What if we just set the ground rules for a High Speed Rail system and let projects be put together catch as catch can.
What would happen?
Well, I reckon it would end up looking something like this:
Notice that I do not show you the map of the US, but I bet you can guess most of the details (point to Chicago … point to Dallas … point to LA/Riverside … point to Florida). Where does this come from? From setting up some rules, and then following them. No master plan, just some basic ground rules. The details, under the fold.
Cross-posted from the Daily Kos
What rules did I use? Well, first there was some arbitary cut-offs.
- The initial set of eligible cities was restricted to metro area populations of 1 million or more.
- Eligible projects had to have an effective trip speed of 200mph and complete their journey in somewhere between one hour and three hours … though single legs less than an hour were allowed if they were part of a larger project. (Note that I used crow-flies distances, but this is a rough approximation)
- … and that was about it … the rest was determined by the Census and what one of those online city distance calculators told me.
The actual result is the solid red line network. If Memphis and the Research Triangle in NC both grow to 1m+, there will be two distinct networks … one for the west coast, and one for the east coast and middle west.
The dashed lines across the Rocky Mountains run through Salt Lake City, which in the last census was not 1m (but in the 900,000’s, so close), and El Paso, which in the last census was about 2/3 of a million. If you wanted to “connect” the two networks, those would be the natural point … but there is no real up-front reason to want to do that. Remember, these are point-to-point trips in comfortable, Economy+ or Business+ seating, not a multi-day adventure in a sleeper car in an old Hitchcock film. The fact that the networks connects just increase the variety of services that can be put on to meet different travel needs … but the idea is 1 hour to 3 hour trips, not going back to the days of coast to coast rail travel in Pullman cars.
Oh, and the dashed lines at the top are Canada … it just so happens that one the same rules, their four biggest cities could also be integreated into the network, so I sketched them in with dashed lines (and, because of the map I was drawing on top of, an arrow to point up to Vancouver).
That big star pattern at the top, a bit right of center is, of course, Chicago, and the big star pattern at the bottom, almost right in the center is, of course, Dallas. That’s just what happens under those rules. That just might have something to do with why Chicago and Dallas have the populations that they do … hmmmmm.
Note that there are a lot of “alternate routes”, and an “efficiency expert” would ask “which of the alternate routes do we follow”. If an “efficiency export” does that, please smack the efficiency expert upside the head for me. These are not routes. These are connecting pairs of cities of 1m people or more that trains travelling at 200mph (line of sight travel speed) place at 1 hour to 3 hours apart.
If your eye sketches out routes, its because its is normal, in the United States, for cities that size to be separated by distances like that.
As a note, the last Census was 2000, so this is pre-Katrina. However, the dashed line that runs from Dallas to Atlanta across the middle south is not an “alternate route”, “in case NOLA no longer qualifies”. It rather reflects the fact that Memphis and Nashville are getting close, and if they get over the line, that is what happens to the map.
What does this tell us about a High Speed Rail system?
We don’t need no effing master plan. We can draw up maps that show what happens if the country if fully built out according to some rules, and then if someone suggests changing the rules (and especially if they are a Congressperson, so agreeing to their suggestion may help get a policy passed), we can draw up a new map.
For example, suppose that someone says instead of each city in a pair being greater than 1m, the geometric mean (square roote of the product) has to be over a certain threshold. Draw up a new set of candidates, draw up a new map. It will be similar to the one above, though with marginal changes due to whatever differences the clever formula-creator was trying to achieve.
However, the 1m+ cities between Chicago and New York are simply packed too close together for the middle west to be left unconnected to the east coast under any reasonable set of rules … as long as we have high speed rail. Under “express” rail alone (roughly 100mph), important gaps start to pop up all over: Atlanta falls out entirely, dropping Florida to a local networks; Dallas disconnects from the Central Plains; Sacramento disconnects from Portland, Oregon on one side and from Los Angeles on the other.
In short, the US looks like it is made for 200mph High Speed Rail: it’s a natural fit. And going back into our history, at least in the the Great Lakes and the Plains … that is probably right. As soon as you start doing this exercise, the old rail-heads of the 1800’s jump into the network as key points … and as you go further west, the distances between those key points start to stretch out … tracking the rapidly accelerating trains across the second half of the 1800’s.
The final point that is dramatized by the map above is not shown in red, but in white … by no stretch of the imagination does the 200mph high speed rail system go “everywhere” under this … not even close. So if the high speed rail is not going through the town where you live … what are your options?
Actually, as a lingering legacy of the first age of Rail … they could well be pretty good. To make full use of the existing rail corridors still in use and available, we need to find a way to get a path for 100mph passengers and freight that is free and uncluttered of slow moving bulk rail cargoes. And so that is the planned topic of my next rail diary … though when it will appear, like present-day Amtrak, there’s just no telling.
Some final auxilliary notes (prompted by dKos discussion)
Given the number of times that it has come up, I do want to stress that 200mph means that trying to use existing rail Right Of Way is difficult, when it is not totally infeasible … and at the same time, it may well be that this Right of Way is probably better used for express freight, express passenger, local passenger, and bulk freight.
However, substantial stretches of Interstate Highway offer attractive HSR right of way. If built along the edge of the highway right of way (rather than the median), this means frequent “dives” to clear underneath highway exits. However, “dives” for High Speed Rail can be more energy efficient than with slower rail, because the train clears the dive so rapidly that it does not have time to lose very much momentum.
… and this from the European Tribune … in flat areas like Florida, this example from the Netherlands should give a good idea how it would look:
One could argue that the Interstate Highway program was established with a very substantial National Security component. Two of the major real National Security challenges faced by the nation are reducing this nation’s rapidly escalating dependence on imported energy and reducing its contribution to rapidly escalating risks from global warming. So devoting suitable portions of Interstate Highway right of way to help face up to these National Security challenges could be seen as only a means of paying back some of the support provided by the National Security establishment.
One could argue, that is, assuming rational people in government, which is a hope that is at the moment focused on the Congress.
