San Antonio actually has ANOTHER historic train station the city is planning on using for high speed rail. Here's the link: www.viainfo.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/01-2016_1220_VIA_Villa-Vision-Plan_FINAL.pdf
This station is on the near west side instead of the near east side. It’s close to Market Square and UTSA Downtown Campus. However it’s also close to the County Jail and our Haven for Hope shelter that was highlighted previously. On the plus side I-10 in this area is elevated for the whole length which makes walkability conversion easier!
@@MrFlatage and Japan is currently building Phase 1 from Tokyo to Nagoya. It will be done in 2027, that is, if the impasse in Shizuoka will be solved on time.
A note of optimism: a lot of Japan's shinkansen stations where build in rice fields that were later developed into high density secondary centers with great connectivity to downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods, so building stations a bit out there isn't a deal breaker on its own
Interesting fact: many European stations were originally built outside of the city center because, guess what, people didn't like having big steam trains in their back yards. The lively station neighbourhoods that exist today only emerged after the stations were built, and it took even longer before these new neighbourhoods became connected to the old city centre. Of course, this process was helped by the fact that most cities were quite small back then so the incorporation happened naturally when the cities grew. However, I think it remains true that you don't need to built a station in a 24h neighbourhood, you can built the neighbourhood around the station instead.
thats why im excited to see what the future of the houston station will look like. there's nothing around northwest mall and having the station there could lead to big improvements in the area
@@cheeseburgerfromtexas can see a station bringing new development there, just hope it gets added to the rapid bus network (would prefer rail but i know it wont happen lol) also this explains why the antique mall inside the former northwest mall is closing at the end of the year
Well yes, except as you say, cities were much smaller then so everywhere was within easy walking distance when the station was built. For instance London. Lines from the north had to stay north of Euston Road, but I have no difficulty walking through the city to the river. Modern cities are much bigger and sighting terminals away from the central area is much more problematic.
Just wanted to write basically the same comment ;) I think it is crucial to understand that those walkable railway neighbourhoods grew naturally in a time when neither cars not buses were a topic and ordinary people walked all shorted distances. And still it took a long time. I have serious doubts that this can be easily replicated in the 21st century
Walking in the US was always weird when I lived there. As long as you're on the grid it's super convenient because it's next to impossible to get lost, but going beyond that you'd always have to cross under a highway, run across a ramp or some train tracks, and eventually you'd realize that the path just ends. You'd get to the edge of a town and then realize that going any further would either require a car, or crossing private property. It kinda felt like being trapped. The trains on the other hand were very pleasant (the Amtrak in California), with super comfortable cars and service and some magnificent views!
becuase you couldnt design a town in the us as walkable as they were mainly developed at 3 diffferent times. the early history, wild west times, and after ww2
@@capnsteele3365 Exactly. Also comparing US cities and towns to European cities and towns, the towns in there are a lot more compact and mostly are built during medieval eras, thus there's no need to drive. Most of US towns and cities are built during the advent of the car.
Wow, i'm an Operator for them right now! Been there for about 2.5 years, so I just missed ya. I too am really hoping I can hop on the Texas Central project when it arrives, and leave DART behind. It's just as messy as you most likely remember.
@@PopsiclePenguinWasTaken I was out of CROF, on the extra board for three years. I LOVED operating, and have even contemplated coming back. Sign up for their emails so you’re up-to-date on when they start hiring for the high speed train
Your videos inspired me to run against and successfully displace the district 1 San Antonio city council man of 8 years in order to provide better transportation to the citizens of the city and visitors. To see you do a video about what we are trying to do in city hall is encouraging. Thanks!
@@iact1 well as someone else commented, VIA is a private company that is in charge of the city's buses and they are planning on using a station on the opposite side of the city in their future transportation model. Our plan, is a light rail system similar to Vancouver's SkyTrain. But as many plans have been put forth to the citizens before, the problem in implementing it is the same. The Auto Industry, the Highway industry, and the city charter prohibits any funding of a streetcar plan.
@@mjacobs8139 why not use low speed maglev or suspended monorail? It’s actually cheaper per mile to build. Plus low speed maglev is easier to maintain look up the technology.
Frances TGV (their high speed train system) stations are often located outside of the actual cities they serve. The key to success for them (despite often offering nothing of interest in their proximity) is the connection to the central stations and city centers via local trains and other modes of public transport.
I think the TGV system is a little more nuanced than that. In some cases, such as Lyon, the out of town station is for trains not terminating at the city. If it is then the TGV just transfers into the conventional network and goes into city centre. There are some purely rural stations, such as Aix en Provence TGV which are there to serve a less densely populated area where generally passengers drive to and from the station.
@@redakteur3613 Absolutely not. DB has no dedicated high speed rail network and despite the ICE being their flagship product, they are notorious for their delays especially among high volume routes. The TGV terminating outside metropolitan areas and offering a reliable service to the city centers is far better than having an irreliable train directly serving the city center. I think its really unfortunate that the DB is in that bad shape it is right now, especially looking at projects they can do if given the money and political support (thinking about the Munich - Berlin high speed connection). I really hope the new government is helping the DB get in a better shape
I recently moved from NYC to Austin. I don't drive and I have a lot of work in Dallas, so I frequently take the bus, but I prefer train travel and would pay a premium to use it if it were available. My first time in Austin was in December of 2018, when I thought it would be a nice idea to take the Texas Eagle to San Antonio. I waited 2 hours for the train to arrive and we had a 90 minute stop in San Marcos. Needless to say, improvements and more options would be very welcome.
Aye shout out to people who can’t drive for medical reasons! People make us out to be villains honestly. I’m up by the Great Lakes and public transport is pretty nonexistent in my small town life. I almost get killed by cars on a normal basis. We gotta keep fighting for better infrastructure, now is a better time than ever (:
@@Jenny-tm3cm yeah I almost get killed in my parking lot on a daily basis because people think everything is a thruway and don't look out for pedestrians because literally nobody walks
I was on the Acela just last week, and it is great. It is a lot like basic intercity rail in most of Europe, but at twice the price and half the speed.
One thing I noticed in Europe is just how varied the pricing can be. I don’t remember the line, but I took a trip from Madrid to Barcelona and it was about 12eur which was awesome. Then I tried the same from Germany to Austria and just straight-up flying to Vienna was the cheaper option.
I'm glad that basic intercity rail was mentioned. Modern ordinary electric locomotive pulled passanger train can have top speeds of ~200 km/h (or 120 mph) on a modern railroad. Same locomotives can also be used for freight trains where they are very efficient. High-speed services are great, but basic rail should not be neglected either.
@@asdfas1839 But for a "premium train" the Acela is pretty lacking. I'm sure a lot of our limitations come from the fact that we (The US) were relatively untouched during WW II, and therefore a lot of the old infrastructure was never updated. It is a lot easier to build straight train lines between cities when you are rebuilding after being bombed to hell and back.
@@DJTI99 well, most of our cities (except Germany) weren´t that much destroyed to be able to lay down track on previous streets and houses. Take my hometown - Prague, CZ - for example. We still have all our tracks basically in their historical corridors with some minor tweeks and connections (or lost connections) in last 70 years. But even as a capital in central Europe, touched by war a lot, you renew rails in their previous corridors due to price. Yes, on bombed sites you build new houses and districts, but hardly any new major line-builds. Because you wouldn´t have where to lead them and connect them to other infrastructure ;)
The problem is that Texas doesn’t have good last-mile options. It’s easy enough to drive to a station in your hometown, but what happens when you get to the other end where you don’t have a car to drive? You could take a taxi or local transit, but one is expensive and the other is slow b/c it has to compete w/ car traffic and won’t take you directly to your final destination.
Amtrac could invest in future self driving cars or partner with uber and have them wait at the train station. China now has self driving "boxes" because it is driverless and has no steeering wheel and is free
@@CompletelyCr I don’t think you understand how sprawled-out TX cities are and how inconvenient they make walking. Houston is an hour away from Houston, and that’s while doing 70 on the interstate. No that wasn’t a typo. Maybe 0.01% of people who travel between the two cities have a destination w/in a mile from the station. Maybe 20% have a destination w/in a mile of public transit.
@@LK-pc4sq I say this as a software engineer: Self-driving cars have all the same limitations as human-driven cars do. They’re dependent on the same inefficient car infrastructure for which traffic is an inherent problem that won’t go away just b/c you added tech. Tech can’t change the basic principles of physics or graph theory to increase traffic flow. On top of that, most of the promises of self-driving tech are technically infeasible and uneconomical. The ONLY way to fix transportation is to make cars the last resort, not the default.
The Texas Central project is actually doing quite well. It’s not made the same mistake as California HSR by starting construction on sections before vital segments haven’t been approved for construction-instead they’ve got all the planning permission out of the way first as I understand it. They signed construction and operator contracts earlier this year, so I think they’re planning to start construction shortly. That’s not to say I don’t believe that California’s line won’t be finished-they’ve also overcome some of the major hurdles in the last year that we’re holding them back. But the Texas one has generally been better managed, and I think in part that’s because they’ve actually bothered to get more expertise from countries that actually have high speed rail.
@@stupidd6513 I mean it wasn't the wind turbines that were the problem though was it? It was the disruption of fuel going to the fossil fuel powered stations that caused the power shortage. That and the fact that the state government had the bright idea of cutting off Texas's power grid from the rest of the country and making it impossible for more power to be sent from elsewhere to mitigate the issue.
High speed rail doesn't compete against slow trains/buses/driving, it competes against flying. The passengers who take it will just call an Uber between the station and downtown (or wherever their final destination is), just like they do with airports.
I agree, and that's why, assuming comparable prices and travel times to planes, the stations don't need great locations or transit connections, just ones that are better than the airports. The greater comfort of a train seat takes care of the rest.
@@danieldaniels7571 A friend/family can pick then up, rent a car, hire a cab, or ride a bus. Dallas and Houston have adequate public bus systems In their downtown areas, as do Austin and San Antonio. And if you are a businessman, the hotels have vans. Dallas's planned Texas Central station is within a few blocks of present DART stations, while Houston could build their light rail tram to the Northwest Mall if they desired to do so. Saying it doesn't exist today does not necessarily mean it won't exist tomorrow...
Brightline really impressed me from what is saw. Great rolling stock but still slow due to tracks and legal limits and the short route. Trains interior is beautiful. Nice stations too.
@@ianhomerpura8937 It does have its own dedicated tracks. FEC is the same parent company for both Brightline and freight, so its own dispatch always give priority to Brightline.
The real issue with brightline is all the level crossings, car collisions are extremely common. They resumed service a few days ago (after suspending it for COVID) and literally had a car collision on the first day of service. Lets just say Miami drivers aren't great.
I worked on this project for Hitachi working with the engineers in Japan. They had argued that the rail could be built above existing rail line in Dallas, but for cost reasons this was rejected. The Japanese were confused by this because in Japan the Shinkansen is Tokyo is built above an existing rail line.
I cannot stress how good the commuter system is in Antwerp, and the interior of that station is ridiculously beautiful. I stayed right beside the station in a beautiful cheap Airbnb and could get anywhere around Belgium eg Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, or anywhere in the Netherlands in a very short term also, and return to my apartment the very next day. Nearby suburb towns were built along the commuter line out of the city and some like Lier had great mix of medium density development with a beautiful historic looking square.
As someone living in Belgium I can say trains are probably the worst mode of transportation. I have had many occasions where I was waiting for a train and it either did not show up, was late, or it showed up and the doors would not open. It is super rage inducing. Also trains in Belgium only come every hour (sometimes every 30min in rush hours) while allot of other European countries have them every 30min or less. The trains are very expensive way to commute each day for the service you get. And do not get me started on how the trains are maintained. The seats are usually extremely dirty with gum, dirt and stains are over them. Now I use my bike or car to commute and it is allot less stressful.
I think it will end up like the newer train stations in Canada: still terribly car dependent. Probably going to include lots of free parking but you have to pay to use the bus to get there. Still surrounded by highways and the cities themselves will still be sprawling so that you need a car to get anywhere once you arrive.
