Note: Data cited in my previous post in regard to MSA populations came straight off Wikipedia.
Fine, I’ll give you education; the industries are education and government. The point remains, as you concede: it’s a tertiary market.
Florida’s legislature has 160 members. Let’s say each one supports 100 staffers and lobbyists. That’s 16,000 people, or roughly 5% of the population of the entire urban area. That’s a very, very high estimate (the average member of US Congress has about 25 staffers).
Now let’s eliminate all the ones who aren’t travelling back and forth; the receptionist at a lobbying firm or the guy who opens the mail are not going back and forth to anyone’s home district regularly. based on what I know of congressional staffs, that’s most of them, but we’ll call it half.
Now we’re down to 8,000. Now eliminate all the ones representing Jacksonville or Fort Myers or Bradenton or Daytona or Gainesville; your route is only going to help the approximately half of the state in the three major MSRs. We’re down to 4,000.
And they aren’t all going to take the train–we already have high-speed rail from Boston to Washington, and only 40% of the people making that trip use the train. So of our 4,000 staffers and lobbyists who are making the trip, a reasonable guess is that 1,600 are going to make the trip on the proposed HSR.
And how often do they take that trip? Not every day, even at 100 mph, its too long to commute. At most, they might go back and forth every weekend; so that’s two trips a week for 1,600 people, or about 1142 a day.
So, sure, I retract my “a few hundred staffers going back to Boca Raton every weekend” … and say “1,600 staffers and lobbyists combined taking the train every weekend.”
And “the weekend” is the key here – even if you had a train that would be full on weekends or when FSU goes on break, you can’t just run it those times. It’s got to run all the time, including Wednesdays in the middle of the summer when nobody is going anywhere.
It’s exactly as big as I think it is: MSR of 360,000. You’re kidding yourself about how big that is w/r/t the immense numbers of highly compacted people needed to make HSR viable.
Amtrak’s Acela connects an area about the same size as Florida, but which has *three times *as many people, and it barely turns a profit on its operating costs, let alone paying off capital investment. Thinking you can do better in the 133rd largest city is sheer fantasy.
I’ve nothing against Tallahassee. The numbers just don’t add up.
No, I’m pretty sure I agreed with you there.
Yeah. What are we arguing about again?
That.
Oh, okay. You win.
Better?
I dunno. How do you feel about Spurrier v. Bowden? 
No dog in that fight at all. I didn’t go to college in Florida. They can both suck it AFAIC.
Are you sure the fact that it’s on a completely different island from most of the major population centers wasn’t the controlling factor?
One thing to consider: you don’t start building high speed rail because you need it now, you start building it because you will need it in 15-25 years.
How would you know you need it 15-25 years from now?? What would you use to predict your needs that far in the future?
-XT
Demographic trends - the same things that corporations use to predict future demand.
What were the demographics trends in Detroit 25 years ago and how do they match up with today? What corporations use demographics trends to plan (what?) 15-25 years in the future…and how do those trends generally work out??
I know this is the Pit, but I’m asking these questions seriously.
-XT
Contributing, sure; it would have made the cost higher to build a new tunnel in addition to the one they already have. But even if you throw out Sapporo, there are plenty of good-size cities unconnected to HSR for the simple reason of not being big enough.
I had forgotten that this was even the pit.
I suspect that corporations that build large scale projects like the aerospace industry and defense contractors have a multi-decade planning horizon. Large national delivery companies like FedEX probably plan with that kind of horizon as well.
On the government side, highway and airport expansion is probably planned on a multi-decade scale as well. As an example, I live in the Bay Area, CA, and there is a multi-year plan to bore another tunnel through the hills between Berkeley and communities like Walnut Creek and Pleasanton, based on population projections that population in the Bay Area will increase substantially over the next 20-30 years and increasing numbers of people will buy houses over the hills and commute to the Bay Area.
Sure, it is not an exact science, but it can be done.
And you raise a good point about Detroit - I probably wouldn’t have guessed it would have crashed the way it did. So, there is the possibility that you don’t anticipate things like that and screw up. On the other hand, it is also possible to miss out on opportunities by waiting. As an example, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System generally is considered to be a benefit to the Bay Area. We had the chance to extend it out to Marin County in the 70s, but there was not the political will to build it out at the time. Now, with development 30 years further advanced, it is too expensive to extend the system out there, even if it would substantially benefit the area. I haven’t studied the Florida transit corridor enough to definitively state that high speed rail would be the right move there, but it has been studied for years and there has been broad bipartisan support in Florida for quite some time for the line. Indeed, the Republican head of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee,John Mica (Rep. Fla) has spoken out strongly in favor of the project.
Well, it’s done now. Florida will not be getting a high-speed rail. The Florida Supreme Court decided that Scott does have the authority to reject the $2.4 billion from the federal government. So considering that a super-majority of the state senate hates him, what will his remaining years in office be like? He’s also not going to be popular with either Tampa or Orlando over this.
“Coincidentally” he has decided to announce today that he’s ordered the Florida DoT to redo their budget to include $77 milion to be spent dredging the Port of Miami. Scott states that the increased shipping will bring in more jobs to Florida than the high-speed rail. Of course, considering that Florida was getting the rail for free there’s absolutely no reason they couldn’t have done both. I’m also skeptical that the increase in shipping through the Port of Miami is going to create 20,000 new jobs, which was the estimate for the high-speed rail.
http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2011/03/rick_scott_pledges_77m_to_dred.php
So which state will be getting the $2.4 billion? Will California be able to extend it’s plans from San Francisco to LA to include LA to San Diego? Will New York-Boston-DC be next on the list? Will Vegas see it’s dreamed of LA-Vegas line? Or will dark horse candidate Hawaii place the successful bid? Okay, so no, Hawaii won’t.
