BF2S Forums California's High Speed Rail

Jay wrote:

I mean, would you want to take the train from London to Moscow, or would you rather fly?

Train actually. I'm sure there are quite a few who would feel the same. Would love to see a HS go in across Canada.

-Whiteroom- wrote:

Jay wrote:

I mean, would you want to take the train from London to Moscow, or would you rather fly?

Train actually. I'm sure there are quite a few who would feel the same. Would love to see a HS go in across Canada.

To each their own, but there aren't enough people that agree with you to make trains economically viable. It's why planes, for all their initial danger, replaced trains in the first place.

Jay wrote:

-Whiteroom- wrote:

Jay wrote:

I mean, would you want to take the train from London to Moscow, or would you rather fly?

Train actually. I'm sure there are quite a few who would feel the same. Would love to see a HS go in across Canada.

To each their own, but there aren't enough people that agree with you to make trains economically viable. It's why planes, for all their initial danger, replaced trains in the first place.

Once again, you are just making baseless claims.  Trains are far more economical.  There are also more trains than airplanes, so you missed the mark on that.  You really need to start providing source material if you're just going to sling around numbers and "facts" like that.

Jay wrote:

Extra Medium wrote:

Jay wrote:

To each their own, but there aren't enough people that agree with you to make trains economically viable. It's why planes, for all their initial danger, replaced trains in the first place.

Once again, you are just making baseless claims.  Trains are far more economical.  There are also more trains than airplanes, so you missed the mark on that.  You really need to start providing source material if you're just going to sling around numbers and "facts" like that.

How are they far more economical?
Sample travel search New York (JFK) to Orlando round trip 1/17/13 to 1/21/13 on JetBlue is $261/pp. Flight time is 3hr10min
Penn Station to Orlando via Amtrak, same dates is $131/pp each way or $262 round trip. Travel time is 23hr15min.
So I lost a dollar and 20 hours of my time by choosing the train.

How are there more trains than airplanes? Are you counting subways? Every day, 1,216 flights leave or arrive from JFK airport (one of four major airports in the NYC region).  By contrast Amtrak operates more than 300 trains each day – at speeds up to 150 mph (240 km/h) connecting more than 500 destinations in 46 states

Economical depends on the situation, country and existing infrastructure for what you are comparing. Why would you fly San Fran to LA?
Europe has better infrastructure and closer destinations, so is probably more economical. But UK trains are much more expensive than continental ones, possibly due to govt. subsidies.

That JFK example is pointless.
Try actually finding numbers of planes (not flights) operated by US carriers domestically (not internationally) for a comparison, say.

I know there are no sources, I cba.

Last edited by PrivateVendetta (2012-11-26 10:23:32)

PrivateVendetta wrote:

Jay wrote:

Extra Medium wrote:

Once again, you are just making baseless claims.  Trains are far more economical.  There are also more trains than airplanes, so you missed the mark on that.  You really need to start providing source material if you're just going to sling around numbers and "facts" like that.

How are they far more economical?
Sample travel search New York (JFK) to Orlando round trip 1/17/13 to 1/21/13 on JetBlue is $261/pp. Flight time is 3hr10min
Penn Station to Orlando via Amtrak, same dates is $131/pp each way or $262 round trip. Travel time is 23hr15min.
So I lost a dollar and 20 hours of my time by choosing the train.

How are there more trains than airplanes? Are you counting subways? Every day, 1,216 flights leave or arrive from JFK airport (one of four major airports in the NYC region).  By contrast Amtrak operates more than 300 trains each day – at speeds up to 150 mph (240 km/h) connecting more than 500 destinations in 46 states

Economical depends on the situation, country and existing infrastructure for what you are comparing. Why would you fly San Fran to LA?
Europe has better infrastructure and closer destinations, so is probably more economical. But UK trains are much more expensive than continental ones, possibly due to govt. subsidies.

That JFK example is pointless.
Try actually finding numbers of planes (not flights) operated by US carriers domestically (not internationally) for a comparison, say.

I know there are no sources, I cba.

Better estimate I suppose. a total of 631,939,829 passengers boarded domestic flights in the United States in the year 2010. During FY 2011 (Oct. 2010-Sept. 2011), Amtrak® welcomed aboard nearly 30.2 million passengers.

