What is your favorite HSR recruiter

lls I can say is, sure hope we see HPR in the US soon! Especially in the West...

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

I hope that someone enjoys this.

I guess its now after 6pm, Paris time. I'll be out the balance of your evening, and be back around Paris Midnight to catch up with any comments.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

This was good.

I think recruiter technology depends on what kind of trip you are doing. If you go on a holiday for two weeks, then leaving your car at the train parking can get costly and/or risky. Buses/trains are an option if they run fairly close to your home and have space for luggage, otherwise cabs are quite popular.

For shorter trips, were you only have a back-pack or handluggage (to speak in airplane terms) trains and buses are very attractive, especially if they park very close to the station, leaving you to walk only a short distance.

But bikes should of course not be neglected. There is a lot of parking space for bikes at my closest trainstop, and it is heavily used. But I think that is mostly commuting bikes.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

i live in a college town that lies on an old rail line, and that laid the foundation for a citywide network of dedicated bike paths back in the 60s. the vast majority of the city's 60,000 residents (with an overlap of 35,000 undergrads, some of whom live in town and some of whom live on campus and thus outside city limits) are within a 20 minute bike ride of the train station or the university (which is the largest employer in town).
as far as i can tell, the biggest obstacles to radically reduced transport energy use are 1. the ingrained resistance to the idea of a dense downtown, 2. the relatively expensive and infrequent train service to the 2 regional urban centers, and 3. the inadequate transportation networks at the other end of the train line.

it has always seemed to me that the solution lies in building up the downtown area closest to both the university and the train station for higher density (3-4 stories, commercial at street level, housing above), running more trains on the line at subsidized rates, and trying to encourage the urban areas to get their acts together with light rail, buses and the like.

but the very idea that high density is contrary to the suburban dream makes things difficult. the fact that the only people who tend to vote in city politics are homeowners, who are currently bought into the low-density status quo, hasn't helped much.

even low-speed rail, if run more frequently and on-time, would make a huge difference in commuting patterns. people are paying attention to gas prices, and every new train they put on the line fills up to capacity very quickly. high-speed rail, as the state is talking about to connect SF, sacrament and LA, would be brilliant, if they can get it past the oil barons.

our problems are eminently solveable, if we're willing to step outside the confines of the way things currently are. it is that lack of imagination, hostility to anything new, that holds us back.

A general note: I would stress somehow that developing all but the first option is worthy of consideration all on its own, not just as recruiter for HSR.

Now let's go over this point-by-point.

Da Car:

I have one additional consideration. If parking lots be used, why not use existing parking lots? Two possibilities come up: closed malls, and -- well -- existing airports. Given the more progressed exurbanisation in the USA, this might even make some sense there.

In Europe, following an idea of cross-modality I'm not sure I'd subscribe to personally (also see nanne's diary), theree are a number of high-speed rail stations at airports. I list them for you for future use, you may Google them:

• extant: Frankfurt-M/Flughafen, Flughafen Köln/Bonn (both on the Cologne-Frankfurt ICE line), Lyon-Satolas (on the Paris-Marseille TGV line), Aéroport Charles-de-Gaulle 2 (on the Paris-circling Interconnexion line)
  
• in construction: Malpensa airport (Milan-Turin line in Italy), and at Barcelona's El Prat airport (Madrid-Barcelona-French border line)
  
• extant for conventional railway, future HSL connection: Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands is one end of the to-be-opened Amsterdam-Antwerp line, and the station at Brussels's airport will be used by high-speed trains in the future, once it gets a connection towards Antwerp (Project 'Diabolo'); the airport of Graz will be on the Koralm line in the misty future (Graz-Villach, Austria).

Shanks mare

The key sentence in what you wrote is:

It is important to ensure that access to the station is pedestrian friendly ... in part for the direct use of the station by local residents, and in part to maintain the connection between the station and the small commercial precinct surrounding it.

The pedestrian 'market' of a high-speed station is negligible. However, I guess it is a psychological effect, people have less inclination to travel to/from 'dead places'. A station where you always see other people walking through, or shopping or drinking coffee, a station that is connected to its surroundings, both feels more comfortable and safer. I believe some of those out-of-town high-speed railway stations built for political reasons (Haute Picardie on the TGV Nord, or station Montabaur on the Cologne-Frankfurt ICE line) also suffer from such a lack of integration.

The Bike

Since on bikes, people can at least sit and don't get tired from just carrying their own weight, I think the bike drawing radius should be calculated based on travel time. With a generous 10-mph speed and 15 minutes maximum travel time for the core radius, I'd calculate with a 2.5 mile radius, double yours.

Neighborhood Electric Vehicles

I'm not against them per se, but note that these vehicles would be best for shopping and such, if one wants to travel without carrying much anyway, I'd prefer good mass transit.

Local Bus

Thanks for the interesting observation about the behaviour of travellers in Perth!

Here the core point is integration, as you emphasize in the next point. I'd say ideally, local busses have the same range as bikes, but carry lazy people and carry people in all weather. So buses are sufficient in cities up to 50,00-100,000 -- which is well below what one aims for with high-speed rail. So buses are best as feeders for higher-capacity mass transit, e.g. local rail. As such, they enhance each others' passenger numbers. What I write also involves that in large cities, instead of long bus lines across the entire town with distant stops, there should be shorter ones with frequent stops.

One last important note: we have considered downdown local buses, but buses with longer routes (but, capitalising on gaps in thesettled areas, also longer stopping distances and higher top speed) are just as good as feeders in exurbia. In Europe, the revitalisation of some branchlines near major cities involved re-arranging countryside bus lines, with dramatic positive results.

Local Rail

Here I would have liked if dKos readers had been given an idea of the differences between the various local rail systems, though that may warrant a whole new diary. Light rail, subways and elevateds, suburban rail, and various combinations/enhancements of the previous like light rail changing over to heavy rail when leaving town, light metros, RER-type connections. Which is best for a city depends on its size.

Pluggable Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Park-and-plug-and-ride, that's an idea!

Aerobus

I am sceptical of this. In particular, I am sceptical about low infrastructure costs. The capacity, especially if single-track, is limited. If running above highways, stations can't be integrated with the city. If running in a city, unlike when above an already noisy highway, noise emissions can be a problem (you can't build shielding walls). And from what I know about railway catenaries, I really wonder how they manage vertical swings and traverses of attachment points at pylons.

Rail/Bus

This idea has been tried several times in various forms over the last half century, and was always abandoned, not only for technical but economic reasons. I remain sceptical. The problem as I see it is that a rail/bus, instead of just uniting the advantages of the two modes, also carries over negatives. Such as: it is too lightly built for rail use but heavy (->more fuel use) for road use, the railing device introduces extra possibilities for breakdown and higher maintenance needs.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

By the way, I posted a Google video in the Open Thread you may want to use in the future...

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}