Actually, Amtrak has been upgrading the line between Chicago and St. Louis over the past several years and has had trains hitting 110 mph on one stretch since 2012.
Come to Houston & ride our light rail. So far, we’ve got one line. That was just extended to luxurious Northline Mall. (Houston humor there.) Two more lines will be finished this year & will continue to serve the area Inside the Loop. (We’re an auto-based city & our light rail funding was opposed for years by Tom Delay; we got a late start.)
Our light rail (and that’s what I’m discussing here, since you decided to lump it in with high speed rail) is coordinated with bus service; most of us ride the bus & transfer to the train–or vice versa. Suburbanites still drive–or use one of the Park & Ride lots & then take the bus. No light rail for the suburbs yet. (Not that all suburbs are rich & all city neighborhoods poor.)
Thank you for your concern from Lima, Peru.
The suburbs mostly don’t want them. I’m out in Sugar Land, and the attitude is kind of snotty towards mass transit (Tom Delay is both a symptom and a cause here). Except of course, when gas prices spiked a few years back.
Houston is kind of an interesting study anyway. The reason the light rail doesn’t (and won’t) run along the major highways is due to a hodge-podge of interference and regs from the last several decades, most often by the more conservative city councilmen, who wanted to kill any hope of local rail and, instead, expand highways.
It’s kind of a problem, because there’s no realistic way to expand highway access out to Katy or up to the Woodlands or down to Clear Lake indefinitely (40 lane highways?).
I know there’s a bit of an inferiority complex in town towards Dallas, but their more organized planning and less baldly partisan politics have led to one of the better light rail systems.
The contrast is kind of interesting. It’s not so much government can’t fund infrastructure, but that you need everybody on the same page. Nobody objects to highway expansion, so the Katy Freeway expansion is passed immediately. Light rail? Lots of objection to that for various reasons, so it takes a while.
Pay me $1M per year and I will reduce my driving 95%. Good deal? Cost matters.
The problem with the high speed rail project in CA are many. Original cost estimates were way too low. Ridership estimates were too high. The time it would take to travel was too optimistic. The routes suck. The Authority charged with administering the program is full of cronies.
When the initial ballot measure was approved in 2008, this was during some serious budget shortfalls within the state and voters still approved a $10B bond to fund this fantasy train that no one would ride. It’s evidence of general stupidity more than problems with big government.
The Wham Bam Tram?
The “tripled its costs to 4 billion” train?
The one that didn’t increased total ridership of public transport?
The one that cannibalizes buses?
The one that can only really increase ridership by being free?
The one that didn’t reduce miles driven?
Ahhh, that one.
While I think there was more than a bit of concern trolling in the OP, he is right about one thing: the amount of spending devoted to infrastructure in the Stimulus bill of 2009 was a joke when we consider the amount of money needed to build regional high-speed rail systems much less a national one. The Democrats in general and the President in particular needed to to push for massive amounts of infrastructure spending especially on a national high-speed rail system and dozens of new nuclear power plants. This should have been combined with an uncompromising nationalistic rhetoric that would “outpatriot” the Republican rhetoric on military spending.
Instead liberals seem to have given up on this sort of “big ideas”/pro-labour/national liberalism in favour of offering only modest tweaks in infrastructure spending that would barely be enough to maintain existing facilities and instead focus on social issues which serving to divide up the New Deal coalition vote.
My point was that all of the “minor potential obstacles” are part and parcel of all construction projects. That re-paving of your residential neighborhood? Yeah, that had probably 90% of the same regulation requirements as the rail project. Even if there was more to submit for the light rail project, you spend more time on the front end gathering and compiling that information for submittal to the regulatory body.
No one who manages a construction project doesn’t know these things - or, rather, they SHOULD know these things. Obviously, the project managers didn’t bother to know or care and bungled through it. It may have been because of politics. It could also be that the “project manager” was someone’s nephew. In any event, it’s not like someone snuck into their office at 23:59 the day before the ground breaking ceremony and dropped 10,000 pages of regulations on their chairs to be completed before the ground could be broken.
The number one problem with high speed rail or any other form of public transportation is that most Americans simply are not used to it. We want our own cars, park right in front of the building, and come and go as we please.
So let’s say that Mass Transportation Project X is installed. It seems like a good idea and a budget conscious family can save money. What happens when you go to use it? All of the rich and upper middle class people who can easily afford cars are still driving their cars leaving a substantial majority of poor and lower middle class people using Project X. This, demographically speaking, will lead to higher crime rates and dirty, shoddy conditions on the transport.
For the budget conscious family, saving a few bucks isn’t worth getting mugged over, so they start driving their cars. After a while only the poorest people are using the transport and it gets dirtier, more crime ridden, causing more people to leave. It’s a vicious cycle that turns all forms of public transportation into shit buckets, not worth it at any price.
