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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (858110)

5/21/2015 11:54:00 AM

From: TimF

Respond to of 1573344

An example of how time saved by high speed rail can be rather minimal. This is for a new system planed in the UK, not just adding faster cars to 100% existing track like the Acela.

Between Present time High Speed 2 time a [20] Ultraspeed time b [2]

London and Birmingham	84 minutes	49 minutes	30 minutes
London and Manchester	128 minutes	68 minutes	54 minutes
London and Liverpool	128 minutes	96 minutes	73 minutes
London and Leeds	132 minutes	82 minutes	74 minutes
London and Glasgow	248 minutes	218 minutes	160 minutes
Manchester and Liverpool	50 minutes	N/A c	18 minutes
Manchester and Leeds	54 minutes [21]	N/A c	19 minutes

en.wikipedia.org

The third is for a rejected magnetically levitated train plan. High Speed 2 is the conventional high speed rail that is planned to go in to operation in 2026.

So assuming that the system is as fast as planted you save only a bit over a half hour to Birmingham or Liverpool. And only a half hour for all the way from London to Glasgow. London to Manchester saving an hour might be worth the extra cost from the passenger's perspective. The flight is only 55 minutes but with security times that route should be competitive with air as well as lower speed rail. Flying to Glasgow takes half the time even considering time to go through security.

For those supporting HSR because of concerns about CO2 emissions. Booz Allen Hamilton, and the High Speed Rail Command paper separately estimated no net carbon reductions; The Government White Paper Delivering a Sustainable Railway questioned the value for money of high-speed rail as a method of reducing carbon emissions; and the House of Commons Transport Select Committee Report in November 2011 (paragraph 77) concluded that the Government's claim that HS2 would have substantial carbon reduction benefits did not stand up to scrutiny.
en.wikipedia.org

And of course that's after spending a ton of money on the project -

The cost of the controversial High Speed 2 railway will be at least £80 billion, double the current estimate, a major independent report will conclude.
telegraph.co.uk

Of course you can save money by using existing/shared track but then its not so high speed -

"The quickest Acela can go between New York and Boston is three-and-a-half hours. Fifty years ago, the New Haven Railroad's Merchants Limited made the trip in four. Three-quarters of the way into its maiden season, the best the bullet can do is save you the same 30 minutes over the Acela Regional, as the Northeast Direct is now called. (Between Washington and New York, people on the "high-speed" train can expect to pull in a whopping 15 minutes ahead of those traveling on legacy technology.) The meager minutes saved hardly match the mystique, nor do they derive from Acela's bulleting along at 150 miles an hour. The train hits top speed once, for a couple of minutes, on the flats on the Boston-New York leg; the rest of the time it floats along relatively prosaically under 100 miles an hour, something steam trains accomplished a century ago. The Acela Express only beats the old trains to New York because it makes fewer stops and doesn't have to switch to diesel now that the line has been electrified all the way to Boston."
washingtonmonthly.com

That quote was fro 2001, but I just went to Amtrak's site and look up an Acela trip from Boston to New York and it was 3 hours and 45 minutes. 15 minutes more than what the writer complained about and only 15 minutes less than what was done over 60 years ago.

The UK is denser and smaller (without being too small) than the US, which helps HSR. You might cross the UK on HSR, but not may people are going to do NY to LA or even NY to Chicago. Still its a questionable project for them and even more so for the US.

That could change, say in 50 to 100 years new technologies make HSR faster and relatively cheaper, and fusion or developments in current "alternatives" go way up in capacity and down in price while the peak oil alarmists actually turn out to be right, but if it makes sense only in the future it should be built then not now.