Do you find something unsatisfactory regarding the current Amtrak Acela service along the Northeast Corridor which currently connects Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC (and a few other smaller stops on the way)?
Robot Arm is correct. For travel between any of these cities, the Acela is very competetive in both price and travel time, especially when considering time spent going to and from the airport, passing through security and various airline delays.
I will leave it to you to Google the various enineering reasons why the Acela rarely reaches it’s 175 mph maximum speed.
I certainly find these threads amusing where someone with clearly no knowledge of the engineering, economics or finances involved states some simplistic off the cuff proposal as if no one had ever thought of these things before.
Public transportation - because unless you live in an area with a population density similar to New York City, public transportation is impractical.
Universal medical care - ecause I think most people believe it will be extremely expensive with little to no overal improvement in benefits
Metric System - because it is the tool of the Devil.
You asked where the demand was for rail travel in the U.S., so I showed you.
That’s the “after” part of the debate. The tracks and trains between Boston and New York City were improved, people are using them, and market share is increasing. Travellers will take trains if they provide a competitive afternative to other modes of travel. Lots of cities are still in the “before” stage. We should find those places and determine if high-speed rail would work there as well as it has in the Northeast Corridor.
Also, there is room for improvement in the Northeast Corridor. If it has 41-percent market share at its current level of service, how many more people would take it if you could cut 30 minutes off the travel time?
Your arguments seem to boil down to:
[ul]
[li]If something doesn’t exist, or exists but is unsuccessful, it proves we don’t need it.[/li][li]If something does exist, and is successful, it means it’s good enough and we don’t need to improve it.[/li][/ul]
Brilliant. We never need to spend another dollar on transportation infrastructure.
That’s just simply an unfair strawman of his position. There is nothing wrong with questioning whether a sufficient market exists for high speed rail before committing very large suns of money to a project. In fact, what xtisme is proposing is eminently reasonable: before embarking on a major project, the government, or even a business, should assess whether putting money toward that end will bring sufficient benefits (like social, environmental, or monetary) to justify not using the funds for some other purpose.
So far as I can tell, while I think the Northeast Corridor would be a good test case for HSR, investing funds in research for clean and abundant energy is a much, much more compelling need. I don’t even think it is close. Tens of billions of dollars for fuel cell technology, or the same amount to link Boston and New York? That’s a complete no-brainer as far as I am concerned.
Hey, welcome to the internet. At the end of the day we’re all a bunch of frustrated geniuses in our underpants. Think you could manage to stick to the issue?
I’m more than aware of my ignorance - which is one of the reasons I posted, I wanted to find out whether it would be plausible/desirable.
The issue is more complex than I thought, but I’ve yet to see a knock-down argument against the plan, especially in California.
Hey!! Welcome to the SDMB! Between your attitude and the ridiculous nature of the various threads you have started, I suspect you won’t be here long.
Well, for one you might want to look at where current passenger rail service exits. Your “East Coast Line” is commonly referred to as the Northeast Corridor and is one of the most highly traveled rail lines. That also happens to be one of the major reasons trains can’t reach speeds of 200 mph on that line.
The reason you are not likely to see a “knock-down argument” against your proposal is that besides being an extremely vague proposal, it’s basically an issue of economics. I think very few of us are in a position to have enough information to calculate the cost of implementing or improving those rail lines and comparing it against the revenue generated.
I think that you’re being too harsh on put down the sabre.
The OP asked about the feasibility of 200mph trains between Boston and Washington DC. This strikes me as by no means an unreasonable question; the French TGV regularly runs the 535 miles between Paris and Marseille in 3 hours, for an average speed of nearly 180mph. Since the fastest scheduled Acela Express runs DC-Boston at an average speed of 72mph, the possibility of HSR following the European or Japanese model (like, for example, South Korea and Taiwan have done) seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable topic for debate.
Given that the arguements against transcontinental HSR in the US often boil down to the issue that the US has a lower population density than Western Europe, it’s somewhat counterintuitive that the reason that the NEC is probably not the best subject for an initial foray by the US into the Big Leagues of HSR is that it might be too densely populated to make the extreme cost of the upgrade financially viable. The French Government faced much less political opposition (and expense) pushing TGV through the countyside than would be the case for the NEC.
