Not really because you can’t crash a train into a skyscraper.
Again, suppose you are going from Newton, Mass. to Barrington, RI. To get from Newton to Canton/128 is about a half hour drive. Then it’s another 30 minutes or so to get on the train and take the train to Providence. Then another half hour or so to Barrington. That’s a total of about an hour and a half, ignoring the fact that you need to leave early to make sure you make your train. And that your friend in Barrington has to drive extra and wait for you to pick you up.
From experience, I can say that transfering from one form of transportation to another tends to add significant time and aggravation to a trip.
By contrast, if you drove straight from Newton to Barrington, the whole trip would take about an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes. It’s just a lot quicker and more convenient to drive.
Anyway, I agree that having a stop in the suburbs with lots of parking makes rail more feasible, but I’m skeptical that it will improve things enough to make a big difference.
And your point in pointing to a wiki article regarding an event that everyone here knows about it is?
You still can’t crash a train into a skyscraper so the security concerns are different. How is this hard for you to comprehend?
As exemplified by your own post. You guys are turning the SDMB into a wankatorium for train geeks and naysayers. Jaysus, the election is over, do we have to go through every single one of the wingnut arguments again?
Sheesh.
That trains are vulnerable to terrorist activity. Duh.
Very easy. But that’s not quite the argument you seemed to be making before. A couple posts ago, you seemed to be arguing that you can’t crash a train into a skyscraper, and therefore therefore a situation could never arise where concerns over terrorism would delay and inconveience passengers similarly to the situation in airports.
A few years ago I had to fly to California on short notice, and the cheapest fare I could find was to fly out of T.F. Green Airport in Providence. I drove there and left the car for a few days. (The parking was much cheaper there than at Logan, too.) If I had to make that trip again, I’d probably do it just the same way. But the last time I drove to New York, I was stuck in traffic most of the way through Connecticut; I don’t want to do that again.
I don’t see anyone here claiming that rail travel will replace cars for every journey. I just hope that it will be designed well, and will take lots of people where they want to go with fewer demands on our national resources. I’ve seen evidence that it’s effective and popular when done right. What’s wrong with that?
True, but so are a great many other things. If terrorists just want to cause mayhem, why not crash a truck full of explosives into the Staples Center during a Lakers game? If someone takes over a train, they can destroy the train. If someone takes over an airplane, they can do a whole lot more. Trains don’t need security greater than any other public gathering.
Another nice thing about traveling by car is that you often can work your way around the inevitable problems that develop with the roads. This tends to be a lot harder with plane and rail. I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent a lot more hours of my life (proportionately) stuck waiting in airports and train stations than hours stuck in traffic on the road (for inter-city travel).
I think it’s easy to underestimate just how difficult it is for trains to compete with cars and planes (and buses). There are a few areas in the United States where trains have been pretty popular. Mainly the Boston to Washington corridor.
And a lot of public gatherings have a good deal of security. Maybe it doesn’t take 30 minutes or an hour to get through, but it’s still significant time and inconvenience.
Do you know what else you could do to ‘create jobs’? You could employ 10,000 people to dig a big hole, and another 10,000 to fill it back in again. Won’t the economy boom with all that job creation?
Repeat after me: Governments do not create jobs. Period. Just where do you think the money for the train comes from? It comes from other California taxpayers, who then buy less and invest less. Or it comes from California businesses, who then have lower profits and have a harder time attracting investment capital and workers.
There are no free lunches. Governments don’t create wealth, they just divert it from one area of the economy to the other. The money government extracts is diffuse, so it’s harder to see the negative consequences. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
In fact, it’s entirely possible that a project like this will result in a net jobs loss for Californians, because the taxes come directly from California citizens and businesses, but the money may be paid out to international conglomerates, foreign consulting firms, or large international companies like General Electric. And if it does get built and displaces air service, won’t that cost jobs in the air travel industry?
In addition, the money taxes could come from industries that have large human capital requirements, whereas the money paid out will be spent on high technology (probably built out of state and trucked in). To convince me there would be a net jobs gain, you’d have to show that the HSR project would employ more workers per dolllar than the industries the money was taxed away from.
Never justify stuff like this as a jobs program. That’s a losing argument. You want to convince me that high-speed rail in California is a good thing? Explain to me why adding such a beast to the infrastructure will result in a net economic gain for California. To do that, you’d have to show me why 10 billion dollars spent on this will do more good than the 10 billion spent on whatever else Californians wanted to do with the money. You’ll have to show me how this boosts California’s productivity, or reduces travel costs or other benefits the state by more than 10 billion plus ongoing operating costs.
