You are suggesting a city with no mass transit system.
I’d suggest a decent light-rail system would certainly do wonders to make it all work really well.
Boston has a ring highway, Route 128, about ten miles from the center of the city. The Acela starts at South Station, which is also a stop on the subway’s red line. Then it goes about a mile to Back Bay Station, which is a more residential (think brownstones) part of the city, and is on the orange line. Then there’s a stop at Route 128, where there’s a large parking garage. You don’t have to drive to downtown Boston. The next stop is Providence, Rhode Island.
As a result, the train is reasonably accessible from anywhere around Boston. You can take transit to downtown or Back Bay, or drive to 128 and park. For the route planners, I’m sure it’s tough to balance the competing demands. Each stop makes it convenient to serve more riders, but adds a little to the travel time. But I expect other cities can find that balance, too.
I’m looking at it from my perspective, which is going between Dallas and the Houston area to visit my mother, who lives in the Sugar Land area Let’s use the example of leaving to come home from her house on a Sunday afternoon at 1 pm.
Driving: Pretty much no less than about 4 hours, and usually 4.5-5 hours, assuming a 15-35 minute stop in there somewhere. So we’re leaving about 1, and getting home at 5:30-6 most of the time. It’s not an easy drive- I-45 has a lot of traffic, so 4.5 hours of constant attention to what I’m doing.
Flying: It’s only about a hour in the air, but if I’m leaving her house at 1, I’m getting the 3:00 nonstop flight to Dallas Love Field. So I can go from her house to Hobby Airport and have an hour and a half to get through TSA security and cool my heels before the flight. I’ll land between 4-4:10, and it’ll take another 20-30 minutes to get off the plane, through the airport, and on the parking shuttle to my car. And I live another 25 minutes from Love Field, so I’m looking at getting home around 5. So not much of an advantage, except that I guess I could have stayed at mom’s house another 30-40 minutes.
HSR: Leave Mom’s house at 1 o’clock, get to the train station by 610/290 in about 25-30 minutes, and catch the 1:30 train if I’m lucky, or the 2 o’clock train if I’m not. Ride the train to downtown Dallas, and get off at 3:30. Drive another 20 minutes home, and I’m home by about 4.
So faster than driving or flying, more pleasant than either, and competitive price-wise with flying.
Of course, the highways and the airports already exist. Replace enough airplanes with the fuel-cell models already in testing and the climate change impact is no longer a factor. Rail being “about the same” or “kind of better” isn’t good enough. To justify the trillions of dollars in investment for an HSR network that will almost certainly be impossible to actually complete regardless due to legal paralysis, it needs to be a lot better than things that already exist and only need to be maintained. Even its proponents don’t seem to think that’s the case.
For a fair comparison, how many trillions will it take to make fuel cell airplanes commercially viable, replace all the airliners currently in service, and build the infrastructure to produce, store, and transport hydrogen to airports all over the country.
Well, technically, you do not need to transport the hydrogen, just feed the electricity to a facility that will split the local water.
Of course, fuel cell powered planes are prop driven, which means the speeds will be somewhat-to-verymuch slower than jets at not that much quieter. And the actual robustness of fuel cell stacks is not well established. Never mind the fact that the water they will exhaust in large quantities is a powerful, albeit transient, GHG.
Planes reach the end of their useful life anyway and replacing them is something that airlines pay for. There is no comparison here. You’re handwaving away the fact that HSR costs over half a billion dollars per mile - when it can actually get built, which has proven to be essentially never, and you have no plan at all to address the problems with our legal culture that make building it instead of pouring money down a hole impossible.
How much would it cost to make cars and airplanes carbon-neutral? A hell of a lot less than half a billion dollars per mile of route, and it requires only technical solutions that have already been largely demonstrated as viable, not fixing political problems that you don’t actually have any plan or will to fix.
I’m not handwaving anything, you did. You compared fuel cell airplanes with the huge cost of building high-speed rail, and completely neglected the cost of the infrastructure needed to support those new airplanes. And we can’t just repurpose the current tank farms and fueling systems. If airliners do switch to fuel cell power, there will be a changeover period when airlines are operating both types of aircraft, so airports will need systems to deliver jet fuel and hydrogen.
And why are airlines going to make this huge investment to replace their fleets? Fuel cell aircraft need to be more than “viable”, they would need to be better, and cheaper, to get airlines to buy them. Or do you envision some kind of government incentives to discourage burning carbon-based fuels? Talk about something we haven’t shown the political will to accomplish.
But that might be a bonus for California if it will help their drought!
The cost of setting up a hydrogen pump right now is anywhere from 1 to 2.8 million dollars (COSTS AND FINANCING | H2 Station Maps et al). A consumer gas station costs $500K so the marginal cost on hydrogen is .5 to 2.3 million.
You can build at least 217 hydrogen stations for what it costs to build a mile of high-speed rail. You can build over 50,000 hydrogen stations for what it costs to build a high-speed rail line from Dallas to Houston alone. That’s at current prices when there’s no economy of scale involved.