On the other hand, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (HSR running between London and the Chunnel), which opened 6 months ago, cost ~$10 billion and shaves a “mere” 40 minutes off the London-Paris trip. Time alone will tell whether the result was worth the expense, but the project shows that upgrading “fast” rail to HSR in densely-populated urban areas is at least deemed worthwhile by somebody, and as such makes (IMHO) a perfectly valid subject for debate on the SDMB.
As I attempted to explain in post #74, I don’t think that the NEC is the best initial test case for “real” HSR in the US (and I say that as pro-HSR European who has traveled the NEC dozens of times). California HSR would much more closely match the demographics and land-cost patterns of the initial European HSR lines. If the bond measure on this November’s ballot passes, and the California network is built and proves to be successful – as I sincerely believe it would be – it would provide a great deal of data for future HSR projects in the US. Remember, HSR in Europe didn’t start out as a massive transcontinental project; one TGV line was built first (opening in 1981), and the success of that led to other HSR lines in several countries. If, in the future, HSR lines stretch from Lisbon to Berlin (and eventually Moscow?) it won’t be because of some massive master plan, but of networks building organically based on past successes.
The same could have been said of the French before the first TGV line was built.
The people at the California High Speed Rail Authority are very serious about this. As someone who has attended their public meetings and given extensive feedback, I can personally say (for whatever my opinion is worth in this debate ) that they have done extensive engineering, financial, and customer research, and aren’t just a bunch of pro-train nuts. IMHO, if world-class HSR can be initiated successfully anywhere in the US, given current and near-term-foreseeable conditions and technology, it’s in the (San Diego) - Los Angeles - San Francisco - (Sacramento) corridor.
If CA-HSR is successful, other networks may follow. Here are a few options under consideration (although I have serious questions about some of the prospective routes on that map – Houston-New Orleans but not Houston - Dallas / Fort Worth strikes me as bizarre…).
[If anyone’s really interested in the California HSR initiative, here is the text of Assembly Bill AB3034 (the S10 billion bond measure up for vote this November), and here are links to today’s “KQED Forum” (San Francisco public radio station) show – 52 minutes long in either streaming or downloadable mp3 format.]
One problem with this is if you invest the money in a HSR network, you get something that will be useful to a lot of people for a pretty long time. With R&D on the other hand, you may not get anything. For the record, I think both are good ideas.
As for funding, would it be completely politically impossible to impose a tax on gas guzzlers to fund HSR?
While I love the idea of having more extensive rail lines in the US, I think you guys should probably be a little wary about bringing Japan into the discussion. If you want to discuss technology and outstanding practical implementations, go for it, but the economic and political aspects are very different. The inclusion of Japan as an example of where high-speed rail works actually weakens your argument.
Japan spends around 8% of its GNP on infrastructure and public works projects, compared to about 4% in the US. They’re a perpetual pork barrel, and both construction firms and politicians have their dirty little fingers in the barrel up to the elbow. Heck, the payoffs happen even after retirement for many politicians. Construction employs about 15–20% of the total Japanese workforce.
To say that Japan is more than willing to throw money away on construction projects is vastly understating the case. There are next-to-useless airports, bridges, train lines, roads, tunnels, landscaping, concrete sections of rivers, etc. Anything that stands still long enough gets concreted over eventually. There might be a couple of rivers left in all of Japan that haven’t been “improved” somewhere along their lengths.
I know of at least 3 expensive projects in my immediate area that either were useless to begin with, or at most slightly benefited a couple of hundred people, and I live in the ass end of nowhere in one of the poorest prefectures; we’ve got next to no pull for getting projects. There were two, count 'em: 2 tunnels, extensive road building, and a couple of bridges built to link two towns with less than 20,000 in population each. There were already indirect routes to them, but this one was more direct, since it goes through a couple of mountains. I usually see about 5 cars on it whenever I use it, which is less than half the time I travel between them both since there’s practically nothing along the route until you get to the other end. It doesn’t even save much time.
