> Even with the best available rail technology, trips between them would take over 12 hours by rail.
New York-San Francisco (for example) in 12 hours by train could be great: leave at 7pm, eat dinner, get a full night's sleep, wake up the next morning and you're there.
The night on the train shouldn't cost more than an extra night in a hotel room would've cost, and you've gone city center to city center and avoided the nightmare of air travel.
So you're spending a bunch of money to build a route - and how many stops do you have in between dragging down that average speed? - that does half of what you can do in air, at probably not a ton more comfort level at twice+ the length (I've not seen a lot of inexpensive long train trips in the US or Asia that beat domestic coach (let alone domestic first) by enough for me to want to put up with it for two or more times the amount of time), and at the end of the day you haven't solved SEA-NYC, LAX-NYC, etc, which are all already served in the status quo.
As a historical timing thing, most of the US leapfrogged the need for urban density and big train networks with air travel and automobiles, and neither of them are expensive enough relative to national wealth now to make it easy to justify investing more in alternatives currently. Especially with self-driving electric cars and alternative energy sources potentially around the corner to plow through the biggest pain points we've encountered around our car-centric urban design so far.
"how many stops do you have in between dragging down that average speed?"
It's amazing that other countries haven't solved this problem by inventing things like express trains.
Oh wait, they have. It's the literally same technology as a skip list.
"that does half of what you can do in air, at probably not a ton more comfort level at twice+ the length (I've not seen a lot of inexpensive long train trips in the US or Asia that beat domestic coach (let alone domestic first) by enough for me to want to put up with it for two or more times the amount of time), and at the end of the day you haven't solved SEA-NYC, LAX-NYC, etc, which are all already served in the status quo."
And yet, most people aren't traveling cost-to-coast. We don't need to solve SEA-NYC with trains. Solving SEA-LAX or NYC-ATL would be more than good enough.
Otherwise, your comment is completely counterfactual. I just spent a year in Japan. Trains there are cost-competitive with air travel, far better in terms of time and convenience, and vastly more comfortable. The only train segments that are "twice the length" of driving or flying are the segments that don't exist (i.e. you have to take a circuitous route, because the direct line isn't there). No rational person in Japan prefers to fly or drive if they can take a train. Even the local lines are preferable for trips under 4-5 hours.
And Japan is the size of the US west coast, with similar population distribution (a few big cities, with lots of smaller, rural towns between). There's no reason we can't have the same systems in America. We just don't, because we don't invest, and Americans insist on arguing about things they don't understand, based on little more than opinion and ideology.
"Osaka is just 300 miles from Tokyo. You can't even get from SFO to Los Angeles in 300 miles. Of course trains work in Japan."
Come on. You're a smart person. You can do better math than this.
San Francisco to LA: 383 miles. Seattle to Portland: 200 miles. Portland to San Francisco: 636 miles.
That extra 80 miles means it'll clearly never work, I guess. Because obviously, Japanese people would never ride the most heavily used shinkansen line in Japan if it took thirty minutes longer.
(Not incidentally: Tokyo to Kagoshima - 900 miles. Takes 7 hours by train. Costs less than $280. I've done it. Entirely pleasant, and time competitive with airlines, if you include the time you spend waiting, going through security, and so on. Which you must.)
Most of the largest cities in Japan are within ~340 miles of Tokyo. Neither Seattle nor Portland are in our top 10. The point I am making here is pretty clear. HSR makes sense as a national investment for Japan. The people of Houston, Atlanta, Miami, and Phoenix hardly benefit at all from coastal HSR --- which is already happening anyways.
I'm not arguing against west coastal HSR. PDX-SEA makes a lot of sense, if you can get Oregon and Washington to agree on how to fund it, as does SFO-LAX. But find the nearest city to SFO not directly on the west coast that's in the top 10 by population, and see whether HSR makes sense compared to commercial air. Chances are: no.
"Most of the largest cities in Japan are within ~340 miles of Tokyo. Neither Seattle nor Portland are in our top 10. The point I am making here is pretty clear. HSR makes sense as a national investment for Japan."
You keep repeating this "top ten cities" thing, as if it's important. But the only question that matters is: do enough people/things travel between X and Y to justify investment in a rail system at cost $Z? That's an actual debate we can have. Moreover, regardless of what you think of Seattle and Portland, if you don't count SF and Los Angeles (again, 380 miles) as important American cities, I don't know what to say to you.
"The people of Houston, Atlanta, Miami, and Phoenix hardly benefit at all from coastal HSR --- which is already happening anyways."
