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tweet by amtrak ben: i think we should build high speed rail next to freeways only because it would make drivers feel like complete losers all the time
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It doesn’t need to go high speed, I was in a train a few years ago and the conductor on the loud speaker said “if you look on your left, you will be happy to be in a train and not stuck in a traffic jam.” Everyone looked and the highway was completely stuck. Really Really long traffic jam. Everyone started giggling.
I wish the train was affordable
The one thing Germany did right in the last like 20 years: Deutschlandticket. One ticket, 49€ per month, regional/local public transport for all of Germany. I can literally take a bus from my apartment to the train station, hop on an RE train and go wherever I want, and then take the local bus in that town.
It doesn’t include long haul highspeed trains, but the regional trains will still get you almost everywhere.
And if you travel a lot and invest in a BahnCard 50, long distance trains are not that expensive anymore. A Flex ICE ticket from Nuremberg to Hamburg will cost you 80€. Fuel will be more expensive. Well, if you buy the ticket a week earlier, you can get it very cheap like 13€.
BC 50 is only a good option if you frequently need to go on short notice – you get 50% of the Flexpreis, but the same Sparpreis offers as the BC 25, which costs about 1/4 of the BC50.
If you are flexible and can stay out of the busy hours you can still get great deals with the BC25.
I recently booked Berlin to Cologne for 2 people first class for 60€ total. On the way back the train had 2h delay, so I got 40€ refund. All in all about 100€ for a two people round trip.
And if someone wants to start the “2h delay!!!1!” talk: It would have been way worse on the highway, which had a major traffic jam for most of the day. Meanwhile I sat comfortably in the restaurant with beer, currywurst and fries (to quote Harald Juhnke: “no appointments and slightly tipsy” 👋)
Germans complain a lot about DB, it’s a national hobby, but compared to France (tgv pricey as fuck!), Britain (basically 0 high speed): ICE is a pretty damn good service at a very affordable price, especially with a BC25. Sure, it should be faster on many stretches where the tracks can’t handle high speed yet, but you really can’t beat the ICE price and comfort level on many travels if you book a bit in advance.
Well, I mean… this is a bit of a “both sides” thing, maybe. We’re in a not too bad spot, but could do much better, both things can be true I think.
A lot of it is valid criticism, and the situation is quite dire and will be for the unforeseeable future now. And just because the UK is a neoliberal hellhole doesn’t mean Germany should become one as well.
But yeah, there’s also a lot of non-constructive complaining, which frequently comes from people who aren’t even using public transport and just want to justify why they have (“”“neeeed”“”) a car.
Ask climate friendly taxing. Plane fuel isn’t taxed right now but trains are.
Go to germany and purchase Deutschland ticket.
Whole germany unlocked.
Yup, unlimited access to public transportation (besides the super fast trains) for 50€/mo. As someone coming from the US, It’s pretty awesome
Same. It’s crazy that taking a car, with all the waste that implies, is somehow the cheaper option in some reasons.
This is the case in Germany, and it’s glorious. The fastest people on the Autobahn drive around 200 km/h, whereas the trains sometimes travel at 320 km/h. Always fun to see the slow cars!
Likewise Spain with the AVE. Cars are speed limited to 130 max I think, so it looks like the cars are stopped.
I don’t know if Deutsche Bahn is the best example of this. ICE’s maximum speed only means you usually end up leaving when you are supposed to be arriving.
Well, Deutsche Bahn is the place where I experience exactly what the meme is suggesting. Should I have mentioned another rail service I don’t know and haven’t experienced?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/oct/08/german-train-travel-deutsche-bahn-kafka explains it better than I could in a single comment. Searching for “Verzögerungen im Betriebsablauf” will give you more examples of the mess Deutsche Bahn’s operations are.
I know that the delays are a mess. But I’ll ask again: why should I talk about some different rail service that I have never used instead of the one I have used?
It’s not like the trains don’t drive at high speeds due to the delays. I sat in them and experienced what the meme describes. And now I’m not supposed to mention it as an example because of train delays? What?
god, driving at 200km/h is so insane
Ya, I also wish those slowpokes would get out of my way…
I’m sure newer cars are much better at it, but 150 is already scary enough in my 2012 model. It doesn’t handle bumps well at 130, I don’t want to test fate.
It’s not a question of age, but of the car model. Any german upper middle class car from (at least) the 80s onwards was able to comfortably go 180–200 km/h, upper class > 200 km/h, lower middle class 160–200, smaller cars provide an adventurous driving experience at 150 km/h.
There shouldn’t be bumps on the autobahn.
No, driving a moving truck (that’s small enough to not full under the separate speed limit for trucks) at 200km/h is insane. Seen that before ^^
Stuttgart - Köln is one of the connections that go max speed, and it really is glorious.