So 631.939,829/30,200,000 = 20.25x more people flew on planes domestically compared to riding on Amtrak. Light rail, subways etc would not be direct replacements for airplanes as they would simply replace cars, so those ridership levels can be discounted. We're strictly talking about intercity travel. I don't even know why I had to provide links for this stuff. Only an idiot would think that more people travel by train than by airplane.

300 trains a day? The entire country? WTF?

It is currently 20:30 here and the train station at the end of my road will having another 80 services stopping there over the rest of the day. 80 services over a few hours in one tiny local train station compared to 300 a day for the entire US. Either the 300 figure is nonsense or trains in the US are really shockingly shit.

300 for the US cannot be right when it is 18000 just for mainline rail services in London - with some individual stations having 1000s of services a day.

Liverpool Street, one station in the city, is used by more than twice as many people as Heathrow Airport.

Your figures are either wrong or the rail network in the US is in dire need of investment.

Bertster7 wrote:

300 trains a day? The entire country? WTF?

It is currently 20:30 here and the train station at the end of my road will having another 80 services stopping there over the rest of the day. 80 services over a few hours in one tiny local train station compared to 300 a day for the entire US. Either the 300 figure is nonsense or trains in the US are really shockingly shit.

300 for the US cannot be right when it is 18000 just for mainline rail services in London - with some individual stations having 1000s of services a day.

Liverpool Street, one station in the city, is used by more than twice as many people as Heathrow Airport.

Your figures are either wrong or the rail network in the US is in dire need of investment.

Figures must be wrong. I live in Brisbane and we get more trains than 300 services a day, and we are a far cry from places like London.

The difference is in total trains vs. total trips per train.  So each one of those 300+ trains could be making multiple trips per day.

13urnzz wrote:

Jay wrote:

Light rail, subways etc would not be direct replacements for airplanes as they would simply replace cars, so those ridership levels can be discounted. We're strictly talking about intercity travel.

have you ever been out West? intercity is not just a stop sign and a street sign separating two towns. i live 35 miles from where i work, and i've never flown or taken a train.

you don't get around without a car out here . . .

Oh I know. I remember driving on I-70 through Utah and seeing a sign that said 'Next gas 117 miles' or something close to it. Needless to say, I stopped for gas

I ride a train to work every day simply because it takes me 20 mins on an express train to get to Penn Station. Then I take a subway downtown. Costs me $193 a month for the ticket, but I save so much time and gas it's worth it. Even with the massive ridership numbers, and all the toll money taken in from the bridges to subsidize it, the railroad is still near bankruptcy every year

its the same for canada with via rail.  i take it fairly often - i took it twice this weekend - since its pretty cheap ($88 to go to ottawa and back, a ~4.5 hour trip).  it would cost me at least a few hundred to fly, if not more and when you calculate time to get to the airport, security, etc its not much longer to take the train.  plus its more comfortable and has half decent food.

but i entirely agree with the fact that almost nobody takes the train, it was mostly empty both ways.  rich people fly, most people drive and people without money take the bus ($40 round trip).  plus they always seem to leave at inconvenient times

Jay wrote:

Extra Medium wrote:

Jay wrote:

How are they far more economical?
Sample travel search New York (JFK) to Orlando round trip 1/17/13 to 1/21/13 on JetBlue is $261/pp. Flight time is 3hr10min
Penn Station to Orlando via Amtrak, same dates is $131/pp each way or $262 round trip. Travel time is 23hr15min.
So I lost a dollar and 20 hours of my time by choosing the train.

How are there more trains than airplanes? Are you counting subways? Every day, 1,216 flights leave or arrive from JFK airport (one of four major airports in the NYC region).  By contrast Amtrak operates more than 300 trains each day – at speeds up to 150 mph (240 km/h) connecting more than 500 destinations in 46 states

Trains are far more economical because they use considerably less fuel as an airplane.  If you tried to make the raw material on a train airborne it would take a considerable amount of fuel, but since high speed trains run on the principle of magnets, they are far more fuel efficient.  A plane can only carry 1/100,000,000th of the cargo and or passengers that a train can and uses 17 1/4 more fuel doing so.  Amtrak may only run 300 trains but each train has 50 cars that are equal to 1 plane.  So essentially there are 15,000 trains.

