Why? Though in the US I believe freight typically has RoW priority over passenger fleets, in practice on that route I've only seen (/heard) freight at night.
I have seen rail deliveries during the day in Redwood city to the port but I don't think that spur connects to that line...? It is shocking that the rail runs right down residential streets with NO separation to keep kids from being run over.
I believe freight typically has RoW priority over passenger fleets
That's a big part of it.
The other part is that UP is making electrification difficult and more expensive. UP wants to run double stack cars but the overhead wire would eat into the vertical clearance. I believe there were issues raised with horizontal clearance too.
"Permanently" what? the harbor will be cleared, probably sooner than later, and there will be a new bridge/tunnel built in a few years. Like that's not permanent.
I mean, in that case the original point doesn't quite make any sense. The article is very clearly discussing the larger airports associated with commercial aviation.
Canada is already a federal state with sub national entities that don’t have all the rights of the federal government. Pretty much any state that has a federal system already deals with this.,
The implicit claim being made in this sarcastic comment is that it's not possible for a law to be detrimental to one company while unfairly favoring another.
Which, of course, is obviously false when you think about it.
Which major tech companies would it be good for while being bad for Apple? Keeping in mind that the owner of a device is also allowed to repair without certification.
The OP said "a giant handout to the industry". If you're trying to make a point that excludes all the major players in the tech industry then by all means go ahead but it isn't the conversation you joined.
Well, it is in distress because of their extreme fetish for austerity over a growing economy that is enabling the rise of the far right and Wagenknecht's socially conservative GDR vanity project.
what extreme fetish for austerity? Compared to what other countries?
The rise of the fascists, left an right, is due to refugees and inflation - and Trump style conspiracy theroies. And vaccs. But mainly refugees. Just talk to some AfD voters.
Acela isn't HSR, and Metroliner which came before had travel times from NYC to DC as low as 2.5 hours. Acela does the same trip in 3.5 hours. Metroliner lowered trip times primarily through faster acceleration.
I just rode it last week, and it actually took 3 hours, not 3.5.
Most of the NEC corridor from DC to NYC has a speed limit of 125mph; from NYC to New Haven, it's generally 70mph (!), from New Haven thence to about Kingston generally 90mph, and from there to Boston it's mostly 150mph. Given the density of the corridor, Amtrak should be trying for 150-220mph speed limits, but even 125mph is generally agreed upon to be the lowest end of HSR.
A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections before large stations to allow trains to go faster through them. You can probably cut around 10 minutes out of the entire length with an investment of less than $100 million just by doing that.
> “Given the density of the corridor, Amtrak should be trying for 150-220mph speed limits, but even 125mph is generally agreed upon to be the lowest end of HSR.”
In the UK and Europe, 125mph (~200 km/h) is considered the top speed limit of conventional rail. Legally, operating speeds beyond that require full in-cab signalling, positive train control, upgraded safety and structural requirements, and whatever else is required for HSR. Further, all the trains operating on a section of line need to be upgraded to those standards if any of them are to run at speeds > 125mph.
The UK does have some sections of conventional line that are capable of > 125 mph running, and even have done so in the past, but this is no longer allowed.
I’m not sure if the US has similar rules, but it wouldn’t surprise me if so!
> ”A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections…”
Yes, generally speaking, fixing the low-speed bottlenecks will typically yield the biggest benefits for the cost in terms of overall journey time.
No, it's like writing "Mexico and America". If you're going to add geographic qualifiers like "North", the equivalent would be more like "UK and West Europe".
Without such qualifiers, the meaning is clearly "continental Europe", which is a meaningful distinction when it comes to the rail, because they have two almost entirely disjoint rail systems.
Ok, yes, technically the European rail system does actually physically connect to the UK main lines at a few places on HS1 between London and the tunnel at Dover, but no public train uses such connections. Functionally, European and UK rail are essentially entirely separate in terms of operation, regulation and technology. Whereas on the Continent, trains regularly cross between countries and the whole system is much more-but far from entirely -integrated, politically and physically (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Rail_Traffic_Manageme...).