I neglected the cost of building out hydrogen infrastructure in comparison to the cost of a national high-speed rail network because in comparison it is literally negligible.
You speak of handwaving. The only way to make automobiles carbon neutral is to switch the whole country to electric hovercraft so that all that excess pavement can be dug up and replaced with lea-ways. The cost of road maintenance is quite large and paved roads cause all manner of problems. But, obviously, electric hovercraft are probably not really viable.
This is the tank farm at an airport.
It’s not the same thing as a consumer gas station. It’s not a matter of marginal cost; we wouldn’t be building this instead of a jet fuel tank farm, but in addition to the existing jet fuel infrastructure. The first thing you need is the land to build it on.
This is pretty much the textbook example of a handwave.
As opposed to smelting steel and track maintenance, which have no environmental or financial costs.
If the externalities only count for one side of the argument then surprisingly the other side looks great. But in reality, the cost of maintaining asphalt isn’t going to matter. The only thing that matters is: $500 million per mile for construction alone, and years and years of lawsuits with all the delays and excess costs involved, for every single one of those miles. You can put in a larger number of pro-HSR arguments (especially if they take the form of “assume manufacturing and maintaining asphalt has costs but manufacturing and maintaining rails does not”) but in terms of the reason why HSR will never happen they don’t add up to any kind of counterbalance to $500m and 3+ years of legal wrangling to wring out every, single, mile, of track. Not even close.
The Acela route from Boston to Washington is 457 miles. I had no idea it was litigated for 1,371 years.
I’ve never ridden Acela. Are the stops quick like a commuter train or more leisurely like a typical long-distance train? You still have to accelerate down then back up, of course but a ten-minute dwell time at the station won’t help any.
It’s been a while since I took the Acela, but I remember the stops being pretty short. It’s not like a plane, where everyone has to file out through a single door. From stop to start is probably less than a minute.
When we’ve had this debate before, I’ve tried to search and find out how much time each stop (decelerating, stopping, and getting back up to speed) adds to the journey, but I haven’t found it. I think that’s part of designing a successful high-speed rail system; serve as many people as you can without slowing things down too much. Acela ridership has been good, so they seem to have found the sweet spot.
Oh, I thought we were talking about the realities of building new high-speed rail, not running trains with an average speed of 84 mph on track that was built in the 19th century.
It’s the closest thing we have to high-speed rail in this country, so it seems like a good place to start. It’s been running for years, and lots of people use it, so there is evidence that passenger rail can succeed in the U.S.
You got your motte in my bailey.
There are only a small number of Amtrack routes that are profitable. Amtrack loses money constantly. I don’t think they’ve ever had a profitable year. The northeast corridor is the main source of profit for Amtrack, but even so the company lost $194 million in 2017. The Acela Express makes money, but it’s located in the densest, wealthiest corridor in the US.
The U.S. used to be festooned with passenger rail. Canada had an HSR and extensive passenger rail. All of it is gone, except for Amtrack.
There’s one reason why new rail is pushed so heavily by Democrats: It pays off the right constituents. Real estate developers love it. Unions love it. Politicians from blue states love the grant money. People who like to ‘plan’ society love it. Lawyers love it. There is always continuous pressure on politicians to push for huge projects like this, because so much money flows from it.
But if it was actually profitable, we’d already have it. As late as the 1970’s there were still numerous passenger train companies. All that’s left is the heavily subsodized Amtrack, and Amtrack is primarily used by wealthy business and political people in the northeast corridor. The poor certainly don’t use it, as it’s bloody expensive.
A ticket on Amtrack between Washington and New York ranges between $160 and $260, depending on day, time of day, etc. It’s an average of 3:23 for the trip.
You can get a one-way airplane ticket for as low as $240, and the flight takes just over an hour.
If you want to go cross-country on Amtrack, Chicago to Seattle will set you back by over $1000. You can fly for about a third the price. And that Amtrack route loses money.
Trains are 19th and 20th century technology. They still work in a limited number of places, but they have to be in densely populated areas located just the right distance apart. Criss-crossing the country with Amtrack and HSR routes will be both a finacial and global warming disaster. Train infrastructure is very CO2 intensive, and the trains themselves can’t come close to matching the energy efficiency of electric cars, which we are all supposed to be driving long before the first of the new trains would go into service. And if the trains are running at less than full capacity, the losses and environmental cost will grow.
Everyone who gets on a train instrad of driving their electric car will be consuming far more energy than they need to. Why would we spend any money on such foolishness when we are already having problems funding necessary things like new power sources?
California is spending $100 billion on a stupid train, and in the meantime they are telljng people not to charge their cars because there isn’t enough power - and they plan to take Diablo Canyon off line in a year and a half - a power station that provides 9% of California’s electricity. They have no effective plan to replace it. But the train goes forward.
This is madness.