Tag Archives: high speed rail

self-driving cabs in Japan next year?

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We’ve been told self-driving cars might be commercialized on a wide scale by 2025 or 2030. Only in Japan, they are saying 1-5 years. How many years behind is the U.S. typically? Well, if we take the example of high speed rail, Japan started operation in 1964, and projections are that the U.S. will have it…never.

In all seriousness though, this is different. U.S. politicians representing rural areas have power out of proportion to the populations they represent, and because high speed rail can never efficiently serve those sparsely populated rural areas, it is politically nearly impossible. But we have designed our entire country around cars. U.S. politics also support big business – including auto, tech, and insurance companies – and opposes public transportation, all for weird incomprehensible ideological reasons. So the self-driving cars will come.

trains

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The sad Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia reminded me of this sad article, Why Can’t America Have Great Trains? An excerpt:

Compared with the high-speed trains of Western Europe and East Asia, American passenger rail is notoriously creaky, tardy, and slow. The Acela, currently the only “high-speed” train in America, runs at an average pace of 68 miles per hour between Washington and Boston; a high-speed train from Madrid to Barcelona averages 154 miles per hour. Amtrak’s most punctual trains arrive on schedule 75 percent of the time; judged by Amtrak’s lax standards, Japan’s bullet trains are late basically 0 percent of the time.

And those stats don’t figure to improve anytime soon. While Amtrak isn’t currently in danger of being killed, it also isn’t likely to do more than barely survive. Last month, the House of Representatives agreed to fund Amtrak for the next four years at a rate of $1.4 billion per year. Meanwhile, the Chinese government—fair comparison or not—will be spending $128 billion this year on rail. (Thanks to the House bill, though, Amtrak passengers can look forward to a new provision allowing cats and dogs on certain trains.)

A few decades ago, news of another middling Amtrak appropriation wouldn’t have warranted a second glance; passenger rail was unpopular and widely thought to be obsolete. But recently, Amtrak’s popularity has actually spiked. Ridership has increased by roughly 50 percent in the past 15 years, and ridership in the Northeast Corridor stood at an all-time high in 2014. Amtrak also now accounts for 77 percent of all rail and air travel between Washington and New York, up from just 37 percent when it launched the Acela in 2000.

Trains connect cities and ignore the empty spaces in between, while highways serve those empty spaces. In our U.S. “republican” system (in the original dictionary sense of the word), our politicians disproportionately represent those population and economic dead zones, so that anti-city and economically unproductive nonsense policy positions pay off in power and re-election. These same politicians also find that it doesn’t hurt to throw a little racism, homophobia and xenophobia into the mix just for good measure. It’s about fear of those people in the city who are not like you.