Magic Hate Ball posted:

having a local grocery is lifechanging and the fact that we, as a society, went out of our way to make sure as many people as possible don't have one is absurd

silicone thrills posted:

lol this totally is written like someone who lives in one of the outskirts burbs in the sea-tac metro area. Like they live in issaquah or snoqualmie.

my costco rules because IT HAS TREES ALL AROUND IT

a_pineapple posted:

I once lived like two blocks from a medium-sized neighborhood grocery store and it was one of the most amazing things ever. Now I'm like 3/4 mile away from a regular-sized grocery store which could be a lot worse but it's still a fast trip sur le velo. Driving to the grocery store and parking and going in and getting 50 bags of groceries and loading them all into the bed of your Dodge Mustang Longdrive Pickuptruk or whatever and unloading them and man that poo poo sucks. Smaller/more frequent trips are way better.

Contrast that with my in laws who live in the burbs and the closest coffee shop to them is a 2 mile drive yeah right buddy lmao !!

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

One of the things you learn when you get mobile is that walking a mile isn’t a big deal. Takes twenty minutes if you’re being lackadaisical about it.

Mr. Sharps posted:

the best part of having a local grocer in walking distance is getting insanely high and ambling over there to stare at the sodas and snacks

silicone thrills posted:

lol this totally is written like someone who lives in one of the outskirts burbs in the sea-tac metro area. Like they live in issaquah or snoqualmie.

my costco rules because IT HAS TREES ALL AROUND IT

quote:

Why high speed rail hasn’t caught on by Casey Handmer

My personal background on trains is that I love them! I’ve taken dozens of trains across multiple timezones, in China, Japan, Mongolia, Russia, all over Europe, Vietnam, Cuba, Australia, New Zealand, and the US. I also worked on track-based transport as a levitation engineer at Hyperloop between 2015 and 2018, so I have some appreciation for the art.

...

Why is HSR so expensive?

I will discuss three main groups of reasons: rail is suboptimal, HSR grading requirements are really tough, and steel-on-steel rolling is less perfect than you might think.

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Rail is kind of obsolete

The first set of reasons are common to all kinds of rail. As mentioned in my post on traffic congestion:

There are a few reasons. Some are similar to car economic problems, with peak and average demand variation, particularly for commuter services. But I think the fundamental reason is that compact diesel engines got, if not good, then acceptable, in the 1930s. After that, shippers could move freight in almost any form factor between any two points directly. Even in 2022, freight by rail is much slower as rail cars must wait in yards for trains to be assembled.

There is another direct issue with trains, which is that rail systems are, by their nature, one dimensional. Any disruption on a rail line shuts down the entire line, imposing high maintenance costs on an entire network to ensure reliable uptime. To add a destination to a network, an entire line must be graded and constructed from the existing network, and even then it will be direct to almost nowhere.

Contrast this with aircraft. There are 15,000 airports in the US. Any but the largest aircraft can fly to any of these airports. If I build another airport, I have added 15,000 potential connections to the network. If I build another rail terminal and branch line, at significantly greater cost than an airstrip, I have added only one additional connection to the network.

Roads and trucks are somewhere between rail and aircraft. The road network largely already exists everywhere, and there aren’t any strict gauge restrictions, mandatory union labor requirements, obscure signaling standards, or weird 19th century incompatible ownership structures. Damage or obstruction isn’t a showstopper, as trucks have two dimensions of freedom of movement, and can drive around an obstacle. In Los Angeles during the age of streetcars, a fire anywhere in the city would result in water hoses crossing the street from hydrant to firetruck, and then the network ground to a halt because steel wheels can’t cross a hose or surmount a temporary hump!

Building a metro system in an existing dense city is also great (if we can avoid cost disease) but for most of the cities in the US, the suburbs are already not walkable enough to enable non-vehicle transport to a neighborhood station. The suburbs of LA will never be able to depend on a Manhattan or Vienna-style underground railway.

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If we want to reduce CO2-generating air traffic between San Francisco and Los Angeles (a worthy goal!) then the HSR route must be, above all, fast. The oft-stated goal time of 2 hours and 40 minutes is both unachievably rapid with finite money and current technology, and also too slow to compete with aircraft, but for insane TSA security delays that will probably also affect HSR. It prompted the Hyperloop experiment, which sidestepped some of the problems and generated others.

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The Earth is kinda bumpy

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The bumps have a really big effect on how fast people can move close to the surface of the Earth.