Economically, rail lines might not be competitive even in Japan with its higher population density. I haven’t looked up any studies on it, so I could be wrong. I mean, it might be just coincidence that the tolls for the highway are about the same as a shinkansen ticket for a similar distance. And it might be just coincidence that airline ticket prices are also roughly equivalent for destinations that shinkansen service. But it might also be that the government controls pricing for all three of the modes of transportation.
Those are very good points, sleel, and were dealt with – albet tangentially – at the California High Speed Rail Authority “public meeting” that I attended last year in San Jose. Although the main focus of that meeting was the northern part of the route, (ie. selecting the optimal route between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Valley, and how HSR would fit in with existing – and planned – commuter rail in the Bay Area), political and budgetary matters were also on the table.
Since the meeting involved discussions for which there do not appear to be any transcripts, I can’t provide a “cite!”, but someone in the audience brought up the issue that Japan seems to go for public works projects that would not be justified in the US (which seems to be your major point, sleel). A CA-HSR spokesperson responded as diplomatically as he could, but made it clear that decisions on the need for HSR in California would follow a California model, and not be influenced greatly by what had happened in Japan. Although much can be learned from the Shinkansen (especially technology related to early earthquake detection and notification, since that’s an issue in both Japan and California), it seems that CA-HSR is going to be modeled more on the French TGV.
An important area in which France and Japan differ is that the TGV uses existing infrastructure (right-of-way and upgraded tracks) in urban areas. When Japan was developing the Shinkansen, it opted to go with Standard gauge, aka Stephenson gauge (1435mm or 4’8.5"), despite the fact that most rail in Japan at the time was 1067mm (3’6")[sup]1[/sup]. Thus, every inch of Shinkansen track needed to be new. When France developed the TGV, it had an easier choice since the “Lignes classiques” (existing rail lines) were already 1435mm gauge. So, the TGV was able to run into major cities like Paris using existing tracks and stations, providing major cost savings. This does mean that TGV trains must coordinate with regular long-distance and commuter rail services, whereas in Japan they are totally separate (non-Shinkansen trains cannot physically travel on Shinkansen tracks).
In California, the system will be similar to the TGV, in that – on the San Francisco Peninsula and close to Los Angeles’ Union Station at least – HSR service will share right-of-way and trackage with local commuter rail. I’m not very familiar with how this is planned in the LA area, but the plan between SF and San Jose is that HSR will share improved (i.e. electrified and grade-separated) tracks with the existing Caltrain commuter service. Currently, the SF-SJ portion is double-tracked, with several miles being quadruple-tracked, and nearly 100 trains (a mixture of local, limited-stop, and “Baby Bullet”) currently run that route every weekday. Needless to say, coordination will be at a premium, but the gauge-equivalence makes it a very different scenario from Japan in terms of requiring new land in urban areas.
Of course, once the train is outside the major urban area it will be on its own dedicated high-speed track, and that’s where the pedal gets put to the metal and speeds go up to near 200mph.
As far as operating profitability is concerned, the goal seems to be to follow the lead of the TGV. As a recent article in The Economist said:
(Note: Paris-Marseille is >500 miles, and takes 3 hours city-center-to-city-center via TGV. For $32US.)
IMHO, operational profitability should be a goal, even if it’s not counted against the initial infrastructure cost. After all, Southwest Airlines would not be footing the bill for the ~$10billion expansions at SFO or LAX, nor Greyhound the bill for new freeways. If new transportation infrastructure will benefit the State of California, it should be considered as a Common Good (user fees may be charged to carriers of course). It’s a complex issue worthy of debate, but remember that almost no transportation pays for itself without any form of subsidy.
[sup]1[/sup]Since Japan is an island, there was no need to match gauge to any neighboring countries, but perhaps they were already thinking of exporting the technology, so wanted to conform to the predominant global standard gauge of 1435mm.
[sup]2[/sup]Spain suffers from a similar-but-opposite problem: traditional gauge in the Iberian peninsula is 1668mm, so the Spanish AVE HSR trains use a gauge narrower than the existing rail network. It matches the French TGV gauge, however; in fact, AFAIK all current “conventional” HSRs (i.e. not Maglev or monorail) use the 1435mm “standard gauge”.
