSANE. the bridge and strip of it is infrastructure that area and region has legitimately never seen. I keep telling all of my friends and family here in Cali that once you can travel from Stockton to Bakersfield in 45-1 hour it’ll completely change the region. The massive economic boom from just the construction alone will be huge, but then the effect after will be felt for generation.
And make the rest of the country subsidize it.
Gee, thanks.
We subsidize literally every other state. Fuck outta here.
California receives less than it contributes to the federal government. It subsidises other states.
Lol yeah screw the us government helping it’s citizens. Also, there has been funding for other cities to expand their public transportation.
Even better, I just hate that people are crapping all over making steps in a positive direction.
After decades of promises and zero high speed rails in use in the US, why believe it?
Because it’s wasting money.
And we seriously doubt the claimed positive impacts.
Yeah HSR is cutting edge and unproven technology that hasn’t been successfully implemented in Europe, Japan and China.
It’s squandering billions. End.
Drop in the bucket, I’m curious how much it would take to make most of the US/NA traversable by high speed rail
Depends on what you mean by most.
- most of the population is quite achievable. Send a little time at https://www.ushsr.com/
- most of the geography, trillions, and we couldn’t afford to keep it operating
I really think that confusing this is a common mistake. People claim high speed rail is impossible in the US because we’re big (and ignoring China, eu), but we have plenty of cities, and most of them are clustered. High speed rail is great for cities within a few hundred miles of each other. We got those, and that’s most of the population
It’s specious to take scenarios high speed rail doesn’t do well at and claiming that it means it can’t work. Let’s apply a little intelligence here’d and use the right technology for the right scenario
What’s after “trillions”?
Kids might say bajillions
Jacksonville FL to Mobile AL is not included even though old rail and established railway right of way is already in place. Its an incomplete plan out of the gate before even looking at the realities of the funding equating to near goddamn nothing. We need real Trillion dollar funding plans at this point for high speed rail on a national level, use the long range east west/north south interstate cooridors to build over/under to connect coasts and Mexico to Canada on 4 or 5 major lines each.
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Think if we instead of giving trillions of dollars to the Ukraine, spent it on our own country. If we spent all that money on this project alone it might actually be beneficial to our people
Until the Republicans shoot it down and instead use that budget to give their rich chums more tax breaks
Deregulation of high speed rail sounds pretty good ngl
Yeah, why should such a thing be regulated?
We all probably still remember the East Palestine accident, but all that turned alright in the end didn’t it?
It’s a joke.
You know, because it’s a god awful idea.
No.
United States will never be able to achieve something like this because tiny ass governments of little weird counties all across the country will complain about having tracks run through their stupid shit hole
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Yet at the same time they don’t want a highway trampling through their neighborhoods. If one gets too close it becomes a “pack up! Time to leave this place for the minorities!” type scenario.
Run the tracks through your backyard then.
I don’t have a backyard because I’m not a pussy
Barack Obama tried to do the same thing: https://time.com/3100248/high-speed-rail-barack-obama/
While I would love for this to be a reality, I just don’t see it actually happening.
The way the US shows more progress is if the Democrats can stay in power for a long enough period of time. But the last time Dems had that kind of power was as far back as 2008. It makes you wonder if the only way Democrats can ever get into power is when a recession hits.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but with climate change in front of us, we actually don’t have time.
I’m incredibly nihilistic right now.
Climate change doesn’t matter when it’s lawyers and economists in charge, there’s money to be made… unfortunately.
Eh, it was predicted we would die because the population growth was exceeding our ability to farm food, but then out of necessity the industrial revolution happened.
I think we are predicting we will die but out of necessity we will make the necessary changes to save ourselves just in time. Not just stopping emissions (this will only help slow the worsening, since we might be past the point of no return by the time we do this), but also carbon capture to remove the CO2, while simultaneously seeding extra clouds with something like the salt water canons running on cargo ships, and other such tech to reflect the sun while we get to work on CO2 capture.
The CO2 will have to be sequestered back in the ground, so a method will have to be made to liquify and pump it back in, but it’s theoretically possible.
We’re not undoing the atmospheric carbon or methane, and sequestration won’t stop the climate change done that will cause issues for 10s of thousands of years. That being said we will figure out survival and a path forward to not make it worse.
The CO2 will have to be sequestered back in the ground, so a method will have to be made to liquify and pump it back in, but it’s theoretically possible.
Not theoretical, they’re doing this as proof of concept at cement plants in Norway, they’re planning on pumping it into an aquifer under the artic ocean
Cool. It’s just like, more than 20 years late, but cool
The 2000 election was such a massive turning point for the US. So many branching consequences, but imagine if we had had an environmentalist in the White House instead of Mr. Buy and Drill Our Way Out of This? At the time of 9/11 I believe it was Tom Daschle of SD on record calling for a Green Manhattan Project which obviously fell on deaf ears quite quickly as the bombs started raining down on Baghdad. Sure there’d still be cries for vengeance, but I also think if POTUS had been saying at the time ‘we win this war by getting ourselves off foreign energy’ it just might have been persuasive enough to embark on some major developments.
