What are the prospects for a three-tiered rail transit system in the U.S.?

Great Debates
41

Sam: Where I start to get mad is when the people who live in the city start calling the people who live in the suburbs idiots and parasites

Certainly, it’s not nice to call people idiots or parasites, and I share your distaste for such tactics. However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that suburban development is often disproportionately subsidized, often by the very metropolitan areas that are losing population and tax base to them.

Automobile ownership, as has been pointed out, is also significantly subsidized; from artificially low gas prices, to externalized costs of dealing with pollution from car exhausts, to zoning regulations mandating a certain amount of off-street parking space in every new home or shopping area construction, the ease and convenience of cars is made possible by contributions from taxpayers.

Car owners and suburbanites who don’t know these things are—well, certainly not idiots, but not quite thinking the matter through. Those who expect to be disproportionately subsidized and don’t see anything unfair in it are—well, certainly not parasites, but not quite seeing the other side of the issue.

Vdc: I couldnt sit on a CalTrain now, seeing all the white collar people riding, without thinking of all the poor in the area being forced to subsidize my train ride. I may be able to afford $8+ a day (plus parking) to go to and from the city, but most poor in the area probably cant, especially when its around 5 times cheaper and 45 minutes faster to drive.

You seem to be assuming that all those poor people have the option of driving whenever they want to. Actually, it’s not cheaper or faster to drive than to take the train—if you don’t happen to be able to afford a car in the first place.

It’s true that once you own a paid-for car (and don’t factor in subsidies or your maintenance costs), the marginal cost of using the car on a given trip is likely to be significantly less than taking public transit, and the convenience is likely to be significantly greater. However, if you can’t afford to get a car in the first place, that reasoning doesn’t apply. Sam Stone has eloquently limned the disadvantages of being forced to rely only on public transit, but there’s a reason his family was taking all those buses: it enabled them to get most of the places they needed to go (despite the serious hassles and restrictions) and it was significantly cheaper than buying a car.

Yes, it sure can be tough being a non-car-owner in a built environment designed primarily for private automobiles, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being a non-car-owner in a built environment designed only for private automobiles, with no public transit available. If we dump subsidized mass transit, we’ll be making more problems for many poor people, rather than solving them.

Some other advantages that your “white-collar” commuter train provides to poor people, though you may not have thought about it:

  • It relieves highway congestion so that the poor people who can afford to save money by driving will spend less time in traffic.

  • It provides a backup system for people who can manage to maintain a car for ordinary use but can’t afford to rent an extra one for special circumstances, e.g., when the car’s in the shop, when a relative needs to come into the city for a doctor’s appointment, when the weather’s bad for driving but they can’t afford to miss work.

  • It reduces the amount of parking needed in the metropolis, so that space which would otherwise be devoted to parking lots and parking garages can be used for higher-density businesses that can employ more poor people.

  • It makes the metropolis more attractive as a destination for tourists, conventioneers, and other visitors who would rather get around for a few days without the expense of a car, thus stimulating the metropolitan economy and producing more businesses that can employ more poor people.

So maybe you shouldn’t go forever renouncing your CalTrain ridership just yet; it may be a lot more helpful to “all the poor in the area” than you imagine.

42

A couple of posters have mentioned that gas prices are artificially low. Can someone explain how they are artificially low a cite would be nice too.

43

Well, they’re not artificially low in the general sense that the fuel is getting direct subsidies.

Fuel is artificially low because the full costs of fossil fuels have been externalized. Meaning that society as a whole bears some partial costs, rather than the producer/consumer. One example is pollution. Pollution from fossil fuels has costs - decreased public health, damage to buildings, etc., etc. These costs are not reflected in the price of gasoline like other costs are. So, in effect, fossil fuels are getting a societal subsidy.

The way to bring these costs into the price of the fuel is through taxes. So by saying that fossil fuels are subsidized, they are saying that the taxes are not high enough to compensate for society bearing some of the burden.

Of course, there’s been no study to my knowledge that has explicitly been able to figure out what an appropriate tax rate would be to counteract the externalities. It may be that the tax rate in the US is right on and European tax rates make fuel artificially high. Or it could be that the US is too low and European is just right. Or both could be too high. Or both too low. Or US too low and EU too high.

I, personally, am in favor of increasing the tax because I believe it is too low. But I could be wrong.

44

From http://www.progress.org/gasoline.htm

You can get an executive summary of the ICTA report here – http://www.icta.org/projects/trans/rlprexsm.htm – and the complete report, in pdf format, here – http://www.icta.org/projects/trans/realpricegas.pdf.