Atlanta to Miami: 662 miles. Houston to Dallas: 239 miles. Dallas to Denver: 800 miles. There are many, many regional connections in the US that make economic sense for HSR. Not just coastal lines.
But no, it's not already happening. We have a few projects that look increasingly likely to die. Because literally every time the subject comes up, naysayers are there to argue that the USA is just fundamentally exceptional to every similar place where HSR is working well.
They say that because it is. Our geography is different, and our transportation market evolved around that geography. In the US, people fly Southwest instead of buying Eurail passes.
"They say that because it is. Our geography is different"
Well, as long as you're being specific...
That comment says nothing new. It repeats the same stuff you've already said across this thread, and provides no evidence to back up the assertions. It does get the basic facts wrong, though: the vast majority of traffic on the "Tokyo to Kyoto" line goes between Tokyo and Osaka. Those cities are big (~9 million people each; Nagoya and Kyoto are comparatively small at ~2 million people each), but they're still only ~14% of Japan's population (17% if you include Kyoto and Nagoya).
Again: the only thing that matters is the number of people traveling between the points on the line. We know these things, and it's clear where high-speed rail would work. We don't need to have nebulous debates about "economic value". And arguing that "people don't buy Eurail passes" is absurd on its face. They certainly would, if Eurail actually existed.
> if you can get Oregon and Washington to agree on how to fund it
Good luck.
We (WA) just had our 3rd special session and although we finally passed our $43bn state budget, our (admittedly smaller) capital budget is still up in the air because of water rights issues.
OR doesn't look much better right now—it's 8 days until sine die and it appears there's a chance they'll run into special sessions, too.
WA just pumped a massive amount of money ($8bn) into K-12 education because of the McCleary decision, and there's not much other money to go around. The Dems are wary about pitching an actual state income tax (this year they tried pitching a cap gains tax as an "excise tax" :-) because it's constantly been rejected by both the voters and state supreme court. The GOP just had to push a state-wide property tax and had to agree to a paid family leave act as part of budget negotiations, so I doubt they'll be down for any new taxes. Plus, ST3 was recently approved which jacks up taxes in the RTA zone, which includes big city centers like Seattle and Tacoma.
Long story short, I really, really doubt there will be any big infrastructure pushes in the near future. There's just not much money and outside of Seattle property it's not politically viable to run on "more taxes!" especially when the east side of the state will go berserk if they're forced to pay for more west side infrastructure.
NYC to SFO in 12 hours is an average speed of 215mph, assuming the most direct route possible.
Practically you would require a top speed of ~250mph, and current current generation of conventional rail trains max out at about 190-210mph. But they could easily do NYC to SFO in 13-14 hours.
The Shanghai Maglev Train reaches a top speed of 268mph (during it's short 7min trip to the airport), so it could do the trip in less than 12 hours. But I'm not sure it's theoretically practical over distances that long.
That's a hell of a lot of infrastructure just to link two end-points at opposite ends of the continent. Any train going that route is not going to be an express, and more stops significantly affect average speed.
Getting downvoted for bringing up completely reasonable points?
And who is gonna pay for this magical high speed railroad that never breaks down and is never delayed?
High speed rail in California is costing around $90 million per mile. A perfectly straight line from NYC-SF is 2,572 miles. That's nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars. All to allow costal elites to increase their travel time? Sure.
It doesn't exist now. That doesn't mean it couldn't be built; the article was lamenting America's loss of vision and technological leadership, and I was replying to your comment that implied that 12 hours between major cities would be too slow, which in the case of coast-to-coast I disagree with.
doing some napkin math (and assuming you can lay track with a run length about equal to doing this by car) you'd need a train averaging 250mph. Current top average speeds for wheeled trains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV) are in the 170mph range.
Does that six hours include travel to the airport, check-in, security clearance, boarding, deplaning, baggage collection, and travel from the destination airport back into the city?
If you factor in all this extra stuff, it looks more like 9-10 hours.
You have most of that with a train too, other than the security clearance (for now). But assuming high-speed train travel became something more than the sideshow operation that is Amtrak today, security screening of passengers would very likely be implemented.
No you don't. As someone who lives in a country with functioning high speed rail and who uses it regularly, let me tell you how it works here:
You go to the train station, which is in the city centre. You use a subway, tram or bicycle to get there. You walk in, go to your platform and enter the train. You place your luggage in the luggage rack and take your seat. When the train arrives at your destination or interchange point, you grab your stuff and leave. Sometime in between, staff will walk the train and check your ticket.
