High speed rail ... how well will it fly?//Obama unveils high-speed rail plan

[Sam_Stone]

Since we’re citing pro-rail organizations, some balance seems to be called for.

Here’s the Cato Institute’s policy paper on high speed rail.

The executive summary:

In the face of high energy prices and concerns about global warming, environmentalists and planners offer high-speed rail as an environmentally friendly alternative to driving and air travel. California, Florida, the Midwest, and other parts of the country are actively considering specific high-speed rail plans.

Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110-to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take few cars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future.

Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by a mere 0.7 to 1.5 percent—but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions.

These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?

As megaprojects—the California high-speed rail is projected to cost $33 to $37 billion—high-speed rail plans pose serious risks for taxpayers. Costs of recent rail projects in Denver and Seattle are running 60 to 100 percent above projections. Once construction begins, politicians will feel obligated to throw good taxpayers’ money after bad. Once projects are completed , most plans call for them to be turned over to private companies that will keep any operational profits,while taxpayers will remain vulnerable if the trains lose money.

In short, high-speed rail proposals are high cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits. Taxpayers and politicians should be wary of any transportation projects that cannot be paid for out of user fees.

Also, we’re not talking about 200 mph trains here. Obama’s plan uses existing rail lines, which will limit most of the trains to around 100 mph. And as Canada’s experience suggests, over time the speeds will probably come down. And if these trains share lines with slower rail freight, it’ll cause havoc with current freight schedules. In Europe, far less freight moves by rail than in the U.S.

[Bearflag70]

Airports and roads = heavily subsidized public transportation systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future that are not paid for out of user fees

[Sam_Stone]

Not true. As a whole, the airport business runs at a profit. And there are plenty of toll roads, so apparently some roads can even make money when they’re not getting a share of gasoline taxes. And of course, people pay gasoline tax to maintain the roads.

From ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization’s report on Airport Operations:

The study evaluates the financial situation of airports and air navigation services for the year 2005 based on a survey of 72 ICAO Contracting States1 and the ICAO Statistics programme. Chapters 1 and 2 review the financial aspects of operations of airports and air navigation services, respectively. Chapter 3 analyses the weight of airport and air navigation services charges on airline expenses.

Overall, airports were profitable in 2005 judging from the income/expense ratios at the global and regional levels. The income of all sample airports exceeded expenses by a ratio of 121 per cent, meaning that out of US$ 10.00 earned, airports spent US$ 8.26.

[Robot_Arm]

Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110-to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take few cars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future.

I reject their premise that the success or failure of a high-speed rail system is based on how it affects highway traffic. We do not consider airlines a failure because roads are still congested. We judge them based on whether they attract passengers and safely transport them from one place to another. Proposed rail projects should be evaluated on the same terms. If the implementation of one mode of travel can make another mode work better, then that is a benefit; but it is not the only metric to use.

Further, I question their measure of “taking cars off the road.” If we accept the premise that our transport capacity must increase (which seems implicit in all discussions of new transport options), then the comparison should be between rail and whatever other options we might consider. Taking cars off the road (compared to current traffic levels) is different than seeing that some cars don’t take to the road in the first place.

“For profit private commuter airlines” are not the same as “profitable private commuter airlines.”

The study evaluates the financial situation of airports and air navigation services for the year 2005 based on a survey of 72 ICAO Contracting States1 and the ICAO Statistics programme. Chapters 1 and 2 review the financial aspects of operations of airports and air navigation services, respectively. Chapter 3 analyses the weight of airport and air navigation services charges on airline expenses.

Does that study take into account the capital required to build an airport (and the cost on that capital), or operating expenses only? Does the Cato Institute study consider revenue sources within train stations, or only the cost of operating the rail service?

[Bryan_Ekers]

We’re better off increasing computerization of cars, including guiding users to less-busy routes and allowing automated highway driving.

[flonks]

@Interconnected_Series_of_Tubes

While I’m personally quite enamored with the efficiency of high speed rail systems in certain applications (I was particularly impressed in Japan) I fail to see what benefit a new rail network would provide. The US freeway infrastructure while arguably lacking a bit of maintainable is extremely through, reliable, and cheap. I don’t see any pressing need for another means of moving between cities when our entire nation has invested so heavily in roads.

From other nation’s experiences (France, Germany, Japan), in areas where VERY high speed trains are available in short and medium distance intercity connections, people don’t use the plane anymore. The 500km (~300mi) between Paris and Lyon are covered in 2h. It’s faster than taking the plane taking into account that the travel to and from the airport takes much time (the train station is in the city center).

