Is there anywhere I can bet money as to the actual cost and opening date of this project?
The absolute #1 issue with huge infrastructure projects is the structural problem with our civil courts. Anyone can sue for anything, and get a temporary injunction, and then sue again if they don’t like it.
One of the chief holdups in the fiasco pyramid that is the Maryland Purple Line project was a third lawsuit filed by NIMBYists who had already lost two whose stated claim amounted to “we don’t think a rail line should be built there. You should build a bike path instead.” It took three years for someone to finally rule that there is no judicial authority to decide that transit dollars are better spent on bike paths than light rail, and the plaintiffs should have made a better case during the electoral and legislative processes that resulted in the light rail project being authorized if they wanted a different choice to be made.
This was only the latest in a parade of bad-faith lawsuits about whether the proper studies of endangered newt habitats had been done followed by new suits over each individual hypothetical bike trail.
The amount of time and effort that is taken up by the ability of essentially anyone with enough money for a legal retainer to veto anything they want is astronomical. And this is for a 16-mile light rail project that uses no new technology. What are we really expecting in terms of court clogging if we try to build 10,000 miles of high speed rail? It would literally be hundreds of years and trillions of dollars down the drain on frivolous cases, every one of which would come with a new stop-work order on the project.
To fix the fundamental problem blocking HSR and other Big Infrastructure, you’re talking about actually getting Democrats on board with real, meaningful tort reform. And I just don’t see any way that’s going to happen. Do you?
One thing TCR has going for it is that it’s not a publicly funded project; it’s a privately funded endeavor, so most of the hurdles are around the use of eminent domain, with a smaller part consisting of general dipshit rural bitching about anything resembling progress.
Those turbo trains that you link to may have been a failure, but the Rohr turboliners were in service for nearly 30 years, so its not like it can’t be done. (Turboliner - Wikipedia)
Class 1 US railroads are actually state-of-the art, if you want to move freight. The US made a decision long ago to prioritize freight, aka profit, over people. That is a mindset that can be changed, if we demand it.
Why in hell would you want to change that? Freight is where rail excels. Trains can carry huge loads over long distances very efficiently.
People, on the other hand, are very light so even if a passenger train is running at 10% capacity it’s still burning as much energy. Trains that run at much less than 100% capacity are extremely inefficient.
If you lower the efficiency of the freight rail system by 10% to accomodate passenger trains, it will be a disaster for the economy and the environment.
People on the left seem envious of Europe’s passenger trains. I wonder how they feel about the roads being filled with semis and box vans to handle all the freight pushed onto roads by passenger trains.
Instead of lamenting the lack of passenger rail, why don’t you celebrate the fact that the U.S has the most efficient freight rail system in the world? If you want to save the planet, having efficient freight transport is much more important than a few passenger trains when there are already airplanes and interstates to serve passengers.
In terms of CO2, trains already lose out tonelectric cars by a pretty big margin. Enticing people out of their electric cars (Which everyone will have by 2035 or so, long before any trains will be finished) would be a big loss for CO2 reduction.
If you compare a less-than-full passenger train with the ideal of a full, perfectly-utilized, passenger train, of course the real-world case will look worse. But so what? That comparison is pointless. I’m much more interested in whether high-speed passenger rail, whether it’s at 10%, 90%, or 100% capacity, is more efficient than the other real-world alternatives.
I read the entire thread and it is very interesting. In response to this, I believe that @Sam_Stone has looked at that factor and decided that HSR isn’t what we need. I believe that he is right for several reasons.
We love our cars. Bottom line. That’s not my personal opinion or Sam’s personal opinion but the opinion of the vast majority of people who use transportation for any distance. It is a reality that needs to be considered. The reasons are many:
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I am on my own timetable. I don’t have to rush to a central location. I can leave when I want.
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I can stop when I want. I can eat when I want. I can listen to my music or podcast and nobody else bothers me.
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If I decide to go off the beaten path and stop at another attraction, I can do that.
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I have cargo space for my stuff.
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I have a car at my destination and save money on Uber/cab fares/public transportation.
However, this freedom is not without its limitations. I only have so much time, and during the drive, I will have to pay attention to the road. (Which is effectively a function of time. I could stop and rest at intervals even at a hotel to be able to drive). Although the distance will vary based on preference, if the destination is more than 800 or so miles from home, then people will prefer flying.
With flying you give up every single convenience of a car, but you save time and have the luxury of not having to pay attention to the roadway.
