As someone who recently moved to the Texas triangle, I’m baffled by the lack of good transportation options between the three cities. It’s a 3-4 hour drive and while there is a train, freight gets priority. So the train takes anywhere from 3-7 hours. You can fly but with security any sort of delay and it would faster to drive.
Check out Vonlane. They are deluxe buses that cover the Texas triangle. We use them for work to move our guys between Houston / Austin regularly and people seem to love it. It's pretty cheap, comfortable, and has wifi.
Will second (third?) Vonlane. After using them, I don't understand why anyone would prefer a flight between Austin and Houston compared to Vonlane. The time is about the same when you factor in the hassle of airport security, and Vonlane goes downtown-to-downtown. The bus is super comfortable with big seats (comparable to domestic first class on an airline) and the service when I've gone has been fantastic. I can also get a ton of work done on the trip if so desired. Once I went and there was an accident on the route that made the trip from Austin to Houston about 45 mins longer, but I didn't care at all as the bus was so nice to work in.
They're priced that way because they compete with shuttle flights, and most importantly, they are far from a normal "bus" experience - the images shown at https://vonlane.com/ are accurate IMO.
A plan to connect Houston to Dallas with a bullet train has been grinding its way along for years now[0]. Since Texas is loath to use eminent ___domain, the planning phase has been stalled for a loooong time.
Texas is very willing to use eminent ___domain, but perhaps not for rail projects or there are different statues for such a project. The use of eminent ___domain is pretty common for pipeline projects
It seems to have been largely forgotten (or never remembered, as transplants weren't around for it), but I think there's still a lot of scar tissue around eminent ___domain after the failed Trans-Texas Corridor project. It was pushed by a very popular Republican governor and completely failed after public outcry.
> Since Texas is loath to use eminent ___domain, the planning phase has been stalled for a loooong time.
Is this a state policy? It isn't necessarily a city one, see https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/fort-worth/article2... and related which I've seen pop up in the news at time for decades. "The City Council has authorized the use of eminent ___domain 29 times in the past two years, the most the city has used the land grabbing tactic since 2013."
Yes, it's a state thing. Getting city people aligned is much easier because the area is much smaller in total area, as well as the parcels of land are smaller. Once you get into the open land outside of the city, the parcels of land become larger with smaller number of owners that are very loath to allow the state to "come and take it". You might get one person to agree, but then the surrounding owners say no, and the route has to change yet again.
Rephrased, Texans think the rights of private land owners matter more than the latest politician’s talking points.
The people downvoting this have clearly never had government agents steal anything from them. Or believe that when they do, it’s always “for the greater good”.
What’s this “transportation right” you speak of? The right to roam isn’t guaranteed by the constitution, but protection against unlawful seizure of private property is. We should be careful to not conflate the rights actually guaranteed to us by the law of the land with things that various individuals feel are “nice to have”. And certainly not deprioritize the former in favor of the latter.
That requires “just compensation”, as per the text of the very amendment I cited. Texan voters are unwilling to provide the compensation. Therefore the project does not go forward. It’s really a very simple concept.
It's interesting that the government can't convince owners to sell. I mean - we're talking about politicians. They manage to negotiate everything and compromise even in the middle of wars. See prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine right now. Or Israel and Hamas. Worst enemies and they can still find a compromise.
It can't be just about money - governments successfully negotiate with unions that hold the whole country over a barrel with strikes of essential services.
But eminent ___domain to build vital infrastructure? No - forced confiscation is the only solution. Strange.
The problem is that there are only so many viable paths between cities. Rails is worse than roads in this case because turns can't be as sharp and grades can't be as steep.
When there are potentially tens of thousands of property owners along that path, each property owner can derail the whole thing or add enormous costs, so they have an insanely strong negotiating position. If you were just to attempt to negotiate with each property owner, the cost would make building new rail in a populated area impossible.
There has never been any real length of railroad built through a populated area with many landowners without some kind of government intervention akin to eminent ___domain.