I don’t know anybody taking the plane. I use the train several times per year. Going from the Paris to Marseille takes 3h, and we cross France from north to south.

Since there is a highway toll, it’s also cheaper than the car. And supposing a functioning market (which might not be true, granted), ie that the highway toll reflects the cost of building and maintaining the highway, we can transpose these costs to a system where roads are paid from taxes -> Building the tracks as well as the trains is cheaper.

It’s also very much faster than taking the car. The car takes me at least 4 1/2 hours, if there is no jam. And there always is.

I could easily imagine that connections between New York and Washington or between SF and LA are very profitable.

[Martin_Hyde]

@flonks

From other nation’s experiences (France, Germany, Japan), in areas where VERY high speed trains are available in short and medium distance intercity connections, people don’t use the plane anymore. The 500km (~300mi) between Paris and Lyon are covered in 2h. It’s faster than taking the plane taking into account that the travel to and from the airport takes much time (the train station is in the city center).

I don’t know anybody taking the plane. I use the train several times per year. Going from the Paris to Marseille takes 3h, and we cross France from north to south.

Since there is a highway toll, it’s also cheaper than the car. And supposing a functioning market (which might not be true, granted), ie that the highway toll reflects the cost of building and maintaining the highway, we can transpose these costs to a system where roads are paid from taxes -> Building the tracks as well as the trains is cheaper.

It’s also very much faster than taking the car. The car takes me at least 4 1/2 hours, if there is no jam. And there always is.

I could easily imagine that connections between New York and Washington or between SF and LA are very profitable.

High speed rail can sometimes make sense in certain geographic areas. I’m for it in such areas, most of the United States isn’t really such an area, though. There are a few corridors but that’s really the extent of it.

[jjimm]

FTR I haven’t flown from the UK to France or Belgium at all in the past few years. I’ve been six or seven times, and on the Eurostar train always. It’s SO more pleasant than flying - and though a flight may only take an hour, the train is actually much quicker city-to-city because you don’t have to fart around in an airport, and the stations are right in the middle cities they target.

I reckon over comparible distances in the US between urban centers - East and West coasts - people who would normally fly would end up taking the train instead. That would be the main competition, in my opinion, not necessarily against cars. But if they did combined ticket-and-car-hire that would get over the no-car angst that a lot of people seem to get.

[BrainGlutton]

Did not see that coming! I’m all for HSR, America needs it (relevant website), but a major infrastructure-project investment now?! Is this going to be politically doable?!

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

Sounds to me like a great idea:

1. It’ll increase jobs; and
2. It’ll help us transport ourselves more efficiently.

Note that the job increase will be both immediate (in terms of the construction and manufacturing jobs necessary to create the network) and ongoing (in terms of maintaining and operating the system).

I suppose there will be a decrease in some jobs at the same time, at least in the ongoing phase. Fewer highway patrol officers, fewer road construction crews, fewer gas station jobs. I don’t know how that’ll all shake out.

[BrainGlutton]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

I suppose there will be a decrease in some jobs at the same time, at least in the ongoing phase. Fewer highway patrol officers, fewer road construction crews, fewer gas station jobs. I don’t know how that’ll all shake out.

Don’t worry about that! It would take a long time for HSR to have any effect on the number of cars on the roads, and HSR can’t do that alone – that would take local commuter rail, light rail, and streetcars. Most car trips are local. Anybody in an automotive-related job is going to have a least a decade, probably more, to update his resume, and many will never have to.

[Dinsdale]

The front page headline made my day.
IMO it is a no-brainer.
A shame we haven’t gone this route long ago.
I hope they incorporate express routes between the train stations and airports in the main HSR destination cities - Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, etc.
And I would welcome a stepping down of federal subsidies to air service on these links. Allow HSR to compete on a fair playing field.

YIKES - there is another thread.
I suppose this should be locked or the 2 merged.

[DSeid]

Again Sam I responded to your request “to hear what proponents of high speed rail think the benefits are”, not as a proponent myself. So far I am personally still undecided but leaning to the belief that there is a role for high speed rail in America, albeit not the same space that they serve in Spain or Japan. More on that in a bit.

First off, my site did seem to me to be comparing apples to apples: one lane of new highway to an existing road compared to adding a line of upgraded high speed rail track. As far as compared to the cost of not upgrading at all? Well I can’t find it right now but yesterday I read an analysis that estimated the cost of lost productivity due to traffic congestion and it was astronomical. If I have the time I will try to track it down later.

