A national-scale high speed rail? For whom?

[unstrung]

@spoke-

So far we have Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas-Ft.Worth, Denver, Birmingham, Indianapolis and Knoxville. I could add Miami (which didn’t boom until connected to New York by rail). Just that short list takes in four of the ten largest metro areas in the US, and there are many smaller cities which I could name, but won’t, because I’ve made my point.

To add to the above, there are many smaller cities that have also seen the benefits of rail travel. One such is my next door neighbor - St. Petersburg, Florida. This town would not have flourished without the rail system, and pretty much didn’t exist until the rail was put in place. See the Wikipedia article for more info, as well as a quaint story regarding a coin toss which supposedly determined the city’s name (which locals love to retell, but cannot confirm is true).

PS - As a side note, St. Pete was home base for Wikipedia up until last year…

[Bryan_Ekers]

Personally, I think North America would be better off with computerized freeways, where the cars drive themselves at a fixed 70 mph. I expect it’s inevitable since as the first Baby Boomers start sliding into their seventies, we’ll see dramatic increases in traffic fatalities and the insurance companies will have to charge ridiculous premiums to any fogeys who don’t have computer-assist (if not computer-controlled) vehicles.

[BrainGlutton]

@Bryan Ekers

Personally, I think North America would be better off with computerized freeways, where the cars drive themselves at a fixed 70 mph. I expect it’s inevitable since as the first Baby Boomers start sliding into their seventies, we’ll see dramatic increases in traffic fatalities and the insurance companies will have to charge ridiculous premiums to any fogeys who don’t have computer-assist (if not computer-controlled) vehicles.

In The Gold Coast, Kim Stanley Robinson envisioned a future where cars would be driven by “carbrains” and powered by electric power-slots running down the middle of every street. But I think a reliable carbrain would have to be a stronger AI than is yet possible.

[Shayna]

Posted by Spiny Norman:

@smiling bandit

Moreover, HSR is not at all a freight service, which is what is economically useful to the cities.

Eh - what? Passenger service isn’t economically useful to cities? I thought the US was turning into a service economy. Service is hard to deliver by freight train, doncherknow?

[mswas]

@Bryan Ekers

Personally, I think North America would be better off with computerized freeways, where the cars drive themselves at a fixed 70 mph. I expect it’s inevitable since as the first Baby Boomers start sliding into their seventies, we’ll see dramatic increases in traffic fatalities and the insurance companies will have to charge ridiculous premiums to any fogeys who don’t have computer-assist (if not computer-controlled) vehicles.

If they are computer driven then driving at a fixed rate is unnecessary. Let them drive at 100 mph. This will work better when we have electric cars.

[mswas]

@BrainGlutton

In The Gold Coast, Kim Stanley Robinson envisioned a future where cars would be driven by “carbrains” and powered by electric power-slots running down the middle of every street. But I think a reliable carbrain would have to be a stronger AI than is yet possible.

Not if it’s run as a data point in a larger system. Have a combination of onboard computer and communication with traffic control computers dedicated to the highway.

[Antonius_Block]

@Chronos

So, who’s proposing a national high-speed rail in the first place?

@BrainGlutton

See here.
And here.

I’m a major supporter of High-Speed Rail (HSR) in areas where it can be justified, but IMHO the New Trains people (your first link) are rail fanboys whose desire to draw linked lines on maps overrides their critical thinking. On the other hand, the networks shown in your second link are at least smart enough to miss out the “dead areas” of the US for which HSR is impractical in the foreseeable future, namely trans-Rockies and trans-Cascades. The latter map does however have some bizarre omissions:[ul]
[li]They’re connecting Cleveland OH to a Midwest network, and Pittsburgh PA to an Eastern Seaboard network, but not linking the two? [/li][li]They link Houston TX to New Orleans, but not to San Antonio-Austin-Fort Worth-Dallas, despite the fact that the latter axis gives a much greater bang for the buck (less distance and more potential passengers).?[/ul][/li][QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
If it works in Europe and Japan, why not here?
[/QUOTE]
“Europe” and Japan are very different situations. Japan is much more densely-populated than the US, and had the strong central government and national willpower to push the Shinkansen through. It’s also hard to get good cost-effectiveness figures from Japan. Still, it’s hugely popular and has undoubtedly been a major success; the question is whether or not it’s an applicable model for the US to follow.

Europe, on the other hand, is a much better model for HSR in the US. Although it’s likely that by 2012 one will be able to travel from Seville (SW Spain) to Berlin entirely using high-speed trains, that won’t be because someone once sat down with a master plan to capture that elusive Seville <-> Berlin business market. On the contrary, it’s because individual countries decided that HSR would work for them entirely based on highly-traveled city-to-city groups between ~100 and ~400 miles apart. Each of these routes stands on their own merits, and the fact that they will eventually meet up is a secondary consideration.