45

And then take a light-rail train to the general area of Capitola you’re trying to reach, then hop a streetcar to your destination neighborhood, get off, and walk to your final destination.

46

Regarding the artificially low cost of gasoline alone, see my post above, and the report from the International Centre for Technology Assessment.

For the rest, I got – and rather simplified – my figures from Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay (University of California Press, 1997), Chapter 6, “The Cost of the Car Culture,” pp. 120-121:

At this point you might well want to know, what are Kay’s cites for these figures? From her notes at the back of the book:

I tried to check that last one – I found the website for Environmental Defense (Environmental Defense Fund) – with several keyword searches, I could not find the study cited – perhaps it just hasn’t been posted on the site. So I’ve e-mailed Ms. Kay for more info (her own website is at http://www.janeholtzkay.com/ – ain’t the Information Age great?) and if she tells me anything, I’ll let you know.

47

Not as much as now. Think how much road space and parking space 30 cars take up, compared to one bus carrying 30 people.

So you haven’t lived in a place with decent public transport!

Perhaps the problem in America is that people have only seen bad public transport, and don’t know how convenient a suburb (not a city) can be if designed around good public transport. By that I mean buses and trains that run every 10 minutes even on weekends.

48

Fifty years ago the United States had arguably the most technologicly up-to-date and most comprehensive passenger rail system in the world. Every major city had some sort of light rail or trolley system and smaller cities had at least bus systems. Metropolitan areas were compact and had grown along public transit routes.

Air travel killed long-distance rail service and cars killed urban transit. I’ve seen nothing in this thread that suggests the situation is any different today.

Take a look at a road map from Chicago to Kansas City. There is no direct Interstate highway route – you either have to jog down to I-80, go to Des Moines and head south, or go to St. Louis and head west. Nobody wants to drive from Chicago to Kansas City.

There is direct Amtrak service that follows a pretty straight line. The train makes, if I recall correctly, only three stops. It takes 7 hours on the night run, 12 hours on the day run.

Let’s stipulate high speed rail services from Chicago to Kansas City. Let’s further stipulate that a high speed train can make the trip at triple the average speed of the current service.

So that would be a minimum of 2 hours 20 minutes.

Scheduled flight time from Chicago to Kansas City? 91 minutes.

That 51 minute difference means you just lost the business traveler.

People outside of the Northeast really have very little comprehension of the tremendous distances in the Midwest, much less the Pacific West. Chicago-St. Louis is often mentioned as a possible high-speed rail corridor. It’s almost exactly the same distance as Boston to Philadelphia, but without the population density. Hell, St. Louis to Springfield, Illinois is about the same distance as Philadelphia-New York, and that’s not anywhere close to half way to Chicago.

49

[QUOTE=kunilou]
Let’s stipulate high speed rail services from Chicago to Kansas City. Let’s further stipulate that a high speed train can make the trip at triple the average speed of the current service.

So that would be a minimum of 2 hours 20 minutes.

Scheduled flight time from Chicago to Kansas City? 91 minutes.

That 51 minute difference means you just lost the business traveler.
QUOTE]

And the two hours you have to spend in both airports (for things such as security checkin, loading the plane, weather and air traffic delays, and retrieving checked luggage), and the hour (30 minutes each way) to get to and from the airports from the city centers (where presumably the train stations would be located), means you just got him back.

What hasn’t been mentioned in these discussions is the increasingly crowded and inefficient air transportation system. The Hub and Spoke system used by air carriers means that the thirty or so busiest airports in America are becoming more and more saturated with traffic and passengers. It’s probably safe to assume that these airports are closely aligned with the list of the 24 largest metropolitan areas listed by BrainGlutton above.

So if we’re talking about the usefulness of a new train system, we should start thinking about not how it competes with the aviation industry, but how it could complement it. In Europe, most every airport has a train station, making connections between modes of transport very easy.

Consider this scenario: I think we all agree that there’s a “sweet spot” in terms of trip distance where a high-speed train would transport a passenger quicker than an automobile (on the low end) and a plane (on the high end). I submit that 200 miles is the low end. That gives us about an hour at top speed; otherwise we run into the problem that Voodoochile stated, whereby the train has to stop at every little town on the route. And Gorillaman suggests that the high end is 1000 miles.

So someone traveling from Los Angeles to Denver would probably fly. Let’s assume two hours in the airports, again, and driving time to and from the airports–that might be 90 minutes, DIA is way the hell out in the prairie and LAX is in the middle of a horrible traffic corridor. The flight itself is about two hours, so that’s total travel time of five and a half hours. A train going 250mph would need over three hours to travel the 844 miles . . . but we’d also have to add the 90 minutes on the ground, as well as time spent in the almost inevitable stops in Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and maybe even a mountain town like Eagle, CO, and the fact that the tracks would be longer than 844 miles, which is the “as the crow flies” distance between the two cities.

