There are a number of arguments against investing in high-speed rail in the United States. Trains will require subsidies by the government; not enough people will use them; passengers prefer to use cars between cities because it’s more convenient and so forth. Whatever merit these arguments have, they fail to take into account the long view. People may not use trains as much when gas is at $3 a gallon, but by the time we have any significant high speed rail laid down in the United States, gas may be much more expensive.
Furthermore, the only reason driving is cheap and convenient is because fossil fuels are heavily subsidized by the government, and roads – for the most part – are public and funded by tax dollars (not to mention our public investment in auto manufacturing). Since we subsidize transportation already, why not subsidize rail? Trains are safer, greener, and provide both freight and passenger options for a future American economy less reliant on oil. Whatever we lack in support infrastructure will come in time. And yes, it will be expensive, but so was the interstate system which cost in today’s dollars approximately $429 billion – quite a lot more than the $8 billion included in stimulus funds.
Along these lines, this piece in Miller-McCune is very good:
Perhaps passenger rail will have to be subsidized by the government, not unlike our Social Security, NASA, thousands of libraries and fire departments and all our roads and airports. This hardly elicits cries of nanny-state socialism in Europe, where government-run, comprehensive health care has been in place for decades, but in America it has become a call to arms for libertarians and “fiscal conservatives” who insist that high-speed rail must pay for itself, while ignoring the massive subsidies received by the auto and airline industries.
[…]Aviation not only receives billions for basics like Federal Aviation Administration operations, airline security, noise mitigation funds for homeowners, and air service to small communities, but airports themselves benefit from tax-free financing on everything from cargo buildings to retail stores — not to mention that the FAA covers 75 to 95 percent of airport planning and development costs in outright grants.
Still more curious is why anti-rail critics don’t concede the fact that our nation’s highways are subsidized with every gallon of gasoline we buy, yet — despite conventional wisdom to the contrary — they rarely pay for themselves. (The federal gas tax has remained at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that will produce more than $40 billion in highway construction and maintenance funds — the Highway Account, part of the Highway Trust Fund – annually through 2011.) How can they fail to have noticed a much-publicized, man-bites-dog study in 2008 from the car-loving Texas Department of Transportation that boldly stated: “There is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their true cost, but most roads … pay for considerably less.”
I think we need to get ahead of the curve on this. Gas won’t always be cheap. Roads will only get more expensive to maintain. As our roads become more crowded, the public health costs and environmental costs will climb higher. Fuel efficient or electric cars won’t change the fact that most transportation fatalities are automobile related. Rail offers one sensible solution to many of these problems. And not just passenger rail – increased capacity for freight rail is just as important. Furthermore, as far as I’m concerned the very best way to use stimulus funds is on infrastructure – not just the roads and bridges we have now, but the infrastructure of the future as well. Why not take a man-on-the-moon approach to this? Our current levels of funding are woefully inadequate.
High Speed Rail is not only really cool – something supporters should certainly capitalize on – it’s also an extension of the greatness of America’s rail history. The railroad was a huge driver in our emerging economy, connecting a vast geographical distance and allowing commerce to flourish. High-speed rail will be a driving force in our future economy, and a necessary component of that economy. Unless, of course, it turns out that we actually do have an infinite supply of oil.
NobodySpecial
Hi, welcome to the Democrats.
Or did you not notice that every single Republican administration and Congress tries slashing public rail as one of it’s first ‘eliminating waste’ ideas?
I would like to see two-track work on high speed rail – one for the obvious metro corridors (NY-Boston-Washington sort of stuff) and one transcontinental train going through most of the major population centers in the North to be the big obvious sign of our investment in high-speed rail.
aimai
Of course we need to “get ahead of the curve on this”–like we need to do on every matter of great national, international, and global importance. But its pretty clear that good policy is not good politics in the age of the Party of No and the filibuster. I just no longer see a clear path to good economic, social, or any other kind of policy at the national level in the US. The more sense something makes for the country as a whole, the harder the large, wealthy, corporate interests seem to fight against it.
I suppose a “truth in payment/transparency in costs” tag might help the ordinary American citizen grasp just how screwed up the accounting system is (for instance, I’d like to see us spend as much on educating our children on a yearly and per capita basis as we do imprisoning people. I’d like every school aged child to be given a t shirt stating how much his town is paying to educate him compared to how much his town is spending on cleaning up the disasters from our failing educational system, our decrepit social welfare system, and our decayed manufacturing/jobs sector. The tagline should be “If you think education is expensive/try ignorance.” But numbers, please.
