High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

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High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by madd0ct0r »

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/04 ... il/390576/
The champion of the bill, Will Metcalf, has given several reasons for opposing the plan. But one of his statements makes clear that he just doesn't see trains as a viable transportation alternative. Via the Star-Telegram:

"We need more roads for citizens to travel to ease our existing roadways,” Metcalf said. "We do not need a high-speed railway in Texas that will only benefit a few, while at the same time disturbing thousands of citizens within its path.”
Metcalf isn't alone in this sentiment. Another elected official, Ben Lehman of Grimes County, has questioned whether the train will attract enough riders. He's also been quoted as saying that the 18 million people who drive between Houston and Dallas each year have "gone through this decision-making process" and concluded "it's more feasible to drive."

Exactly how Lehman knows how drivers might react to a high-speed rail option that does not yet exist was not reported.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Mr Bean »

Well when the option is driving or walking I can see how many people would look long and hard at walking but decide instead to take the driving option.

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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Titan Uranus »

He is not really all that wrong. I would love it if more people liked to use high-speed rail in the USA, but right now basically no one does, and I strongly doubt that anyone will use anything like it unless something like the hyperloop comes online. I do not say that because the Hyperloop concept is fast, but because it would allow you to take your car with you.

High speed rail is only truly useful for intercity travel, and in a society where nearly everyone has a car the nearby intercity travel market is kinda saturated, especially when almost all of the nearby citys are completely designed for cars. The closest big city who's downtown was not specifically designed for cars in New Orleans, I believe.

While I am not from Texas and have not been there often I would be extremely surprised if her cities were designed to be traveled by foot, as all of them only really started growing after the car era, and none of them have the public transport necessary to make them walkable. The same is true of nearly every southern or western city in the United States (I cannot truly speak as to the walkability of the northeastern cities, for I have only been to a handful of them, and only the famous ones at that.) with cities like Savannah and San Francisco (from what I understand) being notable exceptions, not the rule.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Soontir C'boath »

It is going to take awhile, but Dallas and Houston are trying to join the trend of walkability in their cities. As for liking HSR, we have people in their twenties/thirties and younger who do and will want to take transportation other than driving. People asking for more roads are likely from the baby boomer generation who will sooner or later want to be able to take intercity trains when they get too old to drive or fly.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Zaune »

Just how far apart are Dallas and Houston, anyway? Because while I know this is mostly down to the Mass Transit is Communism brigade, I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of any project that's talking about whizz-bang 200MPH+ trains that will need custom-designed track to run. How many small towns an hour's drive outside of Dallas could you link up with passenger rail for the same money?
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Soontir C'boath »

Around 240 miles, 150 of which are apparently farmland. Even so, they are building the route so that it can beat the travel times by air and driving, so making stops to some podunk towns in-between aren't going to help their appeal.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Elheru Aran »

There need to be two kinds of train for mass transit via rail to be practical: local routes with several stops, that are necessarily slow, and high speed with few stops between cities. Local routes are not going to be seen as practical anytime soon though because it's often quicker to simply drive-- you don't have to stop if you don't need to, and you can take a more direct route rather than going through a bunch of little towns. So you're not really going to see much of that in the US, especially given the sheer size of the country. High speed rail between urban centers is more of a safe bet-- for example, I really wouldn't mind being able to hop a train in Atlanta and be in Savannah in a couple hours. Or, hell, Atlanta to New York in, what, eight hours, not counting stops in Richmond or DC and Philadelphia?
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by TheFeniX »

Zaune wrote:Just how far apart are Dallas and Houston, anyway? Because while I know this is mostly down to the Mass Transit is Communism brigade, I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of any project that's talking about whizz-bang 200MPH+ trains that will need custom-designed track to run. How many small towns an hour's drive outside of Dallas could you link up with passenger rail for the same money?
There isn't much between Houston and Dallas. The rest stops on I-45 are the only thing that make it bearable. And Google saying it's a 3.2 hour drive is hilarious. Even doing 80 on the shitheap that is I-45 outside of Houston, you aren't making it to Dallas in under 4.5 hours unless you have a bladder made of steel and the road isn't backed up due to construction.

