I can produce hard facts on the usage of a system that has been built.
Seventh busiest, huh? While I applaud that 593,000 New York/Boston travellers exercised the train option, three to four times that many chose to fly.
I just get suspicious when numbers are provided for one option but not for another.
But we don’t need to navel gaze when talking about HSR, as Europe’s already a model for any US implementation. There’s plane and road routes between all cities served by HSR, yet HSR has intrinsic advantages over planes (less security, less waiting around, arrive in the city centre etc.) and road travel (space to stretch your legs, ability to do work whilst traveling etc.).
There’s also the bizarre belief that redundancy in transportation infrastructure is a bad thing. If redundancy is so bad, why does the US government subsidize domestic air companies? After all, is it not a seemingly logical extrapolation that all major cities in the US are connected via roads, and hence all plane travel is by definition redundant?
Uh, no. High speed rail has distinct advantages and disadvantages over all the other forms of transport you mention, and capitalist economic theory says that some people will express a preference for HSR. The only question is how many people. And this is what bugs me about psuedo-capitalists like you. You only use capitalist economics when it suits your personal preferences. If you can’t produce any evidence of how many people will prefer HSR over other forms of transport, then you are simply trying to extrapolate your own personal preferences to everyone else.
I haven’t done any research on it, but I’ll bet good money that when the interstate freeway system was proposed, there were people like you talking about how it was a waste of money and it would never work. Now, that it’s up and working, people like you run around acting like it’s completely natural. There are plenty of countries in this world that don’t have freeway systems. We built a freeway system and that changed people’s preferences and habits. And if you don’t believe that, then again you simply don’t believe in capitalist economic theory.
Ok, so you admit it’s a guess.
Because large scale infrastructure problems require government intervention. Again, this is basic capitalist economic theory. This is because individual property owners can “hold out” or refuse to sell.
So why wouldn’t an LA-LV link work then?
Who likes it? You? I don’t like it at all. But I guess because you like it, we’re supposed to assume everyone likes it?
No, it doesn’t indicate anything of the sort. In the US, very narrow interests can block popular programs from happening. And you and I have been in threads before where I’ve cited polls that indicated that HSR is fairly popular. We’ll see what happens after November. If CA’s voter initiative passes, then I guess we’ll have to assume a lot of people do want HSR.
This last statement indicates to me that you really need to do some studying about capitalism. Here’s the wiki article on externalities. Please read it, and start a GQ thread if you have any questions.
And all of these arguments could have been made against the interstate system when it was built. I have no information about how much the initial build of the interstate system cost in inflation adjusted dollars, but I can’t imagine that it was cheap. One documentary I watched several years ago (perhaps an enterprising doper can provide a cite) stated that low level nukes were used to carve a path through the mountains for the freeway system. That must have cost a pretty penny in the 50s.
What is your solution then? Have you ever tried driving from Vegas to LA on a Sunday night? It’s bumper-to-bumper traffic. That is a problem that needs to be addressed. We’re entering an age where cheap oil is no longer going to be available, simply because of demand from developing countries. Does it make sense to continue to solely rely on cheap-oil infrastructures?
Yes, that’s true in part. But it’s also true that fixed rail influences development patterns as well. If people know that the transport can’t quickly pull out, they are more likely to invest in development near the fixed transport.
This is a bit of rank speculation on your part. You don’t know that they are cheaper, because you haven’t taken into account pollution (externalized pollution is a type of subsidy), lost time and productivity from sitting in traffic or being delayed at the airport, costs from uninsured and underinsured motorists (which is a type of subsidy), costs from airline bankruptcies (again, a type of subsidy), and on and on.
Ok, you’ve made an argument against the freeway system. What is your solution then? People need to move from city to city, and you are posting arguments against both freeways and HSR?
Every freeway and road and subway line has a distortionary effect. If you are proposing that we move to libertopia, then just come out and say it. Because that concept isn’t going to go anywhere in the US or anywhere else.
No idea what you are talking about because your post has no bearing on either the question you asked me nor my answer to it. Instead you wander off on tangents about me being a psudo-capitalist, blah blah blah.
To refocus your attention, I claimed that a HSR system was redundant and would be less used. You questioned me on that. I showed that since we already have several transport systems linking any possible proposed group of cities that this is pretty much the definition of ‘redundant’. Perhaps the problem here is you don’t know the definition of that word? I ask in all seriousness as your answers here really seem to indicate a fair level of disconnect.