Antonius Block, thanks for all the information you’ve posted.
Yes, my main point was that Japan should be looked to for technology and for examples of practical implementation, but it is a terrible example to use as a case for funding, profitability, viability vs. other forms of transport. The response given by the CA-HSR spokesperson — that high speed rail would be developed on a situation-specific model — is a very promising one. I think it shows that the project is being considered and planned well, and that they recognize what things from previous projects in other places can and should be adapted and what is not applicable to California’s case.
That’s interesting - I hadn’t realised the French TGVs used any existing tracks. One of the major costs of the British Channel Tunnel Rail Link was the 11.5 mile tunnels under north London to allow high speead (160mph + ) running almost all the way into St Pancras.
The existing suburban tracks through London are hopelessly congested and have been one of major problems delaying the Eurostar trains when they went into Waterloo. Up-thread, when talking about the North East Corridor, the assumption seems to have been that you either use existing tracks and rights of way or you have to buy up some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. The CTRL into London does give another option.
Sleelsup[/sup], the thing that impressed me the most about the CA-HSR representatives at the meeting that I attended was that they were the opposite of slimy salespeople. They were facing a public audience containing skeptics as well as boosters, with impressive knowledge both of global HSR efforts and existing US rail networks (intercity and commuter). The CA-HSR people seemed to have really done their homework, but were not ashamed to admit lack of specific knowledge (i.e. rather than insulting the audience by blustering).
Most people are surprised at how much time TGV trains spend on conventional tracks (“lignes classiques”). Here is a map showing the French LGVs (lignes à grande vitesse, dedicated high-speed lines) in blue. For a trip such as Paris-Bordeaux, the TGV train spends most of its time on pre-existing (although somewhat upgraded) track; usually no additional acquisition of land is required. Apparently, system-wide, only about 25% of TGV distance traveled is on new, dedicated high-speed track. (This same link shows that there has never been a fatality on a TGV while traveling on high-speed track – however, when they’re on the lignes classiques they are as subject to accidents on level crossings / grade crossings as any normal train on the same tracks).
South London posed a specific set of problems that were unlike those faced in Paris, or what would apply in the US North-East Corridor (NEC). Whereas existing conventional (i.e. non-Metro or RER) tracks in Paris tended to radiate outwards from the center, suburban rail in South London more closely resembles a spider’s websup[/sup], which made the Folkestone (i.e. Chunnel) - London route difficult to implement. In addition, electrification south of the Thames was all third-rail rather than overhead. The combined result was that hundreds of millions of pounds were spent on a route that only lasted for 13 years; Waterloo International, an architectural marvel built at the cost of £135 million (probably US$400 million in 2008 dollars, with inflation) opened in Nov 1994, and closed in Nov 2007. This is what the “International” part of Waterloo looks like today. One can claim that it was a necessary part of the ongoing saga of trans-Channel rail, but from a US perspective (Devils’ Advocate, in my case) it looks terrible. The fact that Eurostar was switched from Waterloo to St Pancras in a US$10 billion upgrade (CTRL), whose main claim to fame is that it shaves 40 minutes off the London-Paris trip, is not something that I would use to try to sell Americans on real HSR.
North-East Corridor:
As I mentioned in post #110 above, there’s a case to be made that the NEC is too densely-populated to make it a good candidate for HSR, at least until some other HSR system (California?) has paved the way. The problems that I see are partly geographic and partly political. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll limit the study to Washington-NYC, since that’s the make-or-break part of the network. NYC-Boston has a completely different set of parameters, and can be the subject of a later post.
First off, here’s a rundown of the major stops between Washington DC and New York City on the various Amtrak NEC services (Acela Express and regular). Mileage is given from Washington’s Union Station:
Current schedules are here (PDF). Now, note that – with the exception of one train in each direction per day that stops at Philadelphia only, all Acela Express trains stop at (at least) Baltimore MD, Wilmington DE, Philadelphia PA, and Newark NJ. Note that this is (at least) one stop in each of the intermediary states between DC and NY.