In the case of cars every single car should come with a “lifetime cost” in US subsidized oil exploration, tax breaks to oil companies, and cost per gallon of gas/per year at standard rates and unsubsidized rates.
aimai
Neutron Flux
Has anyone seen any reliable (independent) projections of the cost of a gallon of gas as we reach peak oil?
Decent projections could help inform the decision for high speed rail.
zzyzx
The problem with high speed rail is the Mountain Time Zone. With little population, difficult terrain, and dangerous weather, it’s hard to imagine cross country high speed rail.
Vancouver -> Eugene? Sure. SF-> SD? Of course. Boston->Miami, NYC->Chicago? Why not?
Beyond that though, you have issues.
I just drove SF-> Telluride and Telluride->Seattle so that lesson is very fresh for me.
Aaron
It does make sense, for sure – but the argument that it is about the money I think missed the mark a little bit. Budget hawks (often) like to cite the cost of anything as a reason not to do it. However, when it comes to bigger bombs, more military bases, or upper-bracket tax breaks, these issues seem to disappear.
Rather, I would argue the issue is not necessarily one of cost-benefit, but rather cost-benefit for who? In this case, the economic logic may fall to the political one. There is more votes/dollars to be had in perpetuating the military-industrial complex than in building infrastructure.
CalD
We could just do what Eisenhower did: Tell everyone that we need the rail system to move tanks and troops into position quickly in the event of an attack on American soil by our many enemies, who of course are everywhere.
AZmando
Every summer my wife and I drive from Tucson to a small town in the eastern mountains of Colorado. Every summer I rant:
” If we were in Europe, we could ride a local bus or tram down to the train station in Tucson, catch the fast train over to Las Cruces/El Paso, then switch to another fast train north to Pueblo, Colorado, and then take a bus or a slow train over to our small town.”
We could walk up and down the train, nap, read, meet new people, and relax. It would probably take less time (180 mph v. 75 mph), and be a far more comfortable and pleasant trip. The interstates are nice, safe, and easy driving, but anyone who has ever travelled the intercity express trains in Europe knows that driving sucks big-time in comparison.
me
No worries. Jesus will be back soon.
Mnemosyne
@zzyzx:
Depends on where you want to have it. We apparently aren’t permitted to have a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas even though it would be a financial bonanza because then kids could go straight from Disneyland to the Mustang Ranch (/eyeroll). If we were permitted to do it, though, Las Vegas could be a pretty good hub to a lot of the West.
slag
@zzyzx: Have you ever been to Alaska? Not that their rail is high-speed. But it definitely gets into some hard-to-reach places. I believe it was built on something people used to call “American ingenuity”. Which has been replaced by something I like to call “American pants-wetting”.
Napoleon
Good post.
Philip Longman had a good peice on rail in the Washington Monthly about a year ago.
Here it is:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.longman.html
MikeJ
@CalD: When Cuban paratroops land in Colorado you won’t be laughing, and Patrick Swayze won’t be around to save you.
But yeah, call it defense spending and demagogue the fuck out of anyone who hates America enough to dare oppose it.
zzyzx
@AZmando: “(180 mph v. 75 mph)”
After you get past that canyon before The Thing? on the way to Cruces, sure, but I-25 is a windy, hilly, WINDY road culminating in Raton Pass. There were many times where I didn’t trust my car to go 60 on that highway. I don’t know what those forces would do to a train going 180 mph, but I suspect there would be a lot of derailments.
gypsy howell
@aimai:
And you can add to the car cost the trillions we’ve spent on our military meddling in the Middle East, which would be of zero interest to us if it weren’t for protecting oil industry interests.
The Grand Panjandrum
Your logic is impeccable. Until we change how Congress is elected and lobbied (see Lessig’s writing on this) good luck with more than just a handful of Congress Critters doing the right thing. They have zero incentive to be visionary. The system just doesn’t work that way.
Roger Moore
@zzyzx:
Teluride is not a good example; it’s a place that’s almost deliberately hard to get to. The most likely route would be along one of the well established cross country rail corridors. We were able to build a trans-continental railroad using mid 19th Century technology, so there’s no reason we can’t build a high speed cross-country railroad using early 21st Century technology.
Ethan Epstein
make it so, number one.
Gin & Tonic
Last week or the week before (I’m too lazy to look it up) The Economist had a lengthy piece on how the US freight rail system is way, way ahead of freight rail elsewhere, in particular in Europe. Freight rail is the dog, not the tail, here, and leads to the difficulty in improving the speed or capacity of passenger rail. In Europe, where the passenger rail is so good, the incentives are reversed, and thus freight rail sucks. Although they are both “rail”, the imperatives are different enough that they can’t coexist well at a high level. You can’t optimize for both, whereas a hundred years ago they were much more similar, and you could have decent freight and passenger transport on the same track system.
Mary
I took Amtrak from DC to Norfolk last week to meet up with family and travel down to the Outer Banks together. My sister and I left the Outer Banks at the same time. I got dropped off at the NEwport News train station, waited half an hour, took the train to Union Station, took a wrong turn out of the Union Station parking garage and subsequently spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get pointed in the right direction, and finally got home. My sister and her family drove their van straight from the house in OBX to her house in Maryland, which is less than four blocks away from home. I beat her home by 45 minutes.
I love trains.
gypsy howell
@The Grand Panjandrum:
And the only people who can change the way Congress is elected and lobbied is Congress. Somehow I don’t think they have much incentive to change the very laws that are protecting their wealth and privilege.
chopper
when i want to get someone keen on the idea of high-speed rail i just make sure to remind them of exactly how shitty flying is these days. i’ve taken the acela before and it’s pretty damn nice in comparison.
Jay B.
High speed rail makes too much sense, there are already some major infrastructure pieces in place (stations, rail lines — although I know that’s also the problem — and routes) and it would be smart.
That’s not the America I know.
And as far as the Moutain West goes, the Chinese, for various reasons, many of them sinister, have built high-speed rail to Lhasa. Moreover, we’ve LONG had coast-to-coast trains. They still run them. Why would this be any different? The City of New Orleans and the Texas Eagle depart right from downtown LA.
Hell, even the Ozzies have a train that goes through the endless Nullarbor plains. What does it matter if it’s high-speed or not?
zzyzx
LA -> Vegas is another good route that should be built.
Grab the easy routes first before trying to deal with the hard parts.
And it wasn’t the 100 miles to Telluride that caught my eye as much as the vast expanses of Utah and Nevada that would have to be crossed and tunneled across with nary a town along the route. Reno to Salt Lake is a LONG stretch of road…
Davis X. Machina
The average voter has no idea what high-speed rail, or any passenger rail, looks like.
To him, it’s a very expensive substitute for Greyhound, which is all poor and colored people need, and all they deserve. And they already have that.
monkeyboy
The problem is that trains make tremendous sense connecting high population blue areas and make little sense if the aim is to fully connect low population red areas.
The problem federal support of trains faces is the Senate where the red interests will oppose anything that makes is largely for blue areas.
Maybe the best approach would be to tie trains and roads together so that red areas get more support for roads while blue areas get less support for roads but more support for trains.
Zifnab
STOP RIGHT THERE.
Social Security is not “subsidized by the government”. It’s absolutely paid for – every penny – by the 6.2% tax you pay on all wages up to approximately $100k / year. And, in fact, it’s income Positive with a capital “P”. So income positive, in fact, that the program is currently sitting on about $4 trillion in US Treasuries as a cash reserve.
You may continue.
slag
@Gin & Tonic:
I’m unconvinced. Goods go where people go. Trains can do a lot of different things at the same time (unlike airplanes, which seem harder to multitask).
Cacti
As for getting ahead of the curve on rail transportation, we’re already so far behind the curve, that’s probably a multiple decade project.
Not that I’m opposed, just sayin’.
AZmando
zzyzx
I was on the intercity from Hamburg to Munich one time. They had built wide sweeping curves, tunnels and easy grades through the hills of central Germany – the screen in the back of the car said about 230 kmph. It was so smooth, the coffee barely wiggled in the cup.
If we can engineer and fire smart bombs to destroy Pak houses from the bunkers in Nevada, I-25’s hills and the wind will be nothing. We just need to apply our “American ingenuity” in a positive manner.
gypsy howell
@chopper:
Almost any train beats flying these days. I love the metroliner to NY– no airport security bullshit (at least not yet) roomier more comfortable seats, mobility, wifi, phone, cafe car, even electrical outlets for your laptop. I’d like to see the fares come down though – they’re still much too high.
NobodySpecial
@monkeyboy: When you talk airlines, most places that have an airport don’t do direct flights to everywhere – they do hubs. Greyhound is the same way.
There is no good reason that the high population urban areas of the South cannot be hubs for improved rail. If you want to sell it to them, remind them that part of the reason the Confederacy lost the war was because they had a shitty rail system.
Frank
I proposed the same thing to a tea bagger I met recently. He thought it was un-American, waste of tax payer money etc etc. Yet, he apparently didn’t have a problem with all the government subsidies automobile drivers get or our airplane industry industry for that matter.
We have a populace that have opinions that are not based on anything than what the American Pravda dictates, ie FoxNews.
Shygetz
I don’t want to dump on a post I agree with so much (my recent trip to Italy has just convinced me more that rail is something sorely needed in the USA). But I have to ask…
Just why, exactly, do you insist on calling yourself a conservative when you hold to so many positions that would classify you in the eyes of the vast majority of American people as a pretty mainstream liberal? I mean, you insist on calling yourself pro-life when you are adamantly pro-choice, you are pro-public transit, pro-tax increase, etc.
Seriously, I’d like to see a post on this topic. Is it some attempt to reclaim the definition of conservatism, a la Sullivan? A visceral dislike of the label “liberal”? Is it just easier to get a paycheck as a contrarian conservative than a fairly mainstream liberal? What is it?
Brachiator
This is nostalgia, not economics. Unfortunately, high speed rail is not a practical solution, even in California where some preliminary bond proposals have already passed.
Rail is a 19th century to 21st century problems.
If freight needs more track capacity, transportation companies can invest in them. No public subsidies are necessary.
On the other hand, AMTRAK is already a continuing money loser, even when highly used commuter corridors are taken into consideration. And passenger trains, including proposed high speed rail lines, must share freight tracks, which limits the maximum speed of rail.
There is no math mumbo jumbo that makes rail cost effective. And because of the recession, rail and bus services are cutting back on scheduling and also increasing fares, pushing riders back into their cars. At this point, subsidies would only shore up failing systems, not expand rail options.
You would also still need road and cars or other vehicles, taxis and buses, to get people from rail stations to their final destinations.
A case in point. In Norwalk, California, at least a hundred commuters would take the Orange County line train to work. For some riders, a drive could take up to 2 hours from some cities. A fleet of shuttle buses would take workers to City Hall offices. The shuttles were timed to get workers to their desks on time, and ran in the mornings and afternoons, even accommodating night shift workers. In July, the city ended the shuttle service because of budget cuts. Even though city hall was a short distance away from the train station, almost all the workers switched to driving, because the local bus service did not run often enough to get them to work on time, and this service could not be expanded or the route shifted (the shuttles ran directly to the city hall garage, while the local bus line required a short walk to city hall).
I don’t know if rail is as green as people claim. But it is definitely slower, less efficient and potentially more costly, since a commuter would also have to pay bus or taxi fares to complete a trip. Add in government subsidies needed to maintain the system, and it hardly seems a reasonable solution.
Gin & Tonic
@slag:
Not really true. The primary use of freight rail in the US is bulk commodities. Coal, mostly, and wheat, that sort of thing. A mile-long coal train from East Nowhere, Montana, moving at 30 mph doesn’t play well with a 6-car-long passenger train.
Martin
Successful high-speed rail requires a difficult decision – ending the subsidization of car and air travel. These debates about the cost of rail are bullshit from the start as they skip past the debate over why other transportation costs are acceptable but rail is not.
I would really like to see Congress create a transportation plan competition. Get the various transportation planning groups working on proposals for what a national transportation plan ought to look like. If rail doesn’t work, so be it, but let’s approach this sensibly. Lest we think this is politically impossible, the Peoples Republic of San Francisco is ending the subsidization of parking by having parking rates fluctuate based on demand, and making the demand cost consistent from curbside meters to parking structures. The result will likely be noticeably higher parking costs during peak hours, but with a good mass transit system, low-cost alternatives that benefit from increased demand exist. The city will bring in extra revenue from the meters, they’ll reduce congestion by coupling demand and cost, they’ll drive more commuters to mass transit reducing the need to subsidize those systems, and if they can successfully get some cars off the road, they’ll lower their maintenance costs for the road network.