But I don’t think there’s actually that many places the ICE can go that fast, is there?
Not a whole lot, then. But then again, even 160km/h is faster than the average speed you’d travel at on the Autobahn
I posted this comment already elsewhere in this thread, but lemme quote myself:
The ICE’s max speed depends on model and variies from 250km/h to 300km/h. These speeds can be reached on:
- Hannover-Würzburg (280km/h)
- Mannheim-Stuttgart (280km/h)
- Oebisfelde-Berlin (250km/h)
- Siegburg-Frankfurt (300km/h)
- Köln-Düren (250km/h)
- Rastatt-Offenburg & Schliengen-Haltingen (250km/h)
- Nürnberg-Ingolstadt (300km/h)
- Ebensfeld-Leipzig/Halle (300km/h)
- Wendlingen-Ulm (250km/h)
There are more of these tracks currently under construction:
- Stuttgart-Wendlingen (250km/h)
- Bashaide-Rastatt (250km/h)
And many more are currently in the planning stage:
- Hamm-Bielefeld (300km/h)
- Oebisfelde-Berlin (300km/h)
- Ulm-Augsburg (300km/h)
- Gelnhausen-Fulda (250km/h)
- Frankfurt-Mannhein (300km/h)
- Bielefeld-Hannover (300km/h)
- Nürnberg-Würzburg (300km/h)
Sometimes? How about this decade old French record?
Do all trains in France always drive that fast? If not it’s also sometimes, so…
That works. The local L trains running along side the highway in Chicago got me, seeing 5 trains roll by while barley moving in bumper to bumper gave me the final push to covert to public transit
The number of people I’ve met who will never take Amtrak again because they saw one delay, but will sit in gridlock for an hour each way to/from work to go 10 miles without blinking an eye drives me batty
I’d take Amtrak in a heartbeat if meaningful service actually existed.
Yeah, there’s precisely one (1) train per day leaving North from Atlanta, and it departs at 11:30 PM. It’s a fucking joke!
And I was laughing at CPPK for closing during lunch break.
We’re the end of the line but we finally got service back where I live (we had it… In the 80s or something?) we have a morning and evening now and it’s really good for heading north to DC and nyc.
I agree we need to get that network expanded though, we have the rail for it already
You’re moving barley? You can’t move barley on a passenger train, you need a freight train for that.
I mean you could, but it would be very inefficient.
Everyone fill your pockets up!
This is what infuriates me on every interstate freeway drive is that Eisenhower didn’t just lay tracks along the median of every intestate. If we had done it then, we’d have an entire network for the most heavily utilized corridors with natural station locations.
It isn’t even about being stuck in traffic, it’s also about the mind-numbing expanse that would be much more enjoyable if I didn’t have to pay attention.
As a California native who has commuted 2hrs a day to work for decades, but got to live in the UK for a year: I was way more productive when I commuted by light rail/subway.
Instead of looking out for aholes looking to break check, cut you off, deny you changing lanes; I was able to respond to emails, make some calls and even have a descent breakfast off the morning truck while sitting in a wifi available seat traveling into London from Gatwick each day. Way less stressful overall.
I’m in Montréal, my commute by subway is slower than by car most of the time.
But I get 20 minutes of walking and fresh air and either watch an episode of TV or read a couple chapters of a book. It’s also consistently the same time every time by subway. Feels much better.
The median would probably be dangerous because of the tendency of automobiles to deroad
My city has had these since 1989-90. In all that time, I have never heard of a car crashing into the tracks.
They essentially would need to expand the median, which would add even more cost to the system I think it would have been worth it, but they would need barriers on both sides of the rail it wouldn’t just be road rail road, it would be road | rail | road
Frankfurt - Cologne: about twice as fast by train then by car.
Is that the one ICE track where it can actually come near its max speed?
It goes at about 300 km/h on that track.
NEIN!
DOCH!
OH!
The ICE’s max speed depends on model and variies from 250km/h to 300km/h. These speeds can be reached on:
- Hannover-Würzburg (280km/h)
- Mannheim-Stuttgart (280km/h)
- Oebisfelde-Berlin (250km/h)
- Siegburg-Frankfurt (300km/h)
- Köln-Düren (250km/h)
- Rastatt-Offenburg & Schliengen-Haltingen (250km/h)
- Nürnberg-Ingolstadt (300km/h)
- Ebensfeld-Leipzig/Halle (300km/h)
- Wendlingen-Ulm (250km/h)
There are more of these tracks currently under construction:
- Stuttgart-Wendlingen (250km/h)
- Bashaide-Rastatt (250km/h)
And many more are currently in the planning stage:
- Hamm-Bielefeld (300km/h)
- Oebisfelde-Berlin (300km/h)
- Ulm-Augsburg (300km/h)
- Gelnhausen-Fulda (250km/h)
- Frankfurt-Mannhein (300km/h)
- Bielefeld-Hannover (300km/h)
- Nürnberg-Würzburg (300km/h)
Let me present: the new constructed high speed rail line Wendlingen-Ulm, next to Autobahn 8.