*I don’t mean to say that ALL poor people act this way, but as a rule crime is more prevalent with those in that economic status. This obviously doesn’t apply in urban areas like Manhattan where people are used to public transportation and cars are cost prohibitive for all but the rich, but in 99% of the country this is true.
The Obama administration didn’t have a “plan” so much as a vague idea.
While I agree with your (partly-humorous) list of today’s obstacles, this is not a new phenomenon. Example: are you aware that the master plan for Southern California’s transportation system, designed in the early 1950’s, was nibbled away by NIMBY objections and others until, when the completion date arrived in the 1970’s, it had only half of its original mileage, with little hope of ever increasing it? Most freeway construction had ceased by 1980, replaced by futuristic high-speed rail schemes, a system totally inadequate to handle the passengers who preferred cars.
A friend of mine once said, “The best form of public transportation is the private car.”
That is true now and not even flip when it comes to the transportation of the future. Why do some people in the U.S. even want high-speed trains? The reasons are usually fairly superficial and non-logical when you press the issue. The major reason you will hear is that they spent time in Europe or Japan and liked the trains there so they want the same thing in the U.S.
However, this is a case where U.S. exceptionalism really is true. You can’t build affordable European or Japanese style trains in the U.S. with any significant demand for many reasons - the number one of those is that the scale is completely different and the major cities are too far apart for it to be as good a solution. The only part of the U.S. where high-speed rail works at all is the Boston to Washington corridor and even that has limited popularity and bleeds money.
With any ideas of this type, you have to step back and ask what problems you are trying to solve and stay focused on those core goals rather than get fixated on one particular solution. Brain Glutton gave a perfect example of tunnel vision when he said it is worthwhile to cut down on passenger car miles at any cost regardless of any other considerations. No it isn’t. That is a rant and not a solution to anything unless clear, better alternatives are available and this project doesn’t do that. That is an example of losing focus of what the original goals are if they were even well-stated in the first place.
We are getting into the realm of technology today where we may see passenger cars that can be driven autonomously as dynamically combined trains of vehicles in our lifetime. Something like that may make European and Japanese style trains seem quaint and antiquated if we look to newer and better solutions rather than just insisting on a single idea that people favor just because they are familiar with it.
That doesn’t just apply to trains. It applies to large projects of every type. There is a problem if there is bureaucratic gridlock every time a project is proposed but there is an even greater threat of a poorly though out project that accomplishes few of its original goals and yet somehow gains traction.
I think the actual problem is that pretty much every American city was built or rebuilt around car transportation. We have a chicken and egg problem to convert over to a high speed rail of any kind. We need to give up the cars or move closer together for the transit systems to benefit us like they can in Europe.
Zoning laws keep residences far away from industrial or manufacturing areas and most retail/commercial areas are on the outskirts of a large areas of houses.
So, if you wanted to get to work, you take public transit of some kind (traditionally bus, which is slow), get off between .25 and 2 miles from your work and then walk there. Even if you work in a shopping mall, in most cases you’ll have a LOT of parking space to walk across. So, from a time perspective, you spend two to three times as long getting there as if you hopped in your car.
On top of that, our pricing actively discourages people to move closer. As you get to the higher density downtown/urban areas, the prices go up. In my metropolis’ downtown, you can get into a condo for about $200,000 at bargain basement pricing (I saw one tower offering from 750,000 to 2.9 million dollar condos). About half the time, you have to pay extra for a vehicle parking spot.
So, you pay as much as a mid-level house and get trapped to where you move to because there’s no good public transit. If you do have a car, you spend a lot longer trying to get out of the urban core and get to where you work.
We have a long way to go of subsidizing mass transit before we start changing our topography wholesale to work with it.
This is a fascinating way of looking at it when, if you think about it, the United States has a gigantic mass transit system in heavy use right now adored by rich people. It’s called “air travel.”
Americans were not “used” to air travel either and yet embraced it cheerfully, and after deregulation made it more affordable they embraced it even more. The fact that it’s cheap enough to be used frequently by far more Americans has not turned off rich people. The reason, of course, is that air travel actually provides a transportation benefit that cars do not. For most people it is irrational to drive a certain distance instead of flying. There is a reason to take an airplane besides just a vague sense of civic duty. If you want rail to become popular you have to provide people with a reason to take it.
Current rail system are only popular in major urban centers for perfectly rational reasons. If you want new rail systems to flourish it has nothing to do with what Americans are “used to” and everything to do with what is rational for Americans to use. Make rail an economically rational option and you’ll have no problems filling the trains.
I mean, while I’m Canadian, it’s much the same thing here; VIA rail, our Amtrak, is not terribly popular, and it’s not hard to figure out why; I simply have no reason to use it versus taking my car for any distance under four or five hours, and beyond that it’s better to fly. It’s much more costly when one considers the inconvenience and time. But if there was a real high speed rail system, well, that might be different.
Texas provides an interesting example here. It’s about a 3 - 5 hour drive between the three major urban areas (Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio/Austin).