And that means people will stop using it. If the benefits of the train are marginal, it won’t take much to make it a worse option than driving.
But don’t worry - this being California, the very clever central planners in Sacramento will probably ‘fix’ that by doing something like putting heavy tolls on the alternative roads to force people into the trains. Or they’ll heavily subsidize it, or they’ll put a new ‘congestion’ tax on cars to push people towards the trains.
I don’t get the fascination with high speed rail. I mean, as an engineer I love the things, and most boys love trains as kids and that carries over into adulthood. But as a purely practical matter, high speed rail has a ton of problems. For one thing, it’s not as energy efficient as you’d think. I did the math in a thread a few months ago and figured that two people in a car that got better than 30 mpg or so would be traveling more efficiently than passengers on HSR. If we get any kind of reasonable improvement in batteries, we will be moving fairly rapidly into electric cars. So trains even lose that advantage.
This is a silly time to be investing in HSR in the first place, because alternative transportation technoogies are evolving very quickly. You can see a sea change in our transportation coming just over the horizon. We don’t know if it will be biofuels, or electric , or electric hybrid, or diesel, or hydrogen. But it’s coming. It may turn out that our auto fleet becomes very efficient (the next CAFE standards will make the average car more efficient than HSR). One of the problems with rail is that it’s a very long-term investment in a specific technology at a time when technology is advancing at a lightning pace.
HSR is also bad in today’s world because it is fixed in geography, and the country and world are becoming inscreasingly fluid. Have a look at how often airline routes are changed - added and dropped. That’s how much the demand for air travel between two points fluctuates from year to year. But you can’t move an HSR line. Build it for the level of demand measured today, and you’re bound to have built something undersized or oversized by the time it’s ready, and therefore less than optimal in operation. And it will get further from today’s demand as the years go on. It’s a very inflexible piece of infrastructure.
It’s also extremely capital intensive, and has a very long payback time, if it ever does. And you’re giving up the money today for benefits that won’t even begin for years. That adds to the real cost.
High Speed Rail might make sense in a few very dense corridors, between two large cities that are bound to be around and large for a long, long time. Try to nail down as many variables as you can to minimize risk. Use extra margins of caution around estimates for cost and revenue - the tempation for supporters is always to underestimate the first and overestimate the second. But with projets of this magnitude and risk, you need to be conservative. And right now, a conservative analyssi says that HSR generally does not make sense.
Yes, indeed, thus the comparative
Wrong guess, but oddly in Europe the nappies bag and planning around travel schedules does not seem like an enormous burden on parents. In fact, that’s possibly one of the most absurd objections, as what is clear to me is you have simply never particularly tried train transit as such (on a sustained basis such that your initial whining on subsided to make a real appreciation).
I see plenty of possible objections, but this is just rubbish.
That is mere whining on. I mean really, one could come up with equally idiotic and trivial objections to cars - bloody tyre going flat, etc. etc. etc.
Joburg? That’s your example? You simply are close minded. Joburg is in South Africa, one of the murder capital of the world where there is massive underinvestment in police, etc.
Fine, you’re close minded and afraid of change as such.
I don’t understand your point.
Whether it’s an enormous burden, or simply a significant burden, travel by car is much more convenient for a family going inter-city.
I’ve logged many many hours on trains in the US, Europe, and Asia. If you don’t believe it, it’s your choice.
So what? I have no idea what your point is. New Orleans has a higher murder rate than South Africa. What you refer to as “massive underinvestment in police, etc.” is a fact of life in many parts of the world, including some places in the United States.
I have my own rules of debate. Personal attacks are not permitted per Rule 5. Kindly stop.
Hold on. I’m a Brit and I wish our bloody government had made up it’s fatuous mind and build a HSR network in Britain 10 years ago but to ignore the advantages of a car when moving a young family about doesn’t help. It is a lot easier to use the car as one big suitcase, particularly when travelling point to point when neither point is next door to a station.
From my point of view the maximum advantage of HSR would be for business travel. Limited luggage, company paying for the taxi to the station etc. as an alternative to the hassle of airports.
The point to make is that, with more and more people travelling for different reasons and over different distances, there is need of all means of transport - car, rail (conventional and high speed), and air. And, one way or another, they all need public investment whether in building infrastructure or in direct subsidies.
To be sure, problems come up in any form of travel. But in my experience, traveling by rail (or bus or plane) magnifies problems and makes them more stressful and inconvenient.