It's a tragedy of the commons situation - you might be able to buy 90% of the land for a "reasonable price" (which is hard to define - depending on the type of land use, the value of the owner's entire plot would change significantly by having a train going by every day, sometimes greater sometimes lesser), but if the remaining 10% don't play ball you can't have the train.
So the government is in a position of "we'll give you X for this, but if you don't agree we'll just take it from you", which is a... non-Texan position for government to be in, to say the least.
> So the government is in a position of "we'll give you X for this, but if you don't agree we'll just take it from you", which is a... non-Texan position for government to be in, to say the least.
Texas government doesn't seem to have that reservation when it comes to highway expansions within cities, that's for sure.
Good point. But highway expansions have localized benefits in ways trains don't. Everyone "knows" that another lane would fix everything on their daily commute, so amassing the political capital to make it happen isn't too hard. But a train to connect distant region X to distant region Y, by taking land from folks who hardly ever make that trip anyways? Harder sell.
Imagine that you had to negotiate with a homeowner. You could find a price where you could buy their property.
Now imagine that you had to negotiate with 10,000 homeowners. At least one of them is going to insist that their place is worth one billion dollars and count on you caving because they can hold up the entire project.
That's why forced confiscation - because people try to hold the project hostage for ransom.
> because people try to hold the project hostage for ransom
Unions hold countries hostage by closing down rail or airports. Still, a solution that doesn't cost 1 billion dollars per person is always found.
> imagine that you had to negotiate with 10,000 homeowners
Imagine you offer them 2-10x market value. With a confidentiality clause. And the threat of confiscation or project abandonment. I believe an amiable solution would be found in most cases.
> Unions hold countries hostage by closing down rail or airports. Still, a solution that doesn't cost 1 billion dollars per person is always found.
Completely different situation. You only need the majority of the workers in the union. No single person or small group of people can hold up the process.
For this situation to be at all similar to a union negation, you’d need to group all affected property owners together, offer them some multiple of property value each and ask for a group vote as a binding decision.
That’s still eminent ___domain, just potentially with a higher payout, which equates to a higher cost to the taxpayers.
The government almost never does the work on an infrastructure project, but the high price of infrastructure have much less to with the fact that the government is paying the bill than with the regulations that any project public or private has to work within.
If we stopped eminent ___domain though, property purchase prices probably would become a significant portion of the total expense.
> Unions hold countries hostage by closing down rail or airports. Still, a solution that doesn't cost 1 billion dollars per person is always found.
Sure. It's often found in the form of a court decision.
> Imagine you offer them 2-10x market value. With a confidentiality clause. And the threat of confiscation or project abandonment. I believe an amiable solution would be found in most cases.
Sure - in most cases. And for the ones that won't? You're going to have to either abandon the project, wait for them to die, or confiscate.
Then you confiscate, sure. And show publicly that you offered 10x and were refused. But not confiscation by default, in all cases.
I guess my argument is that if you really want something, you better pay up. Like for anything else, from cars and boats to 10x developers. What if the government could come to you whenever they want and say: I forcefully require your work and talent and I will not pay more than market price for it.
The problem is who gets to determine the value of that land. If the government wants you to write software for them for a year, you can protest that you’re a 10x developer deserving millions of dollars all you want, all they need to do is look at your tax return for the last year and pay you double or whatever.
On the other hand, if your family has been living on that ranch and tending that land for hundreds of years, and every generation has contributed to building out and maintaining the homestead, the government can’t properly say “well that derelict lot down the way sold for 100k, we’ll give you 1M and call it fair”.
I went through such a expropriation a couple years back. All I got was a notification letter and a check for corresponding amount (arguably under market value).
You just described eminent ___domain. What, you thought the government took land with no compensation? Saying it should be 2-10x market value is quibbling over execution, not ideology.
Maybe I am quibbling about execution, but as someone who went through a (tiny) expropriation I find it's huge difference between: "here's just market value (in a depressed market too) for the land you really cared about" and vs "here's a nice generous profit on something the big guys really really need.
