Is a US High-Speed Railway Economically Feasible? 1139
An anonymous reader writes "The federal government has committed at least $8-billion (and counting) for the development of a nationwide high-speed intercity passenger railway system in almost three-dozen states. Rail advocates have long dreamed of an extensive railway grid that will provide clean, speedy, energy-efficient travel. The high-speed rail program is also expected to create thousands of desperately needed jobs, while reducing the nation's dependence on foreign oil and easing gridlocked highways and congested air-space. However, this noble, ambitious, multi-year plan faces a multitude of obstacles — including costs that will no doubt escalate as the years pass by; and an American public that may be reluctant to relinquish the independence and convenience of their beloved automobiles for a train."
Re:Don't target cars (Score:4, Informative)
Um, use public transportation?
Re:Don't target cars (Score:5, Informative)
You do know that NY-Washington already has high speed rail, right? It could be better, but it's the only one in the country at the moment, and it makes Amtrack money hand over fist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express [wikipedia.org]
Re:Another stupid idea that will increase the defi (Score:3, Informative)
Don't be silly. Building a rail link is essentially impossible unless you can use eminent domain to acquire the necessary land; there's no way a private company could realistically expect to persuade thousands of individual landowners to sell them land in a straight line from one city to another, possibly crossing several different states in the process.
Re:Don't target cars (Score:5, Informative)
Now obviously trains cant compete with long-haul air travel such as New York to LA but for short haul, it could really work. (but only if its given proper high speed track and doesn't have to share that track with slow freight trains)
At 200 MPH, the trip would take 15 hours, give or take.
Leave at 5 PM, get in the sleeper, drink some wine that you brought on board, eat your dinner, and go to sleep. At 8AM, you arrive at your destination, in the heart of the city, rested, and ready to go. No need to get your luggage, take a taxi, or a long ride to and from airports.
Now compare this to the red eye flight. Tell me it's not feasible.
We take sleepers in Europe whenever we can; they're so much nicer than planes.
Re:Rail System Needs (Score:3, Informative)
Trains don't get diverted to totally different cities because of fog and snow.
Re:Faster Solution (Score:2, Informative)
Such trains have existed for decades already in at least Finland and they certainly haven't killed airlines. Even though there are many advantages: You can put all your stuff in the car when leaving home and at your destination you get to use your own, familiar car instead of a rental car that would also cost more.
Re:Fly-over country need not apply (Score:1, Informative)
Average speed for the Southwest Chief is 77km/h (~50mph). Not really high speed...
I agree with the rest of your comment though.
Relinquish cars? Not a bad idea, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Rail System Needs (Score:3, Informative)
Regarding the timetable issue, I was chatting with a conductor on an Amtrak train I was on, and it turned out that until quite recently Amtrak wasn't allowed to sue freight rail companies if they disregarded their contractual obligations to Amtrak. So the freight rail companies did just that, which meant that it was not uncommon for a train full of passengers to be forced to be late so that a train full of coal could make its schedule.
The rules have since changed, and the trains have gotten a lot closer to on time as a result. I used to take trains to go from college back to visit my parents, and would generally plan for about a 20% delay. Nowadays I can expect to be there on time most of the time.
Re:Fly-over country need not apply (Score:3, Informative)
Auto-trains in Europe are rare, and the only ones that I am aware of run in the vacation season. Just a few of them. I don't know of any regular services where you can take your car on the train. But those vacation trains are very popular.
Re:Fly-over country need not apply (Score:3, Informative)
The I35 corridor in Texas is often talked about as suitable for high-speed rail. A line from San Antonio to Denton could stop at San Antonio, San Marcos (Texas State University), central Austin (near a connection to their commuter rail with access to University of Texas and the capitol), somewhere around Temple (with bus service to Fort Hood), Waco (near Baylor University), Arlington (near the Coyboys and Rangers stadiums, Six Flags, and a connection to the DFW commuter rail), Grapevine (near DFW airport), and Denton (University of North Texas).