So, although anti-HSR objectionists in the US often start out by whining about how BIG the US is compared to Europe, they usually fail to note that European HSR did not start out in the most densely-populated countries such as the Netherlands (1023 people per square mile) or Belgium (892 ppsm), but in France (295 ppsm). [By comparison, the USA as a whole has 80 ppsm, but so what? No-one is talking about HSR in Alaska, and no-one who deserves to be taken seriously is talking about HSR through the big “square” Rocky Mountain states (at any time in the next 50 years, at least)). IMHO, one should build on successful models, and not get carried away.

Let’s look at Spain. The AVE network has been an unabashed success. Total population 45 million, density around 231 ppsm. Major cities (Madrid, Barcelon, Seville) are hundreds of miles apart. What US state does that look like? California (pop 237 million, density 234 ppsm). The San Francisco Bay Area (pop >7 million) and the Los Angeles basin (pop >15 million) are 432 miles apart, and the current air corridor is one of the busiest in the world, so this is a perfect candidate for HSR in the US – better at this point than the NE Corridor, since that already has a “nearly-good-enough” (at least in some people’s minds) train in the Acela, which has already had billions spent on it. California HSR would be nothing like Acela.

And that is why California currently has Proposition 1 / 1(A) on the November 2008 ballot. This is a bond measure to raise just under US$10billion to start building a HSR line between San Francisco and Los Angeles (via San Jose, Fresno, and Bakersfield), with extensions to Anaheim, San Diego, and Sacramento. Costs of the initial system are expected to be in the ~US$40billion range, with the rest of the money coming from Federal and private funding. A current poll (today’s Wall Street Journal) has support at 62% of the electorate. The relevant California Assembly Bill (AB3034 ) was passed bythe Assembly months ago, and by the CA Senate last week (August 7th). Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is in favor of HSR, but is currently “playing chicken” with the California lawmakers in order to get a budget passed, and isn’t signing any bills at the moment. In any case, it will definitely be on the 2008 ballot – it’s merely a question of the precise wording.

Links:
California High-Speed Rail Authority website.
California High Speed Rail Blog.

[Antonius_Block]

@smiling bandit

…forget profitable - you’ll be lucky to go merely go bankrupt.

SNCF, the French national rail network, made a €695m (~US$900million) operating profit in 2006, because its high-speed TGV routes are such moneymakers that they subsidize the other routes. [Note: this is not amortizing the initial expense of building the network, but remember that neither Ford nor Greyhound built the US Interstate system, and Southwest Airlines doesn’t pay to build airports – taxpayers do.]

@smiling bandit

And the price of a ticket would be ungodly. I mean, either the thing would wholly subsidized and virtually free (and would cost a ridiculous amount in taxes) or it would be completely uncompetitive with air travel.

Same “Economist” link as above:

Now 800 TGV services run each day, carrying over 200m passengers a year, and 80% of seats are occupied. “We are the French low-cost carrier,” Mr Pepy says. A ticket from Paris to Marseille now costs as little as €22 ($32).

Note that Paris - Marseille is >500 miles, and takes 3 hours city-center-to-city-center via TGV (faster and more comfortable than the plane door-to-door, and with very little chance of weather delays). For as little as $32US! It’s no surprise that Air France is going to get into the HSR business to replace short-haul flights.

Another example: look at the pie charts for Spain’s Madrid-Seville corridor before and after the AVE (HSR) line was inaugurated in 1992):[ul]
[li]Before: car 60%, bus 15%, regular train 14%, plane 11%.[/li][li]After: AVE (high-speed train) 52%, car 34%, coach 8%, plane 4%, “slow” train 2%.[/ul][/li]
But, one might ask, what about the on-time performance of these Madrid-Seville trains? Well:

On the line from Madrid to Sevilla, the service guarantees arrival within a 5 minutes of the advertised time, and offers a full refund if the train is delayed further, although only 0.16% of trains have been so

Whoever came up with the idea of “5 minutes late =100% refund” was a marketing genius IMHO, and it’s paid off. Try and get that offer the next time you fly…

Seriously, if one can get past the arguments that are virtually straw men (“NYC to LA would be too slow”), and concentrate on corridors and networks with characteristics that have proven to be good investments in other parts of the world, HSR could be a huge boon to the US. Just don’t screw it up in ways that are all-too-easily foreseeable. Don’t try to change things too much because the technology was invented outside the US (e.g. the Acela has been somewhat caught in the “neither fish nor foul” gap, so it isn’t real HSR but it costs a lot more to run).