I mean if you're gonna f_ck me in the end anyway, at least have the decency to buy me dinner first.
I mean, China has 45,000 kilometers of HSR and the US has zero. So I'm not saying that taking people's houses to build public infrastructure is always the right thing to do, but there's a case to be made for a more balanced view than just "never".
(Also China is a huge, spread out place just like the US, so miss me with those arguments about that being the reason passenger rail doesn't work here.)
If people whose houses were taken were given an amount of money that allowed them to maintain their standard of living somewhere else, I'd have no issue with increased use of eminent ___domain. Too often we do see it used in the poorest neighborhoods where people are given some kind of "market price" for their home which isn't enough to buy any other home nearby.
But even without this, the cost to build public transportation in the USA is absolutely insane. The latest figures for light rail in Houston indicate it costs $126 million per mile to build. Houston's "inner loop" (most of the densest housing, central Houston area) is 9 miles by 11 miles, and accounts for just 15% of the city of Houston's land area, or <1% of Houston metro land area. In order to get a "light rail" (above-ground subway) within 0.5 miles of everyone in the just the inner loop, you'd need to build 400 miles of light rail: 18 lines going east-west, each 11 miles long, and 22 lines going north-south, each 9 miles long.
So at $150M per mile it would cost $50 billion to build this just for the inner loop, or $330 billion for the entire city of Houston, or $5 trillion for the Houston metropolitan area. Houston's budget last year was $6 billion, and the GDP of Houston metropolitan area is $513 billion/year.
Inner loop: 96 mi^2, 450,000 people
Houston city: 665 mi^2, 2.3M people
Houston metro: 10,062 mi^2, 7.2M people
Granted, if this was built for the inner loop of Houston, the density of both residential and office space would shoot up immensely. People would love to be able to genuinely get around without a car, and right now vehicle congestion is the #1 thing limiting most inner-loop neighborhoods from expanding any more.
But you're totally ignoring the Texas ethos. I'm going to do whatever I want on my land, and I don't want your train that does absolutely nothing for me to cut through my property is a very common point of view. As a land owner, you never get back once it's been given away. They only continue to want to take more. You do it once, you just show you're willing. This is something that takes the land away forever, not leasing with monthly payments for access like an oil well.
They really just need to wait until the older owners start to die off where their kids would rather have a check than the land. It might take a few more generations though. Generational land ownership is a helluva drug
Yes, the strawman version of the case is not strong, and of course plays on the fear of possible unspecified other things we would do if we copied China as a general approach.
But what about the steelman version of the case? I think it's a lot stronger.
That living in a society entails some costs but the nice things that come with it are on balance worth those costs?
And just to be clear, different societies differ on where they put that marker. Canadians believe in free hospital visits but not (yet) in free drugs, dental, or vision care. Most westerners believe in free fire and police, free schools, and free roads to drive on. Some people are starting to experiment with food and basic housing also being human rights and therefore free, though that's not yet widespread.
A lot of Americans are okay with occasional airline bailouts if it means cheaper ticket prices. So we're definitely okay with taking some things from people for the sake of investing in transportation infrastructure (roads, bridges, parking lots, airports). Just... not for trains.
Nobody believes in "free" anything you say, they believe in the right of the government to tax all individuals in order to provide services to some (ok, some people might believe "free" hospitals are actually free, but they should hopefully be rare enough to ignore).
The question here is to what extent should the government be able to take other things (besides money) from individuals in order to provide other services to some. I believe it should be limited as much as possible, any many agree with me. It would seem Texans generally do too, as no politician has come to power on the promise of building a train from X to Y by any means possible. (Much to the chagrin of random internet commenters who have in all likelihood never traveled from X to Y in their life and never will).
For me, if we were to invest in rail infrastructure at scale, we could create benefits so undeniable that even the disgruntled landowners are ok with it.