Run a high-speed train on that route a few times a day each way, and put ZipCar or Car2Go rentals near each stop, and I'd ride it several times a year. It would sure as hell beat the Austin-DFW drive for the 200th time.
Germany is 1/2 the size of Texas (Score:4, Informative)
Germany is 1/2 the size of Texas: 357,022 sq. km. vs. 678,054 sq. km., into which they've jammed a little over a quarter of the population of the U.S. 82,282,988 vs. 310,232,863.
What are you smoking that makes you believe the same transportation economics will apply in the U.S. as in Europe?
-- Terry
Citation Needed (Score:5, Informative)
Now my understanding is the exact inverse. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16819-city-dwellers-harm-climate-less.html [newscientist.com]
Though I am open to a rational rebuttal.
Storm
Re:Fly-over country need not apply (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Alternate solution (Score:4, Informative)
Roadways are entirely paid for through taxes. While I feel that healthy transportation systems take into account many factors (directness, routine travel, occasional travel, one-way and multiway journeys, etc), the subsidy for roadways is simply miles ahead of the subsidy for rail. The Big Dig alone would have run Boston's subway, light-rail, and bus system for 10 years. The Massachusetts Highway Division spent over a billion dollars last year. While numbers for local road maintenance are hard to come by, clearly that number should be even higher.
If land costs are high, a well-thought-out rail system is a better use of those resources. Can you imagine New York traffic if all of those rail-riders were in cars? Even getting into Boston is a nightmare if you're not on the rail. Funds spent on getting commuters onto rail traffic reduces the need to buy more land for road-based commuters at exhorbitant Boston land rate costs. Of course, LA's rail system just goes to prove that you need a well-thought-out rail system, or it will sit by uselessly. It seems like the people there forgot why cars do so well in non-deterministic destination scenarios.
Please, snipe away between urban and rural dwellings. I've lived in both, and can see why people love both (I have no idea why people love the suburbs, though). But the rail-vs-road argument always seems to forget that we entirely subsidize road construction and maintenance, yet we expect rail lines to be entirely self-funding. A more fair comparison would be to have the physical tracks, land, and stations paid for through taxes, and the trains covered by fares. Or take the expected riderships, the cost of road construction and maintenance those people would represent, and apply that towards the cost of the rail system. Is the rail cheaper overall as than people buying cars on loans and their share of road construction?
Re:Faster Solution (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the chunnel's loading procedure [youtube.com]. It might be more difficult when you don't have completely pre-determined endpoints, but that doesn't seem insurmountable.
Re:Don't target cars (Score:3, Informative)
Just like security of the tube skyrocketed in London after the terror attacks there? Bombing a train is likely to result in less fatalities than bombing a plane (passengers being rather closer to the ground and all), and in collateral (non-passenger) damage. It's altogether a different sort of beast. In addition, there was already the infrastructure in place in the biggest airports (internationals) to facilitate the added security theatre - for customs and quarantine.
Re:Faster Solution (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, they have these in Europe for the trains that go across the English Channel, here's a vid [youtube.com] (starts at 5:32)... but no idea how fast they load/unload.
Chinese high-speed trains (Score:1, Informative)
I live in China where they are building a huge high-speed rail network. (http://wikitravel.org/en/High-speed_rail_in_China) Large parts of it are already in service. On key routes, they are already replacing the first generation fast trains, limited to 250 kph (~ 150 mph), with second generation ones capable of 350 kph (~ 220 mph). Using these is a pleasure. Fast, comfortable, reasonably priced, and in most cities you can walk off the train and right onto the subway. For most domestic trips, they are priced a bit above a bus but well below flying.
A side benefit is that as more passenger traffic moves to these trains, often on dedicated lines, the old lines have more capacity free for freight. Both the fast trains and the increased freight capacity are helping to open up the inland provinces for development.
