ShakaUVM's Journal: The Problem of Geography

Sign, burning two mod points on this (both +funny, whatever), but it's an issue that comes up whenever I talk with Europeans about mass transit, and how they can't understand why we don't have a rail system.

The fundamental problem is that Europeans cannot fully grasp the difference in scale invoved in America, especially in the American West. (It's big. It is really really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it is long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Texas.) I travel rather often from San Diego, through Los Angeles, and to the Bay Area / San Francisco (these are the three major cities in California, incidentally). The trip takes 8-10 hours to complete, depending on traffic passing through Los Angeles. There is a single rail line that runs down the coast. Once per day it travels between SF and SD, and you have to get up at 5AM to catch it. It takes 11 hours.

San Francisco and San Diego are 500 miles apart.

By comparison, Amsterdam to Paris is 500 *km* apart. The distance from San Diego to San Francisco would span the breadth of England (London to Inverness was 8 hours by train, and is about 550 miles, as is Paris to Nice). When I was in Europe, I was constantly surprised about how little time it took to travel from one city to the next while I was on a train. When you live in the American West, you get used to 6 hour drives at 75-80 miles per hour where you literally see no living human beings outside of the gas stations and rest stops. And maybe some farms.

Europe is very heavily built up. It's dense. Rail networks make a lot more sense in dense networks than in sparse ones. That same rail line that runs to Oxford (60 miles from London) can be used to connect to Warwick, or Stratford-upon-Avon (if my memory serves). The rail network in California is essentially a 3-node graph with a line between SF, LA, and SD. With two mountain ranges in between, to boot. The train company loses money on the line pretty consistently. There's literally nothing in between to make the run profitable. San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz are nice places, don't get me wrong, but they simply aren't volume destinations. And because it's not profitable, there won't be any more private infrastructure development. The State of California has been toying with the notion of building a high speed line from SF to SD for a while now, but, hell, I ran the numbers myself. Japan wouldn't have built a high speed rail line if their cities were all 500 miles apart. It's too costly. The main island of Japan is about 600 miles long, total.

It's not a better-than or worse-than comparison, I'm simply stating the facts. You have to have a certain critical mass of density to make rail networks worth your while. An analogy that works well with Europeans I've met: Imagine France. Now imagine there is nothing in the country but Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. None of the little villages, towns, and cities. Nothing but desert. Now consider the practicality of a rail network in the country. This is Texas.

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This isn't an America-is-bigger-is-better argument. In fact, I can pretty firmly say that I would greatly prefer being able to travel to another city in an hour or two. I lose an entire day whenever I make the trip. A drive to Phoenix, first major city east of San Diego (Yuma doesn't count) is 6 hours (@75 MPH) through almost nothing but desert. To the average San Diegan or San Franciscan, the other city is akin to a vacation destination. Road Trips are boring as hell unless you find a way to entertain yourself -- I personally go through audiobooks like water.

Rail Networks simply don't work when the graphs are so sparse. Out in the middle of the desert, a car moves faster than a train, and costs less, so why bother going to the hassle of parking your car in long term parking (unless you have a garage of your own), and paying more money to travel slower? I'd do it just for the scenic-ness of it, except you have to board at 5AM to get into the other town by 6PM (and then have a friend or family pick you up from downtown, which is another hassle). By and large, airplanes simply seem to be the mass transit of the future. $35 one-way between SF and SD (cheaper than gas for driving), and the trip takes 45 minutes instead of 11 hours. The same train ticket is around $40-$60.

I'd agree that America could use better mass transit systems, especially between transit hubs like Airports and downtowns, but most American cities are so geographically disperse now that they almost require a car to get around in anyway (for example, if you were to take a bus to downtown San Diego, I doubt you could even find a hotel room there -- the hotel district is 10 minutes away by car). You can't even walk from Point A to Point B in San Diego. It's just too far away, and the sidewalk will just vanish at some point. The geographical area that the greater LA area encompasses is an oval about 130 miles in diameter. By comparison, this would be almost the entire southern half of the UK (not counting Wales). Leicester east to the coast, and south to the coast, that square would be covered by the city of LA. All American cities have picked up such sprawl to a certain degree, and, as you said, tend to build their airports outside of the city for sound and traffic reasons.

When I travel in Europe, I take a train.
In America, I rent a car.

You can't say that America is bad for not having a train network. Trains don't make economic sense in a sparse network. France and Texas are the same size, and shape, but Texas along the I-80 is filled with 10 hours of nothing but desert and homocidal cops (a long story for another time).