For example, if you are traveling by car and you miss your exit, it usually doesn’t cost you more than 10 minutes. By contrast, if you miss your stop on a train, it can easily cost you an hour.
No, I’m afraid you don’t know it very well. One set of burbs is a two hour drive from another, and there are many sets of burbs. And freeway access doesn’t mean fast access, unless you are talking about the low-density rush hours between 2AM and 4AM.
One of my favorite bloggists has a number of posts on the HSR fascination. A recent post of his with opinion on the California boondoggle is here
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2008/09/the-9-billion-d.html
Warren has an open suggestion to any HSR (or LR) project…buy every supposed rider on the new system a Prius instead. It will be cheaper.
He has done some research (available on his blog) on other metro rail systems and concluded that that total expenses - capital plus operating - always blow through initial estimates by a huge margin.
The state has gone to shit (fiscally speaking) under a Republican governor and Prop 1A, like all referenda, was nonpartisan and (AFAIK) received no funding or official support from any particular party.
You really don’t know our Governor very well, do you? He wised up and started acting all bipartisan around reelection time a couple years ago, but you shoulda seen the things he was trying to do to our fair state when he first came in. And his Republican agenda was not completely unpopular, by the way–we were, collectively, sick of Democrat Gray Davis.
By the way, the Governator campaigned for McCain.
Um…either that, or this is paid for partly by bonds and mostly by private investors, not to mention the massive in-state job growth it will create, the ticket revenue it will bring in, and the boost to the tourism industries and local economies of every major city along the proposed route. Or are you just flinging whatever falls out of your ass, instead of actually reading the thread?
Clearly, you’ve never driven from Anaheim to San Francisco.
It’s not intended for commuters, it’s intended for sightseers, foodies, tourists, business travelers, and weekend warriors.
I think you’re misunderstanding the political process of getting this thing done. There isn’t an entity higher than the state of California which decided that ours was the place to start the HSR experiment. Instead, a group of supporters and investors got together here in California and put a referendum on the statewide ballot, and voters approved it rather overwhelmingly. It has nothing to do with any prospective plans in any other states, and has no connection whatsoever to the federal government of the USA.
The first route, and the only one which has been specifically approved by the voters so far, connects Los Angeles and San Francisco. As it stands, a positively immense number of people drives from one to the other on any given weekend (and some do it several times a week). Believe me when I say that you’d better pack some bags if you’re going from LA to SF, no matter which mode of transportation you use, and that any train would be much faster than driving when you consider the non-stop traffic nightmare in LA and the hassle of driving a car in SF.
BTW, I personally will go to San Francisco quite a bit more often (read: at least once at some point in the future 
) when we have the HSR. That’s the main reason I voted for it.
$74 a pop is the latest number I’ve heard. No cite, although it did come directly from the mouths of babes (the Yes on 1A campaign).
Clearly, you have not lived in California and had relatives in other parts of California.
This referendum only applies to one route, between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which I hear are large cities that are bound to be around and large for a long, long time.
ETA: By the way, the untold story here is that, on Election Day, we voted down several other propositions which involved massive expenditures of money. In fact, the California electorate sent a unitary message about spending tax money by voting down every substantial proposed expenditure except those using bonds instead of taxes (like the Veterans Bond Act, the Children’s Bond Act, and the High Speed Rail).
Actually I have lived in California (Bay Area; Central Valley; and Los Angeles) and traveled by car many times between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles area. It was never a problem, although it’s possible that I was not travelling at the peak times.
Let me ask you this: In your view, how long would it take to drive from Woodland Hills to Hayward on a typically congested weekend? Yahoo maps says it takes 5 hours and 20 minutes . . . . how much time is added by typical weekend congestion? Given the sparse population of most of the area between, I doubt it adds very much. But I would like to hear your estimate.
From the perspective of reducing fuel consumption, the question is how many people will switch from car (or plane) to train.
Fuck if I know. I live in San Diego and haven’t been north of Bakersfield (on this coast, anyway). I also spend very little time in LA and have only been there a handful of times. Nor do I have any idea where Woodland Hills or Hayward are (more specifically than “kinda near LA” and “Bay Area”, respectively).
Considering that Prop 1A passed by a huge margin, I’m guessing a lot of people hope to use it. I can’t give you any more specific estimates than that, but I’ve already enumerated a couple of reasons why I voted for it, and the others have been listed in this thread.
I don’t think I’ve claimed to have any specific estimates, but I have given my best guesses based on what I know about California traffic patterns.
Whereas airports, airlines and highways always run like clockwork?