If you’re not in a rush, you can drive, but Southwest provides at least a dozen short flights between these cities every day. That’s where they got their start and how they made their bread and butter in the early days - commuter flights between the big three cities and connecting service to other Texas towns. You could barely do a day trip between cities if you had to drive, but you could put in a full day of work if you hopped on a commuter flight.
High speed rail between the 3 major Texas metros that doesn’t stop in every podunk town would actually be effective. You could actually get some work done on the train if you wanted, and it would be no slower (and potentially a fair bit faster) than driving.
This idea had enough support that in the late 80s/early 90s Texas investigated building a system similar to the TGV. But local investment wasn’t there (car culture strikes hard) and Southwest lobbied hard against it. Since it would compete directly with some of Southwest’s best business, of course they did. Even a recently proposed passenger rail line between Houston and Galveston got a full PR blitz from Southwest.
Indeed, I’d imagine a proposed high speed rail system in the Northeast would be heavily opposed by JetBlue, Air Canada, Porter, et al.
If I have to go from here to New York City I’m going to either fly or drive, depending on the specifics. Probably fly out of Buffalo; it’s mass transit, but it offers conveniences and safety driving does not. I cannot imagine why I would take a train. If offers many of the frustrations of mass transit with no time advantages at all.
Now, if there was a high speed link, something like the TGV, you’d get my attention. A TGV from Buffalo to New York City would be more convenient than air travel (unless the TSA went ballistic over it) but so much faster and easier than driving. I’d love TGV-style rail links to New York, Montreal, Ottawa, or Chicago. Rail as it currently exists is completely out of the question; I am far better off driving.
The Obama administration’s “plan” for this is not a plan at all, it’s a series of open-ended funding offers of amounts of money that aren’t even close to enough. (The Canadian federal and provincial governments, conversely, don’t even pretend to have a plan; Canada is the only country in the G8 that has absolutely no high speed rail of any kind.)
To be fair to Canada, rail roads suck to maintain there. And building new lines over the Canadian Rockies would probably be a political disaster - either in cost of money or cost of lives, judging by what they had to do to get rail roads through there in the first place.
Outside of the Rockies you have what amounts to a huge plain (well, at least compared to the mountains) that is very prone to inclement weather in the winter. It’s an expensive endeavor to keep the cargo rail lines going in the winter. I would think that it would be as expensive for commuter rails to keep themselves going also.
So without a ridership need already existing, a lot of government subsidy dollars would go to keeping those commuter trains safe to operate. As a result, i’d guess it’s less tenable for high speed rails to our northern friends.
When I was traveling in Europe years ago, they had several levels of train: local trains stopped at every podunk town, inter-city ‘express’ trains stopped only at major towns and cities, and then the high-speed trains mainly between major cities. This stratification gave people lots of options depending on their destination, schedule, and budget.
I dont see why we should not invest in the existing rail system to enable more choices where it makes sense (around urban centers). A train that ran non-stop from SF to LA could be done today and probably would be popular as an alternative to driving, if it could be cheaper than flying. Add to that a car-train like they have on the East Coast (bring your car along) and it would have some advantages.
The problem is every train seems to have to stop in every town it passes, which adds a lot of time to each trip. The rails are not set up for ‘express’ trains - they need extra sidings every few miles and would need to pass thru some towns at full-speed. Add to that many miles of track, at least in CA, cannot handle a train going 75 mph.
I would much rather see a large investment in upgrading current rail capabilities, both passenger and freight, than some pie-in-the-sky high-speed rail fantasy. I think it may be less expensive and more effective.
With due respect this is kind of an assessment of high speed rail based on looking at a geographic map of Canada (and one not very carefully examined if you think Canada apart from the Rockies is all plain) but one without the cities. Nobody is seriously suggesting high speed rail across the Rockies or in the middle of Saskatchewan.
The most logical place would be the Quebec City-to-Detroit corridor, which connects close to twenty million people in an area where the weather is not any more inclement than New York City or Philadelphia - and also happens to cut through a metropolitan area that has a very, very serious shortage of transportation infrastructure.
the barrier isn’t weather. The weather isn’t that bad where half of Canadians live (which, of course, is why so many of them live there.) The barrier is that the government lacks the will and skill to get it started.
It would be logical except for one serious flaw: Border crossings are no longer painless, quick or easy. Those damn Canuck terrorists keep trying to bust through and nuke our cornfields, so we must be vigilant.
Then you’d be better to pick an example of one that is more clearly and widely valued. HSR rail is a very, very dubious investment, and even if the government was really, truly committed to it and wasn’t merely making noise to please certain key constituencies (I have my doubts).
Yes, conservatives just love oppressing the poor for no reason. It’s their hobby.
It’s 2014, and poor people who travel fly. On almost any route over a hundred miles or more, flying on a budget airline is faster and cheaper than Amtrak. That’s the Amtrak that uses decades-old rail lines and trains and gets large taxpayer subsidies. Taking HSR would cost significantly more than flying Southwest.