It would seem to me that a train would take away every single convenience of a car, however save you very little if any time, but would give you the luxury of not having to pay attention to the roadway.
That being said, there may be some very limited potential uses for trains, such as in very congested metro areas where parking and driving are inconvenient so long as you live close enough to the rail station.
So, given all of this background information, Sam Stone starts a thread saying that investing in HSR in the future is bad given: 1) that it is this niche market anyways, 2) that regulations will cause 30 or more years to build it and by then, we will likely have miscalculated where to built it, 3) the infrastructure costs would be enormous and actually cause more CO2 output until it is actually built, and 4) that self driving cars will make this niche market even smaller as these cars will operate at higher speeds and do not require attention to the roadway.
To me, this all seems unassailable, but we are 326 posts in and I have not seen one refutation of it, although I did enjoy the side argument about automated cars telling you when to take a leak.
I’m not trying to lecture, but I am genuinely interested in any counterpoints to Sam’s arguments. It seems like he has made a convincing case that all of these proposals for HSR are a complete bust on all fronts.
We love our cars – because motor fuel is subsidized to the gills. If we really had to pay for the fuel (without all the subsidies, it would be in the neighborhood of two to three times the price), that love would evaporate in an instant. We do not have good rail because no one wants to be responsible for the cost of cars.
So, we switch to electric? Fine, but then you still have to account for the infrastructure, which is nearly impossible to maintain without continuing to use fossil fuels. Electric vehicles are unquestionably more efficient for getting from here to there, but they have to have decent roads which still need the same amount of maintenance – and we have to have enough grid to keep millions of them charged, which is no small hurdle.
Rail, yes, does also require infrastructure, though somewhat less of it. It could have been a really good strategy 40 years ago, when we had a President bent on encouraging us into our cars. We are now in a corner, and there is no good answer, other than dealing with the issues arising from that comfort thing, which we simply cannot let go of until it blows up in our faces.
I have never seen any reliable source that would defend such a claim. For US prices, $1 a gallon is a typically HIGH estimate. That’s about where Stiglitz and Blimes put it, if I recall correctly, and their work is famously solid on this topic.
My major counterpoint is against your item 4, above. In my opinion self-driving cars will not be a reality, except for niche uses, in my lifetime, or even my kid’s lifetime. And I speak as someone who has worked on software at the periphery of this industry.
Beyond that, I agree that HSR will not, in general, compete against the car. It will compete against the airplane. Do you know how many plane flights a day there are between Northern and Southern California? During normal, non-COVID times, more than 100. Many people on those flights would probably take HSR if it were available. That would free up space at the airports for what they’re good at: long distance travel.
Indeed so.
Southwest Airlines has been very vocally against high speed rail in Texas, where its bread and butter has been the the DFW/Houston/San Antonio triangle. There’s some evidence they were largely responsible for killing HSR the last time it was considered in Texas back in the 90s. At the very least, they did make some public claims/threats about canceling some air routes and potentially pulling up stakes and moving to another state.
A choice was made long ago to have the US be car based. We had lots of rail infrastructure before the US government conspired with General Motors. Large sections of our rail lines were eventually abandoned while cars and highways were subsidized.
It was all about profit and greed, a mindset that is clearly failing us now.
Mindsets can be changed, the US rail network could be rebuilt to move both people and freight efficiently.
But that’s the problem: People in favor of trains often quote efficiency figures based on full capacity.
The best resource for data on the efficiency of various modes of transport (and tons of other transportation data) is the Transportation Energy Databook put out by Oak Ridge Labs:
Everyone interested in this subject should bookmark that.
Energy efficiency of passenger transport is typically measured in BTU per passenger mile. Here are some values:
Commuter Buses and Trolleys: 4560 BTU/Pass Mile
Light rail Transit: 530-5,000 BTU/pass mile (difference due to capacity factor in different cities. Seattle the best, Cleveland the worst)
Heavy Rail: 560-4800 (Same reason)
Highway driven cars: 2840 BTU/Pass Mile
On the face of it, passenger cars are slightly less efficient than the average for heavy rail, but they kick the ass of buses and trolleys. That number uses real world passenger averages. Cars on the highway have an average of 1.5 people in them.
However, that number is from 2018. The fleet average age of cars is 11.7 years, so these are mainly cars that get much poorr mileage than new ones. In 2006 the average fuel economy of cars was 23 mpg on the highway. In 2018 it was 30. So take the median, and the current fleet probably gets about 27 mpg on the highway.