As for the last part, it’s not up to ME to show how many people will or won’t use a proposed system…it’s up to the advocates of HSR to show, even roughly, that such a system is both cost effective and will be used enough to justify building the thing. Thus far I’ve seen nothing indicating that such a system is feasible either from a cost perspective or from a usage perspective. It’s rather ironic that you accuse ME of basing things off my own personal preferences, blah blah blah when the reality seems pretty clear…where is the HSR system, BrightNShiny? Unless you figure I have a lot more power than I in fact do, seems it’s not just XT’s whim that is driving these decisions.
People like me, ehe? Well, you may be right…I probably WOULD have been against building an continental freeway system from scratch. I probably would have thought it was a huge waste of resources and redundant. Of course, our freeway system wasn’t built initially as an integrated system either…it sort of grew over time. There is another key difference too which you seem to not be able to get through your head…we ALREADY have it at this point. Lamenting over that fact is crying over spilled milk. Our highway network is already here and at this point it’s just maintenance and expansion. And HSR system however doesn’t exist…it would have to be built essentially from scratch.
See the difference?
And your assertions are facts based, ehe? :dubious: Since no one has built or even seriously proposed an HSR system here in the US all we can do is guess and base it on existing traffic patterns and usage of existing systems. It’s funny that you don’t actually speak to my assertions at all, just hand wave things away that it’s my preferences or that I’m just guessing.
Yes they do. Did I deny that somewhere? What I said is…where is the HSR system if it’s economically or politically feasible? Again, you seem to be talking past the points I made and going off on your own little tangents here instead of addressing them.
Did I say it wouldn’t work? The question isn’t whether or not it would work, it’s A) Is it feasible? B) Is there a need for it, given that there are already several ways to travel between LA and LV, and C) Would enough people use the thing to justify the costs?
My guess (based on reality), is that, since there are currently no plans to build such a system that one or several of those conditions aren’t currently being met. Put another way, if it IS feasible, if the cost IS justified, if enough people have a need for such a system then where is it? Why aren’t there serious plans to build it? Why isn’t the money being budgeted to build it? Why aren’t proposals being sent out to vendors to build it or to provide all the trains and such necessary?
It’s widely used. There is no serious groundswell of citizens (read:Voters!) who are demanding or even asking for such a new system. So, QED, I’d say that most people like the current systems…or at least don’t dislike them enough to want to spend billions on another redundant system.
That would put you in the small but vocal minority who dislike the current system (while probably still using it heavily). All you need to do is convince enough other people (read:Voters!) and one day you may get your wish. In the mean time, sadly to say, reality rears it’s ugly head.
Polls don’t translate into votes. I don’t think that truly popular programs can be blocked by ‘very narrow interests’, so I disagree with you there. If people wanted HSR then they would get it…for several different reasons. First off, there would be an obvious demand. You figure companies don’t like to make money? Secondly, if there was a demand than some politician would capitalize on that demand because popular demand = votes.
I think what you see in polls is the same kind of vague desire you see when people are polled about universal health care (in the US)…they are vaguely for it (or even very much for it) until they start seeing the price tag. Sort of like I’m all for getting myself a brand new Corvette this year…until I have to figure out how I’m going to pay for the car, gas, insurance, etc.
As for the thing about the CA voters, I’ll believe it when I see it. But I won’t be all that surprised if it DOES happen. I said I think HSR in a limited, niches sense WILL eventually happen. And CA would be a perfect place for it. If it doesn’t happen this time it doesn’t mean it never will. If it does happen that doesn’t mean that HSR’s time has come and we’ll have a coast to coast network of HSR transport either.
I don’t think this deserves more than a scornful :rolleyes: When come back bring argument.
-XT
Nuclear bombs were not used to construct the interstate highway system.
Rural highways cost anywhere from $1 million to $15 million per mile. The best estimate for the total cost of the Interstate Highway system was 128 billion dollars, which included 42,795 miles of interstate. Just around 3 million dollars per mile. It’s tough to adjust this number for inflation, since it was built between 1956 and 1996. Feel free to double it.
The per-mile cost of HSR actually isn’t that far off the cost of building a highway, but HSR is less flexible and has much higher operating costs per track mile. Highways can accomodate passenger traffic, heavy freight, provide access for emergency vehicles and evacuations, etc. HSR lines do one thing well - move lots of people from one place to another efficiently.
It’s really the operating cost of HSR, and it’s absolute dependence on rider volumes, which makes it susceptible to changing economic conditions. A system that might break even or turn a profit at 80% capacity can be a big money loser at 50% capacity. This makes HSR a dangerous investment.