I feel the need to point out that you were more than a bit off in regards to the Texas Central station locations on your maps. Houston you pegged over 2 miles from where it is going to be, 2 miles (a 33% increase) further away from downtown Houston. Dallas' location is immediately east of the I-30/I-35E interchange, making it just a half-mile from Union Station, and walking distance to the convention center and its LRT station.
There were some city light rail proposals that would replace freight train to connect the station to downtown. Alot more feasible than buying expensive property to bring high speed rail into downtown.
@@Korina42 For this particular part of the track network, there are two tracks about .25 miles south that wouldn't obstruct freight traffic. The track in question is just one track. What it would effectively do if force trains to switch at the rail yard further east...think it's about 3 miles.
Here in South Africa I often take highspeed trains to travel around. I use the Gautrain in my area. When I went to Texas in 2017 I was actually surprised of how much driving you have to do rather than to take a train.
Houston and Dallas are so sprawly, I feel like they almost really need two stations each - one for the city center, one far out into the suburbs. The suburban station is much more attractive for people that live in the suburbs, by avoiding the need to drive long distances in heavy traffic to the center of town, just to reach the station. For those catching a rideshare vehicle from the station, reducing the driving distance from 40 miles to 10 miles greatly reduces the monetary cost of the trip. Considering that the vast majority of the population in each city lives in the suburbs, this feels important. The Houston station out near 610/290 kind of fulfills this purpose, except the city sprawls out far beyond that, enough that there should probably be a second station further out. I also hope that the the bus connections from the station to the actual downtown will be good. Even if most people live in the suburbs, access to downtown still matters.
High speed rail is for inter-city travel not intra-city travel. It should only have one stop, then you have a local transportation network that connects it to other parts of the city.
For real, I live in the suburbs and it sucks that we can't simply walk to a nearby train station because it's designed to driven by cars. The government could have to give just all a pardon from going to school and work to stay home just to make our suburbs and cities walkable and convenient lol
@@danieldaniels7571 you can create pockets of walkability, even in Texas. It's not going to help the entire city and all its inhabitants, but these walkable areas make transit, cycling etc more viable, at least within those areas and between similar areas close by.
"Location is critical to any successful train station." I think the causality is wrong here. City districts around successful train stations grow, so they sort of create their own locations. Of course, this was the case a century ago, and trying to implement missing infrastructure now is going to be painful.
Making it possible to get to a station without a car is extremely important, but we have to acknowledge that these Texan cities have gigantic sprawling suburbs for which car dependency is an unfortunate and almost unfixable reality. I'd rather have people drive to the train station than take the car of plane for the whole trip. Suburban stations with rail connections to downtowns seem like a sensible option.
I think I'd rather drive 30 minutes to an austin station and take a train to dallas instead of drive the whole way. Would be nice if I could take light rail from my development to the station, but considering the only way out is along 620 and the traffic has gotten worse over 10 years and nothing has been added on the other side, I have zero faith that the road situation will improve, let alone the (nonexistant) rail situation. I hate driving and there isn't a single viable alternative so as a result, I end up rarely going anywhere. Maybe I should just move out of the US...
2:17 This shot is hilarious. It's filming Cologne's central station, which is nice, but the steps the camera is standing on are literally the steps of Cologne Cathedral, which seems like the far more interesting thing to film there.
I'm a train nerd and i have a photo from that exact perspective. I guess some of us just think train stations are cooler than even very cool cathedrals.
@@MikyleChristian and it's not just regular regional rail, there's also the underground Stadtbahn (a special sort of LRTs) station serving lines 16 and 18 (and 5), both also going to Bonn
Mexico is currently building a high speed rail from the city of Monterrey to the Texas border near San Antonio. As Monterrey is a powerful wealthy city that does a lot a commerce with Texas and the USA, they line will be very successful for business travelers from both Nations.
And guess who provided there high speed train and help build it, you got it Gchina not the US!!😂🤣😅😆😅🤣😂🤣😅😆✌👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻it'z already happening to other Asean countries like Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia,Thailand and Indonesia. US and Canada are already 40 years behind there infrastructures of there roads and trains while these secondary world countries are advancing towards the future!!! And that's not facts that iz the truth as much we say it USA and Canada are playing catch up!!!😉😊😂🤣😅😆😅🤣😂✌👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻All talks and Bull sh!t walks that iz American government Motto!!!!
Not a high speed rail. It was planned to be, but it seems that the planners figured it would be more realistic to keep it as regular rail instead. Either way, it's just concept right now.
Somewhat ironically the interstate highway system was built so that cities could be quickly evacuated in case of an incoming nuclear attack or Russian invasion. Unfortunately since cars are not the most efficient means of transportation and tend to clog up the roads with traffic, the interstate does not serve it's purpose well. You can't evacuate from a disaster of any sort quickly if you're stuck in traffic along with every other driver.
France often builds dedicated high speed stations in the middle of nowhere. While a country like Germany has its train going to main stations in city center. There is countless reason why its designed that way. But I prefer the german solution.
France does it to expand its ridership. These rural stations don't replace city centre stations but complement them. They are there to attract customers from an area of many small towns, none of which would support its own station. You might not appreciate these stations, but for the communities they serve being able to catch a TGV with just a short drive to the station is definitely a plus.
@@janprimus1947 They're political corruption. Politicians buying votes from the rurals with these locations. They bump up property prices, so farmers and developers love them and how politicians their appreciation with votes and $$$.
The actual reason is that it takes forever for high speed trains to pass through city centers. In France, they'll typically run trains from large city (usually Paris) to smaller cities. Some will go to the dedicated high speed stations, while others will go to the city center stations if they don't go that much further. In Valence for instance, the city center station will have direct service to Paris, but if you want to go to Marseille, you first take a regional train to the HSR station. This makes longer journeys way quicker. Contrast this with Germany where the HSR network is far slower because it has to take you through most city centers along the way. I have used both systems and the French one is way better in my opinion.
Oh, and to clarify for some commenters: the Houston station would actually be close to the heart of Houston. 610 is the tiny INNER loop at maybe 10 miles diameter. Beltway 8 encompasses that (and much of Houston's actual city limits) with a diameter of about 30 miles. The suburbs of the Greater Houston Area (which some are larger and more populated than many other well known US cities) are encompassed by 99 -- the Grand Parkway -- about 50 miles in diameter.
Florida bright line will also have Orlando connect to Tempa in the future after the Miami and Orlando route is finished. This will ease traffic since a-lot of people travel between these cities for vacation.
I would love a Tampa to Orlando line with decent frequency. My brother lives in Tampa, and when I visited him last, it would have been great if we could have traveled to Orlando without driving. Looks like there is one train a day? My small city of under 150,000 has 3 trips a day from Amtrak to Chicago (and some smaller cities to our south) and they are looking at adding a high speed line between Chicago and St. Louis that also stops here.
@@blackopscw7913 You can take an Amtrak train from NYC all the way to Miami. It just takes days. But honestly, even if you had a Japanese bullet train from NY to FL it would still take over a day. Rail is just less convenient than air at those distances.
I'm a bit cynical about this project, considering the irrational hatred many Americans have to any form of transport apart from cars and planes. We'll see if it actually gets built.
I know that’s always the stereotype. But would you’ve guessed the largest light rail system in the country is Dallas’ DART? As a former Dallasite I promise there’s huge appeal and demand. To be able to hop on a DART train to get me to a high speed rail would’ve been a no brainer to get to Houston or Austin. Driving to either is miserable, and flying is expensive and takes just as long.
@@racerman7303 lol the car companies would love this project. You'll need rental cars at the destination points for both cities which means Enterprise and other rental agencies would have more setups like their airport locations which means more cars they'd need to acquire. This would have no effect on oil companies, if anything they'd welcome it as it'd be another large machine in need of oil products. The only industry that will oppose this are the airlines. Southwest Airlines was able to kill the Texas high speed rail project of the late 80's. Although they don't seem to keen on trying to interfere here the airlines are the ones that'd lose ridership if this goes through. Especially since this would likely lead to expansion to the other cites.
I worked on the masterplanning of the high speed rail stations back in 2018 while being an urban design intern! People joked that I may be well into my middle ages before the project is completed. The biggest issue we came across while planning the stations was accommodating the huge driving culture of Texas, so we had to prioritize personal parking even more than expected over bikes, busses and even ride sharing.
Heads up: you can reach the riverwalk without ever having to cross a road with cars from the Alamodome, there’s a tunnel underneath i37 you walk across from the parking lot, from there you enter one of the parking lots for the Alamodome, go straight and you’ll be at the tower of americas, and if you continue in that direction you’ll end back up on the riverwalk by the convention center. It’s a long ass walk, I did it from the canopy once, but is doable and you will never once cross anywhere with any cars. That being said I tried the route above the riverwalk to the tunnel that goes under 37 and it was way shorter
The issue of station placing is what has made our Dart (Dallas) system largely unused. Other than downtown the stations are generally nowhere. You have to drive to the station, park, then ride as there is nothing worth going to nearby save for one or two stops like marketplace or mockingbird station.
Dallas built too suburban of a system. Houston's rail stations are where there's usually urban life around the stations to go to and wasn't designed with any parking lots next to stations that weren't already there if there.
So true. I moved to Dallas years ago and I lucked out. My home and job were both walking distance from DART stations. Once I moved about mile away it was no longer worth it to take light rail. It made more sense to drive everywhere, even to my job. It would help if there were more bus stops and more frequent busses, but the ridership is probably too low to justify it.
One thing to mention with Dallas is the light rail and commuter rail has connections to the DFW Airport and Fort Worth respectively. There is a small local rivalry between Fort Worth and Dallas with Fort Worth having the more beautiful train station district in my opinion. I found the Dallas Union Station interior dark, outdated, and lonely. If Texas Central gets built AND completed, Fort Worth, I hope, would probably put the money to improve connections on that side of the Metroplex so not to be seen as the little brother.
Texas central is in court battling against Land owners and farmers over the project because Texas central wants imminent domain to build bridges over their land. Which if you think about it, it's not messing up the farmers land in no way. But I mean your land is your land. But at the same time, Building a bridge over just 60 feet of land that is probably not being used...what harm can it do really
@@KingAsa5 still doesn’t answer the question, they’ve had renderings after renderings of the stations since at least 2015 and not one single has started construction because of those court battles. That’s why I’m skeptical that it will be built.
@@VinceroAlpha wasn't trying to answer your question, I was trying to add to your question. I'd like to know the same thing. We'll know in the next court hearing.
In fact, many Japanese shinkansen stations and Chinese HSR stations actually located far away from the city centers, which brings new opportunities to underdeveloped regions in the cities
I’ve seen a lot of stuff on high speed rail recently. I like the idea, but I’m confused as to why it’s important right now. I’ve seen a study that shows the majority of travel is from suburb to suburb. It seems to me that we need to improve bus and light rail networks before we improve high speed rail networks. As you said when talking about Dallas, the connectivity to light rail makes it better to get from the high speed rail station to the other parts of the city like downtown. Seems like we should build that up and see how travel is affected before we worry about high speed rail
Its a good point. I think the stations are super important to the success of rail here in US. Ive traveled in many different European countries and the stations were always super convenient in middle of the city. Seems like this Texas rail is almost doomed to do poorly unless somehow they start developing the stations or at least access to them.
There has not been any development around the numerous out of town French TGV stations. They nevertheless work. Avignon and Aix TGV receive twice as many passengers as expected.
@@GarrusN7 Aix-en-Provence TGV is in the middle of nowhere, the only place where HSR could be built, a scrubby inhabited plateau. Aix (143 000 inhabitants) is 16 km to the east via a congested road. The station is popular despite the proximity of Marseille airport and its faster connections to Paris and other northern cities, 13 km to the west. Benefiting from well located stations in large cities along the North East Corridor between Boston and Washington DC, Acelas carry at most 3.6 million passengers annually, slightly less than the number getting in or out of the TGV in Aix-TGV.