Thank you for the link about Canada’s past efforts. Indeed as suranyi noted these scarcely counted as high speed in operation, but then again, America’s high speed proposals are not expected to run at Japan or the EU’s speeds either. The Obama DOT plan defines High Speed rail as 110 mph and above. I do accept it as a cautionary tale that high speed rail works best when the corridor is congested and the distances appropriate.

And you are going to dismiss figures from a site promoting high speed rail and then cite Cato as a source?! Oh c’mon. You’ll excuse me if I do not take their analyses seriously in return.

Now back to my evolving personal opinions on the matter. I began this thread with a link to a past thread regarding LaHood’s initial nomination. Let me return to that and these quotes linked to within it.

The US is experiencing its longest and steepest drop in driving, signaling a permanent shift away from reliance on the car to other modes of transportation …

What “transportation” really means here in the nation’s capital is a never-ending battle between rail advocates and highway advocates. The highway people have almost always won, of course.

Honestly I think that Obama is being a wee tad disingenuous in packaging these monies as being for “high speed rail.” That’s the sexy veneer, the “man on the moon” bit, and will play a role but most of this money will go to maintaining and upgrading the rail we got to be more efficient and incrementally faster. Very little is shovel ready for true high speed rail and these monies are really mostly “strategic investments that will yield tangible benefits to intercity rail infrastructure, equipment, performance, and intermodal connections over the next several years …” (from the actual “Strategic Vision” pdf that you can get to following my initial link). Yes, it will also fund planning and evaluating for future pie in the sky projects and mentions many regions as part of those plans but it commits building funds to none of them.

This in a stimulus package that commits much more to highway infrastructure needs seems to me be the means by which the DOT allows rail to get a slice of the pie in an era in which Americans are already switching away from cars in record numbers.

High speed rail in America will not be the 200 mph+ bullet trains - it will mean desperately needed upgraded train service with maybe eventually a few highly congested corridors running at 110 mph+ but more likely not even that fast. Which corridors will actually get the build? Well it makes lots of sense along the East Coast corridors. Maybe some in California where traffic congestion is very rate limiting to additional development. Maybe some in the Chicago hub region. I am less sure about elsewhere.

Rail has gotten too short a shrift for a long time. Vast interconnected true high speed rail lines are probably not really going to be our future but certain corridors of higher speed rail and overall improved rail service will be. Less sexy and exciting but likely very useful and a bargain I am beginning to think.

[suranyi]

@BrainGlutton

Don’t worry about that! It would take a long time for HSR to have any effect on the number of cars on the roads, and HSR can’t do that alone – that would take local commuter rail, light rail, and streetcars. Most car trips are local. Anybody in an automotive-related job is going to have a least a decade, probably more, to update his resume, and many will never have to.

The big benefit in California would be to reduce the number of shorthall airline flights between the northern and southern parts of the state. Those are tremendously inefficient.

Ed

[Sam_Stone]

Why would new passenger rail lines work any better than Amtrak?

Let’s look at subsidies: The entire U.S airport system gets an annual subsidy of about 100 million dollars. This subsidy goes completely to small airports to keep air service available to remote communities. All the major airports in the U.S. run at a significant profit. And yet, twice in this rail debate so far I’ve seen air travel described as being ‘heavily subsidized’.

Amtrak, on the other hand, gets about 1.3 billion dollars per year - over 10 times the subsidy of the entire air travel network. This subsidy keeps fare prices way down, and yet Amtrak routinely runs with its cars about half empty. And Amtrak is situated right in the dense corridors that are supposed to work well for high speed rail.

Why can’t Amtrak run at a profit? Why can’t it fill its cars, even with a heavy subsidy?

And if the government can’t make Amtrak work, why should you invest hundreds of billions of dollars in more passenger rail lines?

Have you got a cite for the claim that lower car travel means more people are seeking alternative travel? It seems to me that there’s less car travel because people are traveling less, period. There’s no mass exodus away from the car, or pent-up demand for alternatives to the car. Or put another way, if lower car travel represents a flood of people into alternate transportation, where are they going? Which modes of transportation are seeing major increases in use? Air travel is down as well. Transit ridership is up slightly by 3-4%. All these effects can be described better in terms of a recession rather than any burning desire to move away from the car.

I would also be extremely wary of using the European or Japanese experience with trains as an example for the U.S. Those other countries are very densely packed, and their cities are much less car friendly and are much more suited to mass transit. A high speed train makes sense when you’re already taking mass transit. But if you need a car at both ends of the connection, the usability goes way down.

