HSR Lines - Distances, City Populations

I've decided to collect various numbers and figures. I'll approximate distances with Google Maps highway distances, and I'll use metropolitan-area population figures.

France, UK, Belgium, Holland
Paris: 11.8m
P - London: 12.3m, 456 km, P - Brussels: 1.83m, 306 km, B - Amsterdam: 2.16m, 203 km
P - Strasbourg: 0.64m, 487 km
P - Lyon: 1.76m, 466 km, L - Marseille: 1.60m 315 km
P - Le Mans: 0.15m, 208 km, P - Tours: 0.14m, 239 km

Spain
Madrid: 5.84m
M - Barcelona: 5m, 618 km
M - Valencia: 1.71m, 355 km
M - Sevilla: 1.51m, 532 km
M - Valladolid: 0.32m, 211 km

Italy
Turin: 0.91m, T - Milan: 1.32m, 142 km, M - Florence: 0.37m, 317 km, F - Rome: 2.75m, 284 km, R - Naples: 0.96m, 229 km

Russia
Moscow: 10.1m, M - St. Petersburg 4.57m: 707 km

Japan
Aomori: 0.30m, A - Sendai: 1.03m, 362 km, S - Tokyo: 35.7m, 365 km, T - Osaka: 2.67m, 512 km, O - F*k*oka: 1.46m, 611 km, F - Kagoshima: 0.61m, 282 km

South Korea
Seoul: 24.5m, S - Pusan: 3.57m, 436 km

Taiwan
Taipei: 6.78m, T - Kaohsiung: 2.77m, 356 km

Germany and China are rather patchwork and confusing.

I've mentioned the larger cities on the routes; they range from a few hundred thousand people to a few million, with some much-more populous cities and a few much-less-populous ones: Le Mans and Tours. Route lengths are usually around 300 - 500 km / 200 - 300 mi, with a few longer ones here and there.

Distances are rough estimates that should add up to approximately the right distance from end to end, but aren't necessarily exact with respect to proposed station locations.

Tampa-Orlando HSR
Tampa-St. Petersburg: 2.7 million (38 miles west of Lakeland)
Lakeland: 200k (30 miles west of Disney)
Orlando: 2.1 million (Disney is roughly 25-30 miles from Orlando International Airport; Orlando International Airport is roughly 30 miles west of I-95 via SR528)

Orlando-Miami HSR (via inland route)
Miami: 2.5 million
Fort Lauderdale/Broward County: 1.8 million (28 miles north-ish from Miami International Airport)
West Palm Beach: 1.3 million (45 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, 60 miles south of Ft. Pierce, 180 miles from Disney via inland route)

Orlando-Miami HSR, alternate routes
Ft. Pierce/Port St. Lucie: 400k (add for Turnpike and I-95 alignments (70 miles south of Melbourne along I-95, 114 miles southeast of Orlando airport, 60 miles north of West Palm Beach)
Melbourne/Brevard County: 531k (add for I-95 alignment) (55 miles east from Orlando airport, then south along I-95)

HSR along I-95 continuing north from SR528 to Jacksonville
Daytona Beach metro area: 255k (90 miles north of Melbourne, 60 miles north of SR528)
Jacksonville (includes St. Augustine & beaches): 1.3 million (90 miles north of Daytona Beach; St. Augustine is roughly 30 miles south of Jacksonville)

Southwest Florida (HSR south from Tampa, generally along I-75
Sarasota-Bradenton: 673k (55 miles south of Tampa)
Port Charlotte/Punta Gorda: 155k (50 miles south of Sarasota Airport)
Ft. Myers/Cape Coral: 587k (30 miles south of Port Charlotte)
Naples: 221k (35 miles south of Ft. Myers)

Interesting things that might not be apparent:

Official population figures GROSSLY under-estimate the number of warm bodies physically present in southwest Florida. Sometime before Hurricane Wilma, someone on the news mentioned that the Naples-Bonita Springs metro area officially has a population of 221,000... but if you ask the building department how many houses and condos exist in the Naples metro area alone, it's something like 460,000. Fort Myers isn't quite as skewed, but it's definitely up there as well. Try driving from Cape Coral to Marco Island during the winter, and there will be NO DOUBT in your mind that you're surrounded by at least a million people.