But let’s consider someone going from LA to Eagle (which is close to Vail and other mountain resorts). Instead of flying and renting a car in Denver, they’d get off the train and save at least three hours time (two hours to drive, plus time in the airport and in traffic).

Or consider LA to the Bay Area. A high-speed train integrated with BART and Caltrain might have just two segments, Bay Area-San Luis Obispo and SLO-LA. Each might take 45 minutes to complete, plus a stop in SLO . . . call it less than two hours. Flying takes an hour, plus time in the airport, plus air traffic backups (if SFO is foggy, that shuts down one of the two runways, causing backups throughout the country.) According to this site, 2.8 million people fly on the LA to San Francisco route each year (which I don’t think includes the routes between Oakland and San Jose in the north and John Wayne and Burbank in the south). If you get 1 million of these people to take the train, at $100 round trip, that’s $100 million per year.

The real question is one of political will. California residents will be voting at some point on constructing a rail link (website here) between San Diego, LA, the Bay Area, and Sacramento. Their assumptions are 50 miles between stations in rural areas, and 15 miles in urban areas, and two and a half hours between LA and San Francisco. Problem is, they keep delaying the vote because of the shaky state of the state’s finances. But here’s where we pretty soon may see the rubber hit the road . . . OK, bad analogy.

50

Nitpick: In fairness, we have to consider that, if we do build a national high-speed rail system, the trains will be natural targets for terrorists – they can’t hijack them, but they might try to smuggle bombs on board, like in Spain earlier this year – so we would probably have security checkpoints in train stations, just as strict as the airport security precautions. We would also probably have to provide security cameras along the tracks, and security fences on both sides, to stop anybody from planting bombs on the tracks.

But it’s still worth doing. We just need to take the precautions our times make necessary.

51

Both before and after the Madrid bombings, nobody in Spain or Britain are contemplating such security measures. They’d be simply impossible.

And why would they be necessary on a long-distance train but not on the NY subway?

52

Well, most of the major airlines have been losing buckets of money ever since before 9/11/01, and the government has, in some cases, stepped in to assist them. Yet nobody seems to suggest that, because we are subsidizing air travel, we really don’t want it.

With all its problems–basically, slowness due to having to wait on sidings for freights to pass in the other direction–the L.A. – San Diego line does make money, or so I was informed at one point. THe trains are frequent and quite crowded. It would be shortsighted to assume that a well-run dedicated passenger rail system could not be successful, especially for distances and travel times where driving and flying are equal. Amtrak, for the most part, shares the rails with the freight companies, and has to yield to them, since it’s the freight companies who own the rails.

There is really no rail service at all, presently, between L.A. and San Francisco. Amtrak will sell you a ticket, but the trip takes about 10 hours, and is actually mostly by bus. To look at the popularity and profitmaking power of this “rail” service and to conclude that a railroad would be impractical is nonsense.

53

Good point – I guess there’s no way to make the world completely safe.

54

[QUOTE=Airblairxxx]

And the two hours you have to spend in both airports (for things such as security checkin, loading the plane, weather and air traffic delays, and retrieving checked luggage), and the hour (30 minutes each way) to get to and from the airports from the city centers (where presumably the train stations would be located), means you just got him back.

What hasn’t been mentioned in these discussions is the increasingly crowded and inefficient air transportation system. The Hub and Spoke system used by air carriers means that the thirty or so busiest airports in America are becoming more and more saturated with traffic and passengers. It’s probably safe to assume that these airports are closely aligned with the list of the 24 largest metropolitan areas listed by BrainGlutton above.

Actually, I think my Kansas City-Chicago example works exactly because O’Hare is a nightmare and the KC airport is a good 20 miles from downtown, while Chicago’s train station is right downtown and KC’s is close.

My hypothetical business traveler isn’t necessarily going from city center to city center. He might be going from Schaumburg to Lenexa, in which case, going downtown might actually take longer than going straight to the airport. There is no ideal location for inter-city transportation that benefits all travelers and penalizes none.

A hub and spoke system is exactly what’s being proposed for high-speed rail. In other words, instead of driving to the airport, flying to a hub city, changing planes to a spoke city and renting a car, you get yourself to a local train station, transfer at the main station, take a high speed train to a hub city, change trains to a smaller city, then get to the nearest local station and go about your business.

Again, my argument is that high speed trains might work in a densely populated corridor like Boston-Washington or even San Diego-Los Angeles. But look at a map of Cleveland/Toledo/Detroit/Chicago/Milwaukee. The distances are too long and the density is too light.