With up to 200km/h (125mp/h for you american folk) with regular trains and even more with our high speed trains!
You can run so many cancelled trains on that bad boy
Also, in the US this could help bypass land-use issues. If you use the right-of-way the interstate highways already have, you don’t need to have a legal fight over building on privately held land.
It’s pretty easy to expropriate (eminent domain) those, at least in Canada.
You should read about the efforts to build fast rail in California. It was totally destroyed because they had to ask permission to each and every tiny county and make so many compromises, that it’s no longer considered high speed rail.
Then they threw it all out for Musk to build his taxi loop 😂
Yeah, I figured it would be different in different countries. I live in Texas, where a promised high-speed line between Dallas and Houston has been stalled by landowners telling the state to fuck off. If they had asked the Obama administration to let them use the interstates, it would probably be in construction already.
There actually was a transportation agency that had an ad campaign oriented around this idea. Basically people in the cars saw the train going by so fast and felt jealous because they were stuck in their cars.
Anyone remember what agency put this on?
I have no idea, but I remember a great ad DB brought out: A picture of cars bumper to bumper in a traffic jam, under it “Bumper to bumper is definitely the right approach. Now safely accelerate to 300km/h”.
They did this where I am from, but the high speed trains cost way too much yo be worth it and they never travel at their full speed and are about the same speed as a car.
You also HAVE to drive to the train station. And by the time you wait for the train and pay for parking, you might as well just drive into the city.
In fact, it hardly saves time or money and often ends up being about the same cost and time.
Also the last train leaves the city shortly after the work day ends. So if you work late or get held up, then you are not going home or paying a crap ton for a Uber home.
It’s just fucked and I hate that it is that way.
This chaotic scenario is exactly why we need to focus on public transport. If it sucks, we need to improve.
The first computers sucked. Should we have given up because they were massive, expensive, totally niche, and required specialized knowledge to even turn on? Very impractical, but we improved. The same can go for transport. Look at the goal and work towards it.
Don’t look at the ingredients and give up because they aren’t already a pie.
“High speed rail” means intercity rail (think airplane or Greyhound bus replacement), not commuter rail or metro rail. That makes sense to put along a freeway because there’s generally only one direct freeway connection between each pair of major metro areas.
I agree that it doesn’t make sense to put commuter rail or metro rail adjacent to a freeway. Ideally, it would be the opposite: the routes radiating from the city should have the freeways and rail lines spread as far apart from each other as possible, so that commuters in different areas have good access to either one mode or the other, rather than some having good access to both and others neither.
they never travel at their full speed
Why? Too much risk someone will be close to the tracks?
If following Hanlon’s razor, that entire situation sounds like someone proposed “we need trains going into the city”, set it up, and called it a day.
The train I usually take saves maybe only like 15 minutes (normally about an hour to drive), but at least you can do more stuff on the train rather than sitting at the wheel.
I would imagine the curvature of a highway is too tight a turn for a HSR to make safely, if “building rails along highways” was taken literally. I could be wrong though
it should still be enough to travel faster than cars though, like 140 is pretty normal for trains whereas for cars that’s about the maximum they should ever go no matter what
Number of reasons, risk of trespassing at a large number of crossings is only one of them:
- Too many curves
- Old tracks
- Narrower right of way
- Poor maintenance
- Old bridges and tunnels
- Travelling behind lumbering freight trains
- Too many trains at central station
- Said central train station has a 100 year old electro-mechanical switching station (Looking at you, Toronto Union)
None of which are in any way a high speed rail thing. Level crossings doubly and triply so, that’s like building a driveway directly off a highway.
These are simply reasons why it’s difficult for even high speed projects to go fast in the city, due to using existing infrasturcture because building a separate high speed network in a built up area are orders of magnitude greater…
Just look to Amtrak’s Acela, The States’ first, and for a long time only high speed rail line. It can only go its full speed for a portion of the line because of all the kinds of challenges mentioned above.
High speed within city limits is something like 100km/h, metro speeds. Which also don’t have level crossings due to frequency.
For actual HSR you need distance between stations, a stop max. every thirty minutes or so, better upwards of an hour. If you want to have multiple stops within the same metro area (which can make a lot of sense) the train isn’t going to drive particularly fast between them, how could it, it has to accelerate, decelerate, and probably also deal with local trains sharing the same track.