It's probably the only in-state travelling I'd rather fly than drive if only because it's so goddamn annoying and there's really nothing to break up the monotony. Even Houston > Corpus Christi has Victoria and Refugio along the way..... and a lot less hills.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Zaune »

Soontir C'boath wrote:Around 240 miles, 150 of which are apparently farmland. Even so, they are building the route so that it can beat the travel times by air and driving, so making stops to some podunk towns in-between aren't going to help their appeal.
Those "podunk towns in between", as you put it, probably have a hell of a lot more people living in them who regularly commute to and from either city for their 9 to 5.
Elheru Aran wrote:There need to be two kinds of train for mass transit via rail to be practical: local routes with several stops, that are necessarily slow, and high speed with few stops between cities. Local routes are not going to be seen as practical anytime soon though because it's often quicker to simply drive-- you don't have to stop if you don't need to, and you can take a more direct route rather than going through a bunch of little towns.
On the other hand, even if it's a bit slower you can spend most of the trip sipping coffee and fiddling with your tablet. Not to mention the fact that electric commuter rail is largely unaffected by the price of crude oil.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Prannon »

I can do Houston to Dallas in 3.5 hours easily. The pit stop is in the (aptly named) Centerville, and unless a lot has changed then there isn't too much obstruction between the two cities.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of rail transit. I commute to my office job in downtown Austin using the local metro rail. Any expansion of rail transit is a huge net plus in my book. As far as the intercity transit market being saturated, I have only this opinion: "If you build it, they will come."
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by FaxModem1 »

Personally, I'm all for it. Dallas has been steadily increasing its public transportation through the Light Rail system the past couple of decades, and the traffic congestion along the highways has always been bad, and the expansion of highways hasn't been cutting it.

Walking anywhere in the Dallas area without public transportation or a car is simply not feasible, but the DART rail and the expanded local stops throughout the Metroplex have made things easier for going somewhere via public transportation. Having expanded rail between major cities would be a good thing, ease traffic congestion, and enable more travel without continuing adding to the local pollution in the area.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by RogueIce »

The problem with high speed rail in the US, at least for now, is what do you do when you get there?

That's not a problem if you're, say, using it to visit a place. Take the cancelled Tampa - Orlando plan we had here. That would have been positively awesome for me if I wanted to make a trip to Disney. Drive down to the station, take the train up to Orlando, and I'm sure Disney and the other parks would have a direct shuttle. It would certainly make a day trip more feasible as, after spending all day at the park I can chill on the trail for awhile before making a 20 minute (or less) drive home, as opposed to the full hour I'd be doing now after walking all day.

But the daily commute, which will probably be the lion's share of expected passengers? Yeah, not so much. To take an example, I have a professor who commutes from Orlando to teach down here. To get from Union Station (where I assume the terminus would have been) to USF via mass transit is 1 hour and 18 minutes, or so says Google Maps. The same drive from "Orlando, FL" to USF is also approximately 1 hour and 18 minutes. So not really a time savings, is it? Now sure that could change depending on when exactly he leaves and traffic (given I pulled it up at 20:00 on a Sunday), but that's also between two fairly major destinations here: downtown and the University.

For people who actually work downtown it's quite feasible. But for those who work out in the urban/suburban sprawl of the Tampa area, well, our mass transit sucks. We just don't have the general mass transit infrastructure to really make it worthwhile for the daily commuters in a lot of places.

Granted I don't know enough about Dallas and Houston to judge the effectiveness of such a scheme. How is their mass transit? How large are their 'downtown cores' (where the stops would presumably be located)? How many of the commuters really work there as opposed to somewhere outside of those core areas? Tampa's actual downtown, for example, is kind of small. So totally walkable. But if you work away from there, even though you're still in the city limits, well...not so much.

If these high-speed links for commuters are going to be viable, you'd have to seriously beef up the local mass transit options for each of their hubs if you want them to really be viable for day-to-day use, IMO.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by FaxModem1 »

I don't know about Houston, but here is the full operational map of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit: It's a PDF

So, depending on one's arrival into Dallas, you could conceivably get to the general area of a town via the Light Rail, then take subsequent buses to roughly your destination. This, however, would take far longer than just driving to a location, and of course isn't as precise, nor does it cover the entire area, as there's so much spread out area that you would be walking for miles depending on the destination.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Elheru Aran »

Yeah, that's the big problem. Take a train to any city in the US... and you're pretty much stuck either taking a taxi, walking, or hoping like hell that wherever you're going has a bus or metro that serves your train station. There are only a very few cities with halfway decent mass transit. I live near Atlanta, and MARTA has been the butt of jokes ever since it started up back in the 70s.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Soontir C'boath »

Same can be said for those traveling by air between Dallas and Houston or for any place you would travel to; rent a car or Uber it.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Elheru Aran »

Which is missing the forest for the trees. The problem here is that everybody drives so much that mass transit-- both intercity and between cities-- is essentially at death's door.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Borgholio »