I have no problem with HSR where it really makes sense. Maybe the Vegas line is one that makes sense - I don’t know enough about it to say. What I do know is that HSR is only going to make sense in some very specific places, and therefore is not going to make a dent in our overall energy consumption. Transportation only makes up about 25% of the energy we use today, and that includes planes, trains, and automobiles. Passenger autos make up only a fraction of that. If you could replace even 10% of those passenger trips with rail (which would be an astoundingly high number), and if each trip resulted in only 1/3 of the energy being used (that’s close to the right ratio for per-passenger mile energy use of HSR vs an auto), you might cut overall energy use by .5% to 1% or so.
This is why I asked before what the real rationale is here. If you think HSR is any kind of answer to the energy problem it’s not. As a comparison, if you used the oil in ANWR to make up that 1% difference, it would last for over 70 years.
The point is that HSR is not a national solution to a national energy problem.
Is it an answer to congestion? It depends - it depends on how many passengers you can shunt into to the trains, and how much of the congestion is due to passenger traffic vs commercial traffic. Also, you might find that congestion is actually a limiting factor on auto use, and if you offload a lot of it onto trains, you’ll get even more traffic. Take the congestion burden off the roads, and you make it easier to live in the suburbs and build more suburbs further out. So you may have even less effect than you think. The end effect of HSR might not be less energy used, but more overall travel.
Right - rather than investing in development where it would otherwise be better suited. Throw politicians into the mix looking to justify their big train investment, and you may find all sorts of distortionary investment that has more to do with covering political butt and making an otherwise money-losing train pay, rather than building things where it makes most sense to build them.
Yes, estimating the entire life-cycle cost, including all the intangibles, is a herculean effort. But you do not think trains will go bankrupt? That the environment won’t be disturbed when building out the tracks? That there aren’t hidden costs associated with train travel, such as the need to find transportation at each end of the rail link and the time needed to buy tickets and board the train?
These are not small factors. There’s a lot of overhead associated with a train ride - not as much as for an airplane flight, but more than for driving a car.
As for pollution, modern cars are extremely clean burning. CO2 is the only issue we need to talk about as a major issue. And there are plenty of problems with efficient carbon pricing - the most important of which is that we still don’t really understand the net impact of CO2 release. We don’t even know at this point if it will cause economic damage at all. But even assuming it does, high range estimates for ‘reasonable’ carbon taxes to account for the externality tend to run around 50 cents per gallon of gas. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not so much - a small fraction of the total operating cost of a vehicle. So it doesn’t change the absolute numbers by that much.
First you have to convince me that there’s a problem. We still haven’t determined what you think the main problem is. Is it congestion? Is it energy?
If you ask an economist why congestion exists, he’ll probably tell you it’s because the cost of the road is free to the user, so market forces don’t work very well. When infrastructure use is free, you’ll get more of it until you hit some other hidden ‘price’, such as time. So congestion is a natural result of an unlimited resource being used up until some other limit is hit.
You could solve a lot of congestion, and make the transportation system far more efficient, by implementing congestion pricing. Make it cheaper to drive off-peak, and the economy will adapt to take advantage of the savings. You’ll see more flex-hours. You’ll see a bigger shift to night-time truck movements. In fact, with the correct congestion price, you’d never have congestion at all, unless there was so much traffic that it was congested 24 hours a day. But even then, in the long term you would greatly stimulate development away from congested areas, so people could take advantage of lower transportation costs.
So pay for the roads by eliminating the fuel tax and implementing congestion pricing in a revenue-neutral way. The technology is available now - all you’d need to do is provide cars with GPS receivers and a datalink to report their aggregate road use. Then the road owner would bill the owner of the car. You culd also stimulate the development of toll roads and even trains.
That’s my ultimate answer - first, implement congestion pricing in congested areas. That will make the current infrastructure more efficient. THEN you’ll see if you really need trains. If the roads are still congested and people are paying constant congestion fees to travel, an HSR trip will become more cost effective for people, and it’ll be easier to make money from trains.
You could try not putting words in my mouth. I don’t think I even hinted at any kind of libertarianism in any of these messages. The systems I’ve been comparing are all built by the government. So you might want to keep that knee from jerking.
The fact is, HSR makes sense in some areas, but doesn’t make sense in many areas. It makes sense in few enough areas that it will not solve the energy problem. For congestion, there are other alternatives that could be tried first, and for a lot less money.