55

There are other considerations than just time. Let’s say we had high-speed rail with first class seating that was the same price as airline coach (i mean the actual seats, not the service). Would you be willing to spend an extra couple of hours travelling for that kind of comfort, if the price was reasonable? What if you were overweight, and couldn’t travel in airline coach? Or extremely tall?

I frequently have to take red-eyes for work. When I’m flying overnight, I’d be very willing to spend an extra hour travelling if it meant I could get a comfortable seat to sleep in.

I don’t know if this is enough traffic to make high-speed trains profitable, but it’s certainly something to consider.

56

Another thing to mention…

My understanding is that the internet has caused a boom in shipping traffic (because of online ordering). What difference does it make to most cargo if it takes a few extra hours to get to a destination? And this doesn’t even depend on corridor density. Even if very few people would take the train all the way from LA to NY, there’s still probably plent of cargo to be sent.

57

Brainglutton: Do you cites include any of the positive externalities of car ownership? Like a more flexible work force, lower cost of land in outlying areas, time saved in travel to/from work (and hence a more productive work force), offloading of casual transportation needs from the public system, ease of emergency transportation, and a zillion other factors?

Because if you only look at one side, it’s disingenuous.

And does your study also consider quantities of scale? (i.e. when the cost of roads can be shared between 10,000 people through gasoline tax, it’s more efficient than if you have to maintain the same roads so that commercial vehicles can use them).

58

Shortly after 9/11 (11/01, actually) I…

-Slung a bag over my shoulder and walked down the street.
-Got on the T and took it to South Station in Boston.
-Caught the Acela to Penn. Station in midtown Manhattan.
-Got on the A Train and took it up Central Park West.
-Walked a couple blocks to the hotel where my SO was staying.

In less than six hours, door-to-door.

I rather doubt I could top this if I had, rather than taken the train from Downtown Boston to Manhattan, taken an shuttle from Logan (Eastie) to La Guardia (Queens), with all the cab rides, possible subway connections, security checks, etc. that are involved. The actual journey from Boston proper to New York City proper would take very little time. It’s the B.S. you have to deal with getting yourself to, through, and away from airports that’s the killer. For such a trip, I’ll take high-speed rail any day. Plus, I don’t think I spent any more than the airfare and cab fairs, overall.

59

I don’t discount the “positive externalities,” Sam – but the obvious advantages of automobile transportation are what we’re paying all that money for, not things that should be subtracted from the overall price. That’s the point: We put all that money (much, much more money than most people seem to realize) in, and personal mobility, a more flexible work force, etc., are the things that come out. Adding up both sides of the transaction – I think we have to ask ourselves whether it’s really a good bargain. But as it is now, we don’t ask ourselves. We just assume it’s all to the good. The automobile has sometimes been described as “the elephant in the living room” – it’s there, it’s huge, it produces bad smells and tons of waste products, yet for some strange reason we just ignore it and never talk about it.

60

Well, the essence of “externalized” benefits is that the recipient is getting more than they pay for—just as externalized costs mean that payers are contributing less than they really owe. The classic example of an externalized benefit fouling up market price-setting is private school tuition: paying to educate your individual child is quite expensive, and the direct benefit to you individually may not be all that great. There’s a huge benefit to society as a whole in having lots of its children well educated, but that diffused benefit (which is largely external to the individual consumers, i.e. parents) cannot be captured in the price that individual contributors are paying directly.

Similarly, many of the costs of automobiles (the roads, the gas, the pollution, the accidents, etc. etc. etc.) are external to the direct payments that individual car owners make in order to operate cars. What Sam seems to be suggesting is that the car owners are also directly paying for significant externalized benefits—in other words, that they actually pay more for automobiles, gas, insurance, repairs, parking, etc., than the individual advantages of their cars are really directly worth to them.

That would suggest that it’s more advantageous to be a non-car-owner in a car-dominated society—just as it’s more advantageous to be a non-parent in a private school system: you get the externalized benefits of the educated workforce and so forth without contributing to the costs.

Certainly, I’d be interested to see whatever numbers Sam has to back up his claim of significant externalized benefits from cars. But on balance, it doesn’t look to me as though most non-car-owners find that a car-dominated society really does provide them with a net advantage over car owners. As Sam’s own personal history indicates, most non-car-owners find, on the contrary, that not having a car in a car-dominated society is overall a severe disadvantage to them. Whatever externalized benefits you receive from almost everybody else having a car (say, getting occasional rides from friends) seem to be far offset by the burdens of not having adequate alternatives to cars.