The first fast trains used technology from Bombardier, later ones Kawasaki and Ascom. Nearly all the parts are now made in China, though, and China is aggressively seeking export markets, especially in Latin America. One example: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aCcJrs3oM6ME&refer=latin_america They are also talking about international high-speed lines, South to Singapore and West to Moscow, each crossing several countries: http://www.2point6billion.com/news/2010/03/08/china-to-build-pan-asia-europe-17-country-rail-network-4328.html
I'm sure they'd happily bid on systems for the US, quite likely at competitive rates.
Re:Alternate solution (Score:4, Informative)
Since none of the proposed routes for California's high speed rail have ever come anywhere near Marin County (the two northern termini being San Francisco and Sacramento, and Marin County being north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate), your description is rather implausible.
The only thing even close to that was, IIRC, a lawsuit over the procedures used in the the impact report supporting the part of the Bay Area to Central Valley route, which has forced the High Speed Rail Authority to have the report redone and then reconsider the route based on the new report. But even that isn't anyone successfully lobbying (or suing) to get the route changed, since its quite possible that the original routing decision will be maintained.
But nice try.
Re:Faster Solution (Score:3, Informative)
"Or they could design the train so that people could drive their cars onto it and park.
It'd kill the airlines in a week."
I was thinking the exact same thing. I'd never fly or drive more than 300 miles again and I'd actually take a train for the first time in my life.
This would also help electric cars because you no longer need a car that can drive 400 miles on a tank of gas and be refilled in 5 minutes.
1) Drive electric car 20-50 miles to train
2) drive electric car onto train
3) leave car and go to quarters for sleeping, eating, etc
4) get back in car and depart train to destination
only problem I see is that a boxcar is only about 10 feet wide [answers.com] while a large SUV is closer to 20 feet long [motortrend.com] so you couldn't drive vehicles on there the easiest way which would be sideways, they'd have to go lengthway like the train. I'm afraid by the time you loaded hundreds of vehicles on the train most people could have already arrived by plane.
Mind you, Amtrak's Auto Train [amtrak.com] has been pulling this off for a while, albeit in the limited sense of one route departing each terminus once daily. Were they to add more trains (which itself might not necessarily be practical, considering the way rail traffic observes prioritized access and spacing along a given stretch of track -- but if the departures are 11 hours apart, that'd be OK, wouldn't it? Theoretically, at least?) or more routes (like, say, outside Chicago to San Antonio, or to San Fran or Seattle), Auto Trains could prove extremely popular.
Since there's only one route (Lorton, VA to/from Sanford, FL), the transit to either station to travel on the train can vary quite a bit -- I used the Auto Train to move from SW PA to Tampa last summer, and I had roughly a 2.5-3 hour run from my original hometown to Lorton. Were I moving from just outside of the DC beltway, I would've of course used considerably less fuel (not even driving a hybrid, me) for my trip.
Re:Alternate solution (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think your point stands when we look at states/countries -- or possibly you have a different value of 'feasible'. Sure, Japan and UK have high population densities but they aren't the only places with working public transport... Finland is in the same league as California in total area and has only a fifth of Californias population density. Even the "densely populated" south is still empty by Japanese standards. Public transport throughout the country still works. Less populated areas are naturally harder to reach but it's possible.Whether ultra-high-speed trains are feasible with these population numbers is another thing altogether.
Your point is spot on when you start looking at cities: Most of Los Angeles is just not dense enough for working internal public transport. This of course affects the feasibility of state-wide public traffic because people have no way to get to the long distance train station...
Re:Alternate solution (Score:2, Informative)
CodeBuster is referring to this: http://www.sonomamarintrain.org/ [sonomamarintrain.org] It may not be "high speed" but everything else he said is accurate. The measure was passed with 3/4 of the vote, but it will be a miracle if we see any progress made before the ice-caps melt.
Re:Don't target cars (Score:2, Informative)
You do know that NY-Washington already has high speed rail, right?