By any standard, Sarasota is low-hanging HSR fruit. IMHO, once Miami-Orlando-Tampa is done, the only issue with Sarasota is deciding whether to backtrack and head south from Tampa, or wait until it's time to rebuild 275, rebuild the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, and run HSR from Tampa across the bay into St. Petersburg, then head south to Sarasota from there. The St. Petersburg route is clearly "better", but the cost... (shudder)

If you count only people who live within 25 miles of a station if HSR runs from Tampa to Orlando to Melbourne to Miami, there are about 11.5 million people, which is roughly 61% of the state's population. I don't know what % of the state's Republican population that is, but Dade County is about 50% Republicans, and just about everything besides Broward and Palm Beach counties are solidly Republican as well. I'm quite confident that if you wanted to make a proposed HSR line politically-bulletproof in Florida by ensuring that it covered at least 51% of the state's Republican voters, you could easily achieve that by making sure Sarasota-Bradenton was included in the mix.

IMHO, there's going to be a HUGE fight someday over who gets to be third -- Jacksonville or Southwest Florida. Both would cost about the same amount of money to build, and both would serve roughly the same number of voters. Jacksonville is a more economically-important city by far, but Southwest Florida packs one hell of a Republican punch in Tallahassee (Jacksonville has lots of Democrats, though the coastal areas and Daytona Beach balance it out). My guess is that Sarasota and Jacksonville will get built simultaneously as phase 3, skimming off roughly half of Southwest Florida's voters with a fairly cheap 55-mile segment and completing the vital core of Florida's HSR network with Jacksonville.

Adding to the confusion for Naples, FL, the US Census Bureau estimates about 315,000 people. The other cities: Orlando: 2.08m, Tampa: 4m, Miami: 5.55m, Jacksonville: 1.53m

Distances, using Google Maps:
Orlando - Tampa: 86 mi
Orlando - Miami: 235 mi / 257 mi
Orlando - Jacksonville: 141 mi / 175 mi
The second in the pairs is the distance including Titusville, for coastal routes.

Orlando - Tampa is rather short by HSR-line standards, but distances and populations for the other pairs are in the range of typical European and Asian figures.

Now for some other US routes:

Northeast Corridor
Boston: 4.52m, New York City: 19.0m, Philadelphia: 5.84m, Baltimore: 2.69m, Washington, DC: 5.4m
Boston - NYC: 232 mi, NYC - DC: 226 mi
Distances similar to Paris - Brussels, but with more population

Empire Corridor
Albany: 0.86m, Buffalo: 1.12m
NYC - A: 150 mi, NYC - B: 437 mi

Keystone Corridor
Harrisburg: 0.53m, Pittsburgh: 2.36m
Phl - H: 107 mi, Phl - P: 305 mi

Southeast Corridor
Raleigh: 1.13m, Charlotte: 1.75m, Atlanta: 5.48m
DC - R: 262 mi, R - C: 170 mi, C - A: 244 mi

Ohio
Cleveland: 2.25m, Cincinnati: 2.15m
Cl - Ci: 250 mi

Chicago Hub
Chicago: 9.79m, Detroit: 4.40m, St. Louis: 2.85m, Minneapolis: 3.27m
C - D: 283 mi, C - SL: 300 mi, C - M: 408 mi

Pacific Northwest
Seattle: 3.41m, Portland: 2.23m, Eugene: 0.35m
S - P: 174 mi, P - E: 110 mi

California
San Francisco: 4.34m, San Jose: 1.84m, Sacramento: 2.13m, Fresno: 1.00m, Los Angeles: 15.2m, San Diego: 3.10m
SF - SJ: 48 mi, SF - F: 199 mi, SF - LA: 466 mi
Sac - F: 172 mi, Sac - LA: 439 mi
LA - SF: 466 mi, LA - F: 266 mi, LA - SD: 160 mi

And our neighbor to the north:

Southeast Canada
Montreal: 3.64m, Toronto: 5.11m
M - T: 339 mi

A small addition to your Canadian chart:

Western Canada
Edmonton: 1.03m, Calgary: 1.23m, Vancouver: 2.12m (from Wikipedia)
Ed - Cal: 201 mi

Cross-Border USA to Canada
Van - Sea: 142 mi
Det - Tor: 236 mi
NYC - Alb - Mon: 367 mi
NYC - Buf - Tor: 525 mi

Distances are typically printed in timetables, so there is no need for "research."

More to the point, distances are altogether meaningless as indicators of future passenger rail growth, even when combined with population figures for terminal urban areas.

goodnightjohnwayne wrote:Distances are typically printed in timetables, so there is no need for "research."