I'm from Europe and besides being used to relatively good (high-speed) rail-connections, there is one slight problem between certain countries: rail system compatibility. With certain trains, that can be mitigated (some of which might support different rail distances/widths), but still, it's a bit of a pain, when the infrastructure isn't standardized. So, I was wondering whether or not the different (private and public) (high-speed) rail lines, that are being built, could eventually (in many, many decades, if some billionaires don't suddenly invest in that massively, of course) be connected with each other without the need for special trains then? Cheers and thanks for this short insight and assessment, to which I can fully agree.
The operations planned by Texas Central Partners are to utilise non-compliant equipment (i.e. rolling stock which would not meet the current safety standards as set by the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration). This in itself is NOT a problem, since the F.R.A. approaches safety from the prospect of crash survivability, whilst true high-speed operations tend to view safety from a crash avoidance perspective. At any rate, joint multi-modal station facilities would certainly be possible, but there will be no foreseeable way that Shinkansen-type trains could mix and mingle with general system services in these United States - to the point where the trackage itself (despite both being standard gauge) would (generally) not be allowed to interconnect. I trust this helps!
@@garlboydlatham4295 Thank you so much for this insight. So, this sounds similar to Japan's, France's and many other Country's approaches to High-Speed-Train-Tracks vs. Standard-/Cargo-Tracks then. I think it's the better way to go in general, yet it would be a waste of investments if at least the high-speed-tracks wouldn't be (allowed to) interconnect/-ing at some point (maybe after regulations were adjusted accordingly and standards either implemented or at least assessed and classified for each of the existing systems then - like the French TGV is only going at slower speeds on German Tracks most of them aren't built for such high-speeds and also not used exclusively for High-Speed-Personal-Transport-Trains). Well, about the safety issues: recently a Japanese Bullet Train derailed during an Earthquake in Japan and there were no injuries reported so far - much different to what happened with German ICE-Trains in the past (Hannover-Derail in the 1990's I think it was). So, I'm sure in this Age of Information Technology, engineers will certainly take the lessons learned into account before building new rail systems since there are - quite literally - "Lives on the Line". It will be interesting to see how all of it is working out though and I hope to live long enough to see it and maybe even experience it some day...
@@BulukEtznab here in Germany HSR lines use the same standard gauge and electrification as all other lines, but some of them are too steep for some trains to climb, the Cologne-Frankfurt line for example can only be used by ICE 3 because of it's max 40‰ gradient
@@BulukEtznab the Eschede (60km North of Hanover) accident was the only deadly ICE accident AFAIK, but it was the deadliest HSR accident at the time, and caused by a broken wheel resulting in a derailment which led to parts of the train crashing into a bridge that then collapsed. 101 people died and 88 were severely injured. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschede_derailment
If I need to rent a car at the destination station, then I would just rather drive. Saving the train fare and car rental fees. This has been the problem with US train development everywhere. Very few places in the US have a strong, non-car based local transportation network. What could work would be using these handful of places as hubs. Chicago has pretty good public trans. I lived in Omaha. I could imagine parking my vehicle in Omaha, then riding a train to Chicago, traveling by bus, train and occasional taxi in Chicago and then coming home. Spokes from Chicago to Omaha (which would pass Des Moines and Quad Cities), to Kansas City, to St Louis and to Indianapolis, among others could prop up a failing Chicago and provide useful, road declogging profitable train service.
Why? If you can rent a car at your airport destination, then you can rent a car at your train destination station. You just need to switch from your old way of thinking. Riding a high speed rail will be much more comfortable and restful than driving your car all the way and back.
@@rap3208 That implies I'd be willing to fly. The distances posited for train travel tend to be closer to drive distances for me now. Even before covid insanity, I'd only fly if the distance was more than a days drive.. While some aspects of the ride on the train might be better, others are worse, most notably, loss of flexibility.
Yeah, but the intersection is gonna be in Bryan. Maybe Bucee's can adapt to the train life. At this point I would think Bucee's needs to be looking into charging stations. The Bucee's in Giddings missed out on the Tesla chargers there.
A couple years back I travelled from Italy to Finland in less than 48 hours. As he mentioned the proximity of train station to the city center really helped and we managed to experience quite a lot during that time.
Hearing about the backwardness of public transit in the US is always baffling to me, as a Dutch guy. It's like a window into a bleak past, but it's actually now...
Many places don't have security cameras or mass transit in America. If you carry a valuable backpack and get robbed in the suburbs, no one is outside to help. A solution is to just drive a car until you reach your destination.
@@weareorigin or carry weapons for self defense. I have a knife, pepper spray, and 9mm. It's sad I have to, but that's just reality in America. High crime rate, and you're on your own.
@@weareorigin My suggested solution would be, to invest in public transit, and not worry too much about getting robbed. I have to admit, I've never been to the US, but in all my walking visits to weird and desolate suburbs in European capitals, I've never once been robbed?
Americans need to rethink all the conditioning that has been done to them over the decades by the car manufacturing lobby. Using public transport does not make you a ‘commie’. The car and your sprawling neighbourhoods have been designed to keep you in debt forever. Imagine how nice it is to live in a place where you have excellent public transport. Walking is also good exercise. If you live in a small non-car dependent neighbourhood a trip to buy milk and eggs can be done without a car.
To defend car people in the South, Texas is unwalkable in the summer time due do high heat. But yes; it is ridiculous that the nation with the first intercontiential railway and a great history of rail, does not understand how to do rail.
@@jahbrenpanvilla I rather sit with 100 strangers in a bus than with 1 stranger in a car. The 100 strangers become a crowd and fade into the background. In an Uber I am much closer to the driver and since there is just one person their presence is harder to ignore.
Glad to see Leipzig Central Station, it is just in the middle of the city, connects with local trains and just outside is the tram/bus station. Also, it's just beautiful.
Northwest Houston is a nightmare getting to and from, and I remember this having lived there. They would need better public transit serving North Houston or else the station is going to fail.
So long as there is another Transit connection it should be fine, in Japan, many new stations were built, or rural stations upgraded for the Shinkansen, when the downtown station couldn't handle it. Like Shin-Osaka, Shin-Aomori, Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto etc. In most of the cases, the cities and their downtowns were located a bit far away from what the optimal route was for the Shinkansen, so a Transfer station to other lines was needed.
As an austin resident I cannot wait for Texas rail to get underway and expand over here. By then we’ll have several new light rail lines that should ease circulation
The Houston Station on the map is ~3miles northwest of the actual proposed site. Let us remember that New York's Grand Central was built on land that was then considered the edge of town.
290 and West 18th is kinda in the center of where a lot of people live even if it is an urban blight area. And plenty of room for development there with lots of blighted light industrial stuff. Plus the near northwest suburbs really could use a boost. This is the homeland of Shelly Duvall and Patrick Swayze who both went to Waltrip HS.
I have a suggestion for some Entrepeneur out there. As part of the commercial development planned for these major HSR railhead Stations, why not include a small Park & Ride facility for overnight parking? This could work at even some of the bigger Commuter rail stations that would feed into these three main Stations. I envision some commercial developer building one of those Carvana "auto vending machines" that hold 30 - 40 cars inside. These things are built by a company call Nussbaum for 5 or 6 million! You could drop your car off at the facility, where a parking lot attendent would put your car up for a couple of days, while you take a commuter train into Dallas, Fort Worth, or Houston, to catch the "Texas Acela" for a weekend get-a-way or business trip. that would help solve the "last mile" problem!
@@donnerwetter1905 If transit is actually much faster than cars and even planes, many will take them. The real problem isn’t density. It’s traffic flow, land use and building layout. You can still have pretty high density and still be very car dependent
In Orlando, the commuter train (SunRail) runs on a CSX freight track, and is shared by Amtrak. It works pretty great, but people constantly want it to expand to weekends, or an easy-west route and to the airport. I’m excited for Brightline to connect Orlando to South Florida.
Hi - I really enjoy the City Beautiful videos. Not sure how else to contact you, but I do have an interesting future topic? In Memphis, in the late 1960's/early 1970's the citizens fought and eventually won against the Federal Government and stopped Interstate 40 from being built through our beautiful park in the center of the city. Overton Park in Memphis was designed by the same folks who designed by Central Park in New York. While multiple folks led the fight in the 60's, many of the leaders described themselves as little old ladies in tennis shows. Sadly, 50 years later, the Memphis Zoo now wants to take some of the hard fought land from the Greensward of the Park and add it to their parking lot.
Also hoping for the El Paso to Denver rail that’s supposedly been in the works. There are a lot of car accidents when people drive into southern NM from TX due to a combo of poorly designed/maintained roads and dangerous driving from large oil & gas trucks
Fort Worth’s Amtrak/Trinity Commuter RailThe T City transit bus & Greyhound bus station are in the same building and that would make a great Texas Central Rail Station as well as the Fort Worth Texas & Pacific Terminal which all the floors of that building are condos.
I sure hope that a high speed rail station comes to San Antonio. I love the city but it’s not very conducive to travel by anything other than car. I hope that it brings better development and possibly make it end up as a more pedestrian friendly city
Could you do a video of NC Trains, the stations built in Raleigh and Charlotte and the future HSR that is proposed and the future transit in the cities surrounding
As someone who grew up in Texas and now lives in Germany. You will never be able to replicate urban fabric in Texas - the sprawl is simply to expansive.
Thank you for the most recent video talking about the i35 lane expansion in Austin. I can’t tell you how much I hope they don’t move forward with that project.
I live in Dallas and the area where the future high speed rail is supposed to go is being developed with the train station in mind. I think it's gonna be the best option in the TX triangle
Texas high speed rail? So basically I can drive my car to a train station where I can pay $200 to catch a train to another city where Ill have to rent a different car to get around? Yeah, that should work no problem. Seriously,when Americans talk about HSR they just demonstrate they they understand nothing about Europe.
This is actually a very good point that seems to have been missed in this video. I know Dallas has a light rail system, but I don't recall there being one in Austin, San Antonio, or Houston.
The Townlake Y is fairly new and residents love it. It’s not going away any time soon. A better idea would be to build a new station where the animal shelter next door is.
I wish the rail in DFW ran later. You know how convenient it would be to leave a sporting event or concert and take the train home? It’ll get you there, but you’re left looking crazy when the events are over.
This rail line will likely never happen, the builders already soured relationships with property owners, and they don't have any real money to build it.
I am a huge advocate for public transportation, especially trains, but I honestly think that this won't work. This, in my opinion, has to do more so with culture than accessibility. I used to live in Japan and the public transportation culture is so huge, that it is more convenient to actually ride a bus and train, compared to riding a car. Stores and restaurants are so close together with nice side walks compared to Texas where it takes forever to walk from store to store. In Texas, streets are dangerous at night, they are not well maintained, and 1 block in Texas is like 3 blocks in Japan (maybe exaggerating a little). This is important because once they arrive in the central station, how are they going to get to their final destination? Tokyo has a sprawling subway system in which a train comes every 4-5 minutes ON TIME that covers every inch of the city. This is all without mentioning the bus system as well. Buses come like every 20-30 minutes in Texas with a one dimensional metro system. So until Texan cities figure out how to make public transportation more appealing in their own cities, the cons will far outweigh the benefits.
It's desirable to have high-speed rail stations in major cities and densely populated areas. I think it would be stressful to be far from cities. The Shinkansen is being built in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, and it looks like the station will be underground. There is no open land above ground. Even in Hokkaido, which is the largest region in Japan, the reason why they have to build the railroad underground is probably because building a station far away from the city will cost more in the long run, such as the operating costs of the railroad connecting the high-speed railroad station to the city. However, there are some stations that have a large number of passengers even though they are far from cities. This is because they have succeeded in fostering office and residential areas. I'm not familiar with the state of Texas, but most Japanese railroad companies are engaged in two businesses: railroad and real estate. This was translated at DeepL
So long as we get a Galveston connection at some point then yes please, for once give us a proper train to use. I would love to do a huge Texas tour one day ending with a nice beach siasta but that is just a dream of mine.
i love that fact you used the leipzig main station (wich used to be the largest terminus station in europe until 2 years ago) but i belive the best example of a downtown railway station in europe would have been eighter prague, berlin or, Dresden.