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As a result, HSR grades cannot be built between nearly any city pair on Earth without moving a LOT of dirt and rock and pouring a LOT of (CO2-emitting) concrete, most of which only has an actual train on it for a few seconds per hour, and thus drives incredibly high cost of construction.

Of course roads also operate with public subsidies and require expensive grading, but road traffic is slower, more diverse, and more versatile, while road materials are far cheaper and car operating costs are borne by the user. The result is that the per mile and per passenger mile costs of roads are much lower than HSR. For example, the I-70 cost an average of about $2m/mile, despite routing through remote and mountainous parts of Utah. CA HSR is currently budgeted at more than $350m/mile.

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Rail wear, or steel wheels in the real world

Finally, we come to the third major challenge of HSR and another major contributor to its cost. Steel wheels and rails are hard – they’re made of steel, but they wear over time. Wheels must be remachined and rails must be reground.

...

Where HSR has to bore tunnels through >100 miles of incredibly unforgiving hard and flakey rock for decades just to get somewhere, planes fly serenely through the unobstructed atmosphere. Where trains must slow down and speed up to serve political expediency in smaller intermediate stations, planes route freely through the three dimensional sky direct to their destination, and at 3x the speed, and at lower overall energy usage per passenger-km.

Planes emit CO2 as they fly, but CO2 emissions on routes that could be served by HSR are a tiny fraction of aviation’s total, which itself is a small fraction of the totality of humanity’s output. It can be directly offset through carbon capture and sequestration for a modest increase in the ticket price, as plane ticket prices are mostly not fuel. Alternatively, synthetic aviation fuel is under development to make aircraft carbon neutral. Indeed, at Terraform Industries we think synthetic fuel will ultimately be even cheaper than current options, expanding access to the convenience, speed, and safety of air travel.

Trains are wonderful and I love the Shinkansen, but let’s stop flogging this dead horse. HSR is not a compelling option for generic high speed intercity transport.

quote:

The oft-stated goal time of 2 hours and 40 minutes is both unachievably rapid with finite money and current technology, and also too slow to compete with aircraft,

mortons stork posted:

there's a guy named ashton in the comments who is absolutely ventilating the author ~~with facts and logic~~ and getting him increasingly pissy and mad

thalweg posted:

Musk freely admitted that the whole Hyperloop project was just a play to get CA to stop working on HSR. And that dumb rear end blogger thinks working on that makes him more credible?

webcams for christ posted:

show me a car that can drive up a 64% incline

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Just let me go to the Amazon or whatever warehouse myself, go into a little room built on the front of it, beep boop on some kiosk, sit in a chair for a few minutes, and then pick my stuff up at the window when my name is called

mortons stork posted:

there's a guy named ashton in the comments who is absolutely ventilating the author ~~with facts and logic~~ and getting him increasingly pissy and mad

mortons stork posted:

there's a guy named ashton in the comments who is absolutely ventilating the author ~~with facts and logic~~ and getting him increasingly pissy and mad

FreeRangeHexagon posted:

Japan is one of the most mountainous countries on Earth, and they invented highspeed rail so lmao at "the Earth is kind of bumpy" for talking about America

quote:

Japan, a linear archipelago, famously developed the high speed Shinkansen but like recent Chinese development, it must be seen in the context of very heavy-handed government subsidies and a response to geographic and structural factors that inhibited the development of airports. For example, while the US has more than 15,000 airports (most of which are untowered paved strips), Japan and much of China is relatively mountainous, historically relatively poor, and historically beset by relatively poor transport networks. Add to that various Japanese prohibitions on certain weapons technology in the post war period and high speed rail served as a government imposed solution to mass transportation.

It did not come without cost, however. Japan’s ostensibly private rail companies have gone bankrupt and been bailed out so many times I’ve lost count, racking up billion dollar yearly deficits year after year. Indeed, as far as I know there isn’t a single HSR route anywhere on Earth that operates profitably on ticketing revenue, and so operation always requires substantial subsidies. I should probably mention here that actual ridership and thus fare revenue is, as a rule of thumb, typically around a third of projections.

quote:

Second is that Japan exists, has a ton of mountains, and constructed a bunch of HSR for a lot less money than California is. The latest line, Hokkaido Shinkansen opened in 2016 and cost a cool $4.67B for 92.5 miles of track, including a 33mi tunnel right in the middle of it. Not just a tunnel in fact, a tunnel under a straight to boot. So clearly HSR can be made in mountains and with tunnels for a lot cheaper than what California’s HSR will cost.

Buck Turgidson posted: