And there’s a flip side to that coin; when the government is picking the marketplace’s winners, it’s also de facto picking the losers.
So, in this instance, Disney would profit from HSR (more accurately, Medium Speed Rail, given the actual specs proposed), and so would, Busch Gardens in Tampa, as they would likely get a stop put in for them. Win for Orlando and Tampa, win for Disney and Busch. A big “screw you” to Winter Haven and Legoland.
Winter Haven is south of Orlando and used to have Cypress Gardens; when that park closed down, it was a big blow, and when Legoland bought the property and started building a theme park there, it was a big win. By car, Legoland will be a 40 minute drive from Disney. It’s a perfect pairing for families with small kids. They plan on having bus service to Disney, but certainly some people will choose to drive down, and along the way they’ll pass umpteen mom-and-pop stores selling oranges and tourist crap along Rt 27. Who knows, maybe people will stay a night in Winter Haven and go see a minor-league ballgame or check out Bok Gardens or Highlands Hammock or something. That area has been hit hard by the recession (and for most of the past 50 years, really) and a few more tourist dollars would help a lot.
You put in a sleek modern rail line straight to Tampa and Busch Gardens, and now they’re a lot less competitive. And before someone says it – there’s no plans for the rail to run anywhere close to Legoland. The eminent domain will be easier to get up by I-4, and they only want to have one, maybe two stops along the way; last I heard there would be one stop in Lakeland and that’s it.
It’s the same story every time the government starts “coordinating” with big corporations: Fuck you, little guy.
Oh shut up, you tool. Sometimes you’re as bad as Der Trihs.
At worst, it’s a misguided wish of urbanites to expand their ability to travel safely and efficiently without need of personal transportation from intracity to intercity. It may be a pipe dream in certain respects, particularly where there isn’t already a great deal of traffic, but there’s no need to ascribe malicious and selfish motives to it.
Some of your criticisms are sensible. I don’t agree with all of them, or many of them, but they’re reasonable and worth arguing. The two I’ve cherry-picked here are not.
Distorting the planning of cities has been done thoughout history, ever since cities were invented. City fathers have always tried to improve transportation in cities, and it has always had an affect on settlement patterns. Most recently in the U.S. and in Canada, it is the spending of money on highways and freeways that have encouraged suburban growth, that has harmed the core city, and has enabled the creation of bedroom communities. There is no more reason that the current settlement pattern should be written in stone than there was in the 1960s.
In general, the highly populated and industrial states of the coasts pay more in federal taxes than they receive in payments, and the reverse is true for the more rural and central states. Residents of Kansas and North Dakota (for instance) are actually being subsidized by the residents of California and New York (for instance). Regardless of that, your implied argument that I should not pay a tax for something that I do not receive a personal benefit from is both simplistic and ignorant. I pay taxes for a local school district, for turning U.S. Route 36 into a freeway, and for disaster relief in Haiti. None of those are a personal benefit to me, all of them are a benefit to my society. I also pay taxes for the salaries of Republican members of Congress, and for the war in Iraq. None of those are a personal benefit to me, none of those are a benefit to my society. Yet my society, via its democratic and public process, has decided that I should help pay for them. So I do. Such is life.
Oh, please this is just so much bullshit. Who writes your stuff for you? The Kock brothers? The same thing happens with highway networks. Got an off ramp to your town, good for you. Are you against highways? And it works for airports as well. Got an international airport close by, w00t.
I’m guessing you’ve never tried to commute anywhere in the US during rush hour on a highway. I’m thinking Chicago, LA, SF, SD, Las Vegas.
Why should I care where you want to live or how you want to travel in the USA. You live in Canada. Feel free to do what you want on your own turf. As it is businesses in the US are free to locate wherever they want now. Do you really postulate that if HSR becomes a reality in the US that the interstate highway system will be doomed?
cite
Cite that this will be a problem in the US. As far as I know the HSR in FL will be new track. So no freight traffic disruption.
cite? And if that’s true so what. Cities lost advantage to the burbs in the past when lots o cars and highways were built.
Most Americans don’t drive Focus’s or hybrids and probably won’t for years.
Cool so we shouldn’t do anything to reduce pollution and grid-lock in any of our large cities because it doesn’t benefit those in the fly-over states (where I live btw). But we should pay to build and maintain interstate highways in the fly-over states because…
Jeez, settle down. Planning the movement of the population is not exactly an extreme position. There are lots of people who think that scientifically planned, centrally managed transportation is better than people driving themselves around willy-nilly in cars. Public transportation advocates can talk all day about the advantages of planned transportation networks, and they often couch it in terms of saving inner cities, promoting high density living, ending suburban sprawl and all the rest.
The difference is that, as I said, the road network is a mesh. There are billions of miles of interconnecting roads. The interstate highway system is a complex network that reaches through every state and every major city, and rural and bedroom communities have access to it through on-ramps and connecting roads.
High speed rail does not share those features. There will never be enough profitable lines for it to extend everywhere, and thus it will be limited to the dense coastal corridors.
Also, cities do spend money on roads to improve them, and states spend money to improve state roads. But that is money that is collected locally and spent locally. Spending a bunch of money on a new ring road in a city requires the raising of taxes in the same city.
Of course you’re right that all these things change land-use patterns and benefit some at the expense of others. Relocate a road, and businesses along the old road die off, and the land value along the new road goes up. But I would argue that this is a liability and not a feature, and that this is the kind of thing that creates corruption of the process. High speed rail is just a bigger version of this - much bigger. A rail line that costs tens of billions and is only accessible from two or three locations creates major distortions and attracts major rent-seekers such as Disney.
True to a certain degree, but in general the federal government should be working for what’s best for the country as a whole, and not for specific, highly influential constituencies.
You’re right that the center of the country receives a lot of pork, but you act as if that’s a justification for more pork for coasts, rather than an argument for getting rid of pork. Eliminate ag subsidies and other subsidies that fall disproportionately on those states. I would support that.
No one is suggesting that HSR replace the interstate highway system. This is a strawman.
Most if not all ring roads as you call them are interstate highways in the US, subsidized by all tax-payers.
How is HSR in appropriate areas not good for the country as a whole?
Who said anything about ag subsidies? Is this just another distraction? And again what is your stake in HSR in the US? Or in ag subsidies? For the love of Og you only have one fucking 2 lane road in Canada. What do you know about having, paying for and supporting an interstate highway system? Or HSR for that matter?
Look, if you’re going to invent a crazy new arch-nemesis, at least learn to spell their names right. It’s the Koch brothers. You know - the guys who support gay marriage and gave 20 million to the ACLU to help fight the Patriot act. They’re the guys who opposed the war in Iraq and who fund groups that fight to end the war on drugs. The bastards. Little did they know that all that civil libertarianism would make no difference to liberals if they got in the way of their beloved public unions.
I remember not long ago when liberals were trying to convince libertarians that they could find a home in the Democrat party. I thought it was a joke then, and this widespread liberal attack on the Koch brothers, who support many liberal causes, proves that I was right.
And you automatically assume that adding HSR will relieve congestion. You might like to read this article about China’s experience with high speed rail and congestion. In some cases, HSR forced coal off the rails into trucks, and made congestion worse.
No. My point is that expensive, fixed point-to-point links make the system brittle. Compare rail to building an airport. An airport is a hub, but the spokes can and do change all the time. Go check with your local airport and see how much traffic patterns change. For example, let’s say a big company moves into a city, and now has 50 executives that need to travel to the head office in New York, or in Boise, or wherever it may be. Airlines can simply add an extra flight, or even a new flight if previous demand didn’t warrant flying directly to that city. Or maybe a big company closes down, and suddenly a flight that used to be profitable no longer is. No problem - the airline can just re-route or cut the number of flights.
High Speed Rail cannot do that. It’s hard wired to move between two fixed points. Not only that, but it absolutely needs to operate near 100% capacity to turn a profit and be energy efficient. So what happens if something changes and people no longer want to travel that route in the same quantity?
This is not theoretical. There was once pressure to build an HSR link to Las Vegas. There was also once pressure to build an HSR link to Detroit. Good thing neither of those ever happened, because right now they’d be running empty and losing billions of dollars.
It gets worse, because large public projects like that are rarely allowed to die. So they become white elephants and a drag on the economy. They start getting ever-larger taxpayer subsidies, communities start passing zoning laws to force construction near them, the special interests who benefit from them fight tooth and nail to keep them. They become a giant hole into which money is poured.
The road network does not suffer from this to anywhere near the same degree. For one thing, the cost of maintaining a road is much lower, and if a road gets less traffic it requires even less maintenance. And as I said, the road network is a mesh, so it’s much more able to accommodate shifts in demand and usage patterns.
In the 20th century, manufacturing was much more centralized. Traffic movements were more predictable over time. In the 21st century, manufacturing is becoming increasingly decentralized. Modern supply-chain management, automation, and efficient transportation has allowed micro-manufacturers to spring up. Virtual companies can exist that job out the construction of projects to hundreds of small firms. Telecommunications and the internet allow greater distribution of the workforce. The 21st century is more of a mesh model of societal construction, and change is becoming more rapid. Smart infrastructure needs to match that reality, and that means it needs to be flexible, and not a rigid system consisting of huge fixed megaprojects.
Futhermore, decentralization is a good thing because it allows us to exploit comparative advantage. Real estate is extremely expensive in the big coastal cities. Adding HSR will only drive up taxes and drive up the cost of real estate. In the meantime, there is plenty of cheap real-estate all through the country that is not accessible by HSR. But if there’s an even playing field with respect to the transportation network, then a company will be able to gain advantage by going where real estate is cheap, or where there is access to water or cheap energy or raw materials the company needs. HSR puts a bias on that process.
Do you have a link to the plan? Because the plan I’ve seen for the South Florida corridor says that it will share track with freight and commuter rail. here’s the application.
BTW, the planned new track would use existing rights-of-way along the interstate. Florida is one of the few places where this is possible.
I’d like to add that I’m not against all HSR projects. I think there are maybe 1-3 corridors in the U.S. where HSR might actually turn a profit and where the economy will be stable enough to minimize risk. But those corridors should be funded by the states and not the federal government. If they’re truly a profitable enhancement of the state transportation network, the states should be willing to fund it themselves.
The fact is, most HSR projects plan to share existing track with freight rail, because it’s too difficult and to expensive to build new track and attain and the rights-of-way. America’s rail freight system was deregulated in the 1970’s, and much of the track is owned by freight companies. In addition, it is a highly optimized and very complicated system. Throwing a bunch of new trains into the mix will not only reduce capacity for freight, but could easily result in politicians re-regulating rail freight and destroying its economic and environmental efficiency.
I highly recommend that everyone read that economist article. It points out that America already has a world-class rail system. Only it moves freight instead of people. But it does so with spectacular efficiency. Not only that, but secondary ‘intermodal’ transportation has evolved along with it. For example, flat-bed semis that move entire train cars between rail links or from rail hubs to customers. The whole system has become optimized around America’s advantage in rail freight, and HSR runs a real risk of messing that up.
In China, HSR has forced the offloading of freight into trucks, which are congesting the highways. In Europe, freight has been heavily displaced by passenger trains and moved into smaller vans that also contribute to road congestion and move freight with much less energy efficiency.
There’s no reason to believe that America’s experience would be any different.
Currently, the U.S. has the best rail freight system in the world. That’s a big deal, because freight actually benefits from rail movement in great degree. It’s the heavy loads and tightly-packed dense shipments that are efficiently moved by trains. Trains carry a lot of dead weight which cuts into efficiency when it comes to transporting passengers. It’s much less of a factor when transporting cargo. That’s why rail transport is so much cheaper than other modes. Screw with that at your peril.
That may be, but the economy has adapted to it. Make major changes to the transportation network, and you’ll force it to adapt again, and adaptation is expensive.
And the HSR links won’t be built for years. As it is, a current vehicle that gets the EPA average fuel economy is more efficient than HSR per passenger mile if there are at least two people in it, and a car of the Prius/Volt/Focus variety is more efficient with even a single passenger. And if Obama’s EPA mandates are met, the auto fleet will be more efficient than trains before the HSR links are even completed. Then won’t the environmentalists pushing for big trains look foolish?
And what happens to energy efficiency if people start telecommuting or moving to states with low-cost real estate and low taxes because teleconferencing and cheap airline travel allows them to do so? Do you know how energy inefficient a train is when it’s running at 50% capacity? It’s an environmental disaster. That’s yet another risk of putting your eggs in the HSR basket.
No, the cities and states should do something about pollution that is contained within those cities and states. If the pollution travels across state boundaries, then the feds should get involved. Los Angeles had to deal with its smog problem through local initiatives, didn’t it? California has stricter emissions requirements than other states, right?
I never said it would. I said that in general, you don’t want to move away from a flexible mesh of roads to a hub-and-spoke system consisting of very expensive fixed corridors.
Because it’s not? Shaving a commuter’s time by half an hour in LA does nothing for a farmer living in Iowa. It’s not lowering the cost of goods or increasing the efficiency of production for the nation as a whole. And in my opinion, widespread HSR would actually weaken the economy and be a net loss for the country.
This was a response to the claim that the ‘flyover states’ get more money from the feds per capita than do the coasts, so the argument that they shouldn’t be taxed to pay for coastal trains was invalid. They get more money from the feds because they disproportionally receive pork due to their disproportionate influence in the government. My point was that the answer would be to reduce their pork, not to give more pork to the coasts.
Thanks for that snotty assertion. Let me smack you with a clue-bat: Canada had high-speed rail in the 1960’s that was faster than what you’ve got planned now. The UAC turbotrain could do 200 km/h, but was limited to 160 in operating due to track issues. A Canadian-built TurboTrain still worlds the North American speed record.
We also had the LRC in Quebec, the world’s first tilting train. Canada is a pioneer in high speed rail. The Jet-Train you want to build in Florida would use locomotives built by Bombardier - a Canadian company. In addition, one of the proposed HSR links would extend into Canada. So we have a vested interest in this as well.
But guess what? The TurboTrain doesn’t run any more. It never turned a profit. It never ran at capacity. As it turns out, reality doesn’t match with the promises of the special interests who push for it. The Turbotrain had to run on regular track, and was speed limited because of it (as American trains would be). The result was that the time savings wasn’t great enough to make it cost-effective for most travelers. It ran along heavily subsidized for a decade and a half, then was quietly shut down.
As for us having ‘one fucking two-lane road’ in Canada - are you just trying to insult the Canadians on this board, or are you really that stupid? We have a world-class transportation system. I live in Edmonton, and the Edmonton-Calgary corridor is served by the QE2 highway, which has a speed limit of 70 mph and has four to eight lanes of divided highway over the entire distance. Both cities have light-rail transit and major international airports, too. We even used to have an hourly air shuttle on a 737 that you could get on without even a ticket reservation. Just walk into the airport, buy a ticket, and you’re in downtown Calgary in an hour. And, Edmonton has an airport right smack in the center of the city for commuter flights in addition to our international airport.
Oh, by the way - the Edmonton-Calgary corridor has been one of the prime candidates for an HSR link in North America. And Calgary’s LRT system is powered by a huge wind turbine farm.
Someone being socially apathetic doesn’t make them a good person. At least the Koch bros. aren’t doing harm on the specific issues you claim (as far as I know, you’ve spouted misinformation before) but that doesn’t make them good people, or the sort of individuals that stand for Democratic Party principles.
In some cases eating vegetables caused someone to choke to death. I assume you advocate an all meat diet?
Run fewer trains you imbecile.
Or conversely, they might never have stagnated. Assuming the absolute worst thing doesn’t make you smart. It makes you a hysterical idiot.
Like the highways, right?
And the patterns develop based on what other options there are. Looking for a simplistic answer to suit your iron-clad, unmoving, ideology is hardly a compelling argument.
People still need to move. And moving them quickly and economically is a good idea.
So?
That’s an ideological statement, not a logical one. The federal government has as much of a reason to build HSR as it does the interstates.
Because, I assume you think America is stupid and unable to learn?
Hysterical nonsense. Can you show that the usage time of the rails is at 100%? Never mind that additional rails can be built as needed.
In other words, never, ever fix anything until it breaks. Never, ever plan for the future and accept moderate inconvenience for future benefit.
Trains have other advantages over cars.
You do know then can schedule them to increase efficiencies, right?
In what way does adding HSR move us away from the flexible mesh of roads? Surely you can’t be so fucking delusional that you can’t understand that adding a hat doesn’t make your shoes disappear, right?
Stupid argument. There are plenty of worthless miles of interstate from a city-dwellers perspective. Boosting the economy around a rail line will help the country as a whole.
If the coasts are driving the economy then doesn’t it stand to reason to leverage them as much as you can?
Does the interstate turn a profit?
Big talk for the second most delusional and blindly ideological regular poster on this board. I’m lookin’ at you Kanicbird.
As usual, a hyper-partisan, content-free post from Lobohan consisting of nothing but ad-hominem attacks and witless rejoinders, who then has the gall to repeatedly call me hysterical. You know, for posting carefully researched messages littered with cites to partisan rags like The Economist.
Just thought I’d add this on here. You know that report about ridership that Gov. Scott ignored? Turns out that it suggests that the HSR would have run at a surplus.
I would say the same thing about cars. They are expensive as hell to buy. Then you have to pay for all of the fuel, insurance, scheduled maintenance and repairs. They pollute the air at no charge to the owner (how convenient). Every city has traffic congestion which wastes more fuel and time…impractical. And they impose a huge trade deficit on us, having to import all that oil from a lot of unsavory producers. They are ill-suited to moving quickly through heavy rain, snow, and ice. And here’s my favorite quality of cars: on any attempt to travel from point A to point B, you and/or someone you love may end up dead or permanently disabled. What is the associated cost of that? If all of the true costs of auto transportation were considered, rail wins.
Thanks for that. Although apparently those on the right side of this issue have a little trouble with mathematics:
It’s between 65 and 90 miles from Orlando to Tampa (depending on which bits you’re going to). A 150 mile round trip would only require 12 gallons of gas if you were driving a Bugatti Veyron.
Now show me an HSR system that came in on budget, and which had the amount of ridership as predicted, and which managed to maintain the originally quoted ticket prices.
For a more realistic assessment, I suggest you look at the latest numbers for California’s HSR project. Its budget has more than doubled, as have the originally quoted ticket prices. Two of the lines have been dropped because they were too expensive, and it’s way behind schedule.
That’s what happens when the real world of engineering runs up against the best-case assumption sales job put out by advocates for HSR.
I love how you guys are instantly skeptical of big companies like Halliburton or the big military contracts, and always are ready to assume that military contracts will go over budget, but you’ll swallow any glurge put our by the big industry or big government agencies behind HSR without a critical thought.
California had the same kinds of ‘independent’ analysis of its HSR plans, and have a look how that’s turning out.
Public transportation is non-existent in a good chunk of the northeast. You mean outside NYC, DC, and to a lesser extent Boston. You sure as hell don’t find much in the way of public transportation in five out of the six new england states, anyway.
Perhaps they were basing their numbers on these eight vehicles since none of them gets more than 13mpg brand new.
Let’s think about this for a minute. Let’s take the worst-case scenario of 90 miles each way. Let’s say a car averages 55 mph and the train averages 90 mph (the Tampa-Orlando plan includes FIVE stops for the train, so I’m guessing the block-to-block time will be less, even if the peak speed is over 150mph).
The train takes two hours for the round trip. The car takes. 3.3 hours. So you save 1.3 hours - except that you have to get yourself to the train station, get on the train, wait for it to leave, get to your destination, find a cab or other transit, and take it to where you’re going. You’d be lucky to save any time at all. And you will need transportation - the Orlando stop for the HSR is at the airport. Do you know how long it takes to get to downtown Orlando from the airport by cab? About 20 minutes after you’re in the cab. Oh, and it costs $43 - more than the entire cost of driving yourself to Tampa, and more than the cost of the HSR ticket itself. Do the advocate reports mention that?
Of course, you can take the bus for $2. The bus takes 40 minutes to get downtown. Add in the time to get off the train and get to a bus, and you’re probably talking 50 minutes or more to get downtown after you arrive.
In terms of cost, at the CAFE average in 2016 (the only fair comparison, since the train won’t be available until then). the car will get 34.6 MPG, burning 5.2 gallons of gas (not the 12 gallons of gas Nelson claimed). Even at $4/gallon, that’s only about $21. The train will cost “as little as” $30. But of course, you have to pay for a cab to get to the train station and a cab to get where you’re going. Or you have to rent a car if you have to drive around a lot in either city. This makes the train WAY more expensive than driving a car.
And, at 34 MPG, the car will get you there on less energy. Per passenger mile, HSR won’t touch 34 MPG - especially not on such a short leg with so many stops. Trains are heavy, and take a lot of energy to get moving and to stop, and only a portion is recovered with regenerative braking.
And if you’re carrying two or more people, it’s a big environmental win if you travel by car instead of by train.
Seriously - ask yourself if YOU would leave your car at home and get on a train to go a lousy 60-90 miles? Would you catch a cab to the train station, buy a ticket, haul your bags onto the train and find your seat, go the 90 miles, then haul your stuff off the train, make your way through the station and find a cab? Or would you just bloody drive yourself there?
I can tell you who wants HSR in Orlando: Disney. HSR opens up Disneyland to casual tourists from Tampa. It allows people to fly into Tampa and take the train to Disneyland. But you know what? The taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing Disney. And money taxed from other parts of the state to provide benefits to Disney hurts tourism in the rest of the state. It makes other businesses more expensive. It’s much like the folly of using business taxes to build giant sports stadiums - the stadium owners get a big benefit, while every other business sees its costs go up and its customers leave.
And what happens if Disney World stops being a big draw? What if people stop going there? What happens to ridership then, and who’s stuck holding the bag for a train running half empty and losing $20 million a year, while sucking down gobs of energy?
And all this assumes the train can really be built on budget, on time, and its operating costs will not go over the estimates. And you had better hope they don’t, because HSR is extremely price sensitive because it has competition on the low end from cars and buses, and on the high end from airplanes. If its ticket prices can’t find the ‘sweet spot’ between the two, ridership falls off and the thing becomes a boondoggle.
So you know how this goes - private industry ‘invests’ in it, and if it all works out, they make big profits and everyone’s happy. And if it doesn’t… The taxpayer gets left holding the bag. Does anyone else recall a recent situation where private industry had privatized profits but used government to socialize their losses? Anyone? Buehler?
And you wonder why there’s so much money and so many big interests pushing hard for HSR - the unions love it, because HSR provides good union jobs. Big construction loves it. Big industrial firms love it because they get to build out the infrastructure. Disney loves it. They all love it because behind the high-tech, HSR is just a big wealth transfer from taxpayers to special interests. And if it all goes to hell, they all get to walk away while everyone else in the state takes it on the chin.
In private industry, you have to price in risk. These HSR plans never do that. They assume the best-case, because if the best case doesn’t happen, they don’t care. They’re not paying the cheque.
But the first estimate is just looking at the gas. There’s also tolls, maintenance, and depreciation of the car. Even at $4 a gallon they can be as big or bigger than the gas component.
For multiple riders it would still wind up cheaper to drive (unless of course you’re in a Canyonero.) But for singles, it would probably be cheaper to ride unless the parking/other means to get there is outrageous at the terminal and your car is pretty efficient and cheap.