If SF can pull off something like this, I don’t see why it can’t be done everywhere else.
LGRooney
Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint sold me on the idea long ago.
Svensker
Not to mention the fact that the suburbs are subsidized via the road system we have, which does a bunch of things, including:
1) destroys inner cities
2) aids in the segregation of rich suburbanites from poorer city folk
3) leads to further resource wasting as people have to drive long distances to shop and work
4) leads to the destruction of open/green space because of all the houses/malls, etc.
Perhaps we should instigate a system where the pump price of gasoline reflects its actual cost, not to be all libertarian or anything. Then we could see if rail seems so expensive after all.
Jody
I live in CA and have ranted for a long time that it’s crazy that I can’t quickly travel between here, San Diego and the bay area on a train.
Anyone that’s driven up the shit-filled hellhole that is route 5 would agree that driving is highly overrated.
slag
Yep. That was the WH’s original vision. I don’t know where that stands now, though.
El Tiburon
You were much more fun when you were a faux-conservative.
Actually, it is an insult to us liberals that you are considered a conservative, especially if you are going to co-opt our ideas as your own.
Now, you’re just a common-sense American with liberal/progressive ideas.
So perhaps now we can dispense with the entire nanny-state bullshit that your (ex)side keeps tossing out.
What a concept: MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, THE GOVERNMENT IS A CRUCIAL AND NECESSARY COMPONENT OF THIS GRAND EXPERIMENT THAT CONSERVATIVES HAVE SPENT 30 YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY.
Frank
@Brachiator:
Take a look at the composite earnings of the entire airline industry. You will find that it has never made money. Should we either get rid of that industry or stop all the government subsidies that the airline industry is getting?
What about cars? Should we get rid of that mode of transportation as well? What about all the subsidies this industry etc is getting?
jl
Some responses to Brachiator:
“But it is definitely slower, less efficient and potentially more costly, since a commuter would also have to pay bus or taxi fares to complete a trip.”
But the most promising high speed rail routes are medium haul intercity routes (SF to LA, for example), and much of the substitution would be from future increases in air travel to high speed rail. You don’t need a bus or tax, or a car, to and from the airport?
“Add in government subsidies needed to maintain the system, and it hardly seems a reasonable solution.”
Roads are not subsidized from general funds? I saw a study recently that said about 50% of state public road funding is from general funds. that is not a subsidy?
I am at back at work now, so will look for links this evening on general funds devoted to public roads, and post what I find.
Perry Como
The trains need to look like this.
zzyzx
@slag:
and I was a big fan of that. I’d love for the urban corridors to have high speed rail. Go to downtown, be in Portland in 90 minutes? I’d never take I-5 again.
georgia pig
I agree, but it doesn’t even have to be “high speed.” Right now, for example, I’d be happy with reliable electric train service to DC that averages 100-110 mph, and does that more than 2 times a day. That alone would take a huge bite out a dangerously overcrowded airspace. I’ve become to detest flying anywhere in the US (non-US carriers tend to be a different experience), and you’d have to have a death wish to want to drive on I-95.
Providing decent rail service doesn’t require tremendously expensive infrastructure. What it requires is capacity and dependable modern equipment so that folks can be sure they won’t spend 4 hours on a rail siding broken down or waiting for freight traffic to pass. Some intercity rail should properly be high speed, e.g., SF-LA. There also may be room for high speed cross country rail, but you wonder if air may be better for that.
None of these things are mutually exclusive. Germany has exquisite local and regional trains and high speed intercity rail service. It also has airports. The US, however, seems to be increasingly devoid of understanding that there are national goals other than bombing the shit out of foreigners that require national government action. We could never build an interstate highway system now because we’d have too many morons bitching that it would give free rides to nameless moochers of the wrong skin color. A national rail plan would suffer the same fate, it would be politicized as some kind of kowtowing to environmentalists or some kind of creeping communism.
Comrade Dread
Yeah, I’m fine with rail projects.
Hell, I think we should subsidize rail systems in large cities that run alongside, in the middle of, or above all of the freeways with stops at every highway exit. To be more convenient for commuters and to give the ones who are driving and sitting in traffic jams train cars full of happy commuters speeding by them on their way home every 10 minutes.