As to the Acela… those might be high speed trains, but it’s definitely not running on high speed track most of the time, as such it would be wrong to call it a high speed line: The Acela does an average of 113km/h, Germany has S-Bahn trains (something in between metro and commuter rail) which go 140km/h (not average because they stop in every village but the track supports it and they hit it regularly).
And I know the track there isn’t quite as bad but it still looks somewhat like this. Don’t be surprised if trains have to crawl. Cargo companies don’t care about speed and hate maintenance, that’s why that happens. I’m actually surprised it’s even legal to drive there. Proper HSR trains couldn’t even drive there same as a Lamborghini won’t go offroad, and I heard they had tons of trouble getting the Acela trains to run on its track, those modern units monitor track condition.
I can’t really discuss this further if your definition of high speed rail changes. Typically it is defined at somewhere above 200km/h. Trains can’t go much above 100km/h in the city, as you say, but by the above definition this is not high speed. My previous comment gave reasons why high speed trains are often further limited to anywhere between 10 and 80km/h in urban areas.
My definition didn’t change: It’s just that HSR is not an inner-city thing, it’s between cities, and 100km/h are properly fast metros. HSR it’s not a metro replacement, or a streetcar replacement, it’s for travel between metro areas to across the continent but it also shouldn’t be surprising if within cities, HSR can’t go faster than your usual metro. Unless you build the corridor first and the city second, or demolish a couple of neighbourhoods, there’s just going to be too tight curves. And that’s fine HSR trains spend most of their time in cities standing in a station anyway.
My previous comment gave reasons why high speed trains are often further limited to anywhere between 10 and 80km/h in urban areas.
And that’s insanity while metros are zipping by with 100km/h. Also Acela’s track troubles are not just in urban areas, even though the worst spots are in city centres.
The first actually HSR line in the US will be in California, with a minimum track speed of 180km/h and grade separation everywhere. Not all corridors are new but none will have curly track.
Electro-mechanical? Lucky you, most of tram networks here have only mechanical, where old lady should switch direction with a crowbar.
If it is the same time and cost, you still save on time where you don’t need to focus on the street or even worse. You can read something, prepare other stuff or just do nothing and relax.
In Illinois, there is an Amtrak line from Chicago to St Louis that isn’t high speed, but it is “higher speed.” It has stretches that it goes 110mph. Not hugely fast, but much faster than the 65-70mph speed limit on the interstate, it is alongside much of the way. I’ve rode it once, and it was cool to look out the window and watch as we passed by cars with ease. I’ve only had a taste, and it makes me want more.
I’ve ridden that I’ve when I went to siue. The train was never on time, being hours late. Also we always had to pull over to let other freight trains through. Amazing really needs to find a way to own it’s rails.
Amtrak is actively building dedicated rails in quite a few places
I agree with all of that. And that’s why part of Biden’s infrastructure plan was Amtrak upgrades and line additions.
Joke’s on you, I have a humiliation kink
You can experience this in multiple parts of Los Angeles. Don’t tell anyone. It’s fucking glorious.
no but that’s the best part: you SHOULD tell everyone, the more people using the trains the higher frequency you get and if there’s enough demand you get higher speed services too!
Public transportation in the US is abysmal.
In California, any time I have seen an Amtrack train going the same direction as me on the freeway, I was passing it, never the other way around.
America’s rail is almost all low-speed or higher-speed (125-150 mph, but much lower average speeds)
For comparison, China has built ~20,000 miles of HSR, much of which goes up to 220, some lines averaging 200 mph.
That would be because Amtrak is not a high-speed rail. They barely maintain their rails and so they have to go quite slowly.
Amtrak only owns tracks in the DC area. Everywhere else, the rails are all privatized
This modification with perpendicular seats in carriage and on-demand open is used on line 4, where this probably was filmed.
All other lines have parallel seats only and open all doors on platforms.
German car-brainers: „Mein Auto kann do 350 km/h, und it is legal“
“I’m not attending your funeral”
Still below 570 km/h.
Passenger trains in Germany are capped at 300 km/h
They can go faster but it’s just not worth it regarding maintenance and everything. And the old ICE3s are actually 10 km/h faster than the ICE3neos (330 vs. 320km/h). Siemens would no doubt be happy to build them faster but the network can’t take it, there’s no dedicated high speed rail the ICEs have to contend with cargo trains rumbling over their tracks. Oh and 320/330 isn’t their actual maximum speed that’s just what they’re specced and tested to.
Typical high speed tracks aren’t shared with cargo trains. Frankfurt-Siegburg for example is only usable by high speed passenger trains.
And regarding the max speed, I’d suggest to look at china. The chinese railways run the Siemens Velaro CN, which is the local version of the Velaro D (DB Br407) at 380km/h in regular use.
Glorious
