There are two big problems with the way Amtrak is doing this:
1) As if there's a Federal interest, rather than a regional one
2) As if the NEC needs win a race with other railroads, when all it really needs to do is beat the airlins.
1) The problem with Amtrak is that it makes NE Governments stupid and dependent. HSR would be a huge win for the NEC. Clearly, using other people's money (the Feds) would be even huger, but in the process we act like we can't/shouldn't do this thing for ourselves, but instead should wait around for somebody else to shower it on us as a gift, rather than just something like a 1c Regional Fuel Tax (over 40 years).
And here's the other kicker...
bypass New York????? And get Congressional approval to do so? Yeah...a House of Representatives apportioned by population does not work that way.
Go through 3-5 states dependent on a New York stop as the cost of doing business and your greatest-fastest-bestest build ever must stop in New York. There is no logic in the "A+" route and investment therein kicking NYC to the slow lane, because the majority of the demand is still shaped by the slow lane. No Congresscritter taking the temperature of his/her own district would vote to fund that.
2) It starts from the wrong technological and competitive assumptions.
If it is totally-new ROW (which I don't recommend), it makes sense to do Maglev. If all these new lines are going through "populated" areas, you're going to end up doing a whole lot of tunneling. But if you're spending 10x to tunnel from NYC to Providence, the additional marginal cost of going to maglev is insignificant, but you get an additional 2x in speed. You'd no more put conventional rail in that expensive tunnel than you'd put a canal boat in there.
No, they shouldn't. Maglev is never getting out of the laboratory in any serious way because conventional-rail HSR has so hugely closed the technological gap. To-date there is no maglev system in the world longer than 19 miles, and the only ones that have proceeded to the serious (non-fantasy or whitepaper) stages are more of the same: airport dinkys and commuter shuttles. Niches where it may viably be able to replace automated people movers. Those grand HSR maglev proposals around the world are one-by-one getting chucked into the file cabinet next to Hyperloop and getting supplanted by common-carrier HSR proposals that can be done sooner, less costly, at larger scale, and with confidence that the technological gap is going to keep quickly narrowing. Hundreds more miles of real HSR track worldwide open up every year. The worldwide market has made its choice on Jetsons Shit rail.
Maglev's not going to graduate beyond technology test bed. It's
useful as a test bed because that's helped push innovation along on all kinds of transportation tech...and it is a real testable technology unlike Hyperloop. But common-carrier rails, including the ones that segregate high-speed and low-speed traffic on different infrastructure, always have the better scale and better cost-per mile. And always have more flexibility to mix common-carrier traffic in constrained areas, alt-route anywhere under the sun, or to fill in empty frequencies. Look at DesertXPress, which began its conceptual life as a maglev. How fast did it take their private developers to see that...duh!...thru-routing into CAHSR after flying across the desert opened up way more travel options to Vegas from the coast. That's where every maglev proposal starts wavering. It's not raw performance, but the options...so many more options.
It's important not to demagogue the FRA's faults so badly as to call for junking the U.S. rail network with isolated splinter modes. North America has the most standardized common-carrier rail network on the planet. If we want something that serves this continent's needs...embrace it, don't extinguish it. A national HSR network has none of the patchwork of platform heights, loading gauges, rail gauges, incompatible electrification schemes, incompatible signaling schemes, and so on that the EU has to square which has to shape and contort a lot of those cross-continent routes to certain paths over others, lots more frequent transfers, and certain on-a-map direct routes off-limits to practical thru traffic. It's an administrative nightmare for them in the same sense that everything EU-integration is an administrative nightmare.
The North American rail system's problem is funding, not flex. The NEC is a special beast to tackle because it's through some of the oldest, most built-up, and most constrained megalopolis in the world. But applied at Euro/Asia levels to, say, the Midwest? The South? The West? Trans-Canada? Fuck yes a capacity-enhanced North American common-carrier network can reach that performance level with less overhead than EuroLand because of the standardization in our common carrier rails.
Embrace and extend. I honestly think the "KILL THE FRA!" shouting (just read some of the CAHSR blogs out there for a taste of that) is really unproductive.
