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Class 6 and above only exist on Amtrack's NE Corridor between NYC and DC. 

Florida's Bright Line I think is in this category, or will be soon.

Brightline Train Service Review [Miami - Ft. Lauderdale - WPB] (upgradedpoints.com)

So for an example local to me, Cleveland has a Transit Authority as most large cities do.  Cleveland's Rapid Transit Authority (RTA) operates (I think) two train lines.  In any case, the one I am familiar with is the Red Line because it goes from downtown out to the Airport which is in my direction.  I've used it a few times for concerts, sporting events, and the like.  

The run from the Airport (CLE, Cleveland Hopkins International) to Downtown (Tower City Center) takes 38 minutes and leaves every 15 minutes.  

The problem is that Google says this is an 11.7 mi drive that takes 13 minutes by car.  Thus, taking the train costs me 25 minutes (and it is actually a lot worse than that for most people, see below).  

The only time I've used the train is for, as mentioned above, sporting events, concerts, and the like.  In those cases there are a few things that make riding the train worthwhile:

• Parking rates are jacked up downtown which offsets the cost of the train.  
• Traffic is heavy which increases the auto-travel time but does not impact the RTA time.  
• The events have been in the immediate vicinity of the downtown (Tower City) station such that the train station is probably closer to my destination than the parking lot I would use if I drove.  

So I've used the train for certain specific events but I've never used the train as a commuter.  When I was working downtown my office was VERY close to Tower City  which is ideal for using RTA but I never did it for two reasons:

• The time factor:  In light traffic the Train takes an extra 25 minutes (38 vs 13 per Google).  At rush-hour this shrinks or may even invert but there is another problem.  I don't actually live within walking distance of CLE or any RTA stations.  Thus, I'd have to get in my car, and drive to an RTA station anyway.  When I get to CLE on I71, I'm on the highway already driving.  I can't just Star Trek Transport myself from my car on I71 to a train.  I have to get off the highway, park my car, walk to the station, buy my ticket, wait for the next train, THEN go.  It would be a minor miracle if I accomplished all of that in 15 minutes so the real time difference is around 40 rather than 25 minutes.  Having commuted to downtown Cleveland for a few years I can say that the RTA would only beat traffic on *MAYBE* the two or three slowest traffic days of the year.  
• The cost factor:  In theory the RTA is cheaper than a car.  However, this includes the acquisition cost of the car.  That makes it probably cheaper if you can actually use RTA exclusively and thus avoid buying a car altogether.  For the rest of us (like me) this isn't feasible and I'd have to own a car anyway.  If I took RTA for that portion of my commute I'd save 24 mi/day on my car but so what?  Granted, my lower mileage car would be worth a little more when I sold it but the difference wouldn't be all that significant at least here in NE Ohio where it snows and we use salt on our roads.  Once my car gets to 10-13 years old or so it is going to rust out regardless of whether I drive all the way downtown or take the train the last 12 miles and my rusted out 10-13 year old car will have minimal value regardless of mileage.  12 miles is only going to be about 1/2 gallon of gas maximum so even at $4/gal the cost of the train is actually more than the cost of the gas.  

Continuing thoughts on HSR:

As I see it, the trip from CLE to downtown simply is NOT long enough for HSR to really work.  Even if they made that trip every 15 minutes with no stops at 200 MPH it would still take AT LEAST 5 minutes (counting speed up and slow down) so it still wouldn't really shorten my commute significantly because by the time a parked, got to the train station, and boarded, I could have more-or-less gotten to downtown in my car.  

I think you have to start far enough away that the high speed of the HSR has enough distance to build up an a big enough advantage over driving to be worthwhile.  

If you stretched the route out to near where I live, it is a 30.9 mi drive along I71 from just East of Medina to Tower City.  Per Google this drive takes 31 minutes.  A nonstop train at 200 MPH would cover 30.9 mi in just over nine minutes.  Adding time for speed-up and slow-down you could probably make the trip in 15 minutes.  In theory that is half the time of driving but in practice the two are a lot closer together.  If I leave my house and pass a train station at I71 and SR18 that has 200MPH trains leaving every 15 minutes for downtown my options are:

• Stop at the train station.  Get out of my car, walk to the station, buy my ticket, walk to the platform, board the train, ride downtown, or
• Stay in my car and drive downtown.  