Berlin is a very bad example. The new central station (opened in the mid 2000s), is not a local transportation hub (with the exception of the new U5, a tram line and the east-west S-Bahn lines, no local transport stops there, which makes it cumbersome to go north or south by local transport), and while located centrally, the immediate walking-distance neighborhood lacks most of what would be useful near a station.
@@sebastianlabusch465 i was more referring to the Ostbahnhof (old Mainstation) but yes the new mainstation is still a bit isolated, however it is also still surrounded by empty lots and will in time grow its own 24/7 Quater.
As much as an advocate I am for high speed rail, I do think considering the sheer land mass of the US and Canada it makes the most sense in mega regions like the one in this video, or even New York to Chicago. Anywhere further and you’re probably flying anyway
Personally I think there could a nationwide rail network so long as each state is treated like a country in this respect. Poland, being just shy of the size of Texas has a rail network with daily commuters, while not the best in Europe, it still exists. As well some states like Wyoming realisticly only need 2 to 5 stations in the whole state and just be mainly a thru line for other rail networks
If the rail was half as fast as flying, but had a far more pleasant ride and station experience it would get used heavily. Especially if it connected all the "small cities" along the way, like Albany, Springfield, Syracuse, Hartford, as well as the Majors like Boston, NYC, Buffalo. And for the "slow rail" have a station placed to be on average under a 1hr drive from places and you would be amazed the amount of tourism that would happen from people who couldn't care less about cities visiting other smaller destinations.
@@jasonreed7522 This is the Japan model. Using a combination of the shinkansen, high-speed rail lines, and then chugga-chugga 30 mph local lines, you can get to like 90% of towns in the country, or else to a bus stop that will take you the rest of the way. I have visited tiny little tourist spots and minor cities and everything in between there, and I have had to step in a car like twice total. Are there many people getting off the Tohoku line at Oyama station? No, but they can if they want to, so I can live in Oyama prefecture and commute to Tokyo for work without a car if I want to. Rail lines are about having the option to do things, and once you have the option, people are going to take it. Living in the Twin Cities, if I had the option to live out in like Farmington or further south and hop on a high-speed rail to get to work every day I'd probably take it.
Live outside austin, the abandoned Bergstrom Spur that once connected to the Air Force base which is now the airport, they chose rails to trails when they should’ve/ could’ve made it a Amtrak connection or more commuter line. If they do high speed trains in my home state it needs to be Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Dallas, austin, Houston. No excuses
@City Beautiful - Beautiful city of Leipzig @ 4:22 with Leipzig-HBF (Railway Main Station) shown with 4 tram platforms on the plaza infront of the stations (showing refitted Tatra trams , Tatra was used in much of the Eastern Bloc)
Thanks for great analyses of the station locations and their relations to success at other train stations. I know first hand how much a station’s neighborhood matters (such as Denver), and that at best the Texas locations are no better than LA’s Union Station-only a few blocks and freeway away from Downtown, for strangers dragging luggage. On the other hand, neither Love nor Hobby Airports have much to offer, yet Southwest Airlines has packed airplanes full between them for 50 years. At the same time, it’s telling that in spite of Southwests’ success, no competition has made inroads to grab a piece of that pie in 50 years. Texas Central wants to make a very expensive bet that they will succeed where no other airline in 50 years has. I live 1500 miles from Dallas, but I visit its Downtown more often then all my friends who live there-combined. Both Dallas and Huston are huge, sprawling, devolved, car dependent metropolitan areas, and I bet the HSR stations need huge car rental infrastructure and freeway access more than anything else.
You neglected to mention something that you may not be aware of. Interstate 45 between Houston and Dallas is the deadliest highway in the state and one of the deadliest in the US. TXDoT acknowledges that freeway widening of I-45 will not keep up with the gigantic growth of car/truck traffic expected in the coming 20 years. It is 250 miles between the downtowns of the two cities (and the speed limit is 75), but it can take 6 hours to travel. The I-10 & I-35 corridors are not far behind. Perhaps (hopefully), the increasingly unmanageable congestion on I-45 will chase people out of their cars and onto the HSR when it opens.
"Cost Overruns" is just a fact of life with ANYTHING being built, no matter the project. I've never heard of a construction project coming in under budget.
The section of CAHSR currently being built had a budget of $30 Bn and now the projected cost is $90 Bn and counting. That's a 300% increase (and counting).
One thing that hasn’t been thought of by many is the upcoming rise in driverless cars like Teslas. Driverless, electric vehicles taking people from and to the stations is going to be extremely convenient for passengers. Brightline is doing this right now with their rail service here in FL with Teslas (not driverless yet though, but that’s the next step).
@@deans-rewind2882 It will, because driverless cars will disincentivize people from purchasing cars. It will be like driverless Ubers. This has been Tesla’s plan for a while, once FSD is a mature and safe they’ll turn to becoming a service. Not to mention, AI will improve traffic flow since there is no human error or emotion involved.
Dallas and Houston are not even dense enough for mass public transit. How am I supposed to get a good ride from either two rail stations at Houston or Dallas? Taking a taxi or renting a car is expensive. Uber is getting more moderately expensive. I have my doubts about Texas Central High Speed Railway, but I hope I'm proven wrong and it improve the traffic crisis in the Texas triangle.
I'd love to see a video comparing these Texas High Speed Rail Station locations with the ones on the Acela High Speed line up in the Northeast. DC's Union Station, New York's Penn Station, and my hometown of Boston's South Station are such a huge (gorgeous) contrast to the ones covered in this video!
If you look at mainline stations in London you will notice that they are, for the most part, in the periphery of Central London (Zone 1). This is in large part due to the nature of rail development being a previte venture so different companies were competing for accessing passenger market for trips to London and had to separate out where in London they took them in order to do this. But the great thing is that it means that different mainline termini stations in London serve different parts of the UK, largely because of which companies where operating from each station. The mainline station does not need to be directly downtown as long as it is well connected to it (and other mainline stations, as is the case for London as a result of the Tube)
Texas as well as other areas of America have been ready and need high speed passenger rail service. If the personnel that have been holding positions and hindered the development of high speed rail had been removed years ago rail transportation would likely been on par with the rest of other developed countries. Build it and the people will utilize it.
The biggest problem I see for Texas Central is the fact that public transit in TX is terrible and the cities are not pleasant walking experiences at all. The designs are too car-centric and it absolutely ruins walkability, and the complete lack of usable public transit means that you basically have to take a car to your final destination anyway.
Would absolutely love an HSR connection at Sunset Station. Looking forward to the day that I can hop on a 30 minute train to Austin and be home by sunset.
Last I have seen only two high-speed train routes make a profit. Both are in Japan and serve a pair of cities with a total of 50 million population. China loses US$44 million a day with its high-speed rail vanity projects.
Classic America for sure: only thinking about what you want, getting the single thing that you need for it but forget absolutely every other essential thing
I’ve noticed a lot of channels are now doing videos on US infrastructure and it’s crazy seeing the civility and actual discourse of this comments section compared to that of the other channels, where it quickly turns into giant circle-jerk of Europeans bashing America and Americans.
The problem is lack of population density It was kind of annoying how you compare them to Europe when most European cities/countries are small and/or densely populated
there are also cities across Europea which are spread-out, and even countries with half the population density than the US they still run passenger rail services in remote areas, and beyond that provide public transit via buses even to the most rural areas, all across the area; Also take London and NYC as example: both have a comparable population of 8.3 and 8.4 million inhabitants, but London is 138 sq mi larger than NYC
San Antonio actually has ANOTHER historic train station the city is planning on using for high speed rail. Here's the link: www.viainfo.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/01-2016_1220_VIA_Villa-Vision-Plan_FINAL.pdf
This station is on the near west side instead of the near east side. It’s close to Market Square and UTSA Downtown Campus. However it’s also close to the County Jail and our Haven for Hope shelter that was highlighted previously.
On the plus side I-10 in this area is elevated for the whole length which makes walkability conversion easier!
Hi
Meanwhile China is starting to build out Maglev infrastructure and trains doing 600 mph.
@@davefroman4700 Which Japan had for ages now, lmao!
@@MrFlatage and Japan is currently building Phase 1 from Tokyo to Nagoya. It will be done in 2027, that is, if the impasse in Shizuoka will be solved on time.
A note of optimism: a lot of Japan's shinkansen stations where build in rice fields that were later developed into high density secondary centers with great connectivity to downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods, so building stations a bit out there isn't a deal breaker on its own
true, induced demand is a thing. ;)
@@Robbedem I'll let you induce my demand bb ;)
@@jesussavesanus9790 seek help 🙏
Yes if you could reliably travel from Merced to the Bay Area in under an hour that would definitely make some people commute that distance.
@@jesussavesanus9790 atleast buy them dinner first
Interesting fact: many European stations were originally built outside of the city center because, guess what, people didn't like having big steam trains in their back yards. The lively station neighbourhoods that exist today only emerged after the stations were built, and it took even longer before these new neighbourhoods became connected to the old city centre. Of course, this process was helped by the fact that most cities were quite small back then so the incorporation happened naturally when the cities grew. However, I think it remains true that you don't need to built a station in a 24h neighbourhood, you can built the neighbourhood around the station instead.
thats why im excited to see what the future of the houston station will look like. there's nothing around northwest mall and having the station there could lead to big improvements in the area
@@cheeseburgerfromtexas can see a station bringing new development there, just hope it gets added to the rapid bus network (would prefer rail but i know it wont happen lol) also this explains why the antique mall inside the former northwest mall is closing at the end of the year
Well yes, except as you say, cities were much smaller then so everywhere was within easy walking distance when the station was built.
For instance London. Lines from the north had to stay north of Euston Road, but I have no difficulty walking through the city to the river.
Modern cities are much bigger and sighting terminals away from the central area is much more problematic.
Just wanted to write basically the same comment ;)
I think it is crucial to understand that those walkable railway neighbourhoods grew naturally in a time when neither cars not buses were a topic and ordinary people walked all shorted distances. And still it took a long time. I have serious doubts that this can be easily replicated in the 21st century
We already tried building neighborhoods around the stations here in America, they didn't last long and the stations had to close.
Walking in the US was always weird when I lived there. As long as you're on the grid it's super convenient because it's next to impossible to get lost, but going beyond that you'd always have to cross under a highway, run across a ramp or some train tracks, and eventually you'd realize that the path just ends. You'd get to the edge of a town and then realize that going any further would either require a car, or crossing private property. It kinda felt like being trapped. The trains on the other hand were very pleasant (the Amtrak in California), with super comfortable cars and service and some magnificent views!
I almost got killed today walking to class
Since american cities are in grids it would be really easy to indtroduce superblocks.
ny lmao
becuase you couldnt design a town in the us as walkable as they were mainly developed at 3 diffferent times. the early history, wild west times, and after ww2
@@capnsteele3365 Exactly. Also comparing US cities and towns to European cities and towns, the towns in there are a lot more compact and mostly are built during medieval eras, thus there's no need to drive. Most of US towns and cities are built during the advent of the car.
I’m a former DART (Dallas) light rail operator, and I’m so excited for this new project. It would be my dream to operate this new train!
@@stewbie_ I appreciate that, though I feel that phrase is better suited for the men and women who serve in the military, but thank you!
@David Moore I left if 2017, but I operated them all, and the streetcar, along with some bus routes when I first started.
Wow, i'm an Operator for them right now! Been there for about 2.5 years, so I just missed ya. I too am really hoping I can hop on the Texas Central project when it arrives, and leave DART behind. It's just as messy as you most likely remember.
@@PopsiclePenguinWasTaken I was out of CROF, on the extra board for three years. I LOVED operating, and have even contemplated coming back. Sign up for their emails so you’re up-to-date on when they start hiring for the high speed train
@@PopsiclePenguinWasTaken and yes, it was messy, but there’s something about being in uniform and behind the master controller, that makes me miss it
Your videos inspired me to run against and successfully displace the district 1 San Antonio city council man of 8 years in order to provide better transportation to the citizens of the city and visitors. To see you do a video about what we are trying to do in city hall is encouraging. Thanks!