Another factor is the quality of life on a train vs an airplane.  Can you have sex on an airplane?  Yes, but it is very difficult.  It is very easy and quite common on trains.  Can you stick your head out of the window of a plane?  No.  Can you get up and walk around on a plane?  No.  Can you eat a sandwich on a plane?  No.  Trains are way more fun as well because you can see stuff out the window other than clouds and brown.

I dont know where you found your ticketing information because I have never seen a train that ran for 23 hours.  Also wikipedia is not a proper place to source your data.  If you want to be taken seriously, you need to find a reputable site or source for your facts.

I've never in my life seen a passenger train with fifty cars attached to it. Ever. Freight trains, yes. Passenger trains, no.

Why would you want to have sex on a train? Are you an exhibitionist? That's your argument? Really? Sticking your head out of a window? At 200 mph? Ok. You can get up and walk around on a plane. You can get up and walk around on a train. You would need to get up less often if you flew because hey, the trip is 1/5 the time. Holy fuck I can't believe I'm actually having this conversation.

And trains are not economical, not because of the cost to operate them, which is still considerable, but because it costs many billions of dollars to build them, and the ridership levels required to pay off those bonds are much higher than demand. This is why no private company is willing to build them. They can't afford the massive losses that governments don't seem to mind. When California's High Speed rail was attempting to have their project approved, they had rosy ridership estimates of ~111M people per year. That's now been downgraded to 20-30M/yr. The estimated cost is $68.4BN. It will struggle mightily to ever turn a profit. But hey, ilocano stands to make bank

During my time in India, I saw many passenger trains with over 50 cars.  If you were more well traveled you too would understand that there are more ways to do something than simply the way they do it in Utah where you live.  I want to have sex on a train because sometimes I want to have sex and I don't feel like waiting 3 1/2 hours ok?  If I'm driving my car I can pull over and have sex whenever I feel like it.  I can stick my head out the window whenever I want when driving my car as well.....AS WELL AS ON A TRAIN, but not an airline.  The simple fact is, is that people have a better quality of life on a train than they do on a plane.  You can't refute that.  No one on a train has ever told me how to use a seatbelt.  No one on a train has every told me that at some point during my commute oxygen bags might fall from the ceiling and I should let my kid suffocate while I struggle to fasten my own.

You source was flawed (yet again), as my source showed their were over 900,000,000 train commuters in the U.S. alone.  Also, the data you supplied as having 800 million flying a year is flawed as the airlines treat stewardess and pilots as occupants in the flight.  So considering a plane has 3 pilots and 8 stewardess' being counted both ways on each flight we can safely knock 200 million people off your number and thus showing the fact that train lines are more used than airlines.  Why do you think the trains post a loss?  It's because so many people are riding and using fuel that the old obsolete trains can't keep up.  It's red tape, thats all.  Also, private companies do make trains.  BNSF and Amtrak make trains all the time.

You would never make it in college with your sub-par sourcing.  You're going to have to step it up if you plan to make it in life son.

He's obviously trolling if you can't tell by his tone and content.

OHHHH GREAT!  Didn't see this one coming.  Every time I start to win an argument, along comes KEN-JENNINGS and his liberal gang of faggots to try an DE-ligitimize my arguments.  If you can't beat them with facts, just gang up on them and verbally beat them out of the discussion.  People like you guys are why our country is going down the toilet and women are murdering babies on a daily basis.  Everytime someone like me takes the moral high ground someone like comes along and tries to make taking the moral high ground a bad thing.  MAYBE SOMEONE NEEDS TO TAKE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND!!!  We live in a society were it's perfectly acceptable for a 15 year old boy to watch gang bang anal porn on the computer and for little 12 year old girls wear push up bras and get abortions.  Half the time I can't even defend myself from you hyenas because I have to wait 30 minutes between posting because I'm not liberal enough to warrant membership.  Don't worry Jay, we'll come to your rescue, EM's a clown, hes a TROLL, no one listen to him, he's a fool.  If me thinking mothers MURDERING their babies is wrong  makes me a fool then I guess I'm a fool.

Go back to a political thread you thugs, grown ups are talking here and your left wing garbage doesn't apply.