Same here in the LA area. My wife and I live in Lancaster and although there is a commuter Metrolink train that goes from near out house to the San Fernando Valley area, it's a few miles from that stop to where she works. So that pretty much means she has to ride a bike from the stop to her job at 4:30am. Or buy a clunker car to keep down there. Either way just makes the whole thing less than convenient.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Soontir C'boath »

Elheru Aran wrote:Which is missing the forest for the trees. The problem here is that everybody drives so much that mass transit-- both intercity and between cities-- is essentially at death's door.
Mass transit on any level in the USA has the fundamental problem in that we continue to believe driving is above all else or in other words you're allowing yourself to think in a circular manner. The only thing available for most people is driving and therefore building this new bus route or two and/or intercity train is useless. As long as we believe driving is the only way to get around, shifting focus to mass transit from top to bottom whichever one comes first will certainly be hard to do and believe in.

Perhaps I see things a bit differently because many Long Islanders certainly drive to LIRR stations especially to the lines that have higher frequencies to take a train into NYC where there aren't a whole lot of free parking, but a whole lot of expensive garages.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

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As long as we believe driving is the only way to get around, shifting focus to mass transit from top to bottom whichever one comes first will certainly be hard to do and believe in.
Trouble is, how do you change that? The growth of suburbs has directly led to the growth of the car culture. High-density areas like New York do fine with subways and trains, but how do you get a place like Los Angeles with one of the largest suburbias in the world to use mass transit? How can you shrink a city and make it dense enough to work without so many cars?
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by madd0ct0r »

You build the mass transit, and watch, over years, as the population density around the stations and easy access points goes up. The suburbs without access will gradually die back, either to lower popualtion densities, or completely the same way the inner cities did.

http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/31/the-en ... e-suburbs/
Many older suburbs are still going strong, and real estate developers are beginning to build new suburban neighborhoods that are mixed-use and pedestrian-friendly, a movement loosely known as New Urbanism. Even though almost no one walks everywhere in these new communities, residents can drive a mile or two instead of ten or twenty, own one car instead of two. “We are moving from location, location, location in terms of the most important factor to access, access, access,” says Shyam Kannan, formerly a principal at real estate consultancy Robert Charles Lesser and now managing director of planning at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA.)

(MORE: Selling Your House? Choose Your Words Carefully)

As the country resettles along more urbanized lines, some suggest the future may look more like a patchwork of nodes—mini urban areas all over the country connected to one another with a range of public transit options. It’s not unlike the dense settlements of the Northeast already, where city-suburbs like Stamford, Greenwich, West Hartford and others exist in relatively close proximity. “The differences between cities and suburbs are diminishing,” says Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program director Bruce Katz, noting that cities and suburbs are also becoming more alike racially, ethically, and socio-economically.

Whatever things look like in ten years—or twenty, or fifty, or more—there’s one thing everyone agrees on: there will be more options. The government in the past created one American Dream at the expense of almost all others: the dream of a house, a lawn, a picket fence, two or more children, and a car. But there is no single American Dream anymore; there are multiple American Dreams, and multiple American Dreamers. The good news is that the entrepreneurs, academics, planners, home builders and thinkers who plan and build the places we live in are hard at work trying to find space for all of them.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Soontir C'boath »

I find it weird you would ask about LA since if there is any city that is aggressively expanding mass transit, it is them; LA Metro.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

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Soontir C'boath wrote:I find it weird you would ask about LA since if there is any city that is aggressively expanding mass transit, it is them; LA Metro.
Yeah the only expansion I've seen for the last couple years is adding carpool lanes...which I revile for all sorts of reasons. I have not seen increased bus access or more train stops to the suburbs or anything like that. Sure there's plenty of stuff going on downtown, but most people who commute INTO downtown have little access to the transit methods there.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Soontir C'boath »

I didn't mean to imply any relation to your specific case or for that matter that is necessarily going to be completed soon. Even so, it does look like they are planning to do something that would open far ahead near the 2040's in San Fernando area using heavy/light rail or BRT; Sepulveda Pass.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Borgholio »

Thanks for pointing that one out. Yeah if they can do something people will actually use, it will greatly ease traffic in that area. The Sepulveda pass is pretty well packed during most of the day. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against mass transit in the downtown area...that's a good thing. But LA is expanding into places like Santa Clarita, Palmdale, Lancaster, Hisperia, and all sorts of places where mass transit is non-existent. That will probably come back to bite them in the ass before they realize it.
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Re: High speed rail for texas ain't a road!

Post by Zaune »

Borgholio wrote:Trouble is, how do you change that?
A few thousand sea-mines in the Strait of Hormuz ought to do the trick.
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