See if you can find some distances in TGV timetables or Shinkansen timetables or timetables for other HSR systems. But even that won't cover systems not already existing. But if it's possible to find such distance values, it would be interesting to compare them to the highway figures, as a way of checking on how good a proxy a highway distance is for a HSR distance.

Amtrak's schedules give us some numbers, but all of Amtrak's routes are on "old" trackage. In miles:
NYC - Boston: 231, 232 ... NYC - DC: 225, 226 ... NYC - Buf: 437, 437
Phl - Hsb: 104, 107 ... Phl - Pts: 353, 305
Chi - StL: 284, 300 ... Chi - Det: 281, 283 ... Chi - Mnp: 418, 408
Sea - Ptl: 187, 174

I could also find some numbers for the new high-speed lines in France and Spain. In km:
LGV Nord: Paris - Lille - Calais: 333 / 332
LGV Est: Paris - Baudrecourt (near Nancy and Metz): 300 / 332
LGV Sud-Est: Paris - Lyon: 409 / 466
LGV Rhône-Alpes: Lyon - Valence: 115 / 111
LGV Méditerranée: Valence - Marseille: 216 / 213
LGV Atlantique: Paris - Tours: 232 / 238
AVE Madrid - Valladolid: 180 / 211
AVE Madrid - Barcelona: 621 / 618
AVE Madrid - Valencia: 391 / 355
AVE Madrid - Sevilla: 472 / 532 (highway route not very direct)
AVE Cordoba - Malaga: 155 / 169

Good agreement here also.

More to the point, distances are altogether meaningless as indicators of future passenger rail growth, even when combined with population figures for terminal urban areas.

I disagree.

goodnightjohnwayne wrote:Distances are typically printed in timetables, so there is no need for "research."

It doesn't hurt to compile them in one place for easy comparison ... especially for proposed routes that have no trains to timetable.

goodnightjohnwayne wrote:More to the point, distances are altogether meaningless as indicators of future passenger rail growth, even when combined with population figures for terminal urban areas.

The presence of people is meaningless to passenger rail? The more people you have the better chance some of them will want to go between those two endpoints ... and might consider a train.
Distances are certainly a key. The distance has to be long enough to get people out of their cars yet short enough to keep people off planes. The more successful routes are where the trains beat the planes (perhaps not in precise takeoff to landing vs train departure to arrival but total travel time including security). In countries with less reliance on cars and more on public transit shorter journeys can be replaced by rail.

A third aspect would be frequency of service. One train a day each way may not serve the need - or it may. There are airlines operating on one a day frequencies. (And several one a day airlines between the same points provide a multiple frequency service.) And people do like bargains so price is always an issue.

But distance (creating a competitive trip) and population (they are potential passengers) are important.

Now for Texas and nearby.

Houston: 6.1m, Dallas: 6.5m, Austin: 1.7m, San Antonio: 2.1m, Oklahoma City: 1.3m, New Orleans: 1.2m

Houston - New Orleans: 352 mi
Houston - Dallas: 243 mi
Houston - Austin: 161 mi
San Antonio - Austin: 80 mi, A - Dallas: 199 mi, D - OK City: 208 mi
A - Fort Worth - D: 225 mi

All these are respectable populations and distances for HSR lines, and in fact, there was an effort to build a Texas TGV system back in the early 1990's. But state politicians were not interested in financing it, and Southwest Airlines lobbied heavily against it, and the project collapsed.

lpetrich wrote:Now for Texas and nearby.
All these are respectable populations and distances for HSR lines, and in fact, there was an effort to build a Texas TGV system back in the early 1990's. But state politicians were not interested in financing it, and Southwest Airlines lobbied heavily against it, and the project collapsed.

While I'll agree Southwest Airlines lobbied against it, to suggest that Southwest Airlines helped killed Texas TGV is going much too far. Texas TGV was authorized by the Texas Legislature to stand up on its own, without subsidies. The project advanced slowly, but eventually private investment funds had to be secured. That's the point where the project failed, Texas TGV couldn't finalize sufficient private funds to carry the project further, and they were never going to get any public funds from the State.

I'm also not so sure Texas TGV plans were all that great anyways, skipping Temple entirely, which reinforced public opinion within the rural areas of the State that this HSR train wasn't for them.

mtuandrew wrote:A small addition to your Canadian chart:

Cross-Border USA to Canada
Van - Sea: 142 mi
Det - Tor: 236 mi
NYC - Alb - Mon: 367 mi
NYC - Buf - Tor: 525 mi

Anybody out there with an old B&M timetable that shows the distance from BON to Montreal via White River Jct.?