Amanda in the South Bay
Here in CA, the biggest opposition comes from rich folks in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, etc-people who decided to live in fancy homes next to the (long since pre-existing) railroad tracks, and are bitching about their property values.
Even among die hard CA HSR supporters, I think the general consensus is that HSR is mostly a regional thing, not for long cross country trips. Eugene-Vancouver, or like what CA voters approved in 2008, the Bay Area to SoCal. Building HSR through the Siskiyous, for example, to connect the PNW with California, would be a pretty daunting technological challenge, and probably really expensive. There’s a lot of improvement that can be made for those longer train trips that don’t involve HSR.
I think comparisons to Europe sorta miss the mark, simply because the US is soooo much bigger; the distance from SF to San Diego is almost twice that as London-Paris.
My guess is that a lot of opposition to HSR comes not only from rank and file Republicans, but people who are older, wealthier and probably aren’t going to be around in 20-30 years when fuel prices make travelling by air too expensive for regional trips (where, of course, “regional” in American usage is the equivalent in Europe of “crossing several countries.”)
p.a.
Let’s pay for high speed rail by selling off all TVA assets in any Authority states with 2 Republican Senators. Write the bill before Dems lose the Senate. They like privatization and balanced budgets/pay-go? Give it to ’em where the sun don’t shine.
Lihtox
I think it will be a long time before people use anything but air to go from NY to LA, but we don’t have to think that far ahead. Acela is a good start, but how about a decent Chicago-NYC line? They had two of them ten years ago; now you can either go via Albany (bit out of the way) or you can change trains in Pittsburgh. And in either case, unless things have changed much in the past 10 years (and maybe they have), whenever you go through Ohio you risk multi-*hour* delays, stuck behind a freight train doing 10mph.
There’s so much room for improvement in even small ways.
MikeJ
@gypsy howell:
It’s ~$75 for the metroliner from DC to Penn, it’s ~$30+tip for the cab from LGA to the city.
MarkJ
@Gin and Tonic
You’re assuming that freight and passenger rail will run on the same lines. If we had dedicated high speed passenger rail it wouldn’t be a problem for freight rail. Yes, dual tracks would take up more space but we’re much less space constrained in the US than in Europe.
The major challege as I see it is getting the rights of way for more dedicated track into core urban areas. This was a problem for the interstate system (it’s why there are spokes missing in the Capital Beltway spoke and wheel system here in DC) but fewer people are left who remember neighborhoods being leveled to put in highways. For most of us, they’ve just always been there.
Linda Featheringill
@Neutron Flux:
The cost of gasoline at the consumer level as peak oil occurs and the shortage kicks in:
I haven’t seen any hard numbers. Everyone says “expensive.”
Ethan Epstein
I am so tired of Americans who travel to Europe once or twice in their lives (junior year abroad!!1!) and then return and start droning on about we “need” to build more trains. As if we can just point to the Dutch train network – the one that serves one of the world’s most densely populated countries – and say (perhaps with a flurry of a magic wand), “build that.”
Mary G
I do agree with all of this, but
I took the Amtrack from LA to Las Vegas, which is a 5-6 hour drive. It took eight hours because we kept having to pull over for freight trains, which have the right of way. I think we’d need a whole other track.
NIMBY’s would come out of woodwork. It would cost a fortune and many years of litigation to get more land. The city of South Pasadena has blocked the completion of the 710 freeway from Long Beach to Pasadena since 1964. I know, because I was one of them.
I am afraid gas prices are going to get much higher before our only pay attention to this minute/what are the celebrities doing culture will even begin to focus.
slag
@Gin & Tonic: That’s a really good point. Although I’m still unconvinced. Currently, we use trucks to haul a lot of goods that could be hauled by train and aren’t. The trucking industry would hate to see that change, but I seem to recall reading a study (I’m too lazy to look it up) that indicated how much more efficiently (carbon-wise) we could move that stuff by rail.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
I’m not sure why California’s massive budget meltdown proves that rail doesn’t work. It sounds like it was working just fine until the Governator and the legislator decided to try and close the budget hole on the backs of state workers rather than by raising taxes. (Reminder for my fellow Californians: today is Furlogh Friday, so don’t bother trying to visit any DMV office!)
