A 20-year-old woman named Cara sent out a tweet showing a map of a high-speed rail plan that someone with no sense made eight years ago with the comment, “I want her so fucking much.” She got 185,000 likes and 50,000 retweets, so Vox concluded that Generation Z (also known as zoomers) is sold on high-speed rail.
The high-speed rail map endorsed by Cara. Click image to read the Antiplanner’s comments on the map when it was released in 2013.
Of course, not everyone who liked or retweeted Cara’s tweet is necessarily a member of Gen Z, nor are zoomers (who number more than 60 million) necessarily accurately represented by 235,000 likes and retweets. But I remember when I was 20 years old and loved passenger trains and was convinced there was an evil conspiracy to kill them off, even though I personally hadn’t ridden on very many of them because they were too expensive. I suspect Cara is just as naive today.
Aside from the contractors who will make a ton of money if high-speed rail lines are built, support for it comes mainly from people who are nostalgic about the past (though they didn’t live there and don’t remember that passenger trains were once used mainly by the elites), people who don’t want to be cramped into tiny airline seats (though they aren’t willing to pay first-class airfares but are willing to let other people pay for them to ride in high-speed trains), and people who fantasize that a system whose infrastructure costs $100 million to $200 million per mile will somehow cost less to ride than a system whose infrastructure is mostly free (namely the air).
I have to wonder if Cara or any member of Generation Z would support high-speed rail if they knew:
- The nearly 20,000 miles of lines on the map Cara endorsed would cost at least $3 trillion and take decades to build;
- Tickets to ride the trains would either cost far more than flying or have to be heavily subsidized;
- Most people will rarely ride it and those who ride it most frequently would mainly be in the upper incomes, while the subsidies to support the trains would almost certainly come mainly from regressive taxes, making the trains especially socially unjust; and
- The environmental cost of building the lines would swamp any operational savings so that they would be a greenhouse gas disaster.
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Zoomers have been dismissive boomers because we are supposedly the ones who created all the problems they see today. While I could argue that point, what kind of problems does Gen Z want on its conscience? Perhaps massively greater debt than ever before? A stagnant economy due to the nation’s inability to repay that debt? Increased income and wealth inequality? Dramatically increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere? That’s what they will get from high-speed rail, not comfy cross-country rides.
Anyone using a bong, beer or otherwise, should not be turned to for policy advice.
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Tickets to ride the trains would either cost far more than flying or have to be heavily subsidized;
” ~anti-planner
I just saw someone, maybe it was an op-ed, extolling the virtues of high speed rail. Their example? China.
They pointed out that you can ride Beijing to Shanghai for $50 and cover that 1000 kilometers lickety-split.
What they didn’t share with people is that you can fly the same route for $50 in half the time.
Note that the scale bar in the lower left part of the map says “travel time at 220 mph”. This implies that the routes in the network will average 220 mph, not that it will be the top speed along any segment.
This means almost certainly that any roadway crossing will need to be grade separated. It also means that routes will need to find relatively fast (and unobtrusive) ways of getting into large urban areas. Bear in mind that this consideration is part of what doomed the LA-SF high-speed line.
Also note that Chicago is a major hub of the proposed network. How will movements into and out of this region be handled? There are existing rail lines that used by lower-speed trains to get into and out of the central city, but they are not equipped to handle HSR and Chicago’s freight rail network is already one of the major bottlenecks for inter-regional freight movement. Loading more traffic onto it would only degrade it further.
“… routes will need to find relatively fast (and unobtrusive) ways of getting into large urban areas.”
Reminded me of this editorial from Gilroy CA a dozen years ago:
“…the station that’s proposed for Gilroy will require two miles of 100-foot-wide clearance for tracks — one mile north of the station, one mile south of the station. This allows the trains enough distance for slowing as they approach the station, as well as another track so that express trains can pass trains stopped at the station.
Take a tape measure and look at what 100 feet is and ask yourself: Where in downtown Gilroy could that much track go?”
https://gilroydispatch.com/with-brakes-on-high-speed-rail-project-lets-look-at-our-options/
Is this map using the font from Star Trek, Deep Space Nine?
Yes, a Bajoran font for sure. Kara is likely an autist and clearly has never traveled from Denver to Utah because there ain’t no way HSR is even possible there. Or maybe that’s why that’s why she used a science fiction font?
I think the Antiplanner actually caught the font style used, and mocked it in his previous post about this, which he linked to.
A person living in central Montana (Great Falls, Helena) is nearly 500 miles from the nearest high speed terminal. Right now you can get tickets to the hub airports Salt Lake, Denver, Chicago or Seattle for about $100. These flights range from and hour to an hour and a half. By their logic you would have to drive to Salt lake which would take between 7-10hours. Also, there is next to no way Montana or other inland western states would ever have the population density to justify extending service there.
“support for it comes mainly from people who are nostalgic about the past (though they didn’t live there and don’t remember that passenger trains were once used mainly by the elites),”
I am in a few FB rail groups both modern and classical and you do have a disproportional number of geezers who actually did ride on the old trains. Of course the thing is a lot of them probably were around five years old so they don’t remember the experience accurately. I am sure a seven year old who rode the Sunset(“limited”) in 1970 to them it was the time of their lives even tho to most people it was the worst way to possibly travel. Many of them claim they got a good deal but its obviously the geezer mentality of not adjusting prices for inflation.