That's awesome, congratulations! How do you plan on improving the transportation network in San Antonio?
@@iact1 well as someone else commented, VIA is a private company that is in charge of the city's buses and they are planning on using a station on the opposite side of the city in their future transportation model. Our plan, is a light rail system similar to Vancouver's SkyTrain. But as many plans have been put forth to the citizens before, the problem in implementing it is the same. The Auto Industry, the Highway industry, and the city charter prohibits any funding of a streetcar plan.
That's great! Good luck!
@@mjacobs8139 why not use low speed maglev or suspended monorail? It’s actually cheaper per mile to build. Plus low speed maglev is easier to maintain look up the technology.
@@mjacobs8139 streetcars are too slow skip em
Frances TGV (their high speed train system) stations are often located outside of the actual cities they serve. The key to success for them (despite often offering nothing of interest in their proximity) is the connection to the central stations and city centers via local trains and other modes of public transport.
Shinkansen stations often are too, i.e. in Osaka, Yokahama, etc...
That’s why DB despite all the flaws is far better
I think the TGV system is a little more nuanced than that. In some cases, such as Lyon, the out of town station is for trains not terminating at the city. If it is then the TGV just transfers into the conventional network and goes into city centre.
There are some purely rural stations, such as Aix en Provence TGV which are there to serve a less densely populated area where generally passengers drive to and from the station.
In Rennes, Lille, Bordeaux, Strasbourg or Le Mans you directly arrive in the city center and this is the case for most mid-size city in France.
@@redakteur3613 Absolutely not. DB has no dedicated high speed rail network and despite the ICE being their flagship product, they are notorious for their delays especially among high volume routes. The TGV terminating outside metropolitan areas and offering a reliable service to the city centers is far better than having an irreliable train directly serving the city center.
I think its really unfortunate that the DB is in that bad shape it is right now, especially looking at projects they can do if given the money and political support (thinking about the Munich - Berlin high speed connection). I really hope the new government is helping the DB get in a better shape
I recently moved from NYC to Austin. I don't drive and I have a lot of work in Dallas, so I frequently take the bus, but I prefer train travel and would pay a premium to use it if it were available. My first time in Austin was in December of 2018, when I thought it would be a nice idea to take the Texas Eagle to San Antonio. I waited 2 hours for the train to arrive and we had a 90 minute stop in San Marcos. Needless to say, improvements and more options would be very welcome.
Just get a license
@@ahadumer418 I cannot drive for medical reasons, but thanks for the suggestion!
@@jastrub man you have just moved to Texas, the more automobile-dependant place on earth
Aye shout out to people who can’t drive for medical reasons! People make us out to be villains honestly. I’m up by the Great Lakes and public transport is pretty nonexistent in my small town life. I almost get killed by cars on a normal basis. We gotta keep fighting for better infrastructure, now is a better time than ever (:
@@Jenny-tm3cm yeah I almost get killed in my parking lot on a daily basis because people think everything is a thruway and don't look out for pedestrians because literally nobody walks
I was on the Acela just last week, and it is great. It is a lot like basic intercity rail in most of Europe, but at twice the price and half the speed.
🤣🤣
One thing I noticed in Europe is just how varied the pricing can be. I don’t remember the line, but I took a trip from Madrid to Barcelona and it was about 12eur which was awesome. Then I tried the same from Germany to Austria and just straight-up flying to Vienna was the cheaper option.
I'm glad that basic intercity rail was mentioned. Modern ordinary electric locomotive pulled passanger train can have top speeds of ~200 km/h (or 120 mph) on a modern railroad. Same locomotives can also be used for freight trains where they are very efficient. High-speed services are great, but basic rail should not be neglected either.
@@asdfas1839 But for a "premium train" the Acela is pretty lacking. I'm sure a lot of our limitations come from the fact that we (The US) were relatively untouched during WW II, and therefore a lot of the old infrastructure was never updated. It is a lot easier to build straight train lines between cities when you are rebuilding after being bombed to hell and back.
@@DJTI99 well, most of our cities (except Germany) weren´t that much destroyed to be able to lay down track on previous streets and houses. Take my hometown - Prague, CZ - for example. We still have all our tracks basically in their historical corridors with some minor tweeks and connections (or lost connections) in last 70 years. But even as a capital in central Europe, touched by war a lot, you renew rails in their previous corridors due to price. Yes, on bombed sites you build new houses and districts, but hardly any new major line-builds. Because you wouldn´t have where to lead them and connect them to other infrastructure ;)
The problem is that Texas doesn’t have good last-mile options. It’s easy enough to drive to a station in your hometown, but what happens when you get to the other end where you don’t have a car to drive? You could take a taxi or local transit, but one is expensive and the other is slow b/c it has to compete w/ car traffic and won’t take you directly to your final destination.
Amtrac could invest in future self driving cars or partner with uber and have them wait at the train station. China now has self driving "boxes" because it is driverless and has no steeering wheel and is free
Robo taxis
If it's just one mile, surely walking would be convenient for most people?
@@CompletelyCr I don’t think you understand how sprawled-out TX cities are and how inconvenient they make walking. Houston is an hour away from Houston, and that’s while doing 70 on the interstate. No that wasn’t a typo. Maybe 0.01% of people who travel between the two cities have a destination w/in a mile from the station. Maybe 20% have a destination w/in a mile of public transit.
@@LK-pc4sq I say this as a software engineer: Self-driving cars have all the same limitations as human-driven cars do. They’re dependent on the same inefficient car infrastructure for which traffic is an inherent problem that won’t go away just b/c you added tech. Tech can’t change the basic principles of physics or graph theory to increase traffic flow. On top of that, most of the promises of self-driving tech are technically infeasible and uneconomical. The ONLY way to fix transportation is to make cars the last resort, not the default.
Keep in mind people have been proposing high speed rail in Texas since the 90s. I'll believe it when I see it.
I wonder how many big cities they’ll have by the time it actually gets built 😂
Same with CA, I'm 31 years old now and I recall hearing about it since my early childhood. We really just are not a rail culture.
The Texas Central project is actually doing quite well. It’s not made the same mistake as California HSR by starting construction on sections before vital segments haven’t been approved for construction-instead they’ve got all the planning permission out of the way first as I understand it. They signed construction and operator contracts earlier this year, so I think they’re planning to start construction shortly.
That’s not to say I don’t believe that California’s line won’t be finished-they’ve also overcome some of the major hurdles in the last year that we’re holding them back. But the Texas one has generally been better managed, and I think in part that’s because they’ve actually bothered to get more expertise from countries that actually have high speed rail.
LOL, Texas should fix it's power grid before taking on any new projects. Gotta fix those windmills.
@@stupidd6513 I mean it wasn't the wind turbines that were the problem though was it? It was the disruption of fuel going to the fossil fuel powered stations that caused the power shortage. That and the fact that the state government had the bright idea of cutting off Texas's power grid from the rest of the country and making it impossible for more power to be sent from elsewhere to mitigate the issue.
High speed rail doesn't compete against slow trains/buses/driving, it competes against flying. The passengers who take it will just call an Uber between the station and downtown (or wherever their final destination is), just like they do with airports.
I agree, and that's why, assuming comparable prices and travel times to planes, the stations don't need great locations or transit connections, just ones that are better than the airports. The greater comfort of a train seat takes care of the rest.
Fact. Or they will rent a car.
Some of mainland China's train stations even have elevated & underground driveways as well as taxi ranks I remember, like airports
@@danieldaniels7571 A friend/family can pick then up, rent a car, hire a cab, or ride a bus. Dallas and Houston have adequate public bus systems In their downtown areas, as do Austin and San Antonio. And if you are a businessman, the hotels have vans. Dallas's planned Texas Central station is within a few blocks of present DART stations, while Houston could build their light rail tram to the Northwest Mall if they desired to do so. Saying it doesn't exist today does not necessarily mean it won't exist tomorrow...
@@ronclark9724 if'n you day so. From what I've seen, Texans drive.
Brightline really impressed me from what is saw. Great rolling stock but still slow due to tracks and legal limits and the short route.
Trains interior is beautiful.
Nice stations too.
All it needs is to have its own dedicated track. Sharing it with freight really slows it down.
@@ianhomerpura8937 It does have its own dedicated tracks. FEC is the same parent company for both Brightline and freight, so its own dispatch always give priority to Brightline.
The real issue with brightline is all the level crossings, car collisions are extremely common. They resumed service a few days ago (after suspending it for COVID) and literally had a car collision on the first day of service. Lets just say Miami drivers aren't great.
Brightline is soon to start construction here in Southern California and they'll have true high speed between Southern California and Las Vegas.
I worked on this project for Hitachi working with the engineers in Japan. They had argued that the rail could be built above existing rail line in Dallas, but for cost reasons this was rejected. The Japanese were confused by this because in Japan the Shinkansen is Tokyo is built above an existing rail line.
I cannot stress how good the commuter system is in Antwerp, and the interior of that station is ridiculously beautiful.
I stayed right beside the station in a beautiful cheap Airbnb and could get anywhere around Belgium eg Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, or anywhere in the Netherlands in a very short term also, and return to my apartment the very next day.
Nearby suburb towns were built along the commuter line out of the city and some like Lier had great mix of medium density development with a beautiful historic looking square.
As someone living in Belgium I can say trains are probably the worst mode of transportation.
I have had many occasions where I was waiting for a train and it either did not show up, was late, or it showed up and the doors would not open.
It is super rage inducing. Also trains in Belgium only come every hour (sometimes every 30min in rush hours) while allot of other European countries have them every 30min or less.
The trains are very expensive way to commute each day for the service you get.
And do not get me started on how the trains are maintained. The seats are usually extremely dirty with gum, dirt and stains are over them.
Now I use my bike or car to commute and it is allot less stressful.
let's just say i have my doubts. it's great to take the train somewhere, but not if you still need a car once you get there.
If you would absolutely need a car, you could maybe rent one?
Or if you still need to drive to the station.
That's the problem. There's no one solution. We need a major overhaul.
I think it will end up like the newer train stations in Canada: still terribly car dependent. Probably going to include lots of free parking but you have to pay to use the bus to get there. Still surrounded by highways and the cities themselves will still be sprawling so that you need a car to get anywhere once you arrive.
I mean thats the same if you take a airplane. Texas is just big enough that people do fly between the cities now
I feel the need to point out that you were more than a bit off in regards to the Texas Central station locations on your maps.
Houston you pegged over 2 miles from where it is going to be, 2 miles (a 33% increase) further away from downtown Houston.
Dallas' location is immediately east of the I-30/I-35E interchange, making it just a half-mile from Union Station, and walking distance to the convention center and its LRT station.
Shoot, sorry about that!
That makes a huge difference for the Houston Station. Still not a pedestrian oriented area, but much closer to the action
There were some city light rail proposals that would replace freight train to connect the station to downtown. Alot more feasible than buying expensive property to bring high speed rail into downtown.
@@bryankasischke523 Wouldn't replacing freight trains just put more trucks on the roads?
@@Korina42 For this particular part of the track network, there are two tracks about .25 miles south that wouldn't obstruct freight traffic. The track in question is just one track. What it would effectively do if force trains to switch at the rail yard further east...think it's about 3 miles.
As someone who lives in College Station, I'm excited about the Texas Central Rail project and I hope it gets built!
tamu?
It may be finished in time for people to take it to your funeral.
If you’re living in college station and not a student then I offer my condolences
@@wclark3196 Damn you trying to catch hands with that negativity
@@jesussavesanus9790 Everyone loves to draw lines on a map with their crayons but nobody's around when the bill comes.
Here in South Africa I often take highspeed trains to travel around. I use the Gautrain in my area. When I went to Texas in 2017 I was actually surprised of how much driving you have to do rather than to take a train.
The only Texans who don’t drive are the homeless and disabled.
South Africa doesn’t have high speed rail
@@The_king567 I literally just named the train.