I understand the appeal of HSR - it uses energy efficiently, the trains are cool, and Europe has them all over the place. It looks like a smart, modern way to build an infrastructure.
But what works for densely-populated Europe with its car-unfriendly roads and cities does not necessarily work for a nation where the population is widely distributed, the roads are wide, there’s already an existing interstate highway system, and the cities are so spread out that you gain benefit from having a car at your destination anyway. North America is simply a much more difficult environment for the profitable operation of high-speed rail.
Maybe a couple of very densely traveled areas could use it - Washington to New York, Los Angeles to Vegas, or a handful of other locations. But you’re not going to see the country criss-crossed with high-speed trains, and the majority of the population traveling by rail. It will never happen. It will never come close to happening. HSR in North America will never move more than a tiny fraction of travelers.
BrightNShiny–Nobody has ever used nuclear explosives in construction.
Especially not during the Cold War.
We will forget you said it. :rolleyes:
They may not have actually done it…although they did use it in hawaii for excavation…but they planned to do it and did some test blasts.
So it’s not as absurd as you may think.
I meant to say they may not have done it in freeway construction. They certainly have done it in construction.
Plowshare was tested…never deployed.
I believe I said that.
But nuclear explosions have been used for construction. Russia did quite a bit of this, in fact.
No, I’m sorry. It’s very clear from the other thread and this one that you do not understand the concept of externalities, particularly in regards to pollution. This is a basic part of capitalist economic theory and if aren’t willing to learn about it, then there is no point in debating with you.
Ok, maybe I misremembered the documentary, or maybe it was on the History Channel. It was tangential to my point.
I’m busy with work for the next few days, but I’ll try to respond to some of the points raised by my debating adversaries after that.
Cool thread so far. I hope Antonius returns with that post he promised.
That is all.
Thanks for the shoutout, VarlosZ!
I’m trying to build a worthy answer to Sam Stone’s challenge in post #91, but other demands on my time are intervening. Hey, if it were trivial, they wouldn’t have paid CA-HSR $20million for the study, right 
?
PLEASE NOTE that the post that you’re waiting for will only discuss the viability of California HSR between SF and LA, with branches to Sacramento, Anaheim, and San Diego, as outlined on the CA-HSR site. I happen to believe that TX-HSR (San Antonio - Austin - Fort Worth - Dallas - Houston) is probably viable, and am willing to accept arguments for FL-HSR, PNW-HSR (Eugene OR <-> Vancouver BC) and perhaps a Midwest Chicago-based HSR. As far as the NE Corridor is concerned, I have major reservations as to its viability as a test platform for true HSR in the US, as I tried to make clear in this thread from 3 months ago – specifically here, here, here, and here.
My argument is – and has always been – pro-HSR where it is appropriate. Reading (briefly, unfortunately) the posts from xtisme and Sam Stone over the last couple of days suggests to me that we might not actually be as far apart as might appear on first glance. As I said back in post #27 of this thread, IMHO the New Trains people are
Trust me, no-one who is seriously planning HSR in the US is thinking of lines that go coast-to-coast – the proposed California network might be extended to Las Vegas NV (although this is not part of the current CA-HSR plan), but if anyone starts talking about trans-Rocky Mountains or trans-Cascade service, serious HSR proponents in California will roll their (+my) eyes. Fifty years from now? Perhaps. To be a serious plan now with current technology and demographics? No way.
Sorry my killer post is taking a while. What I might do in the interim is post some numbers from the CA-HSR study, without SDMB-worthy cites, just to make the case, while being fully prepared to do the gruntwork to back them up when called upon to do so.
While we’re waiting, here’s a timely link to the latest Rail Passenger Association of California & Nevada, showing that ridership for Amtrak services in California is through the roof this year as compared to last. And those are the regular (slow) trains, running on tracks owned by the freight rail companies. Even car-loving Californians will take the train if the latter offers an advantage and the appropriate service exists!
Whatever you say chief. 
C’est la vie.
-XT
I only have a few minutes, but I’ll respond to this.
My bad.
HSR can be used for heavy freigh and evacuations too. But if we just limit it to passanger travel, that frees up freeways for the other uses you mentioned. There is a positive externality from people moving from plane and highway transport to HSR, because of the reduced volume using those other transport systems.
But these arguments also apply to a lot of roads. There are a lot of roads that are under-utilized relative to their costs, maybe because they are in rural areas or maybe because they are built in places where it’s expensive to maintain them (such as on steep slopes prone to mudsliding). I’m not sure I see why we should single out HSR for this kind of argument.