Uk does actually follow EU regulations and standards because all the technology is designed and manufactured in the EU. HS2 is being built to an EU standard loading gauge with EU standard electronic signalling, likewise crossrail. When routes are upgraded to electronic signalling they are upgraded to an EU standard signalling technology, likewise with electrification. Loading gauge is typically smaller but when new bridges are built they will try to aim for the largest EU standard loading gauge that’s practical. The reason why you can’t easily run a night train from Edinburgh to Paris is not technological it’s because the customs and border requirements necessitate an expensive building like an airport to house them. It’s not true that the EU rail system is homogeneous either, e.g Belgium, Germany and France all have electrified lines running at different voltages which can require bi or tri mode trains for through running.
> Whereas on the Continent, trains regularly cross between countries and the whole system is much more-but far from entirely -integrated, politically and physically
That's not true. There are some local connections and integrations, but outside of high speed rail which is generally built using the same standard, each country has their own load gauge, electrification standard, signalling system, etc. Cross-border trains are usually special traninsets built to multiple standards to be compatible.
There is progress on more integration and standartisation, and pretty much all new lines are built to the same standards, but the vast majority of rail is existing.
I read that post, and I have been working slowly on a set of jupyter notebooks, with ipyleaflet (mapping) integration to make building train maps (with max speeds) easier. Looking for colaborators
Could cut it probably but this isn't a private company we are talking about here. The regulations and grifting would be massive, especially in New York which is quite like California with their wastefulness: half to the garbage can, half to their pockets, maybe a cent or two for the actual rails.
So maybe it'd be a few billion at least. Not to say they shouldn't try. But I expect it'll be over budget and behind schedule, it would never happen like Brightline where they broke ground ASAP and just kept building until it was done.
I don't share your pessimism, and that's mostly because I've followed a lot more of the research into why US infrastructure costs are unreasonably high. To put it simply, excessive costs tends to come from a combination of overdesign (in particular the need to add lots of goodies to buy off stakeholders who can otherwise arrest the project), extra overhead in design costs, extra overhead in the way contracts are let, and incompetent management of contractors. But this is the sort of project that doesn't have the design stages to let that scope creep come in--it is pretty much "order off-the-shelf part number 42341 instead of 23421, then do routine maintenance tasks to replace old parts with new ones".
Acela tops out at 150-160 mph (240 km/h-260 km/h) which is is above the 200 km/h bar for it to be considered HSR. Unfortunately, the route it runs on has several speed limits below even 100 km/h due to bridges and tunnels beyond the design life, so it's hard to call it HSR when it can't actually hit those advertised speeds.
Peak speed is how HSRs are defined, and Brightline is 200km/h, which is really mediocre for technology past the 80s, this is the speed at high most upgraded lines run in France.
Acela is indeed fast for a short stretch. But the average speed is terrible, so it's only "HSR" on a technicality. It could be serious HSR if they had control and/or ownership of the entire route and made it as good as that short section where they can hit that peak speed.
Acela is like a Formula 1 car that gets to do one quick lap on a nice racetrack, then has to take another course through bumper-to-bumper traffic for the rest of the race.
You’re overstating it. The rest of the route is, except for a couple of areas around stations, a 125 limit, which is still basically double what Amtrak averages anywhere else.
I assume they always kept it shitty as to not cannibalize VS Code, which does get a lot of use (obviously it's very popular). If you ever used it you'd see that it doesn't feel like normal Windows VS, and it doesn't really feel like a good native Mac app either.
> I assume they always kept it shitty as to not cannibalize VS Code,
What a strange take. Why wouldn't they rather not create it in the first place if they were so worried about cannibalizing their free product by ... another free product?
I agree it is strange take but unfortunately when you view everything through some sort of "big corp conspiracy" lense you end up with ideas like this. It's super common on hacker news. Tiresome but ever present.
The most logical explanation would be something like "they released this product because they were making a huge effort to get C# to be a truly cross platform language but the mac adoption remained low so they decided to retire this product and focus more on VS code which has massive adoption on mac"
But that would be too aligned with most developers priorities so it is not even on the radar for most people.
This is because it wasn't originally a visual studio product. This is just the name they gave Xamarin Studio after the company was acquired by Microsoft.
What? Isn't Visual Studio a paid product (aside from the Community edition)? VS Code is free, so if anything, they would keep VS Code as the shitty product.