Houston and Dallas are so sprawly, I feel like they almost really need two stations each - one for the city center, one far out into the suburbs. The suburban station is much more attractive for people that live in the suburbs, by avoiding the need to drive long distances in heavy traffic to the center of town, just to reach the station. For those catching a rideshare vehicle from the station, reducing the driving distance from 40 miles to 10 miles greatly reduces the monetary cost of the trip. Considering that the vast majority of the population in each city lives in the suburbs, this feels important.
The Houston station out near 610/290 kind of fulfills this purpose, except the city sprawls out far beyond that, enough that there should probably be a second station further out. I also hope that the the bus connections from the station to the actual downtown will be good. Even if most people live in the suburbs, access to downtown still matters.
Yep, this. Walkability in Texas is a fantasy. The success of this train line will depend on how useful it is for normal Texans who drive.
High speed rail is for inter-city travel not intra-city travel. It should only have one stop, then you have a local transportation network that connects it to other parts of the city.
For real, I live in the suburbs and it sucks that we can't simply walk to a nearby train station because it's designed to driven by cars. The government could have to give just all a pardon from going to school and work to stay home just to make our suburbs and cities walkable and convenient lol
@@danieldaniels7571 you can create pockets of walkability, even in Texas. It's not going to help the entire city and all its inhabitants, but these walkable areas make transit, cycling etc more viable, at least within those areas and between similar areas close by.
@@barvdw Texas already has walkable areas. They’re called malls. And strip malls. You walk to them from your car in the parking lot.
"Location is critical to any successful train station."
I think the causality is wrong here. City districts around successful train stations grow, so they sort of create their own locations. Of course, this was the case a century ago, and trying to implement missing infrastructure now is going to be painful.
Making it possible to get to a station without a car is extremely important, but we have to acknowledge that these Texan cities have gigantic sprawling suburbs for which car dependency is an unfortunate and almost unfixable reality.
I'd rather have people drive to the train station than take the car of plane for the whole trip.
Suburban stations with rail connections to downtowns seem like a sensible option.
I think I'd rather drive 30 minutes to an austin station and take a train to dallas instead of drive the whole way. Would be nice if I could take light rail from my development to the station, but considering the only way out is along 620 and the traffic has gotten worse over 10 years and nothing has been added on the other side, I have zero faith that the road situation will improve, let alone the (nonexistant) rail situation. I hate driving and there isn't a single viable alternative so as a result, I end up rarely going anywhere. Maybe I should just move out of the US...
@@THEzTROLLlz Yes leave if you hate it so much. Please !
I disagree that we can't fix the auto dependency in these cities
Yep. But it's only a matter of time before some Euro says "Just make bike lanes like Amsterdam." You can really tell they're all high over there.
@@wclark3196 Correct 😂
As a person who is born and raised in Antwerp I am proud to see our central station in your video
It is a lovely station :)
2:17 This shot is hilarious. It's filming Cologne's central station, which is nice, but the steps the camera is standing on are literally the steps of Cologne Cathedral, which seems like the far more interesting thing to film there.
I was about to say, this has to be the only video ever filmed here, that doesn't feature the Cathedral.
I'm a train nerd and i have a photo from that exact perspective. I guess some of us just think train stations are cooler than even very cool cathedrals.
I love this station. Made trips from Bonn to see the Kölner Dom super easy
Thank You Angela
@@MikyleChristian and it's not just regular regional rail, there's also the underground Stadtbahn (a special sort of LRTs) station serving lines 16 and 18 (and 5), both also going to Bonn
Mexico is currently building a high speed rail from the city of Monterrey to the Texas border near San Antonio. As Monterrey is a powerful wealthy city that does a lot a commerce with Texas and the USA, they line will be very successful for business travelers from both Nations.
Is the line going to Laredo?
@@Bacopa68 it goes directly to San Antonio and it connects with the proposed Texas high Speed train
@@eliteultra9 Cool, it should go to San Antonio.
And guess who provided there high speed train and help build it, you got it Gchina not the US!!😂🤣😅😆😅🤣😂🤣😅😆✌👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻it'z already happening to other Asean countries like Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia,Thailand and Indonesia. US and Canada are already 40 years behind there infrastructures of there roads and trains while these secondary world countries are advancing towards the future!!! And that's not facts that iz the truth as much we say it USA and Canada are playing catch up!!!😉😊😂🤣😅😆😅🤣😂✌👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻All talks and Bull sh!t walks that iz American government Motto!!!!
Not a high speed rail. It was planned to be, but it seems that the planners figured it would be more realistic to keep it as regular rail instead. Either way, it's just concept right now.
I can see this as another way people can evacuate safely in case a hurricane hits Houston, so the highways won't be so packed with cars.
Good point! Resiliency through transportation.
Somewhat ironically the interstate highway system was built so that cities could be quickly evacuated in case of an incoming nuclear attack or Russian invasion. Unfortunately since cars are not the most efficient means of transportation and tend to clog up the roads with traffic, the interstate does not serve it's purpose well. You can't evacuate from a disaster of any sort quickly if you're stuck in traffic along with every other driver.
Coastal areas need to evacuate before hurricanes. Houston usually does not
@@carfreeneoliberalgeorgisty5102 You do not get stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.
@@wclark3196 obviously, but when thousands of cars join together to become traffic, that traffic moves very slowly.
France often builds dedicated high speed stations in the middle of nowhere. While a country like Germany has its train going to main stations in city center. There is countless reason why its designed that way. But I prefer the german solution.
I prefer the latter one as well. It just makes the journey so much more confortable and scenic.
France does it to expand its ridership. These rural stations don't replace city centre stations but complement them. They are there to attract customers from an area of many small towns, none of which would support its own station. You might not appreciate these stations, but for the communities they serve being able to catch a TGV with just a short drive to the station is definitely a plus.
@@janprimus1947 They're political corruption. Politicians buying votes from the rurals with these locations. They bump up property prices, so farmers and developers love them and how politicians their appreciation with votes and $$$.
The actual reason is that it takes forever for high speed trains to pass through city centers. In France, they'll typically run trains from large city (usually Paris) to smaller cities. Some will go to the dedicated high speed stations, while others will go to the city center stations if they don't go that much further. In Valence for instance, the city center station will have direct service to Paris, but if you want to go to Marseille, you first take a regional train to the HSR station. This makes longer journeys way quicker.
Contrast this with Germany where the HSR network is far slower because it has to take you through most city centers along the way.
I have used both systems and the French one is way better in my opinion.
@@countdown4725 How interesting it must be to be so gullible.
Id take a train in every state ngl. Im so sick of driving and cars. I love trains but the nearest one is about a state away.(I live in kentucky)
Oh, and to clarify for some commenters: the Houston station would actually be close to the heart of Houston. 610 is the tiny INNER loop at maybe 10 miles diameter. Beltway 8 encompasses that (and much of Houston's actual city limits) with a diameter of about 30 miles. The suburbs of the Greater Houston Area (which some are larger and more populated than many other well known US cities) are encompassed by 99 -- the Grand Parkway -- about 50 miles in diameter.
Most of the people here commenting have never been to Houston and don’t have any concept of the massive size and low density.
@@danieldaniels7571 not at all! We sprawl till we fall! 🤣🤣😑😭
Florida bright line will also have Orlando connect to Tempa in the future after the Miami and Orlando route is finished. This will ease traffic since a-lot of people travel between these cities for vacation.
I know this would legit cost trillons but one day if you could take a train from the NEC to florida wow Air and road travel would die
I would love a Tampa to Orlando line with decent frequency. My brother lives in Tampa, and when I visited him last, it would have been great if we could have traveled to Orlando without driving.
Looks like there is one train a day? My small city of under 150,000 has 3 trips a day from Amtrak to Chicago (and some smaller cities to our south) and they are looking at adding a high speed line between Chicago and St. Louis that also stops here.
also a station at disney
@@blackopscw7913 air wouldn't die, its way faster. It might take cars of the road though
@@blackopscw7913 You can take an Amtrak train from NYC all the way to Miami. It just takes days.
But honestly, even if you had a Japanese bullet train from NY to FL it would still take over a day. Rail is just less convenient than air at those distances.
I'm a bit cynical about this project, considering the irrational hatred many Americans have to any form of transport apart from cars and planes. We'll see if it actually gets built.
Come on it's texas you know the answer
@@herlescraft That answer you’re thinking of is wrong. Its the OTHER one that applies to all the USA. You know what it is.
I know that’s always the stereotype. But would you’ve guessed the largest light rail system in the country is Dallas’ DART? As a former Dallasite I promise there’s huge appeal and demand. To be able to hop on a DART train to get me to a high speed rail would’ve been a no brainer to get to Houston or Austin. Driving to either is miserable, and flying is expensive and takes just as long.
@@tsmith76092 the oil and car companies won't like this project. They will do everything to make sure this fails.
@@racerman7303 lol the car companies would love this project. You'll need rental cars at the destination points for both cities which means Enterprise and other rental agencies would have more setups like their airport locations which means more cars they'd need to acquire. This would have no effect on oil companies, if anything they'd welcome it as it'd be another large machine in need of oil products.
The only industry that will oppose this are the airlines. Southwest Airlines was able to kill the Texas high speed rail project of the late 80's. Although they don't seem to keen on trying to interfere here the airlines are the ones that'd lose ridership if this goes through. Especially since this would likely lead to expansion to the other cites.
I worked on the masterplanning of the high speed rail stations back in 2018 while being an urban design intern! People joked that I may be well into my middle ages before the project is completed. The biggest issue we came across while planning the stations was accommodating the huge driving culture of Texas, so we had to prioritize personal parking even more than expected over bikes, busses and even ride sharing.
It's kind of wild to see people discussing the plans I helped work on.
HOLY CRAP CITY BEAUTIFUL TALKING ABOUT CENTRAL TEXAS RAIL?!? Am I DREAMING?!?! This is a dream come true
Heads up: you can reach the riverwalk without ever having to cross a road with cars from the Alamodome, there’s a tunnel underneath i37 you walk across from the parking lot, from there you enter one of the parking lots for the Alamodome, go straight and you’ll be at the tower of americas, and if you continue in that direction you’ll end back up on the riverwalk by the convention center. It’s a long ass walk, I did it from the canopy once, but is doable and you will never once cross anywhere with any cars. That being said I tried the route above the riverwalk to the tunnel that goes under 37 and it was way shorter
The issue of station placing is what has made our Dart (Dallas) system largely unused. Other than downtown the stations are generally nowhere. You have to drive to the station, park, then ride as there is nothing worth going to nearby save for one or two stops like marketplace or mockingbird station.
Even then, Mockingbird area was very specifically designed around the station.
Dallas built too suburban of a system. Houston's rail stations are where there's usually urban life around the stations to go to and wasn't designed with any parking lots next to stations that weren't already there if there.
So true. I moved to Dallas years ago and I lucked out. My home and job were both walking distance from DART stations. Once I moved about mile away it was no longer worth it to take light rail. It made more sense to drive everywhere, even to my job. It would help if there were more bus stops and more frequent busses, but the ridership is probably too low to justify it.
One thing to mention with Dallas is the light rail and commuter rail has connections to the DFW Airport and Fort Worth respectively. There is a small local rivalry between Fort Worth and Dallas with Fort Worth having the more beautiful train station district in my opinion. I found the Dallas Union Station interior dark, outdated, and lonely. If Texas Central gets built AND completed, Fort Worth, I hope, would probably put the money to improve connections on that side of the Metroplex so not to be seen as the little brother.
As a native Texan living in Dallas, the better question is will they ever be built?
Texas central is in court battling against Land owners and farmers over the project because Texas central wants imminent domain to build bridges over their land. Which if you think about it, it's not messing up the farmers land in no way. But I mean your land is your land. But at the same time, Building a bridge over just 60 feet of land that is probably not being used...what harm can it do really
@@KingAsa5 still doesn’t answer the question, they’ve had renderings after renderings of the stations since at least 2015 and not one single has started construction because of those court battles. That’s why I’m skeptical that it will be built.
@@VinceroAlpha wasn't trying to answer your question, I was trying to add to your question.
I'd like to know the same thing.