The Federal Government has made it clear that the $2.4 billion is going to a high-speed rail project and any state is welcome to submit why they should be getting it.
Detroit actually drafted plans for a subway system a long time ago. The Big 3 ,mostly GM. put an end to it. They are the same people who had our electric streetcar system torn up . They said the motor city should be on wheels.
I’ve never gotten the appeal of high speed rail as a real transportation solution. It’s almost impossible to justify on economic , environmental or practical grounds.
I do understand all the other motivations behind it. None of them are particularly pleasant to me. One motive is simply the desire to plan and control the movements of the population, so as to make society better. Another is rent-seeking. High speed rail is a rent-seeker’s dream. Not only is there big money in the actual contracting to build it, but the creation of a major transportation line like that causes property values and profits of companies to shift. Disney loves high speed rail. Who wouldn’t like a subsidized transportation device that drops customers at your gate?
It’s not just Disney. Property values increase near major line stops. Every community that gets one gets a boost in value. This is a wealth transfer from the general taxpayer to that community.
Communities that don’t get them are screwed. Property values decline, growth is shunted to the rail hub communities to some degree. It may be small percentages of overall activity, but the aggregate amount is huge. So there are powerful forces that gather on either side of the high-speed rail debate, and both of them are willing to be as dirty as they need to be and sling as much bullshit as they can to thwart the other side.
Keep that in mind when you read advocacy pieces about high speed rail. In particular, pay attention to what’s missing from the financial estimates and how rosy the scenarios are for projected ridership and lack of cost overruns and such.
We can talk about the costs and benefits of HSR, and I think I can make a compelling case against it. But let me try a more philosophical argument:
High speed rail runs counter to how our world is actually evolving. Our populations are becoming more mobile and more connected. Change comes rapidly. We want our 21st century populations to be flexible. We want them to be able to connect together physically or electronically in ways which best suit their needs, and not be constrained by fixed transportation corridors built on the predictions of central planners.
In addition, we live in a world where terrorism and political instability are increasing. The best defense against that is decentralization. Fewer big soft targets and bottlenecks. A society where people are self-transporting on a large mesh of interconnected roadways is much less vulnerable to attack or natural disasters.
I want to live in a mesh world. I want to travel in any direction I choose. I want businesses to be able to locate in the places that serve their needs best, and not be forced to locate in less than optimal locations simply to be near an HSR link. I want a flexible society that can shift in any direction as society, technology, or economics dictates.
High speed rail is a 20th century technology that is becoming increasingly irrelevant as part of a transportation solution. It’s old school. The hip kids are driving their electric cars and hybrids around.
In addition, it’s like corn ethanol - something that in theory sounds cool and green and sensible, but in practice turns out to be a counterproductive albatross created by big business rent-seekers and their friends in government, who have now managed to inject their own little permanent siphon hose into the public teat.
The experience in Europe with HSR has not been all roses. One little-discussed problem is that the passenger trains pushed a lot of rail freight off the lines. This drove up freight costs and energy consumption. That is never factored in as an economic or environmental cost by HSR advocates. But in fact, if the trains were running frequently enough to turn a profit, they would almost certainly have to displace some freight traffic.
HSR in the United States isn’t exactly fast, either. To do bullet-train speeds you have to build new track. But that is hideously expensive and generally runs you into all kinds of eminent domain problems. So most HSR plans use existing lines, and that limits the trains to something like 90-100 mph. The TGV can do 350. So you’d be building the Yugo of high speed trains.
HSR would over time also distort the planning of cities. Surburban flight would be punished, the cities would gain advantage. Bedroom communities would be disadvantaged. I don’t see that as a good thing.
HSR energy savings are also dependent on high utilization rates and on assumptions about the inefficiency of cars that are no longer valid. Per passenger mile, any of the new small cars like the Focus or any of the hybrids are more energy efficient than HSR even under optimistic scenarios.
Many transit systems in North America were justified on energy efficiency and environmental grounds, yet a number of them actually lower the energy efficiency of the transportation system they are in.
HSR will also not reduce congestion as advocates suggest. There are two reasons for this: One is that a single train link will simply not carry a big enough percentage of the travelers to make a huge dent in traffic, but also because congestion itself is what limits road use. The roads are free to use, so usage of them tends to increase until congestion occurs. Taking 10% of the current drivers off the road does not reduce congestion by 10%, because the lower congestion makes the road attractive to other drivers, or makes the area more desirable to home builders, until eventually you hit the congestion limit again.
Then there’s the fact that the money to pay for high speed rail gets extracted from the entire population, but the benefits of it accrue disproportionally to the coasts. A taxpayer in Kansas will derive little benefit from an HSR link between San Franscisco and LA. So it seems a little unjust. The states should be paying for this rail if they wanted it or thought it would make a profit. But most states aren’t interested because for most states it makes no sense. So mandating it federally essentially extracts money from the center of the country and deposits it on the coasts.
Of course, those coasts have a lot of powerful constituencies…
The reason you need a government entity involved is to manage the right of ways on the rail. It pretty much can’t be done solely privately in much the same way it’s pretty much impossible to build a major metropolitan airport or a private toll road.
Specifically in Florida, you HAVE to have the Dept of transportation involved in this. as an aside, the cities of Lakeland, tampa and Orlando were trying to do exactly this.
I know there are plans for rail lines between KC and St. Louis so I really hope Missouri finds a way to snatch this up.
Sorry Florida.