I keep saying that about almost everything. But yeah, “Oh cool we’re where we should have been!”
Who wants trains when you have brown people to bomb?
It’s like a hundred years late. The US was built with
inventedtrains, we should have the best train network in the world.In fact we did until we also invented cars and fucked the world up by favoring highways and essentially single-person metal boxes.
i want this to be real. I’ve loved trains since i was a toddler. and as an adult Trains are some thicc power chungus
unfortunately the only trains left are either subways or commercial rails, yes there is Some passenger trains. But can you get to anywhere in americs on one? Not today, Not the infrastructure that will take decades to build and Not the follow up on promises made promises. kept…coughthebigdigbostoncough
(F40PH gang gang) back in my day we memed about objects, zoomers be all meta n shit. get out of my my head charles!
Amtrak is still a thing for passenger trains. It’s just that it’s slower than flying and just as expensive.
Flew my wife to L.A. for her birthday, easy peasy. Couple of hours by plane.
Amtrak?
Fastest is 26 hours and 13 minutes for $230 coach tickets. Private room for $580.
Amtrak is still a thing for passenger trains. It’s just that it’s slower than flying and just as expensive.
This is the core reason passenger rail has not become dominant in the US. The country is so physically large that planes do passenger rail’s job, but faster and at the same price point.
Instead, rail in the US is almost entirely bulk cargo as that makes a ton of sense. Cargo trains are cheaper than trucks/aircraft and the slower speed can be easily planned for.
Acela is useful. We have one intercity rail line that is useful, has high ridership, is profitable, people choose to use, arguably faster than driving or flying, demand far outstrips supply. also the fastest but it’s not really fast enough to be called “high speed”
It’s not just slower than flying, it’s slower than driving in most cases.
I just punched in a random 7 hour drive in the US. Amtrak would take 16 hours and cost 3x as much as one would spend in gas to take oneself and their SO on a trip. This isn’t even accounting for costs and time associated with getting to/from the station; whereas the car is door-to-door, faster, and cheaper.
My parents once bought a private room on Amtrak. When they were shown to it, they literally thought it was a closet to store their bags not their room.
and to boot, how many tracks/rails would she have had to cross?
i fly frontier/breeze on $50 and can get to florida and Rhode island in 3hrs.
I would rather take the 12-24train. to see the sights , to be able to walk about, a little extra room depending on your budget.
and then harry potter was like “i heard u liked trains m8”
me: yeah? and?
potter: platform 9¾ breh
🤤
Will it though?
What a weak article. It’s barely three paragraphs and contains basically no details. Here is the press release from the Dept of Transportation.
Thank you, thats a lot more exciting to see!
It’ll take the US decades to get high-speed rail up and running, especially with its culture of litigation, property rights, regulatory capture and politicised overregulation of threats to incumbents, not to mention Citizens United and the ability of the aforementioned incumbents to buy laws and regulations. By then, climate change will have won.
Oh good! I was hoping for some defeatism in the face of a relatively positive bit of news.
You’ve got to love internet negativity. Nothing can ever be good.
There are plenty of issues to deal with, but this is a huge improvement over the existing status-quo. Can we be happy that the Biden Administration has done something to move things in the right direction on this issue?
I’m betting this money will just go to bribe some political donors. Take note that the amount of investment here is less than what was outlayed to increase the number of EV chargers in the US (which hasn’t happened) for something that is orders of magnitude more expensive and complicated than installing battery chargers. California is working on a 171-mile stretch of HSR, and the estimated cost is projected to be around $35 billion in a state with tons of open, undeveloped land. Imagine the cost of doing this along the densely populated eastern seaboard. $8 billion in grants is a joke.
I wish them all the best! May this decision carry through administrations and the USA embrace fast, public transport once again.
At this point, Trump will probably win in '24 and immediately kill off the project
Getting more than a little annoyed by the political tennis, back and forth and nothing actually getting done because everything that is done gets undone as soon as the other party takes back control
Isn’t Trump in danger of being taken off the ballot due to something about being involved in a treacherous act? IIRC it was something about an amendment to the constitution introduced after the civil war to stop Southern soldiers from participating in politics.
Yes, and if it actually gets used to prevent him from running I will be stunned.
One judge already ruled that he did, indeed, incite insurrection, but then weaseled out by saying something to the effect of “it doesn’t specify presidents in the amendment” in their ruling so they did absolutely nothing about it.
Hope springs eternal and all, but he seems immune to consequences. Again, hoping that changes, but I’m not holding my breath.
Will he cancel it though? Or will “Trump Trains” become a thing?
Wow. I’m so underwhelmed.
Wildly misleading title, USA has not made any concrete plans for the investment, and has a history of lying about everything.
Hopefully they don’t pick internal systems that lock the train if you take it to a 3rd party repair business😆
as soon as the Republicans are elected with a full house they can shut this down and throw away all of the money that was put into it
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why did they do it to the California high speed rail
Wut