Ridgefielder wrote:

mtuandrew wrote:A small addition to your Canadian chart:

Cross-Border USA to Canada
Van - Sea: 142 mi
Det - Tor: 236 mi
NYC - Alb - Mon: 367 mi
NYC - Buf - Tor: 525 mi

Anybody out there with an old B&M timetable that shows the distance from BON to Montreal via White River Jct.?

According to my November 1966 Official Guide and various timetables:

Boston to Concord via Lowell - 73.3 miles
Concord to White River - 69.6 miles
White River to Montreal via Essex Junction (CV) - 187 miles

Total = 330 miles

Gil, known as Bill somedays ...

electricron, I concede -- the Texas TGV died from lack of investor money also.

Los Angeles - Las Vegas

I should note LA - LV, which can be considered an extension of the California system.

Los Angeles: 15.2m, Las Vegas: 1.95m
Palmdale route: 288 mi
Inland-Empire route: 265 mi
These two paths are detours around the San Gabriel Mountains, and going through them will be expensive and dangerous.
Very respectable. Comparable to Paris-Lyon.

Now for some possibilities that may be little more than pork barrel.

Front Range
Three-state push seeks Denver-to-El Paso rail - The Denver Post
Cheyenne: 0.088m, Denver: 2.55m, Albuquerque: 0.89m, El Paso: 0.80m

Cheyenne - Denver: 102 mi, D - Albuquerque: 447 mi, A - El Paso: 266 mi

Might be good for a Cheyenne - Denver regional-rail line and an Amtrak long-distance train, but that's about it. Populations are too low except for perhaps Denver - Albuquerque, and those cities' separation is too great for a good HSR line.

Rocky Mountains
Home | Western High Speed Rail Alliance
I'll add Tucson and Boise.

Los Angeles: 15.2m, Phoenix: 4.19m, Tucson: 1.02m, Las Vegas: 1.95m, Salt Lake City: 1.12m, Denver: 2.55m, Reno: 0.42m, Boise: 0.59m

LA - Phoenix: 373 mi, Phoenix - Tucson: 116 mi
Phoenix - LV: 287 mi
Salt Lake City - LV: 425 mi
Salt Lake City - Denver: 535 mi
Salt Lake City - Reno: 519 mi
Salt Lake City - Boise: 340 mi

LA - Phoenix would make a good HSR line, and Phoenix - LV a halfway-good one, with Phoenix - Tucson being an extension or a separate regional-rail line.

But the SLC ones are doubtful at best -- SLC is too far from the others and much of the territory is very mountainous. So SLC will have to sit in splendid isolation.

Beyond distances between cities, the critical issue with a transportation infrastructure is it's network. How is it interconnected? Routes such as Tampa to Orlando should not be considered because it's entirely isolated. "Higher" speed rail in the U.S. should be concentrating on things like expanding the Northeast Corridor electrification south and east, as well as creating a system centered around Chicago.

Mikeinneb you are on the right track as its been said time and time again that Chicago would be a great starting point, As I've said however in other topics when it comes to distance and population if the US had started 4 decades ago to initiate HSR from the start of Amtrak, theres no reason most or all the Major cities East of the Mississippi ( including Minneapolis and St.Louis) could not be connected by high speed rail, seeing as the majority 60% of the US population lives in this area which only accounts for 1/3 of the entire US geographical space . Yes some routes over mountain areas will be slower than others but its a give and take, and Yes you may need to transfer or change trains in a city hub, however as long as its faster than that darn "gray running dog" or driving there would be a considerable amount of passengers traveling by rail. you have 25 major cities ease of the Mississippi with population density around or over 500k I've said it before HSR does not need to compete or be faster than air transportation... it just needs to be convenient & comfortable, as well as faster and more affordable than other forms of ground transportation to become a viable option.
" if you build it, they will come"

buddah wrote:Mikeinneb you are on the right track as its been said time and time again that Chicago would be a great starting point, As I've said however in other topics when it comes to distance and population if the US had started 4 decades ago to initiate HSR from the start of Amtrak, theres no reason most or all the Major cities East of the Mississippi ( including Minneapolis and St.Louis) could not be connected by high speed rail, seeing as the majority 60% of the US population lives in this area which only accounts for 1/3 of the entire US geographical space.

That would have been a great opportunity to build HSR across America. They could have added HSR lines adjacent to the interstates. But even then it would have been difficult to find the tax revenues to pay for it. It was hard enough for Ike to find the western political support for highways, it would have been impossible to find it for railroads from the western states without HSR lines....