With option #1 the travel time is 16 minutes shorter but I have to add in time for getting from my car to the train and waiting for the next train.  A lot depends on how close I can hit the train's departure time.  If I barely miss a train and have to wait 15 minutes for the next one that eats almost the entire time savings and I still had to walk to the train.  Now granted, at rush-hour that ~31 minute drive on I71 is closer to 45 minutes or more so the 200 MPH train would be quicker.  But that assumes that my destination is RIGHT AT Tower City.  As you move my final destination away from Tower City, the utility of the train rapidly deteriorates.  


Timewise, it would only *MAYBE* make sense to take the train if it ran from Medina and Medina clearly doesn't have enough population to justify a 200 MPH train leaving every 15 minutes.  If you moved out to say Ashland (further along I71, now at 63.4 mi from Tower City) the time would clearly work.  From that distance the theoretical 200 MPH train would take about 20 minutes vs about an hour to drive.  The problem is that now you are in an area with even less population than Medina.  It simply doesn't make sense.  

Where I could see this working is in HEAVILY populated areas with EXTREME commute times such as the two biggest West Coast Cities, LA and San Francisco.  I think there that California's focus on using HSR to provide transportation between the two is misguided.  

Los Angeles to San Francisco is a ~6 hour drive of almost 400 miles.  Cutting that to a two hour train ride would be nice but at that point you are competing with flights that (according to Google) take 1:20 and depart 26-35 times per day.  

I think what might make more sense would be to set up HSR from say Bakersfield (113 mi, 2:04 driving N of LA) to say San Bernardino (60 mi, 0:58 driving E of LA).  Then the trip from Bakersfield to LA would be a little over half an hour while the trip from San Bernardino to LA would be about 20 minutes.  That is already a savings of 90 minutes to Bakersfield or 40 minutes to San Bernardino and at LA's notorious rush hour the savings would be much greater.  

@betarhoalphadelta , you live in LA, what do you think?

We use MARTA to get to the airport much of the time.  It's a $38 cab fare, more for Lyft.  We have over 65 passes, so the train costs $0.70 per.  It takes us about 20 minutes to walk to the station and the ride is about 25 minutes, wait times vary but are 5 minutes on average I'd say.  Traffic of course is variable and can be horrible depending on time/day.  It's about 10 miles driving.

The trains can hit 70 mph but that is on longer stretches, and we have a lot of stops.

If we have a lot of luggage or are going to the International Terminal, we usually get a ride or take a taxi.

I used MARTA twice:  To get from it's Northern terminus to downtown then to get from downtown out to it's Northern terminus.  

I was in Atlanta for the 2007 Final Four and before the CG we parked at the Northern terminus of the MARTA and took the train back downtown for the game.  After the game we got on the MARTA and rode it out to the Northern terminus then drove home.  It was convenient for that.  

I think this comes down to the population density factor.  I am certain that full trains have lower operational costs per passenger than busses or planes but if the train isn't full that obviously varies and you are right that it is a lot easier to adjust bus routes. 

Right... Which is why light rail and subways/etc can make sense in a lot of dense areas, and HSR is for intercity rail. 

The issue IMHO is that the US doesn't have the population density to make sense for intercity HSR in most areas. 

In either case, if you can't keep the trains full, it's a boondoggle. That's why a lot of light rail (such as Phoenix) has high cost and low ridership, and why LA->SF HSR is a pipe dream. 

Yeah, when we went to Chicago in 2019, we used transit or Uber for everything except the one-day excursion to West Lafayette for a game, where we rented a car downtown and returned it downtown the next day. 

Easy to get from Midway to the Loop and back via transit. Used transit to get from downtown to Wrigley and then from there out to Greektown and back. Most of the rest was walking, although we used Uber to get to the Museum of Science & Industry as it's not really convenient. 

But then, Chicago has a very dense downtown and relatively dense suburbs, so transit makes more sense than someplace like Los Angeles where there's a HECK of a lot more suburban sprawl and the downtown is less dense. 

Big issue with HSR is whether it's purely point-to-point (at which time you get the "high speed" advantage) or whether it has to make a bunch of stops (at which time you don't).

I.e. there's a rail from the Stockholm airport to the city center. It was point-to-point and tops out at 200 kph (~120 mph). It was a joy, especially since it dropped me off a block from the hotel in the city center.

That's where it could potentially make sense for LA->SF. If you could make it from LA Union Station to Downtown SF (or even SFO and transfer to BART) in <3 hours, it starts to be competitive with flying. But if you're stopping a bunch of times, and it's now a 5 hour trip, it's too expensive and too slow to compete with either driving or flying.

However, part of the idea is that you're serving the central valley. And if trains just run through at 200 mph and never actually stop to pick up passengers there, it kinda defeats the point.