If you’re trying to argue that it won’t work because people will refuse to pay the necessary taxes, then say that. Your own example shows that the problem was that the city ran out of money, not that the rail/bus system was unworkable.
slag
@zzyzx: I know. I saw that plan and started to drool a little bit. It was beautiful. I want!
Brett
The best way to save Passenger Rail would be to do two things:
1) Allow Amtrak to close unprofitable routes. One of the reasons why Amtrak has never been commercially viable was because politicians in Congress frequently use their influence to keep a bunch of local routes open, even if they are seldom used and wholly unprofitable.
2) Subsidize separate, high-speed track. One of the big problems with Amtrak’s passenger rail is that freight rail gets a higher priority on the tracks, so the passenger trains frequently have to go on side-tracks for hours on end. If we want to get anything near what the Japanese have with their Shinkansen system, they’ll need separate track.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Amtrack has a problem similar to the post office. It’s run as a public service, including running many lines that are never going to be profitable. The East Coast urban corridor route would be profitable if it were cut off from all the money losing routes that are included to buy votes from less densely populated areas.
Besides, as EDK points out, the other transportation options are money losers, too. Public roads receive far more funding than we get in gas taxes, and that’s ignoring all of the massive subsidies of petroleum that we use as a fuel. It’s unreasonable to complain about rail failing to pay for itself while ignoring that the same thing is true of cars.
Gin & Tonic
@MarkJ:
Lot of hand-waving in that “if.” Of course it’s true. But building the rail for that high-speed passenger train is *expensive.* Not just right-of-way into the cities, but every city and town you pass through on the way. You can’t run 120-mph trains through grade crossings, you have to elevate the track everywhere. That costs. Our bridges are crumbling now and are going unrepaired — who will build thousands of new ones?
Luthe
While I am totally in favor of high-speed rail, there are certain practical issues that have to be considered.
The first is the existing tracks. Rail tracks in America are owned by the rail companies, not the government. Amtrak is ever so generously allowed to those tracks (I can’t remember if they have to pay or not), but freight trains owned by the rail companies get first priority on the tracks (this results in chronic Amtrak delays). If the existing tracks are going to be improved for high-speed rail use, the government is either going to have to convince the rail companies to do it or buy back the tracks.
The second issue is land. If we choose to put in new tracks specifically built for high-speed rail, it will require right-of-way to be acquired. This might be easier in the western, less-populated states, but on the coasts it’s going to be a bitch and a half. There are going to be eminent domain issues, municipalities competing for stations while trying to avoid having tracks go through them, people bitching about noise, and local zoning issues out the ears. Welcome to land use planning in America.
It’s not that it can’t be done. The highway system got built, after all. It’s just that it will take a lot more work than you’d think.
/urban planner
EDIT: I see some of you got here first. Smart people.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Good post.
But we need more than just high speed rail – an effective public transportation system is a nested hierarchy of different systems at large, medium and small scales. What we need is not just high speed long distance rail, but much better local point-to-point systems (e.g. buses, trams, taxis) within the targeted metro areas to complement it, so when people get to their destination they don’t have to turn around and immediately rent a car just to get from the train station to the hotel and where ever else they want to go.
I’d love to hop a train from Albuquerque to LA or Phoenix or Denver, but what the heck am I going to do to get around within anyof those cities once I get there, without a car? Very few of our major metro areas today have good enough public transit or walking friendly architecture to make them attractive to visit without a car. This is why it is so much more pleasant to travel to little towns which are small enough to be walking friendly.
Taking the rental car out of the equation is a big psychological barrier we need to cross in order to get mass participation in using these systems – at which point they won’t need to work as hard at justifying themselves. The title EDK selected for this post exposes a core truth – we have to remove the stigma attached to these systems that they are only for poor people, or at the higher end for Euro-soshulist elites. Taking the train should be as American as eating a hamburger. But it won’t be until there is a world class bus system waiting for you at the other end when you get off the train.
zzyzx
@Mnemosyne:
That’s my main point I was trying to make above. I could see people agreeing for taxes to get a cool train that would get you from NYC to Chicago in 4 hours without having to deal with airport rules. I have trouble getting people excited over a Reno->SLC line that would also be 5-10x as expensive to build.
Gin & Tonic
@slag: “Intermodal” is the fastest-growing segment of freight rail. That’s putting truck trailers on rail cars. Trucking companies have no problem with it and use it extensively, because it reduces their costs. Hauling an intermodal from Chicago, say, to Long Beach/LA, by rail and then hooking it to a truck to take it to San Fernando is way cheaper than driving it all the way.