This is the crux of my argument. That there are areas where HSR would likely work well, and we shouldn’t just rule it out. I don’t think many people in this thread are advocating hooking up the entire nation by HSR (I’m certainly not). But I can’t really accept blanket assertions either that HSR wouldn’t work in the midwest or other areas. There’s simply not enough info to know either way. I’d start with links that are most likely to generate significant volumes of traffic and see how things flow from there.
I don’t think these are the right figures to look at. We’re not really energy constrained in this country, so while energy efficiency is nice, it’s a bit of a red-herring. What we are is cheap-oil constrained, and an electric HSR system gives you energy flexibility, since you can change the power source to nuclear or wind or fusion or whatever comes down the pipeline.
We don’t get this kind of flexibility with cars and planes, since both have a very long useful life, which means it takes a long time for the car and plane fleet to flip over. On top of that, changing the car fleet to another power source will most likely require some type of infranstructure buildout. And I haven’t really seen any significant changes in airplane power coming down the pipeline (maybe I missed it). HSR isn’t a replacement for either cars or planes, but it can be complentary to the overall transportation system by helping to reduce oil demand.
I’m not opposed to offshore drilling, but your arguments seem to take an either/or tack to them. I don’t think anybody seriously thinks that HSR is a solution to every energy problem, but it’s simply one in an arsenal of tools for dealing with both cheap-oil problems and pollution (including CO2) problems.
Who knows what will happen twenty years from now. But we keep building road after road, and congestion keeps increasing.
Same is true of plane transport and road transport. However, because we rely on oil for transport, we are forced to spend a lot of resources ensuring the world has a stable oil supply. Offshore drilling isn’t going to change that. HSR isn’t going to change that either, but I don’t think we should be so completely reliant on oil for our transport that any coup in any tinpot country sends everything into a tizzy.
This is part of my point. There’s really no way to say HSR costs more than planes or cars because we don’t include all of these additional costs. And it’s difficult really to measure them, because a lot of it relies on estimation and guesswork. I don’t know how much HSR will cost eventually relative to these other transport networks, but neither does anybody else in this thread.
Of course there are externalities from HSR. I never claimed there weren’t or that HSR is cheaper. My statement is that you have no way of definitively saying that it is more expensive.
Is this really true? I thought most of the smog in LA was from cars?
I disagree about CO2 being the only major issue, but I’m not a pollution expert. But I’d like to know where you got these figures you’re throwing out here. Remember, estimations of the impact of CO2 to world GDP don’t account for a lot of damage (because GDP doesn’t really deal with externalities).
I agree there should be congestion pricing, but there appears to be no viable political coalition in the US to make it happen. NYC’s congestion pricing scheme didn’t pass, and there is a big political battle raging over what is essentially a congestion pricing system for the airports. We’ll be waiting a long time for congestion pricing to get rolled in, but maybe if you folks up north put it in a few cities the idea might catch on here. But I don’t see why HSR should be dependent on rolling in congestion pricing, anymore then construction of new freeways should be.
Personally, I’m uncomfortable implementing congestion pricing in areas of the country (such as LA) for which non-car transport is extremely difficult, because of the way the transport infrastructure is designed. It’s difficult to bike here, to be a pedestrian, and the public transport infrastructre sucks. I would rather get the alternative infrastructure up and running before implementing congestion pricing, so that the burden on poor people is reduced.
Well, I keep seeing you make arguments against both freeways and HSR. What else is left, then? But if you’re saying I misunderstood you, then I retract.
And I would say it makes sense in some areas, but we don’t have enough info to determine if it would make sense in other areas. But I think we’re more or less in agreement.
And this is where the point of argument is. Why does HSR have to be “profitable” (however that is defined) when roads and airports aren’t profitable?
Who knows? Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I wouldn’t advocate building it everywhere to start with, but if it’s successfull between say Vegas and LA, then it would make sense to look at it for other places. From a California perspective, there’s a lot of traffic between SD-LA-SF, LA-LV, SF-Tahoe, LA/SD-Grand Canyon, and these are areas that should be studied for HSR.
Astounding. You don’t understand basic concepts about market economics and you are completely unwilling to learn about them. Yet, you pop up in thread after thread lecturing people about what the market will do.
Astounding. You are too clueless to get the sarcasm…or to comprehend that your supposed demonstration of ‘market economics’ makes you look like an idiot and that I was humoring you.
-XT