We did exactly that with freeways, and freedom-lovers generally view the open road as a vast source of individual opportunity, not a symbol of the crushing boot of government. Should we not have done that?
Unsupported statements that are myopic deserve a downvote. You assume to know what others believe, and would assume to know their past as well.
Overall, it doesn't really strike me that Texas is actually any different from any other state West of the Mississippi. Do you have the data to show otherwise? As-is, in Texas: "Private property can include land and certain improvements that are on that property. Private property may only be taken by a governmental entity or private entity that is authorized by law to do so. Your property may be taken only for a public purpose." [1]
I'm curious if anyone knows of certain restrictions that exist in Texas that do not exist in other states. I would tend to assume that Texas is actually just exactly like the rest of the country when it comes to eminent ___domain laws.
As for reasons to up-vote or downvote.. There's an interesting history for the national highway system, eminent ___domain was used very heavily to build highways through the centers of virtually all major cities west of the Mississippi. For sure, it was not the rich parts of the cities that were plowed. So, even a stereo-typical twitter "left'ish" might disagree with you that they must believe eminent ___domain to be a good thing and always for the greater good. To this extent, I feel your comment is more talking points than actual dialog.
What's more, nobody should ever assume to know what someone else believes, or to assume to know their history. One problem with the human mind, it has trouble grasping that there are 9 billion individuals on this planet who are all different from one another, each and every single one of them.
That triangle is why Southwest Airlines exists. I think the original brainstorming napkin drawing of the triangle routes is on display at Dallas Lovefield airport.
It's true, lack of highly available public transportation between the cities puts us behind other regions (not to mention other countries). I've been doing the ATX -> HTX drive for years.
Best private alternative I've found is Vonlane (https://vonlane.com/) - takes longer than flying but it's a business class bus so you can get work done.
Puget Sound is an enormous geographic region. Light rail doesn’t even serve most of Seattle’s needs (yet). There’s currently one line to the airport. The largest residential neighborhoods in the city aren’t even close. It’s not viable for “getting around” outside of very narrow cases. It’s a backbone for a system that is still being built.
Probably not, but then why should it? Freight is a massive industry for port cities, not to mention the huge amount of downstream folks across the country that depend on them. A few folks being a bit later on their already-long journey is hardly too steep a price to pay for the continued efficiency of the rail network.
I think you lost track of the context. You claimed Portland/Seattle is an easy train in response to someone asking if it solves the problem of freight priorities.
Train scheduling is not a simple binary “freight gets priority = problem, passengers get priority = no problem” matter. The GP referred to a specific implementation of a priority system in which passengers could be delayed for more than the base length of their trip, which presumably makes planning around taking the train quite difficult. This is the “problem” with it. Someone else asked if the other areas experience that problem. I said the Portland/Seattle and LA/SanDiego trains do not. That doesn’t mean they don’t have some variety of a prioritization scheme whereby freight often goes in front of passengers, it means they don’t experience the specific problem GP referred to whereby passengers can experience massive delays more than doubling the length of their trip. This in turn makes commenting via train in these areas comparatively “easy”.
No. Was on one while we were waiting for a freight train. Conductor even had a funny comment about how we were waiting for a priority <cough> Amazon prime packages </cough> train.
This is definitely not true. Europes high speed trains are far far faster than driving. For example, Rome to Milan via italo is 3h - 3h 40min while driving is 6h. Even the "normal high speed" train is only ~5h.
Similarly Marseille to Paris is only 3.5h by train while driving is almost 8h. It entirely depends on your source and destination. Between major economic hubs train is usually faster than driving, and as you can see by a significant amount. For other routes the train is similar or slightly slower.
In North America, on the other hand, the train is almost always MUCH MUCH slower than driving, if you can take it at all. Not to mention far more expensive.
The OP said “unless you have exceptionally fast rail” and was talking door to door. When you add in getting to the station, waiting on a train to arrive, and getting from the station to your destination, the average speed of the train does need to be a good deal faster.