[Antonius_Block]

Errata for my post #27 above:

@Antonius Block

Barcelon
<snip)
California (pop 237 million…)

Barcelona; and California’s population is ~37 million (major typo!!), although it’s growing by leaps and bounds (and especially in the Central Valley, which is currently strongly underserved by CA’s transportation infrastructure – CA-HSR would be an immense bonus for Fresno and Bakersfield – and later Sacramento – as well as the megalopolises of Greater LA and the SF Bay Area).

Mea culpa.

Although previous posts have only referred to mainland Europe and Japan, recent HSR routes have opened in:
[ul]
[li]South Korea (2004), [/li][li]Taiwan (Jan 2007),[/li][li]United Kingdom (CTRL linking London St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel opened Nov 2007),[/li][*]and – with surprisingly little fanfare given what else is going on there – the Beijing–Tianjin Intercity Rail line opened on August 1st 2008, and is currently the world’s fastest scheduled rail line, running at up to 350kmph (~220mph). It’s a small start for a much longer line to Shanghai.[/ul]

[GorillaMan]

@Bryan Ekers

Personally, I think North America would be better off with computerized freeways, where the cars drive themselves at a fixed 70 mph. I expect it’s inevitable since as the first Baby Boomers start sliding into their seventies, we’ll see dramatic increases in traffic fatalities and the insurance companies will have to charge ridiculous premiums to any fogeys who don’t have computer-assist (if not computer-controlled) vehicles.

So an undeveloped technology rather than one with decades of experience and development? And how does this deal with the oil price issue?

[mlees]

@griffin1977

Has anyone seriously proposed a National one ? I’d say the population densities and distances invovle preclude that.

One the other hand there are some huge pockects of very high population density in the US, and its just dumb there isn’t a decent rail link between them. Why there is isn’t a high speed San Francisco->San Jose->LA link is ridiculous.

hmmp You forgot San Diego. Why does everyone forget San Diego? Some people think there is nothing in California except San Fran and L.A.

mumble mumble

( )

[RTFirefly]

I think the Northeast and Midwest could support a network of high-speed rail lines, plus at least one Southeastern corridor. Once west of the Mississippi Valley, not too many routes are going to make sense. Connecting California’s or Texas’ major cities, certainly. St. Louis-KC and Portland-Seattle-Vancouver BC would probably make sense. But that might be about it.

Whether it can pay for itself in the sense of farebox revenues is, AFAIAC, beside the point. The goal should be to make it convenient for people to get around at least as conveniently as they do now, in ways that involve pumping less carbon into the atmosphere. That’s going to involve some infrastructure investment, and some thought about how to do that in ways that fit together well. High-speed intercity trains within a few hundred miles of one another would get people out of their cars, and reduce the need for short-haul plane flights as well.

We can do a lot of things to reduce people’s carbon generation in ways that don’t involve individual sacrifice if we’re willing to spend some money on creating alternatives.

[RedFury]

@BrainGlutton

…If it works in Europe and Japan, why not here?

For the same answer you gave about Scandinavian-style socialism in another thread a few weeks ago: they work in practice just not in theory.

De nada.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@GorillaMan

So an undeveloped technology rather than one with decades of experience and development? And how does this deal with the oil price issue?

It’s a technology with some promising prototypes built by the private sector vs. one that will cost fifty billion dollars, mostly from taxation.

As for oil, what I describe will be a more efficient use. Combine with hybrid tech (and electric, eventually) and individual transportation will far less of an energy burden.

As for the price of oil, American control over that will gradually diminish anyway. Either find more or get by with less.

[DoctorJ]

I can see this being of some use regionally, but the big problem in mid-sized cities is that public transportation within the cities is often lousy. Not much point in taking the train if you’re just going to have to rent a car on the other end.

[XT]

I think people would use it, whether we are talking about a local HSR system or a coast to coast system. Either would be great, lots of fun to ride and useful to people who commute between the proposed connected cities.

What I want to know though is…who is going to PAY for it? Because it’s going to be highly expensive, take years to build, and I have serious doubts it’s going to be a money maker.

-XT

[Magiver]

@mswas

What came first? The railroad or the population centers that cropped up around it’s hubs?

People always forget that transportation systems bring development to barren areas. You’re thinking about it backwards.

Barren areas, HAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh and
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Expect this from your “barren” areas. It only takes one organization to turn it into an environmental circus in court.

[Spiny_Norman]

@DoctorJ

I can see this being of some use regionally, but the big problem in mid-sized cities is that public transportation within the cities is often lousy. Not much point in taking the train if you’re just going to have to rent a car on the other end.

• yet people do the same thing at the end of short flights all the time. Obviously, good public transportation is nice, but if you’re in a hurry or unfamiliar with the local transit, grab a rental car or a cab - I know I did just that often enough when I lived in Germany and Denmark. I’d rather spend two hours on a high-speed train, relaxing or being productive, than 3 hours on the freeway doing nothing but driving.

At least with trains, there’s a fair chance that the station will be somewhat central, whereas airports tend to be rather less so.

