[kaziusklasterzoroaster]

A friend of mine was complaining that the federal government had once offered to build a high speed train line between Madison and Milwaukee at no cost to the state of Wisconsin, but the governor of Wisconsin had rejected this offer, to 'save taxpayer money'.

Now, I think that reality is probably slightly more complicated than my friend's telling of it, but let's say that this was all correct.

First off, I am going to note a few things:

1. ~90% of households in both metropolitan areas (like most metropolitan areas in America) have at least one car
2. these two metropolitan areas are 1.5 hours apart, by car
3. neither metropolitan area has a public transit system that's as good as Europe's -- buses come every 15 to 60 minutes, and don't thoroughly serve large parts of either metropolitan area. Like most American cities, the public transit network is bad enough that almost no one who has a choice -- i.e., a job and the basic level of ability needed to get a driver's license -- chooses to ride public transit. The only practical way to traverse either metropolitan area is by car.
4. Airports in America deal with points (1) and (3) by having multiple car rental companies available at each airport. The price is $30 to $100 per day, the wait time can be an hour or more for walk-ins, and they're well known for fucking over customers to ridiculous degrees.

So, let's say that the federal government did build a high-speed train line between them. Let's say that the trains come every half hour. Let's say that they ran 1000 miles an hour. Let's say they cost nothing to ride.

Given all this, what the door-to-door journey for a train trip from Madison to Milwaukee looks like is:

1. you drive to the train station, park there, and pray that no one breaks into your car while you are gone
2. you take the train
3. you, what... rent a new car, when you get there? Expensive. Or you take the bus, and then walk the rest of the way? Can potentially triple or quintuple travel times, and is dirty.
4. Keep either driving around the rented car or taking the bus until you take the train home
5. Get into your car (if it wasn't stolen) and go home

Where-as, right now, it looks like:

1. Drive directly from one part of one city to the other part of the other city. You don't pay any money other than for gas, because you already own a car. Everything other than hour-and-a-half journey between the two (which lets you cut out wait times, bus waiting times, bus travel times, and so on) is as fast as possible.

Even in this ridiculously optimistic idea of a free super-train, all the OTHER parts of the trip make it much longer and/or much more expensive than just using the car that you already own to do the journey.

A free high speed train line, to be useful for the cities of Madison and Milwaukee, would need better-than-New-York level public transit systems to be installed in BOTH cities, which would be a multi-decade construction project at massive taxpayer expense all for... what clear benefit, exactly, to the average voting citizen in either city?

And yeah, the state would still realistically have to be the ones to provide for policing and maintenance of the train line between cities.

That all this gets ignored by urbanism nerds and Europeans leads me to conclude two things:

• the urbanism nerds seem like they love trains almost to a sexual degree, and whatever explanation they give for them is just a disguise for a fundamentally irrational pro-train impulse... trains are not a means to them, they are an end
• American urbanism nerds have a deep envy for Europe, to a degree that I have to wonder about the ideological roots of
• Europeans who want America to copy European solutions out of European context have an essentially colonial attitude, which is funny, because it's so divorced from the material reality of things

[rainthetrain]

@amtrak-official thoughts?

[amtrak-official]

First I want to say, I agree that the urbanist obsession with Europe is very Annoying and at times concerning. We need to design transit solutions for the US and even the urbanist wet dream of the Netherlands isn’t as perfect as people say.

But here’s the thing, I disagree with the premise that building the train wouldn’t reduce car dependence at all because cities can place the stations in dense areas where cars aren’t needed and even if the stations aren’t in those areas, the locations can be improved with TOD and Bus network expansions which are pretty cheap compared to rail to build. Another thing I have to meantion in thr premise that buses are garenteed to be unclean and slow, which isn’t true, if a city properly invests in its bus network it can be very clean, and safe. The biggest reason busses are seen as dirty and unsafe is because they are underfunded and seenas transit for the poor.

Rail transit both intercity and local is proven to bring investment meaning it almost always pays off in the long run. So even if a city doesn’t have good transit, HSR can still have benefits.

And one more thing, the ultimate goal of that High-speed rail proposal was Milwaukee to Minneapolis is interesting because Minneapolis is proof that in less than 20 years a decent, functional transit system can be built in a city for the benefit of its citizens, for transit to be effective it doesn’t have to be New York, it just has to be able to take people where they want to go