The context of this thread is travel between major economic hubs. So if you are in say Rome, it does not take 30 min to get to the station. Also, the OPs wording made it sound rare, especially given his claim that it is rare, but the examples I gave are typical, not rare.
300km/h trains are normal without maglev as well. The record for maglev is faster than regular rail, but the record for regular rail is much faster than any in service maglev. For rail the limit is aerodynamic drag which has nothing to do with the wheels. So that maglev can go faster in ideal situations doesn't matter as in the real world you will run the trains much slower. Around 300km/h seems to be the best compromise of going really fast while still not paying too much for aerodynamic drag. You can run trains faster (and a few do), but the energy costs get out of control.
If 300 km/h isn't good enough, then get on an airplane. The altitude means much lower aerodynamic drag and the distances you are traveling often need airplanes anyway. Trains are good to around 1000km of travel distance. If your trip is longer fly.
I disagree with the slower than driving. I could take the train from the Valley to downtown SD in less time to drive. The train is a fairly consistent amount of time where driving totally depends on day/time. Leaving the Valley on a Friday afternoon has taken more than 4 hours. On the train, it is very close to 2 hours.
As more fine grained details, from my place in Burbank to my friend's place in Carlsbad was 99 miles. It took longer to drive that than it takes me to drive from Dallas to Austin with is twice as far.
That is context dependent. In Texas traffic outside of the cities isn't that bad and so slow speed trains are much slower than driving. Inside the city of course traffic is a factor, but even then I'd expect in the normal case you get beyond traffic in a short time and then driving is much faster. And of course driving is door to door so you don't have to figure out time to/from the stations, waiting on trains and renting a car (this is Texas - not known for transit though these cities are getting better)
If a train is fast, it's going through uninhabited areas (no stops). The moment you start having relatively frequent stops is when the average speed goes down.
That's not to say we shouldn't have the trains, it's part of the entire transportation package.
The key is you build the transportation framework first, and let the city grow up around it.
The train is the most convenient method of mid distance inter-city travel in the UK because it’s so fast. Nobody’s driving the 4 hours between London and Manchester, Liverpool or Leeds for a business meeting when the train takes 2 hours.
Inter city trains in the UK aren’t running on dedicated high speed lines - they’re Victorian routes, pass through plenty of stops on the way and are generally 2 or 4 tracks.
They do have priority over freight though - which along with incremental upgrades over decades means the trains can run at 125mph for parts of their routes.
If you're "train stop to train stop" LA to SD is great.
I used to use it all the time, it was only faster than driving on Friday afternoons, and even then half the time it would be quite a close cut.
Much, much more comfortable and fun! But not exactly faster, especially when I counted getting dropped off in time to catch the train and getting picked up on the other end.
I just took my beach cruiser with me, and took off. No need to be dropped off/picked up.
Edit: to follow up on your Friday comment. I made the mistake of not driving down on a Friday night, and waited until the next morning. The mistake was not knowing anything about the ponies running that weekend, and half of the LA basin was trying to get there. That was the one and only time I was sitting on the highway where I felt like I was in one of those disaster movies where everyone is trying to flee. I kept looking to see if someone was taking advantage and shooting some b-roll. It took me nearly 6 hours that day.
Door to door metric is interesting. Bicycles actually shine there, you can save 5 to 20 minutes at every stop on your errand by parking directly in front of the store/destination rather than finding parking and walking in & back out. It's a really significant amount of time, speaks to how much is saved by cutting out unnecessary stops & going directly to your destination.
More so though, door-to-door is probably the most charitable metric for driving compared to trains. I presume door-to-door drive time is not assuming peak rush hour traffic?
Which is what makes the metric a bit weird: (A) makes odd assumptions about traffic conditions, (B) does not take into account that you can save time by being on a train - you can sleep, eat, do work, relax, pee when you want to, whatever.. If you drive door-to-door, all you will have done is likely just driven door to door. Less so with a train trip.