We'll know in the next court hearing.
@@KingAsa5 Since the company’s inception in 09, I just doesn’t look likely AT ALL. Just court case after court case for literally a decade!
@@VinceroAlpha This upcoming one will be the final I believe. It'll determine weather or not They can actually start.
In fact, many Japanese shinkansen stations and Chinese HSR stations actually located far away from the city centers, which brings new opportunities to underdeveloped regions in the cities
I’ve seen a lot of stuff on high speed rail recently. I like the idea, but I’m confused as to why it’s important right now. I’ve seen a study that shows the majority of travel is from suburb to suburb. It seems to me that we need to improve bus and light rail networks before we improve high speed rail networks. As you said when talking about Dallas, the connectivity to light rail makes it better to get from the high speed rail station to the other parts of the city like downtown. Seems like we should build that up and see how travel is affected before we worry about high speed rail
It looks like they are improving all aspects and this video is only about the high speed rail
Cuz high speed rail is flashyyyy and shows the US is powerful and stuff which politicians like more than a boring commuter rail or metro network
Its a good point. I think the stations are super important to the success of rail here in US. Ive traveled in many different European countries and the stations were always super convenient in middle of the city. Seems like this Texas rail is almost doomed to do poorly unless somehow they start developing the stations or at least access to them.
There has not been any development around the numerous out of town French TGV stations. They nevertheless work. Avignon and Aix TGV receive twice as many passengers as expected.
This video got the locations off. Plus there are plenty of examples in Europe of stations in the middle of nowhere and the train still doing well.
@@GarrusN7 Aix-en-Provence TGV is in the middle of nowhere, the only place where HSR could be built, a scrubby inhabited plateau. Aix (143 000 inhabitants) is 16 km to the east via a congested road. The station is popular despite the proximity of Marseille airport and its faster connections to Paris and other northern cities, 13 km to the west. Benefiting from well located stations in large cities along the North East Corridor between Boston and Washington DC, Acelas carry at most 3.6 million passengers annually, slightly less than the number getting in or out of the TGV in Aix-TGV.
I'm from Europe and besides being used to relatively good (high-speed) rail-connections, there is one slight problem between certain countries: rail system compatibility. With certain trains, that can be mitigated (some of which might support different rail distances/widths), but still, it's a bit of a pain, when the infrastructure isn't standardized.
So, I was wondering whether or not the different (private and public) (high-speed) rail lines, that are being built, could eventually (in many, many decades, if some billionaires don't suddenly invest in that massively, of course) be connected with each other without the need for special trains then?
Cheers and thanks for this short insight and assessment, to which I can fully agree.
The operations planned by Texas Central Partners are to utilise non-compliant equipment (i.e. rolling stock which would not meet the current safety standards as set by the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration). This in itself is NOT a problem, since the F.R.A. approaches safety from the prospect of crash survivability, whilst true high-speed operations tend to view safety from a crash avoidance perspective.
At any rate, joint multi-modal station facilities would certainly be possible, but there will be no foreseeable way that Shinkansen-type trains could mix and mingle with general system services in these United States - to the point where the trackage itself (despite both being standard gauge) would (generally) not be allowed to interconnect.
I trust this helps!
@@garlboydlatham4295 Thank you so much for this insight.
So, this sounds similar to Japan's, France's and many other Country's approaches to High-Speed-Train-Tracks vs. Standard-/Cargo-Tracks then.
I think it's the better way to go in general, yet it would be a waste of investments if at least the high-speed-tracks wouldn't be (allowed to) interconnect/-ing at some point (maybe after regulations were adjusted accordingly and standards either implemented or at least assessed and classified for each of the existing systems then - like the French TGV is only going at slower speeds on German Tracks most of them aren't built for such high-speeds and also not used exclusively for High-Speed-Personal-Transport-Trains).
Well, about the safety issues: recently a Japanese Bullet Train derailed during an Earthquake in Japan and there were no injuries reported so far - much different to what happened with German ICE-Trains in the past (Hannover-Derail in the 1990's I think it was).
So, I'm sure in this Age of Information Technology, engineers will certainly take the lessons learned into account before building new rail systems since there are - quite literally - "Lives on the Line".
It will be interesting to see how all of it is working out though and I hope to live long enough to see it and maybe even experience it some day...
@@BulukEtznab here in Germany HSR lines use the same standard gauge and electrification as all other lines, but some of them are too steep for some trains to climb, the Cologne-Frankfurt line for example can only be used by ICE 3 because of it's max 40‰ gradient
@@BulukEtznab the Eschede (60km North of Hanover) accident was the only deadly ICE accident AFAIK, but it was the deadliest HSR accident at the time, and caused by a broken wheel resulting in a derailment which led to parts of the train crashing into a bridge that then collapsed. 101 people died and 88 were severely injured. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschede_derailment
If I need to rent a car at the destination station, then I would just rather drive. Saving the train fare and car rental fees. This has been the problem with US train development everywhere. Very few places in the US have a strong, non-car based local transportation network. What could work would be using these handful of places as hubs. Chicago has pretty good public trans. I lived in Omaha. I could imagine parking my vehicle in Omaha, then riding a train to Chicago, traveling by bus, train and occasional taxi in Chicago and then coming home. Spokes from Chicago to Omaha (which would pass Des Moines and Quad Cities), to Kansas City, to St Louis and to Indianapolis, among others could prop up a failing Chicago and provide useful, road declogging profitable train service.
Why? If you can rent a car at your airport destination, then you can rent a car at your train destination station. You just need to switch from your old way of thinking. Riding a high speed rail will be much more comfortable and restful than driving your car all the way and back.
@@rap3208 That implies I'd be willing to fly. The distances posited for train travel tend to be closer to drive distances for me now. Even before covid insanity, I'd only fly if the distance was more than a days drive.. While some aspects of the ride on the train might be better, others are worse, most notably, loss of flexibility.
I'm totally in favor of that plan with a intersection at Temple, just because Temple has a huge Bucee's in the North part of town.
Yeah, but the intersection is gonna be in Bryan. Maybe Bucee's can adapt to the train life. At this point I would think Bucee's needs to be looking into charging stations. The Bucee's in Giddings missed out on the Tesla chargers there.
A couple years back I travelled from Italy to Finland in less than 48 hours. As he mentioned the proximity of train station to the city center really helped and we managed to experience quite a lot during that time.
Once daily service and three times weekly, as a Brit it just doesn’t make sense.
Hearing about the backwardness of public transit in the US is always baffling to me, as a Dutch guy. It's like a window into a bleak past, but it's actually now...
Many places don't have security cameras or mass transit in America. If you carry a valuable backpack and get robbed in the suburbs, no one is outside to help. A solution is to just drive a car until you reach your destination.
@@weareorigin i'm sorry but lets be real, that's just an excuse.
@@weareorigin or carry weapons for self defense. I have a knife, pepper spray, and 9mm. It's sad I have to, but that's just reality in America. High crime rate, and you're on your own.
@@weareorigin My suggested solution would be, to invest in public transit, and not worry too much about getting robbed. I have to admit, I've never been to the US, but in all my walking visits to weird and desolate suburbs in European capitals, I've never once been robbed?
Americans need to rethink all the conditioning that has been done to them over the decades by the car manufacturing lobby. Using public transport does not make you a ‘commie’. The car and your sprawling neighbourhoods have been designed to keep you in debt forever. Imagine how nice it is to live in a place where you have excellent public transport. Walking is also good exercise. If you live in a small non-car dependent neighbourhood a trip to buy milk and eggs can be done without a car.
But I don’t like sitting with strangers on a train, I rather use Uber.
Not saying I don’t like the idea since I like public transport, but I wouldn’t personally use it.
To defend car people in the South, Texas is unwalkable in the summer time due do high heat.
But yes; it is ridiculous that the nation with the first intercontiential railway and a great history of rail, does not understand how to do rail.
@@jackphillips6742 there's quite some heat across central to southern Europe as well, especially with heat waves coming from Africa
@@jahbrenpanvilla I rather sit with 100 strangers in a bus than with 1 stranger in a car. The 100 strangers become a crowd and fade into the background. In an Uber I am much closer to the driver and since there is just one person their presence is harder to ignore.
Glad to see Leipzig Central Station, it is just in the middle of the city, connects with local trains and just outside is the tram/bus station.
Also, it's just beautiful.
In San Antonio, there is already a pedestrian bridge that connects the Alamodome to the rest of downtown/convention center.
Also, Texas T-Bone was my nickname in high school.
Northwest Houston is a nightmare getting to and from, and I remember this having lived there. They would need better public transit serving North Houston or else the station is going to fail.
So long as there is another Transit connection it should be fine, in Japan, many new stations were built, or rural stations upgraded for the Shinkansen, when the downtown station couldn't handle it. Like Shin-Osaka, Shin-Aomori, Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto etc. In most of the cases, the cities and their downtowns were located a bit far away from what the optimal route was for the Shinkansen, so a Transfer station to other lines was needed.
As an austin resident I cannot wait for Texas rail to get underway and expand over here. By then we’ll have several new light rail lines that should ease circulation
The Houston Station on the map is ~3miles northwest of the actual proposed site. Let us remember that New York's Grand Central was built on land that was then considered the edge of town.
290 and West 18th is kinda in the center of where a lot of people live even if it is an urban blight area. And plenty of room for development there with lots of blighted light industrial stuff. Plus the near northwest suburbs really could use a boost. This is the homeland of Shelly Duvall and Patrick Swayze who both went to Waltrip HS.
This guy probably just wanted to make this video to get more attention to Nebula and the California sites.
I have a suggestion for some Entrepeneur out there. As part of the commercial development planned for these major HSR railhead Stations, why not include a small Park & Ride facility for overnight parking? This could work at even some of the bigger Commuter rail stations that would feed into these three main Stations. I envision some commercial developer building one of those Carvana "auto vending machines" that hold 30 - 40 cars inside. These things are built by a company call Nussbaum for 5 or 6 million! You could drop your car off at the facility, where a parking lot attendent would put your car up for a couple of days, while you take a commuter train into Dallas, Fort Worth, or Houston, to catch the "Texas Acela" for a weekend get-a-way or business trip. that would help solve the "last mile" problem!
It depends on the type of high speed transit, station location and urban planning of area including land use and building layout.
@@donnerwetter1905 If transit is actually much faster than cars and even planes, many will take them.
The real problem isn’t density. It’s traffic flow, land use and building layout. You can still have pretty high density and still be very car dependent
In Orlando, the commuter train (SunRail) runs on a CSX freight track, and is shared by Amtrak. It works pretty great, but people constantly want it to expand to weekends, or an easy-west route and to the airport. I’m excited for Brightline to connect Orlando to South Florida.
As a native Houstonian, that location is TERRIBLE. Heavy traffic area and no attractions near. The one in San Antonio seems best imho
Hi - I really enjoy the City Beautiful videos. Not sure how else to contact you, but I do have an interesting future topic? In Memphis, in the late 1960's/early 1970's the citizens fought and eventually won against the Federal Government and stopped Interstate 40 from being built through our beautiful park in the center of the city. Overton Park in Memphis was designed by the same folks who designed by Central Park in New York. While multiple folks led the fight in the 60's, many of the leaders described themselves as little old ladies in tennis shows. Sadly, 50 years later, the Memphis Zoo now wants to take some of the hard fought land from the Greensward of the Park and add it to their parking lot.
Also hoping for the El Paso to Denver rail that’s supposedly been in the works. There are a lot of car accidents when people drive into southern NM from TX due to a combo of poorly designed/maintained roads and dangerous driving from large oil & gas trucks
I’ve never had an issue with driving on I-25
@@danieldaniels7571 then you haven’t been in Colorado long enough
Fort Worth’s Amtrak/Trinity Commuter RailThe T City transit bus & Greyhound bus station are in the same building and that would make a great Texas Central Rail Station as well as the Fort Worth Texas & Pacific Terminal which all the floors of that building are condos.
