Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Those are legacy origin-destination stations, long preceding HSR. Not what we're talking about, and obviously this reinforces my point, which is that HSR is a replacement for air travel, and the intermediary geography is largely irrelevant.
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I've honestly lost track of what point you are trying to make (other than you hate CHSR, that part is obvious). Are you saying that those German HSR stations in the middle of nowhere are a good thing or a bad thing?
And this does not obviously reinforce your point. Not in any way.
You seem to be trying to tell us that high speed rail networks can only be founded on gleaming new infrastructure on the outskirts of town, while pointing to a system that was largely founded on the principal of connecting to legacy central stations in the center of their towns. And a system dependent on the concept of slowly upgrading older train infrastructure and creating good connections to local/commuter lines at bustling central stations. You are asking us to forget about how that system came to be in the first place and only look at what they are building today.
This is absurd, because the lines that are now being built to connect two cities in the shortest possible alignment are UPGRADES to an existing system. You cannot simply ignore away the fact that the system was initially built by connecting into those existing origin-destination stations (you know, like LA Union Station). The initial high speed lines in Germany DID NOT skip every town along the way. I see that the Cologne–Frankfurt, while it line bypasses many smaller cities, also connects into and out of Cologne and Frankfurt along historic legacy rail corridors and includes capacity upgrades and things like grade separation and new junctions that also serve the local lines into smaller stations (like Wiesbaden). It's not like the smaller towns are just completely disconnected, there are slower-speed lines that often run right alongside segments of the newer HSR routes and increase ridership on the whole system. The new Stuttgart to Munich HSR line, which also includes fancy new highway-adjacent stations and a connection to the Stuttgart airport, will still stop in the center of both Ulm and Augsburg, each with a population of only about 150,000.
Part of the reason high speed trains work as a replacement for air travel is precisely BECAUSE the trains serve the city centers, eliminating the need to travel to and from an airport on the outskirts of town. In the case of the London to Paris, not having to travel through Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle is a big part of what makes its 2hr 22min travel time competitive with airlines. The London to Paris route also includes a stop in the center of Lille, a city with half the population of Bakersfield - they DID NOT simply skip past Lille or put a new station on the outskirts to take the most direct route to Paris. Connecting through Lille also created the junction to the high-speed line north into Amsterdam, which like the future connection to Las Vegas at Palmdale, would not have been as efficient of a three-way split had the route simply taken the most direct path to Paris.
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