Fast Public Transit for North America

[CougTek]

I often read articles and watch videos about public transit these days.

Examples:
RM Transit
City Beautiful
B1M
Simply Railway
DownieLive

A decade ago, I signed a petition in favor of of a high speed suspended monorail to serve the Quebec City to Montreal corridor. Back then, it was called the Trens-Québec. Nowadays, an entity named Coop MGV is pushing the same project. I think it makes a lot of sense. It is quite feasible from a technical perspective and the cost should be lower than other fast public transit. Plus, it doesn't take a large footprint on the ground (so much less expropriations are needed) and since it doesn't interact with other transit ways, the operation could be fully automated, even for large distance travels.

However, many have expressed skepticism over the technology. Some don't believe that high speeds could be achieved with a monorail since all those made so far are rather slow. Other arguments are about the longer curves needed to accomodate the targeted speed, the difficulty to shift tracks to change direction and finally there are concerns that the projected acceleration rate would cause discomfort to passengers. In my opinion, only the track alignment could be an issue, because long cuves and accelration rates are similar concerns for high speed trains found all around the world and those have been addressed succesfully already.

I recently watched the following video about private trains with greats cars. Imagine how travel could be with spacious cars, under a monorail, with large windows and great views. If that wouldn't be enough to convince JTR to get out of New York once in a while, I don't know what would.

Building a high speed, fully automated, suspended monorail across major cities of the East and Center of North America would be a great way to stimulated the economy and reduce the polution generated by the air travel industry. Here's an example of links that could be built between cities as well as an unsophisticated estimate of travel time between some cities :


Other travel times would be:

Chicago to Mineapolis: 3h15
Chicago to Detroit: 3h00
Detroit to Toronto: 2h45

I didn't include a link North of Milwaukee because I'm a Bears fan. Green Bay can go to hell

Finally, the lines could incorporate fiber links to improve connectivity between the stations and gerate additional revenues.

Of course, I would have to be as rich as Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk just to start such a project, which I don't see happening. It would be a far better investment in my view, instead of spending billions sending rockets into LEO. It would improve lives of people tremendously more.

 

[LunarMist]

The first question I would have is how many riders would be needed to make that practical.
For example, the corpoprate travel site wanted me to take a train between two cities on a business trip. The problem is that the places I needed to meet the train at both ends were not near my departure or final destination so I would have to arrange for double ground transportation in addition. And they assume somehow that you don't arrive early or have problems. Trains might be optimimum for certain intermediate distances like 200-400 miles or in the bad weather they have in the Northern Zones, but outside of that I'd rather drive or fly.

 

[CougTek]

You make a good point about the location of transit stations within the cities included in the network. It would be paramount to make sure those are well connected with the rest of the local transit system. Fortunately, it is a lot easier to find a spot for a train station (and even easier for a monorail) because it doesn't need a lot of ground space. This is a big advantage over an airport.

Regarding the amount of riders needed to make it worthwhile, I invite you to watch this video comparing the cost of dwellers depending on the commuting means they use. Even if some sections of the network would be losing money, they would have to lose A LOT of money before they reach the level of cars for society.

 

[Mercutio]

Rail works great on the east coast of the US because there's a major city every 40 miles or so from Boston to Washington DC. In that corridor, there's already plenty of good and useful rail service. Having rail service from Ontario to Vancouver likewise makes sense because some crazy huge percentage of hockey and Tim Horton's fans live within something like 50 miles of the US border anyway.

As you head west in the USA though, rail is a harder and harder problem to solve. There's a great corridor between Chicago and NYC that connects with Pittsburgh and Cleveland, sure, but if you move south from that or if you most west from Chicago, it's harder and harder to justify the investment to upgrade or add new lines. Simply put, as great as it would be to run tracks all over the place, passenger rail becomes increasingly harder to justify. Not enough people will use it. I like the idea of rail lines, but when they don't get you cleanly near where you're actually going and can't run in a time enough fashion, they're just not going to get used. We don't have European population densities to support it anywhere but the very easternmost coast, so we'd just wind up building these lines and find out they'd still not be used by anyone who isn't taking a train now.

 

[CougTek]

It's way cheaper to maintain railroads than it is to maintain roads for cars. A lot of cities in the U.S. have highways between them. Railroads would make more sense financially. If there is a public transit offer that is both fast and frequent, people will use it.

Train stations should be used as hubs for bus circuits (and/or metro/tramways in bigger cities) to dispatch the travelers locally. If done right, it would be a big improvement over the current situation.

 

[LunarMist]

Public buses are just horrible in many areas of the States. I'd never suggest that as the last 10+mile leg from the train station.

 

[Mercutio]

True story: Las Vegas in theory has an Amtrak stop.
The "stop" is a bus that takes you to goddamned Arizona to get on or off a train that runs to transit hubs in San Francisco and Denver/Chicago. It's also off Freemont Street, the "old strip" which isn't particularly easy to get to or close to the mainstream tourist destinations or any of the very limited public transit options in town.

The USA sold out to car companies about a century ago.