I sure hope that a high speed rail station comes to San Antonio. I love the city but it’s not very conducive to travel by anything other than car. I hope that it brings better development and possibly make it end up as a more pedestrian friendly city
Could you do a video of NC Trains, the stations built in Raleigh and Charlotte and the future HSR that is proposed and the future transit in the cities surrounding
As someone who grew up in Texas and now lives in Germany. You will never be able to replicate urban fabric in Texas - the sprawl is simply to expansive.
Thank you for the most recent video talking about the i35 lane expansion in Austin. I can’t tell you how much I hope they don’t move forward with that project.
I live in Dallas and the area where the future high speed rail is supposed to go is being developed with the train station in mind. I think it's gonna be the best option in the TX triangle
Texas high speed rail? So basically I can drive my car to a train station where I can pay $200 to catch a train to another city where Ill have to rent a different car to get around? Yeah, that should work no problem.
Seriously,when Americans talk about HSR they just demonstrate they they understand nothing about Europe.
This is actually a very good point that seems to have been missed in this video. I know Dallas has a light rail system, but I don't recall there being one in Austin, San Antonio, or Houston.
The Townlake Y is fairly new and residents love it. It’s not going away any time soon. A better idea would be to build a new station where the animal shelter next door is.
I can’t imagine why he’d suggest moving it.
I wish the rail in DFW ran later. You know how convenient it would be to leave a sporting event or concert and take the train home? It’ll get you there, but you’re left looking crazy when the events are over.
This rail line will likely never happen, the builders already soured relationships with property owners, and they don't have any real money to build it.
California: Cost overrun on an high speed rail project
Europeans: first time?
I am a huge advocate for public transportation, especially trains, but I honestly think that this won't work. This, in my opinion, has to do more so with culture than accessibility. I used to live in Japan and the public transportation culture is so huge, that it is more convenient to actually ride a bus and train, compared to riding a car. Stores and restaurants are so close together with nice side walks compared to Texas where it takes forever to walk from store to store. In Texas, streets are dangerous at night, they are not well maintained, and 1 block in Texas is like 3 blocks in Japan (maybe exaggerating a little). This is important because once they arrive in the central station, how are they going to get to their final destination? Tokyo has a sprawling subway system in which a train comes every 4-5 minutes ON TIME that covers every inch of the city. This is all without mentioning the bus system as well. Buses come like every 20-30 minutes in Texas with a one dimensional metro system.
So until Texan cities figure out how to make public transportation more appealing in their own cities, the cons will far outweigh the benefits.
I just absolutely love your videos man ! Thanks for focusing on Texas , again. You have a huge fan in San Antonio!
A loaded question: of course, if it's ever built.
High-speed rail is the type of thing most Americans (especially Texans) would gripe about until it’s actually built, then they’d begrudgingly love it
It's desirable to have high-speed rail stations in major cities and densely populated areas.
I think it would be stressful to be far from cities.
The Shinkansen is being built in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, and it looks like the station will be underground. There is no open land above ground.
Even in Hokkaido, which is the largest region in Japan, the reason why they have to build the railroad underground is probably because building a station far away from the city will cost more in the long run, such as the operating costs of the railroad connecting the high-speed railroad station to the city.
However, there are some stations that have a large number of passengers even though they are far from cities.
This is because they have succeeded in fostering office and residential areas.
I'm not familiar with the state of Texas, but most Japanese railroad companies are engaged in two businesses: railroad and real estate.
This was translated at DeepL
So long as we get a Galveston connection at some point then yes please, for once give us a proper train to use. I would love to do a huge Texas tour one day ending with a nice beach siasta but that is just a dream of mine.
The last mile issue will always be the main hurdle.
That's what those bikes, buses and trams are for, I guess.
@@niek024 don't forget those meat loaf under your waist :P
funny how the last mile issue is never discussed with plane travel
@@ouicertes9764 I hate being dumped in the middle of a field with only bad bus transfers
i love that fact you used the leipzig main station (wich used to be the largest terminus station in europe until 2 years ago) but i belive the best example of a downtown railway station in europe would have been eighter prague, berlin or, Dresden.
Berlin is a very bad example. The new central station (opened in the mid 2000s), is not a local transportation hub (with the exception of the new U5, a tram line and the east-west S-Bahn lines, no local transport stops there, which makes it cumbersome to go north or south by local transport), and while located centrally, the immediate walking-distance neighborhood lacks most of what would be useful near a station.
@@sebastianlabusch465 i was more referring to the Ostbahnhof (old Mainstation) but yes the new mainstation is still a bit isolated, however it is also still surrounded by empty lots and will in time grow its own 24/7 Quater.
As much as an advocate I am for high speed rail, I do think considering the sheer land mass of the US and Canada it makes the most sense in mega regions like the one in this video, or even New York to Chicago. Anywhere further and you’re probably flying anyway
Personally I think there could a nationwide rail network so long as each state is treated like a country in this respect. Poland, being just shy of the size of Texas has a rail network with daily commuters, while not the best in Europe, it still exists. As well some states like Wyoming realisticly only need 2 to 5 stations in the whole state and just be mainly a thru line for other rail networks
If the rail was half as fast as flying, but had a far more pleasant ride and station experience it would get used heavily. Especially if it connected all the "small cities" along the way, like Albany, Springfield, Syracuse, Hartford, as well as the Majors like Boston, NYC, Buffalo. And for the "slow rail" have a station placed to be on average under a 1hr drive from places and you would be amazed the amount of tourism that would happen from people who couldn't care less about cities visiting other smaller destinations.
@@jasonreed7522 This is the Japan model.
Using a combination of the shinkansen, high-speed rail lines, and then chugga-chugga 30 mph local lines, you can get to like 90% of towns in the country, or else to a bus stop that will take you the rest of the way. I have visited tiny little tourist spots and minor cities and everything in between there, and I have had to step in a car like twice total.
Are there many people getting off the Tohoku line at Oyama station? No, but they can if they want to, so I can live in Oyama prefecture and commute to Tokyo for work without a car if I want to.
Rail lines are about having the option to do things, and once you have the option, people are going to take it. Living in the Twin Cities, if I had the option to live out in like Farmington or further south and hop on a high-speed rail to get to work every day I'd probably take it.
Live outside austin, the abandoned Bergstrom Spur that once connected to the Air Force base which is now the airport, they chose rails to trails when they should’ve/ could’ve made it a Amtrak connection or more commuter line.
If they do high speed trains in my home state it needs to be Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Dallas, austin, Houston. No excuses
Cars bad :)
Yep, the worst.
train good :)
@City Beautiful -
Beautiful city of Leipzig @ 4:22 with Leipzig-HBF (Railway Main Station) shown with 4 tram platforms on the plaza infront of the stations (showing refitted Tatra trams , Tatra was used in much of the Eastern Bloc)
Thanks for great analyses of the station locations and their relations to success at other train stations. I know first hand how much a station’s neighborhood matters (such as Denver), and that at best the Texas locations are no better than LA’s Union Station-only a few blocks and freeway away from Downtown, for strangers dragging luggage.
On the other hand, neither Love nor Hobby Airports have much to offer, yet Southwest Airlines has packed airplanes full between them for 50 years. At the same time, it’s telling that in spite of Southwests’ success, no competition has made inroads to grab a piece of that pie in 50 years. Texas Central wants to make a very expensive bet that they will succeed where no other airline in 50 years has. I live 1500 miles from Dallas, but I visit its Downtown more often then all my friends who live there-combined. Both Dallas and Huston are huge, sprawling, devolved, car dependent metropolitan areas, and I bet the HSR stations need huge car rental infrastructure and freeway access more than anything else.
Yep. This video is a pipe dream. The success of this rail will completely rely on it’s car accessibility.
You neglected to mention something that you may not be aware of. Interstate 45 between Houston and Dallas is the deadliest highway in the state and one of the deadliest in the US. TXDoT acknowledges that freeway widening of I-45 will not keep up with the gigantic growth of car/truck traffic expected in the coming 20 years. It is 250 miles between the downtowns of the two cities (and the speed limit is 75), but it can take 6 hours to travel. The I-10 & I-35 corridors are not far behind. Perhaps (hopefully), the increasingly unmanageable congestion on I-45 will chase people out of their cars and onto the HSR when it opens.
IT'S BACK FROM THE DEAD!!!
San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Amarillo, And other big names in Texas need more kinds of tracks, monorails, stations, and subways yeah
"Cost Overruns" is just a fact of life with ANYTHING being built, no matter the project. I've never heard of a construction project coming in under budget.
The section of CAHSR currently being built had a budget of $30 Bn and now the projected cost is $90 Bn and counting. That's a 300% increase (and counting).
One thing that hasn’t been thought of by many is the upcoming rise in driverless cars like Teslas. Driverless, electric vehicles taking people from and to the stations is going to be extremely convenient for passengers. Brightline is doing this right now with their rail service here in FL with Teslas (not driverless yet though, but that’s the next step).
Driverless or electric will still not fix the traffic issue that plagues the country.
@@deans-rewind2882 It will, because driverless cars will disincentivize people from purchasing cars. It will be like driverless Ubers. This has been Tesla’s plan for a while, once FSD is a mature and safe they’ll turn to becoming a service. Not to mention, AI will improve traffic flow since there is no human error or emotion involved.
Dallas and Houston are not even dense enough for mass public transit. How am I supposed to get a good ride from either two rail stations at Houston or Dallas? Taking a taxi or renting a car is expensive. Uber is getting more moderately expensive. I have my doubts about Texas Central High Speed Railway, but I hope I'm proven wrong and it improve the traffic crisis in the Texas triangle.
I'd love to see a video comparing these Texas High Speed Rail Station locations with the ones on the Acela High Speed line up in the Northeast. DC's Union Station, New York's Penn Station, and my hometown of Boston's South Station are such a huge (gorgeous) contrast to the ones covered in this video!
Not a good plan for Houston because the station is too far from the city center.
I wonder if it's in a place that will flood too...
If you look at mainline stations in London you will notice that they are, for the most part, in the periphery of Central London (Zone 1). This is in large part due to the nature of rail development being a previte venture so different companies were competing for accessing passenger market for trips to London and had to separate out where in London they took them in order to do this. But the great thing is that it means that different mainline termini stations in London serve different parts of the UK, largely because of which companies where operating from each station. The mainline station does not need to be directly downtown as long as it is well connected to it (and other mainline stations, as is the case for London as a result of the Tube)
Texas as well as other areas of America have been ready and need high speed passenger rail service. If the personnel that have been holding positions and hindered the development of high speed rail had been removed years ago rail transportation would likely been on par with the rest of other developed countries. Build it and the people will utilize it.
The biggest problem I see for Texas Central is the fact that public transit in TX is terrible and the cities are not pleasant walking experiences at all. The designs are too car-centric and it absolutely ruins walkability, and the complete lack of usable public transit means that you basically have to take a car to your final destination anyway.
Would absolutely love an HSR connection at Sunset Station. Looking forward to the day that I can hop on a 30 minute train to Austin and be home by sunset.
Last I have seen only two high-speed train routes make a profit. Both are in Japan and serve a pair of cities with a total of 50 million population. China loses US$44 million a day with its high-speed rail vanity projects.
nonsense， it’s sad Americans only can read English media anti propaganda
And i have never seen a highway that makes money
Classic America for sure: only thinking about what you want, getting the single thing that you need for it but forget absolutely every other essential thing
I’ve noticed a lot of channels are now doing videos on US infrastructure and it’s crazy seeing the civility and actual discourse of this comments section compared to that of the other channels, where it quickly turns into giant circle-jerk of Europeans bashing America and Americans.
The problem is lack of population density
It was kind of annoying how you compare them to Europe when most European cities/countries are small and/or densely populated
there are also cities across Europea which are spread-out, and even countries with half the population density than the US they still run passenger rail services in remote areas, and beyond that provide public transit via buses even to the most rural areas, all across the area;
Also take London and NYC as example: both have a comparable population of 8.3 and 8.4 million inhabitants, but London is 138 sq mi larger than NYC
I'm quite proud, that my hometown Leipzig with it's beautiful station made it to a City Beautiful video.
I feel the same :-).