Um... No, it doesn't. (From the article you linked to, "The average speed of the Acela in operation falls far short of common definitions of high-speed rail, spending much of its time on the route at less than 100 mph")
I've ridden high speed rail [wikipedia.org], it ain't the 60 mph Acela, and it's MUCH better than flying.
Re:The Advantage (Score:3, Informative)
The defining advantage of high speed rail, restaurant cars, when things go wrong generally things slow down rather than falling out of the sky, railway stations are far cheaper and simple affairs than airports and, no fucking 'TSA' ( the single most important defining point). No TSA will mean passengers swapping from flying to riding the rails is guaranteed.
No hassle at the train station, buy you ticket, dump your luggage and get on the train, no strip searches, no harassed children, no you name sounds like somebody else's name, no stolen notebooks and cameras, no disrespect of power freak numb nut means 24 hour detention and anal probes. Of course in the 21st century private cabin with high speed broadband and how much can yet get down on they way there and on the way back and still enjoy the restaurant car and of course the view.
Re:When I lived in Germany (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't have a car, but the only time I rode the train was when I was going from the town I lived in (Lueneburg) to Hamburg. If I was going anywhere more than about 3 hours hours away, I flew. The reason being was a flight from Hamburg to Muenchen was something like 120euro round trip with a single carry on and took about 3 hours to get to the airport, on the plane, and arrival at destination. I was often traveling on weekends and time was something I had limited amounts of while studying or working in the country. If I were taking a regional train, the fare was 140 Euro and the trip took like 13 hours one way. If you wanted to take a ICE (Fast) train, the ticket was like 400 Euro with 6 hour travel time. And that was back when they had a Junge fare.
400 euros is for a 1. class return ticket without any rebates. A standard ICE (fast 5 hour travel time) train ticket between Lüneburg and München is 127 euros, comparable with your 130 euro plane ticket. If you use a rebate card, the same train ticket can cost as little as 63 euros, half price of the air fare. Even larger rebates can be had if one is booking far in advance. On top of that is often way cheaper and faster to get from the train station (in the middle of the city) to your final destination, than paying a cab from the airport (usually located far from the city center).
AFAIK, airlines doesn't pay fuel tax in Germany while trains does.
--
Regards
Re:Alternate solution (Score:2, Informative)
I suppose it's foolish to respond to stupid comments like this, but I'll try: gas taxes are necessary to force people who produce a negative externality to pay extra to account for that externality and lead to utility-maximizing outcomes. If the full costs associated with an activity or good are not included in the price, it can lead to inefficient overconsumption, as in the case of gasoline, resulting in more pollution and global warming and less conservation than is socially optimal.
California wants $30B from Feds for itself (Score:5, Informative)
California voters approved a high-speed rail ballot initiative recently that would build really high-speed trains from San Francisco to LA to San Diego, and also to points in between and Sacramento. The initiative approved $10Billion in bonds for construction - but the official estimated cost was about $30B, and the followup Oops-you-mean-the-WHOLE-Cost cost was about $40B, so they're depending on $30B of Federal money to magically fall from the sky. They've gotten approval for something like $2B of that $8B the Feds want to spend in the whole country, but they'll need a lot more. So the finances have been a total crock from the beginning.
By the way, the route from San Francisco to LA alone is longer than the TGV from Paris to Bordeaux, which is about the longest of the French TGV routes. (The highway distance would be a bit shorter, but the existing train routes across the mountains make the actual route zig-zag for a longer distance.)
I don't think you mean Marin County NIMBYs, though -that's across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and there's no obvious way to get a train across the bridge. There are lots of NIMBYs around Atherton and Menlo Park who don't want the train going down the Peninsula, or at least not near them, or hidden in underground tunnels.
There have also been arguments about whether the route from San Jose should go south first, or should go up the East Bay and east before heading south, but that's been people who want the train to go near them, not people who don't want it.