The above demonstrates the political tightrope upon which rail travel in the US walks. On the one hand you have John McCain, the Presidential candidate who is apparently anti-rail, and on the other hand you have Senator Joe Biden, who commutes 90 minutes each way to the Senate on Amtrak from his home in Wilmington, Del. He has done so since 1972 when he was first elected, at 29, as the Senate’s second youngest member in history.. Biden is probably Amtrak’s best friend in the US Senate, but he’s also why Wilmington DE (pop ~70k) gets a stop on every Acela Express (except one per weekday in each direction). If a future HSR line goes through Delaware, you can bet that it’s going to stop in Wilmington. It could fairly easily go around Delaware, but then it’s just lost 2 of its 10 potential Senate supporters as well as possible DE state funding. MD, PA, and NJ are muchsup[/sup] harder to bypass, so you just know that most future HSR trains are going to stop in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Newark.
So a major problem in the NEC is that even if you could buy new land cheaply for dedicated HSR tracks, which major cities would you bypass? In the UK, “Kent” doesn’t hold the same comparative political power as “Pennsylvania” does in the US system, and Ashford is easier to bypass than Philadelphiasup[/sup].
All in all, IMHO it will be easier to motivate the NEC by jealousy directed at a well-planned-and operated California system a few years from now, than it would be to get world-class HSR running on the NEC as a test case.
Finally, a few more numbers: Here – once again – is Amtrak’s current Washington-NYC schedule (PDF). If one goes to www.amtrak.com and enters “WAS” as the “Departs” station and “NYP” as the “Arrives” station and selects “Weekday”, one can see the cost for Acela Express as compared to regular service for the Washington-New York City route.
Now, let’s say that you want to arrive in NYC shortly before 9am. Great! There’s an Acela Express (#X2100) that departs Washington at 06:00 and arrives at Penn Station at 08:48. Cost? $194 one-way. But wait… there’s a train leaving DC at 05:30 that gets in at 08:42 (only 24 minutes longer trip) for $98, or about half the price. I’m pretty sure that that’s the train that I would take. Now, what’s that you say? You’re going to build a new system – only a few years after the Acela – that costs billions of dollars but saves maybe 40 minutes max for WAS-NYP? What’s that going to cost per ticket? $300? Great, we’re subsidizing Donald Trump…
Now, compare that with California. One single state, with the Governor, both Senators, and most Congressional reps behind it. Currently, if one wants to take Amtrak from SF to LA, the fastest route (the San Joaquin service bus across the Bay to Emeryville, then train to Bakersfield, then bus to LA) takes 8hr51min and costs $52. [The Coast Starlight , which is rail all the way from the Bay Area to LA is $60 and takes 12hr40min – much prettier route but s-l-o-w.] Well, not too surprising there – you’re talking about routes laid out as freight lines in the 19th century. However, a PERFECT test case for dedicated HSR. There’s some definite complication at either end in the urbanized areas, but the CA-HSR plans seem very realizable to me – and I’m not easily swayed.
With California-HSR operational and successful, other regions of the US (note: regions, not a transcontinental network – at least to start with) can take the hard data and apply them to their own situations. By then, it’ll be much easier to sell.
sup[/sup] Sorry for decapitalizing your name in post #115, Sleel – mea culpa, and no slight intended! sup[/sup] I was born in Purley and grew up in Croydon, so you’ll have to trust me on this. sup[/sup] Candidate for the “Understatement of the Century” award. sup[/sup] I’ve been to Ashford, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Philadelphia. The latter is – quite considerably larger.
Antonious Block Thanks for the further information. I like your description of the south London rail lines as resembling a spider’s web. Mind you, this may be an insult to spiders. It’s a long time since I read up on this - I was looking at the history of London’s expansion in Victorian times - and I don’t think they were that structured
) that they have done extensive engineering, financial, and customer research, and aren’t just a bunch of pro-train nuts. IMHO, if world-class HSR can be initiated successfully anywhere in the US, given current and near-term-foreseeable conditions and technology, it’s in the (San Diego) - Los Angeles - San Francisco - (Sacramento) corridor.
