Name: Why The US Has No High-Speed Rail
Uploaded: 2021-05-29T02:47:01.000Z
Duration: 16 min 11 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

China has the fastest and largest high-speed rail network in the world.

The country has more than 19,000 miles of high-speed rail, the vast

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majority of which was built in the last decade.

Japan's bullet trains can reach speeds of almost 200 miles per hour.

They've become a staple for domestic travel and have moved more than 9

billion people without a single passenger casualty.

France began service of the high-speed TGV train in 1981 and the rest of

And high-speed rail is quickly expanding all over the world in places like

India, Saudi Arabia, Russia Iran and Morocco.

used to be one of the world's global leaders in rail but after World War

If you look at the United States prior to 1945, we had a very extensive

It all was working great except a number of companies in the auto and oil

industries decided that for them to have a prosperous future they really

needed to basically help phase out all the rail and get us all into cars.

The inflexible rails permanently embedded in cobblestones were paved over

to provide smooth, comfortable transportation via diesel motor coach.

General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil and a few other companies that

got together and they were able to buy up all the nation's streetcar

systems and then quickly start phasing out service and literally

dismantling all the systems over about a 10-year span.

In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill to create the National Interstate System.

It allocated about $25 billion dollars to build 41,000 miles of highways.

The federal government paid for 90% of that, the states covered the final

Can't you see that this highway means a whole new way of life for the

children? And a way of life that we have a chance to help plan and, and to build.

We dedicated a huge amount of dollars to building automobile infrastructure

in the middle of the 20th century and we're still kind of attached to that

We went from a rail-served country to a auto-dependent nation by the 1960s.

We've become a car culture and it's hard to break out of that cycle.

Not to mention the fact that in our political system we have very powerful

oil lobbies, car manufacturing lobbies, aviation lobbies, all the entities

that the high-speed rail would have to compete with.

This is the American dream of freedom on wheels.

We average some 850 cars per thousand inhabitants in the U.S.,

But according to some this country's transportation ecosystem is reaching

When you look at what's happening with the corridor development, again

who are recognizing they are running out of space to expand their highways

There are limits at airports, there is aviation congestion, so what are

A better rail system is one and could come with significant benefits.

It's largely an environmental good to switch from air traffic and car

That's a much lower emission way of traveling.

When the high-speed rail between Madrid and Barcelona in Spain came into

operation, I mean air travel just plummeted between those cities and

everyone switched over to high-speed rail which was very convenient.

They weren't forced to switch, they did it because it was a nicer option

There's a sort of a rule of thumb for trips that are under three or four

hours in trip length from city to city, those usually end up with about 80

or 90 percent of the travel market from aviation.

Where rail exists and it's convenient and high-speed, it's very popular.

America I think is waking up to this idea that rail is a good investment

One survey showed 63% of Americans would use high-speed rail if it was

Right now the main passenger rail option in the U.S.

It's operated as a for-profit company but the federal government is its

Train systems reaching top speeds of over 110 to 150 miles per hour are

generally considered high-speed and only one of Amtrak's lines could be

That's its Acela line in the Northeast Corridor running between D.C.,

One of the challenges we face is that the Northeast Corridor has a lot of

We really operate Acela Express on an alignment that in some places was

designed back in the nineteen hundreds and so it really was never designed

And while the Acela line can reach up to 150 miles per hour, it only does

Its average speed between New York and Boston is about 65 miles per hour,

which is in stark contrast to China's dedicated high-speed rail system

which regularly travels at over 200 miles per hour.

In 2008 California voted yes on high-speed rail.

Now, a decade later, construction is underway in the Central Valley of the

state. And right now it is the only truly high-speed rail system under

Ultimately high-speed rail is a 520 mile project that links San Francisco

to Los Angeles and Anaheim, that's phase one.

And it's a project that's being built in building blocks.

So the one behind me is the largest building block that we're starting

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Why The US Has No High-Speed Rail

commitment

dedicated

infrastructure

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