[Antonius_Block]

@xtisme

What I want to know though is…who is going to PAY for it? Because it’s going to be highly expensive, take years to build, and I have serious doubts it’s going to be a money maker.

One can make the same arguments against freeways and airports ; they don’t make money directly, but have been considered worthwhile public infrastructure because of the benefits they add. HSR is just another mode, but one with a significantly lower dependence on imported fossil fuels and with a much lower carbon footprint than cars or planes.

For California at least, it’s not as though there is a zero-cost option of not building HSR. Current plans to expand San Francisco International (SFO) and Los Angles International (LAX) airports have estimates of over $10 billion apiece – of course, with airlines cutting back on cheap flights those extensions probably won’t be needed any more! [Southwest is an exception to the current airline problems, but only because of its low locked-in fuel prices, but those expire in a couple of years.] With projected state population growth to over 50 million residents, and oil prices that will likely never go back down to pre-2005 levels, California needs to do something to improve connections between north and south.

The current NorCal-SoCal rail routes bottleneck down to two single-track lines at the Pacific Coast and the Tehachapi pass, which is exactly how things were at the end of the 19th Century. One major result of this is that there is currently no timely rail passenger service between the state’s major population areas. Rather than put billions into expanding airports for planes that can’t afford to fuel up, or freeways that encourage unsustainable sprawl, High-Speed Rail will offer a cheaper, more productive (fewer weather delays, less wait time, and on-board WiFi and laptop power sockets), more sustainable travel option, with a lower carbon footprint to boot.

No, it wouldn’t work everywhere in the US, just as it isn’t envisioned for everywhere in Europe. And forget Coast-to-Coast for the moment, as the gaps between adjacent “HSR-worthy” cities are too great in the Mountain Time Zone for current demographics and technology to make it worthwhile. But, when comparing costs, don’t forget to account for subsidies and externalities that abound in road and air transportation, and bear in mind that the energy efficiency and flexibility of electric-powered HSR will only become more important with time.

[XT]

@Antonius Block

One can make the same arguments against freeways and airports ; they don’t make money directly, but have been considered worthwhile public infrastructure because of the benefits they add. HSR is just another mode, but one with a significantly lower dependence on imported fossil fuels and with a much lower carbon footprint than cars or planes

Except for one thing…freeways and airports are ALREADY THERE. The majority of the infrastructure is already in place and in use. So, any further development or maintenance is just adding on to what’s already there.

HSR however is not there and would essentially need to be built from scratch. Rail stations would need to be built. Trackage would need to be laid down. New rights of way and grading would need to be done (my assumption here is that our old rail infrastructure and grading wouldn’t be adequate as it is for HSR). All of which would cost billions (or hundreds of billions of dollars)…and then would run at a constant deficit when you factor in maintenance. To be sure, our freeway system runs at a deficit which is paid for by taxes…but we already HAVE it. To be sure, we’d save money (in theory) in the long run if we built such a system and then forced people to use it instead of cars or planes (good luck with that). But it’s rather like buying a car for a hundred thousand dollars that gets 100 miles to the gallon. To be sure you’ll save money in the long run…but how long before your ROI balances out? A decade? Two?

There may be some niche places where HSR may make sense…in fact, I think there are several places looking at the feasibility of putting in such a system. But they are small scale or niche markets. Wide scale deployment of such a system would be a huge money pit, IMHO anyway.

No, it wouldn’t work everywhere in the US, just as it isn’t envisioned for everywhere in Europe. And forget Coast-to-Coast for the moment, as the gaps between adjacent “HSR-worthy” cities are too great in the Mountain Time Zone for current demographics and technology to make it worthwhile. But, when comparing costs, don’t forget to account for subsidies and externalities that abound in road and air transportation, and bear in mind that the energy efficiency and flexibility of electric-powered HSR will only become more important with time.

Nope, I’m not forgetting it. And I agree…there may be some niche places that it would or could make sense. Thing is…if there IS a market for it, why isn’t anyone doing it? I’m sure if there is a market for such a system then getting the government to give those subsidies and such wouldn’t be too hard. And yet, as far as I know, there is no serious system currently being proposed (though as I said, I know there are several groups looking into it).

My guess is that HSR, while cool and all, is simply to expensive in the initial investment, and really you are talking about putting in another infrastructure that we already have several meeting those needs. We ALREADY have the freeway system (so, the huge capital investment has already been paid), we already have air ports (same thing, with all the associated infrastructure around them), and we even have a low speed rail system that allows travel between many US cities (especially on the East Coast). So, you are talking about a huge investment in a system that would simply be competing with the other systems we already have and have already paid the up front capital costs.

Sounds like an uphill battle to me to get in more than a niche HSR system or two in some very small or focused areas.

-XT