No long transit to/from the station. No check-in, no security screening, no baggage drop-off/pickup. It's a train, not rocket science.
The Financial Times largely avoids editorializing its news sections, and employs real journalists (maybe because executives need accurate information and are willing and able to pay for it).
Notice how even big stories often appear significantly later on the FT website compared to other outlets, but when they do appear they've generally got the facts straight.
Their subscription fees are substantial, but if we don't want everything reduced to ad-based sensationalism we're going to need to pay actual money.
> As far as I can tell, conservative viewpoint on climate change is varied, from 'the effects of man made climate change will be mild and not catastrophic' to 'golabal warming is caused by increased solar activity'
Unfortunately, that range lies outside what mainstream climate science has been telling us for decades.
Looking at the statistics, I'm not sure that wind turbines are any worse than man-made structures generally (or other human-caused threats, including other types of power plants).
Journals are already under fire for privatizing publicly-funded research. They justify their existence by claiming to hold the research they publish to the highest standard, primarily through the peer-review process.
That this journal has now repeatedly failed in the most basic standard of quality control leaves it with zero credibility, and it therefore should immediately be shut down.
> That this journal has now repeatedly failed in the most basic standard of quality control leaves it with zero credibility, and it therefore should immediately be shut down.
Whatever your thoughts on journals, I don't think that follows logically.
It's hard to have an idea that's completely unique. It actually makes me feel better if there's a precedent, because that's an indication that the idea makes some sense. It's possible that I encountered the MF hypothesis previously and forgot, but it entered into my thinking somehow. I'm really cautious about claiming to have a unique idea without having verified it.
The idea of how MF would work presented in the article sounds really implausible.
My idea of how MF would work is something like this:
1. You get a lot of weird chemistry happening, say, in pools of water. This chemistry starts creating large organic molecules that are like sludge building up in the pools. These molecules are dead, but they are rich in energy and perhaps interesting building blocks. Maybe they are made of amino acids.
2. Now you have this unbelievably rich energy source, and at some point there start appearing chemical chain reactions that start "eating" the sludge.
3. Life originates from these chemical chain reactions.
In that article, their version of MF seems to require high energy. Mine happens under gentle conditions.
@jonathansizz Thanks for posting. I have a technical background but very little education in chemistry or biology. Can you or anyone else here recommend some resources for learning the basics of biochemistry and evolutionary biology?
A core problem is that it's much easier to break things than to build or maintain things, so huge amounts of work can be eliminated very easily, whether through neglect or design.
It makes me sad when I think of the sacrifices made by previous generations for the greater good, to consider that in our time we're happy to gamble with the future just to make things more comfortable for us in the present.
In the 1940s, millions of people made the ultimate sacrifice to defeat tyranny, then in the 60s huge amounts were invested into technology, transforming society, but we can't even agree on a carbon tax to start to pay for the mess we're making, never mind trying to come up with ways to reverse the damage.
A green economy should be our generation's Moon landing. Massive investment in basic research and into renewables, energy storage and transport, and improved materials could again transform the world, and benefit all of us, but I guess if you can't physically see your enemy then there's just not enough urgency.
But please continue by reading more rigorous work on evolution, or you run the risk of being badly misinformed. I suggest, at a minimum, a decent textbook. Here I'd recommend Douglas Futuyma's Evolution.
Follow this up with some key works in the field, such as Gould's early critique of naive adaptationism,
The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.
Also consider different perspectives such as the those described in following books, which take, respectively, drift- and mutation-first approaches to evolution:
The Origins of Genome Architecture, M Lynch; and
Mutation-Driven Evolution, M Nei.
Above all, know that evolution is far more complex, subtle (and interesting) than The Selfish Gene would have you believe.
Obsolete stuff. I groaned as I examined this - Gould, really? This is old noise, that I resented raising mere dust in University decades ago. Thankfully a lot of these old distractrations have been swept aside, since. Do read up on the Gould controversies before citing him. If you knew of them already, it would have been kinder to others to note them.
It greatly oversimplifies a complex process, ignoring modern developments in the field of evolutionary biology (including the entirety of population genetics), and makes many unfounded assumptions.
The Spandrels paper I referenced above explains in detail, and is a good starting point:
New York-San Francisco (for example) in 12 hours by train could be great: leave at 7pm, eat dinner, get a full night's sleep, wake up the next morning and you're there.
The night on the train shouldn't cost more than an extra night in a hotel room would've cost, and you've gone city center to city center and avoided the nightmare of air travel.
Sign me up.