Competitively, the real problem (that former NYCTA and WMATA head and Amtrak exec David Gunn points out)is that its designed as if the line has to out-compete the Shinkansen, when in reality, all it has to do is out-compete the PHL and LGA airports (which isn't nearly as hard)
David Gunn estimates that if you want to shave 30minutes off trips, it is way cheaper to build city-center stations in Baltimore and Philly that save a 15 minute cab ride, and to improve circulation at NY Penn rather than trying to save the same 30 minutes by upgrading long stretches of right of way.
Gunn is a smart, smart dude. He's a little bit of a lightning rod for some of his quirks, but that guy "gets it" about what's uniquely American about American travel patterns. And has "gotten it" decades longer than anyone else. My nitpick with some otherwise scary-smart transportation advocates (Alon Levy, I'm looking in your direction) is engaging too much in "transit tourism"...a sprinkle of Shinkansen here, a dash of TGV there, some U-bahn there...where it cherry-picks individualized feature preferences from regions
completely different from each other. France isn't Germany, and nobody in Europe is like Japan. Things that work in one country would be bad fits in another. But there's this blind spot in some of those voices where the dogma that "The U.S. is stupid if it doesn't do this FrankenTrain mix of things I saw on semester abroad" doesn't take into any account what a uniquely U.S. (or NAFTA countries) rail system is supposed to do that's uniquely North American. If all those other systems grew up around their native lands, what's a native system here? It's not "be Europe with a slice of Japan",
Tell you what...the
freight system is what's uniquely North American. The standards compliance that grew organically from the freight system (and got more efficient in the NAFTA era) is uniquely North American. Co-existence of traffic and routing anywhere-to-anywhere across NAFTA-land is uniquely North American. Don't pretend it doesn't exist. Sketch out an HSR system with all the HSR frills like traffic separation by high/medium/slow-speed lanes off that idea. It doesn't mean we're stuck in the freight-speed era or FRA buff-strength era forever. It does mean that an open system that shape-fits to the most important blended nodes on the existing system--like Gunn says--is what'll make it work here.
Gunn gets that.
It is way better and cheaper to speed the trips at their destinations (where the cities would be thrilled and the NIMBYs would be minimal) rather than trying to carve a straighter path through the 'burbs.
Also along those lines, a tunnel under select Connecticut curvy spots ( New London CT) is cheaper than a whole lot of new ROW upstate.
Yes and no.
The cross-Sound tunnel manifest destiny thing has been around since the early interstate highway era. I really have to roll eyes every time the Oyster Bay-to-CT8, or New Haven-to-I91, or Watch Hill/I-495 routings get dusted off in another permutation. This time on rail. There's no evidence that's going to look any better a deal when studied out as the last 10 times it was studied out.
That said, the Springfield Line is an unused asset because it can be pushed and straightened to higher speed south of Hartford. It's got the right mix of downtown centers for demand and wipe-able industrial crud for speed improvements. And Hartford-east has a mix of the straightest portions of the ex-NYNE ROW and bypass alternatives through the Eastern CT "quiet corner". Like the I-384 bootstrap routing which would pretty much present 150 MPH territory save for about 2 slow zones at Bolton Notch and in the density around Warwick, RI. NYC-Boston used to have FOUR routings: Shoreline, Inland, NYNE, and Air Line. The two surviving (sorta) ones trapped the highest ridership, but the Shoreline route sucking isn't a new thing...they were trying to solve that problem 100 years ago.
I'm a lot more dubious about the Westchester-I84 routing. The New Haven Line, slow and congested and all, just can't be beat for maximal-ridership destinations. So I think you will to some degree, even if the HSR routes split on semi-parallel flanks, have to engage that as one of your trunk mainlines. For the same reasons Gunn says...the demand's too much better hitting city centers and then working your time savings outside city centers. The "Gunn Model" HSR is pretty obvious here: use the Springfield Line and the Eastern CT bypass for time savings on one end, use the New Jersey swamplands and something some off-NEC excursions between Baltimore, Wilmington, and Philly as a speedup on another end...and don't sweat the blending at built-up stations where people need the current NEC stops most.
That is North American standardization in a nutshell. Gunn "gets it". Lots of wiggle room on how you implement it and where the diversions go. I'm not even remotely suggesting there's only one way to do it or that what I cited is anything more than 1 example out of 20. But this cleanrooming fetish is an answer to a question the real sources of demand aren't asking. So embrace it, assimilate it as our own...don't run from it. That's the (North) American way.