Re:Fly-over country need not apply (Score:2, Informative)
1/ France has 1000 miles of 180 mph speeds and the southwest chief, the fastest of amtrak trains, is only 90 mph. There is a total of 20000 miles of railway in France and amtrak operates passenger service over 21000 miles of tracks.So I don't think the problem would be to build/maintain tracks.
2/ Auto trains are not used a lot in europe. The biggest use is for UK/France travel crossing the sea. It enables people to use their cars once they arrive without loosing time crossing the sea thank to a 180 mph max speed. The rest of auto trains are quite slow and people would not use them much. Usually, you would travel to your destination either by train or airplane and use public transportation, if available, like metro, city buses, etc and/or rent a car.
Re:Alternate solution (Score:2, Informative)
Interesting comment about cities being more subsidized. Do you have any evidence? I think that cities are punitively taxed, yet people still move to them because the benefits still outweigh the extra taxes.
For example:
Urban areas pay more than they otherwise would for telecommunications to subsidize rural connectivity
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/07/federal-subsidies-for-rural-living/ [thinkprogress.org]
Fuel used for non-farming purposes cannot claim back tax paid on it. Rebates for an industry primarily situated in rural areas sounds suspiciously like a subsidy to rural areas.
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/industries/article/0,,id=98980,00.html [irs.gov]
Agricultural subsidies are a giant rip-off for taxpayers, funneling money to the largest producers of wheat, corn, soybeans, rice, and cotton. While rural residents are not typically better off for this, there are a lot more urban taxpayers than rural taxpayers.
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/rural-subsidies [downsizinggovernment.org]
Large cities often impose an additional sales (or wage) tax in addition to what the state already imposes; rural residents avoid paying those taxes.
http://money.cnn.com/pf/features/lists/taxesbycity2005/index.html [cnn.com]
Rural areas generally create more CO2 per resident than urban areas, but I feel certain that the costs of CO2 reduction will not be assessed proportionately.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16819-city-dwellers-harm-climate-less.html [newscientist.com]
As for why urbanites still live in cities, despite all these 'crushing' taxes? One reason might be economic: earnings grow more quickly for individuals who live in cities. The analysis points to the advantages of being close to experience you can learn from.
timharford.com [timharford.com]
So this comment might not be conclusive, but at least I have some evidence, rather than just prejudice for holding my opinion.
Re:Alternate solution (Score:3, Informative)
Around here, the farmers tend to do pretty well.
Of course they do, they are directly subsidised by government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy [wikipedia.org]
Re:Alternate solution (Score:4, Informative)
For the most part, yes, though some are paid for through tolls instead. Toll booths are actually capable of paying for major highways by themselves (construction costs at least, not sure about maintenance).
It's worth mentioning, though, that a huge chunk of that tax money comes from the gasoline tax. While it's less targeted than tolls, it still does mean that, if you don't have a car at all, you are paying far less to maintain roads than a driver is. It also has the benefit of ensuring that people who drive lots of miles pay a greater share of the maintenance costs than someone who only drives a couple miles to and from the grocery store once a week. And it indirectly taxes heavier vehicles more (because they are usually less fuel-efficient), which is fair because those vehicles cause more wear and tear.
Do governments usually pull money out of the general fund to help pay for roads? Yes, they do, there's no question about that. My point is that, while your claim is more or less true, it's also very misleading. Let's look at the numbers. My local mass transit system gets 32% of its money from fares. The rest comes from local sales taxes levied by counties in the service area. As of 2003, 70% of all road funding came from gasoline taxes. You tell me which is fairer.
commercial or public ? (Score:3, Informative)
Since people around the world read this - is there an example of privately run national railroads that actually work, are mostly on time, and are comfortable, clean, etc. ?
The examples I know sound like evidence that a railroad system can not be run by private companies. Trains in the UK are famously dirty (and I was riding 1st class!) and late. Germany used to be famous for its punctual trains - on the minute, no matter the distance - and excellent service, but ever since they've made the train company private, both has been going downhill rapidly.
What seems to work are public railroads (Switzerland, as I recall, is now what Germany used to be) or local, private railroad companies (several good examples exist in Germany).
