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jp
ok if coney island is sprawl YOU ARE RIGHT.
but i won't agree with that. where would the population go, if not to fill the city.

sprawl is the strip mall, the mc mansions. sprawl is driving 2 hours both ways to work and the 1.5 acre on the land that was a farm, sprawl is one or 2 story homes
sprawl is not natural population growth. just settling the west is not sprawl it's the way one lives that makes it sprawl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl.
u are right about the plane but. we also used to have more local trains all over the nation. a plane won't get me to mt. holly! a train used to.

hjs from 11211

Nope, sorry, sprawl originally came from trains and trolleys. Coney Island was built by a trolley company so riders would go to the end of the line. After that, the undeveloped part of that line very quickly filled in. This happened all across America well before the car was even thought of. All along the Continental railroad, the rail companies bought up all the land around the tracks and sold it to people who wanted to settle out west. The railroad was able to bring people where it was impossible to travel and settle before. Look it up, it’s all in your 10th grade American history class.

Marc Naroshkhyn from Brooklyn,

People say the car killed train travel but really it was the plane. When transcontinental flight became safe enough for regular travel in the late 50’s, transcontinental train travel quickly began to go under. So did steam ship travel to Europe, a downfall you cannot blame on cars. By the time Robert Moses came around and WWII, most street car service was already transformed to buses. But there is no denying he did a lot of damage….

A lot of these comments are factually incorrect (such as the caller who suggested that "pushers" are used on Japanese high-speed rail - they are used on subways or MAYBE commuter rail). The person from Munich doesn't know how expensive rail travel is here, especially considering what you get for it. If airfares were adjusted to reflect their carbon emission, NONE of them would be cheaper than rail - these are unfortunate, environmentally unsound subsidies of an energy inefficient mode of transportation. No "Schoenes Wochenende" (Wonderful Weekend) ticket here either. However, even with Ryan air and others, air travel on some routes served by the TGV/ ICE has been radically reduced due to the competition from rail. Many of these routes are also quite profitable, in Europe many passenger routes are actually more profitable than freight. Ruthless use of eminent domain is quite common here, especially when connected with private interests, one need only look at the Atlantic Yards project. The TGV runs largely through rural areas - it connects with the existing lines when approaching cities. It is true that the French have not been as considerate as the Germans with regard to sound reduction, but the overall environmental impact of a high-speed rail line is miniscule when compared with a highway. Sound reduction can always be added, what do you do about emissions from engines? The bottom line is, Americans simply don't know what high-speed rail is, Acela doesn't quite cut it. We have not one single dedicated line in this country, so we are 30, if not 45 years (Japan) behind. Rather than the Band-Aid approach which seems to be destroying the health care initiative, let's just build one good one, for example, Orlando-Miami. High visibilty, word-of-mouth, it will speak for itself, traveling 200 mph+ as they now do in France. Then Americans will want high-speed rail.

jp
sprawl came from cars and the highway system not trains.

JP from NJ,

You're absolutely right: much of this country was built on rail capacity, not motor vehicle capacity. That being said, much of this country that was only sparsely settled before WW2 was developed after WW2 with the automobile in mind, using a low-density pattern that has since rendered commuter rail irrelevant in some areas. I'm refering here to Robert A Caro's outstanding biography of Robert Moses, where he quotes LI traffic engineers who in 1973 bemoaned the development patterns in LI. Unless millions of people are moved out of low-density residential development and into high-density housing, we must be honest and admit that some of these passenger rail schemes are simply pie-in-the-sky money pits.

There would not have been a birth of sprawl across the US if it was not for the creation of the continental railroad. We forget that before cars, trains and street cars did just as good a job at sparsely spreading the population across this very big country…

High-Speed Rail misses the point. It would be great to travel on the train, but almost all American Cities need cars to navigate; without a change of urban planning (the creation of walkable, public transit cities), trains between glorified strip-malls will fail!

I hate flying on shorter flights (e.g NYC-Raleigh/Durham) and I'd see a lot more of the US if there were high speed trains between various cities. I took the Acela from DC and while it was not cheap, it was a very pleasant experience, almost like being on the express trains in Italy.

You would have to build a hybrid system and not a true strait line high speed rail like most in Europe or right now on the Boston to DC line. Otherwise you would have to literally plow strait through whatever is in the path of the new high speed rail. Plus no other country in the world that has an effective and efficient high speed rail system does not even come remotely close to the size of the United States (we quickly forget we are the 3rd largest land mass country in the world). Plus you have to take into the effect we have some of the roughest terrain in the world. This all adds up to a very expensive system, especially considering our existing passenger train system is in shambles compared to what it was in its prime.

200 years of organized travel have proven that the real money is not in passenger service, but in freight and cargo. Instead of acquring rights-of-way for billions of dollars, misusing and abusing imminent domain and the condemnation process for billions of dollars more, why not take advantage of the thousands of miles of already existing right-of-way and put this money into frieght service, thus reducing truck traffic, wear and tear on our roads, and reducing fuel consumption, too. This passenger service idea is just throwing good money after bad. Put it in frieght, however, and the pay-off will be far broader throughout the society -- and it can be done for far, far less.

It's amazing that we call train travel more convenient without ever discussing exactly what that means. It's not faster. It's not always cheaper (at least here in Europe it isn't always cheaper). By convenient, I think people just mean you aren't treated so poorly as you are in an airplane. You have some more space, often the freedom to sit where you want. You don't get treated like a criminal in the boarding process and you aren't then told that you are being treated poorly for your own safety. Maybe we should address the lack of convenience in air travel, too.

will old structures near the tracks be revitalized -- or torn down for contemporary ugliness?

will existing lines be expanded between Buffalo and NYC --if so, will the great old architectural structures near the tracks be threatened -- or preserved?

I am all for the development of a high-speed-rail network, but we have to understand that it's not as easy to secure rights of way and satisfy environmental-impact restrictions here as it is in the countries where these programs have been implemented. In France the authorities are ruthless using eminent domain, and a lot of private interests are damaged in a way that would not be tolerated in the US.

I am from France but now living in California. I think a high speed train would make sense from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It would be so much faster and convenient than driving or flying.

modern infrastructure or endless wars.

we'll take more wars please.