Let me give you an example: I live about a kilometer from a light transit station. I have to drive 40 km to work, and it takes about 45 minutes. The train actually goes from my station to a station about two km from my office, and it makes that run in about 15 minutes. But I don’t take the train. How come? Because I’d have to bus to the train station. Buses run every 20 minutes, and they stop so much it’s about a 10 minutes ride to the station. At the other end, I’d have to catch the bus to my office, which is another 15 minutes, plus a two block walk from the bus stop. Plus probably an average 5 minute wait for the connection. So I can choose to get in my car and drive for 45 minutes straight into my underground heated parking stall, or I can walk a block to a bus stop, wait five or ten minutes, Ride the bus to the train, wait 5-10 minutes for the train to arrive, ride the train for 15 minutes, wait 5-10 minutes for my next bus, and ride it for another 15 minutes. Then walk two blocks from there to my office, eating another 5 minutes. Lots of hassle, and it actually takes more time. And then of course, I don’t have my car at work, which means I can’t stop on the way home for milk, or run out at lunch and do some errands.

We have had proposed high speed rail projects between Edmonton and Calgary. Rail advocates also say this run is a ‘no brainer’. But you know what? It’s a 3 hour drive by car. A 150 mph train will cut that down to an hour and a half. But that only leaves 1.5 hours in savings, which gets eaten up really quickly if you have to buy tickets, rent a car at the other end, or catch a bus or a cab on each side of the rail leg. And depending on where you are going in each city, it can take you half an hour to 45 minutes to get there from the train station, whereas it might be close to the end of the city you are driving into and only be 5-10 minutes away by car. The devil is in the details, and once you factor them in train travel doesn’t always look that great.

For a while, we had an express air shuttle between the two cities - even better than high speed rail. And we have an airport right in the center of our city, and the air shuttle ran on the hour. I could walk into the airport without a ticket, buy one at a kiosk, and be in Calgary in about an hour. Round trip price: $90. Average speed: over 300 mph.

The service was shut down from lack of use.

[MichaelQReilly]

This is about 30 years overdue.

[Captain_Carrot]

@Martin_Hyde

High speed rail can sometimes make sense in certain geographic areas. I’m for it in such areas, most of the United States isn’t really such an area, though. There are a few corridors but that’s really the extent of it.

For what it’s worth, that’s pretty much the plan. Nobody’s proposing that there be high-speed rail all over the country, but there are a few areas where it would be beneficial.

[enipla]

High Speed Rail? For whom? At what cost?

The FIRST order of business should be to give tax breaks to companies that allow their workers to telecommute. Saves money, and doesn’t cost a dime. It gets drivers off the road and reduces oil consumption. And reduces wear and tear on roads.

Let me see if I can pull a number out…… Here it is, at least 20% of us could work from home and go into work once a week. The idea of needing an office needs to be put to rest. And will be put to rest in the next 10 years (IMHO).

Our communication networks will need to be ahead of us. But it is a heck of a lot cheaper than High Speed Rail.

Get daily work commuters off the roads and the roads will be open for you to use your Volt to run from LA to SanFran.

There is no need to use a train to do this, and as an Obama voter, I’m surprised that he does not see how obvious this is.

Commuter Trains in the US? That’s a waste of resources (IMHO). We need to think farther ahead than that.

[smiling_bandit]

If the states want to do it, fine… but elave me out of it. I have no intention of paying for something only a narrow corridor of poeple will or can use. I might be willing to allow a small amount of public, national monies to go into it, but that’s it.

Of course, that does seem to be the real clincher. Somehow, the people on the coasts who supposedly most want it… spend all their time trying to convince me I desperately need to pay for it. Pull from your own pockets!

[Grumman]

@Sam_Stone

So I can choose to get in my car and drive for 45 minutes straight into my underground heated parking stall, or I can walk a block to a bus stop, wait five or ten minutes, Ride the bus to the train, wait 5-10 minutes for the train to arrive, ride the train for 15 minutes, wait 5-10 minutes for my next bus, and ride it for another 15 minutes. Then walk two blocks from there to my office, eating another 5 minutes. Lots of hassle, and it actually takes more time.

This is a bit off-topic, but does weather or traffic make walking infeasible? Because it sounds like you could do it faster by ignoring the busses altogether. Ten minutes to walk to the light transit station, five waiting for the train, ride the train for fifteen minutes and then walk 20 minutes to work, for a total of 50 minutes.