[jacquesl]

It’s an incentives problem in the United States. In Japan, for example, the railways are private (so they need to turn a profit) and you usually have supermarkets and department stores on the stations. The stations are the hub. When you look at commuter lines into large cities in the US, you are driving hours to a parking lot with nothing but a platform near by.

[adrianN]

As I understand it, railway companies in Japan are real estate companies in disguise. They own the land around the stations and make a significant chunk of their money from that. Real estate around train stations is quite valuable.

[barry-cotter]

Isn’t that model illegal in the US?

[manigandham]

No, why would it be? Any company can own real estate. Here's a more in-depth article explaining it: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/05/secret-tokyos...

[alteria]

The big transcontinental railroads own several feet around the railroad, which is prime real estate for cables and the like.

[vidanay]

Historical note: A significant portion of that land was granted by the US government in the 19th century to incentivize westward expansion.

[beerandt]

I think you mean several miles. Which is why the PLSS grid looks like a checkerboard out west. Alternating sections for the public and the RR companies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)

[evanelias]

It's legal and it's a model being increasingly adopted in the US, for better or worse. In the NYC metro area, both Port Authority and NJ Transit are visibly leaning on this model to drive revenue.

[manigandham]

It's also a geographic, real-estate, and political problem. There's not enough density in enough areas with enough last-mile coverage for trains to work like other countries.

[9nGQluzmnq3M]

Many cities solve this chicken and egg problem by building the necessary density next to the train station. Hong Kong and Japan are the most famous examples, but it works in Singapore and large chunks of Europe as well (although Parisian banlieues may not be the best model of urban planning for other reasons...).

[manigandham]

That falls under "political" problem. Who's going to build it? Who's paying for it? Where are they getting the land? Is it existing rail lines or new ones?

The obstacles are known, they need to be overcome, and that's very difficult in the 3rd-biggest country by population and land area with an incredibly diverse set of national and regional governance and cultures.

[closeparen]

Financing the development is not the problem, getting the neighbors to consent to it is.

[arcticbull]

Yes it’s sad to see America’s giving up before even trying. Defeatism I believe.

[manigandham]

It's not useful to generalize like that. America is far bigger than most can imagine and the current challenges are much greater than the benefits.

The US doesn't just need trains as good as Japan, it needs them to be at least twice as good for the investments to make sense.

[arcticbull]

I have no idea why you think it has to be “twice as good” or what all that even means.

With that behind us, nobody’s proposing high speed rail from San Diego to Boston, just LA to SF and along the eastern corridor. And we can’t event have that. Let’s start small.

[chao-]

How about starting medium? Houston to Dallas.

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/05/15/texas-bullet-train-a...

I don't know the full list of requirements, but a route has been chosen, some number of federal approvals have been granted, some regulatory hurdles passed, and supposedly two federal approvals remain.

The route is easier (engineering and cost-wise), due to geography, than the California rail, or anything in the Eastern corridor, and to keep it even easier they're running it along existing utility corridors where possible to further reduce the amount of private land access they have to contend with:

https://www.texascentral.com/alignment-maps/

[manigandham]

It means that unless the trains are moving at 400mph with perfect comfort, free wifi, and a price of $20, nobody cares.

LA to SF is a 1 hour flight as cheap as $50, with the same last-mile effort and total trip time as a train. Airlines are also elastic to meet demand without major capex.

So who's going to spend the 100s of billions to buy the land and build a line for a 2-3x slower travel option that will take a century to be paid back? California is actually trying to do this and has failed miserably because the land and infrastructure costs alone make the project infeasible.

[Mountain_Skies]

There are some odd outliers such as Salt Lake City, which has pretty low density, but the transit system is well used. It's far from universal service but in the areas it serves, it is rather popular with a wide cross section of the population.