I wonder why that is, and I wonder if it's a general thing or just a problem with the countries I know.
Re:Germany is 1/2 the size of Texas (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Alternate solution (Score:2, Informative)
The NIMBYs are not peculiar to California. Indeed, the aforementioned tactics and their assorted variations work just as well in many other states.
Case in point, the Cape Wind project off of Cape Cod has been delayed time and again because of the NIMBY movement. They don't want something that will appear to be about 50mm or less tall on the horizon "spoiling" their views. Oh and lets add Yucca Mtn. storage area and pretty much and nuclear plant to the list as well.
NIMBY - Keeping us safe from progress since the dawn of time
Re:California wants $30B from Feds for itself (Score:5, Informative)
By the way, the route from San Francisco to LA alone is longer than the TGV from Paris to Bordeaux, which is about the longest of the French TGV routes.
I get about 400 miles / 650 Km for San Francisco to Los Angeles.
The Paris-Bordeaux TGV line is neither the longest one nor even high-speed on its full length.
The longest line would be Paris-Marseille : 470 miles / 750 Km, line which has been constructed in three phases :
Maps :
Re:Alternate solution (Score:3, Informative)
> Rural areas are generally capable of becoming self sufficient if need be in practically no time at all.
There are a few interesting case studies that show this is not the case, or at least that the transition can be highly disruptive.
The one I am familiar with was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when large amounts of rural infrastructure stopped working because of extreme logistical confusion. Farms all over Russia had difficulty obtaining fuel, and even if they could, were unable to find buyers for their products, and couldn't get credit because of the total absence of anything resembling a banking system. Their crops rotted in the silos, and they themselves were in danger of malnutrition because of specialization. Repurposing the land to a variety of food crops would take a full season, and even then, the standard of living would drop -- this is only more of a danger in the US, where energy and capital intensive monoculture is the rule.
The same lesson is taught by a variety of "farm museums" I am familiar with near here -- there's one near Staunton, Virginia, which replicates various colonial-era immigrant farm practices. One thing that is made abuntdantly clear is that colonial-era farms were by no means self-sufficient, they already had a fairly high degree of specialization and were connected to the cash economy at many levels.
(One of the goals of the American Revolution, in fact, was to break the trade monopoly the colonies had with Great Britain, and allow the colonies to trade amongst themselves, to enhance their standard of living by tapping into a larger cash economy).
And there is a historical counter-argument -- in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, when the Serbs controlled the countryside and Bosnians were mostly restricted to the city of Sarajevo itself. Sarajevans clear-cut the city parks and burned the trees for fuel, and planted vegetable gardens, and bicycled a lot. There was a substantial drop in the standard of living, and it was by no means without risk, but it's not like everybody died instantly.
The truth is that the interconnections do everyone a lot of good. Rural areas can become self-sufficient, in the same sense that, say, a country could be entirely self-sufficient and not interact with other countries. For a bad example of how this works, see Gaza and/or North Korea. I can't think of any good examples, although the theoretical possibility does exist.
Re:Alternate solution (Score:5, Informative)
Rather than these "I don't like what you do with your life so I'm going to try to hinder you from doing it through a passive-aggressive tax measure"
Taxes on carbon emissions aren't about "not liking" liking something, they are about making you pay for costs you impose on the rest of the world without paying for them (externalities).
Libertarian arguments that you don't need taxes because private property will take care of it don't work for many externalities.
So what? (Score:4, Informative)
That's an artifact of the top 1% of income earners paying over 40% of all federal income tax.
The top 1% of income earners earn 23.5% of income. Note, however, that the top 1% of income earners ALSO pay very, very low tax rates on social security and investments, which is where their income comes from.
A middle-class person might pay a 28% marginal tax rate on money they earn by working. A rich person pays a 15% tax rate on money they make by already having money.
If anyone in the top 1% of earners thinks that's a bad deal, I would be happy to trade places with them.