So they're going to have to balance how many express trains they run a day vs actually serving those in between. And if it's too few, or if they are sometimes getting delayed due to routing around the other non-express trains (and thus not meeting theoretical transit time), it kinda screws the deal. Especially for someone like me who can MUCH more easily get to SNA and fly direct, or someone out in the IE who can get to Ontario and fly direct, or someone closer to Long Beach or Burbank, who can fly direct w/o having to get to downtown LA somehow. And if the ridership doesn't justify that many express trains, then you won't get many express trains, and the failure will feed on itself.

This is a very important point.  

My local example is the Cleveland RTA.  That line I mentioned before has the roughly 11 mi trip from CLE to Downtown broken into 11 legs so the stops are something like 1mi apart.  From my perspective as someone who lives beyond the terminus and only ever takes the thing the whole way, that is WAY too many.  Also, anything like HSR is obviously impossible when the train has to stop every mile.  

OTOH, I think that the intention of the designers was for the system to be "walkable".  Ie, if you look at the 3rd and 4th outer-most stops (West Park Station and Puritas), they are 1.6 mi apart as one would walk (per google).  That only makes sense if you are intending the system to be, as I said, "walkable".  Everybody who lives within a couple of miles of the line is within no more than about a 2 mi walk from a train station.  That serves the purpose of making the system walkable but it also makes it incredibly slow.  As noted in my upthread example, the full Red Line trip from CLE to Downtown Cleveland (Tower City) takes 38 minutes despite being <12 miles by car.  12 miles in 38 minutes suggests that they are averaging about 18 MPH.  That includes stops but still, it is incredibly slow.  

To actually work in practice I think HSR has to be designed to work with the local RTA/MARTA/BART systems.  

I don't know, but I *THINK* you'd need a stop basically at the end of the local RTA/MARTA/BART system (which might be extended and speeded up to make this work) both entering and exiting a metropolis.  I know that slows things down but it cuts down on the extra distance problem that otherwise would exist.  

An example:
Suppose that Ohio had HSR running point-to-point at 200 MPH from Downtown Cleveland (Tower City) to Downtown Columbus (I used the Ohio Statehouse).  Per google that is a drive of 149 mi which takes 2:15.  At 200 MPH a train should be able to make it in about 45 minutes which is great.  That saves 90 minutes but only if you actually need to travel that distance.  

Now suppose I'm going to Columbus for a football or basketball game (tying in to this message board).  I'm in Medina (hence the name) so I'd need to get in my car and drive North (the wrong way) to downtown Cleveland.  Then I'd need to find and pay for parking.  Then I'd need to walk to the station, then buy my ticket, then walk to the platform, then wait for the train.  

My drive to downtown Cleveland takes 39 minutes (per google), then if I could park and get to a train in 20 minutes that would probably be an accomplishment so one hour into my trip I'd START heading South at 200 MPH.  Thus, I'd arrive at the Ohio Statehouse at 1:45 into my trip.  Then I'd need some form of transportation from the Statehouse back North to Campus.  Per google this is a 6.4mi drive that takes 11 minutes but since I wouldn't have my car I'd be on a bus which, per google takes half an hour.  So I'd get to Campus 2:15 after leaving.  That is slower than driving, example:

• Leave my house at noon and either drive S to get to Campus or North to take the train.  
• 12:39: if I head S I'm now about 40 miles down I71 (roughly Ashland).  Via the train I'm just getting to Downtown Cleveland.  
• 1:00 PM:  If I head S I'm now about half-way between Mansfield and Delaware so approaching the far Columbus exurbs.  If I take the train I'm just getting rolling from Cleveland.  
• 1:28 PM:  If I head S I'm now roughly at the Northern I270/I71 interchange.  Via the train I'm a little better than half way from Cleveland to Columbus.  
• 1:34 PM:  If I head S I'm now at the exit that I usually use for Campus.  Via the train I'm now 11 minutes out from downtown Columbus.  
• 1:45 PM:  If I head S I'm now parking at either the Stadium or the Arena.  Via the train I'm arriving in downtown Columbus and I'm still a half hour bus ride from Campus.  

The fact that it doesn't make sense for me as an individual isn't important.  The problem is that there are inherently going to be a lot of people similarly situated in that they don't actually need to start or end or both downtown.  If you ( @betarhoalphadelta ) have a meeting in San Jose, at least getting to downtown LA is the same general direction as your meeting but if the train then takes you to downtown San Francisco you've overshot your destination by about 50 miles.  Even at 200 MPH that is a waste of 15 minutes and you now have to make the return trip likely at a much lower speed.