So, 27 mpg with 1.5 people = 2840 BTU/Pass Mile. The average for Amtrak today is about 1500. So why are cars better?
Well, for example the required average fuel economy is mandated to go to 35 mpg by 2026. That alone will drop the BTU/pass mile to about 2100.
And after that things accelerate in favor of cars. As the number of electric cars increases, the fleet average will go up dramatically.
Let’s look at a 2035 scenario where the CAFE average for gas cars is 47 mpg (that’s what is planned), and half the vehicles are eleectric. A Tesla model 3 only uses 861 BTU per mile, So with our 1.5 passenger average we’re looking at 573 BTU per passenger mile. A Tesla absolutely crushes trains for energy efficiency.
So in our 2035 scenario, assuming electric cars are as efficient as a Tesla, half the cars get 573, and the other half get 1631. That’s a fleet average of 1102 BTU/passenger mile, which is significantly better than trains. And if we are all in electric vehicles, then taking the train would use anywhere from twice to almost ten times the energy as driving. Not a win for a planet.
The numbers get much worse if you want to criss/cross the country with trains, because the numbers now represent the fact that trains mainly run in high density corridors with high utilization. Expand them out of the high density routes, and capacity utilization will drop and BTU/passenger mile will skyrocket. The least-used currently running trains (Baltimore) use almost 5,000 btu/passenger mile.
So the bottom line here is that new cars are already close to trains in efficiency, electric cars are much better than trains, and all these trends are going to continue to move in favor of cars.
If you are thinking that trains will get better too, there’s no evidence of that. Trains are a very mature technology with very little low hanging fruit. Energy intensity per mile has actually gotten worse for buses and trolleys in the past 20 years, and hasn’t really moved at all for trains.
Let’s say the HSR takes 20 years to build. That’s 20 years of a 100% carbon sink, making global warming worse. Then when it comes online there’s a good chance that it will use anywhere from 3 to 10 times as much energy per passenger mile as the electric car fleet then will require. Every trip by train will be a huge loser in energy consumption.
And we haven’t even started talking about the consequences of pushing rail freight onto the roads.
If it’s going to take 20 years to build a high-speed rail project, that tells me that they’re going to be laying new tracks. So why would any freight be displaced from rail travel onto the roads?
Sure there is. High-speed rail is usually electrically powered, delivered by a cable suspended over the tracks. And the most recent high-speed trains use regenerative braking, capturing energy and feeding it back to the cable. Compared to Amtrak’s current efficiency, there are significant improvements to be made using technology that already exists.
As I said above, trains don’t compete with cars. They compete with airplanes on short distance flights.
I’ve travelled from the Bay Area to L.A. dozens of times in my life. Each time, the first thing I ask myself: Do I want to drive? Do I need to drive? If yes, then I drive. If not, then I usually fly but sometimes take the train. Economic considerations are not a factor.
So no matter how much better sense it would make economically to take a super Tesla like what you’re talking about, if I don’t want to drive then I’m not driving.
Although cars may be “more efficient”, they are the problem. Even, or especially, electric cars.
This. The transition to electric cars is going to happen rapidly and any government transportation infrastructure should focus on that. That means upgrading the power grid and financing next-generation battery research.
We are taking a trip to NYC later this year and saw the prices to take the train. 
Plus only the airlines rival Amtrak for the opacity of their pricing structure.
Because the best laid plans… HSR often winds up being on a combination of dedicated and legacy track. This is often because of right-of-way issues and private property being in the way of new track. But we aren’t just talking about HSR. Biden wants Amtrack expanded across the country, and I believe that plan would require sharing some track with freight as is often done now.
To give you an idea of what a problem that would be for energy consumption, consider how efficient reeight rail has become: In 1970 is took 691 BTU to move one ton one mile by rail. By 2018 that had been reduced to 296, or less than half. That’s not due to more efficient trains, but due to a more efficient system that developed after the rails were privatized. It’s the result of relentlessly reducing downtime and increasing track utilization and capacity factor on the trains. If you start putting passenger trains on those tracks, you risk damaging the world’s best system for moving cargo overland with a minimal amount of energy.
The U.S. consumed 512 trillion BTU moving 1.6 billion tons of freight by rail in 2018. If the efficiency of that system went back to 1970’s levels, you could add another 500 trillion or so.
From this cite:
Europe decided to put people on trains. The U.S. opted for freight. That was the correct decision.