Politically Lost
After reading the last few posts by Kain, I get a queasy feeling and a thought process that resembles something like this, “hmmm…I support health care reform and expansion of infrastructure spending and reduction of ridiculous types of regulation, marriage equality, reducing dependence on foreign oil too… does that make me a conservative? No, because “conservative” means a special kind of crazy. Jacking off in the bathroom stall of the insane asylum while playing with my own feces in the toilet bowl kinda crazy. And last time I checked, I haven’t done that…not even once.”
I’m having difficulty with this. Can someone explain it too me?
Zifnab
@Ethan Epstein: There’s that enthusiastic Can-Do spirit that really makes America what it is today.
“You want to connect the entire nation with a single rail line? From the Atlantic to the Pacific? Can’t be done. Don’t be retarded, President Grant. Don’t be a retard.”
“You plan to beat back the entire German military machine with a few automotive plants pumping out tanks and planes? While you engage in a second sea war in the Pacific? We’ve got an army slightly less impressive than Poland’s, President Roosevelt. Can’t be done. Don’t be retard.”
“Put a man on the freak’n moon? Are you completely full of shit, Kennedy? Na-ga-na-ha-pan.”
We split the atom and we built the Internet. But we can’t build wind mills and trains. Whatever.
scarshapedstar
You know who else built a national rail system?
Frank
@scarshapedstar:
Thanks for laugh. I needed that!
Cacti
@Roger Moore:
Not to wander too far afield, but this line of argument has long drove me nuts.
To those who say “The Post Office isn’t profitable” my thought is always, well durr. Try getting UPS or FedEx to deliver anything, anywhere for 44 cents.
slag
@Gin & Tonic: Yes! Intermodal! I like that word. We need to use that word more.
Good. Let’s side with the trucking industry on promoting more intermodal transit. And let’s make it go really fast.
Zifnab
@Politically Lost:
So, the problem isn’t actually liberals versus conservatives. Economically, it’s corporations versus populists. Socially, it’s atheists versus bible thumpers.
E.D. Kain wants limited government authority over social issues and practical spending for infrastructure and economic development. He’s not pushing for minority affirmative action any more than he’s pushing for a Jesus in every classroom. He’s a social moderate. He’s not a corporate sell-out, so he refuses to defend ridiculous subsidies and government spending programs that greatly favor a handful of insider businesses.
The problem is that E.D. Kain, like so many conservatives before him, is trapped in the fucking 50s. He thinks conservative means “I agree with Dwight D. Eisenhower” not “I want to make passionate love to Ronald Jesus Reagen”.
rickstersherpa
Hippies like trains. Therefore trains must be eliminated. No Real American rides a train. Only Muslims and Ilegal Immigrants. Thus Spake El Rusho and the Great Sarah!
I am reading Yves Smith ECONNED and one of the many excellent points she makes is that the “efficiency” that neo-classical economists worship (and which the glibertarians use in their selective arguments against passenger rail) is just one value, no greater, or perhaps less than other values such as stability or sustainability.
scarshapedstar
@Zifnab:
I’m pretty sick of this attitude, too. When I was a youngun in the Clinton years, people seemed to have the attitude that this country could do anything. Now it seems to be exactly the opposite: we’re too poor and too stupid to rub two sticks together.
What’s sad is that the people who saw the atom bomb, the moon landing, Velcro, and the Concorde are now the ones most likely to say it’s impossible to lay down some goddamn train tracks.
cyntax
Not “may be,” will be. Working as a transportation analyst I can tell you that none of the companies like Kraft, P&G, Unliver, etc. believe that fuel is going to get cheaper or even stay at the current levels. Controlling transportation costs is one of the primary ways companies are looking to gain/maintain a competitive edge.
So high speed rail should be a no-brainer, but people who like to refer to what businesses do only use that argument to justify why we shouldn’t do something and never look to where businesses are heading as a cue about being proactive (hate that word). Walmart is seriously pushing for optimization of transportation networks and the reduction of carbon footprints but somehow Beck, O’Reily and idiots like McMegan don’t mention that to their aduiences because it doen’t fit the narrative they want to sell.
Gin & Tonic
@Luthe: It’s only a bitch and a half if it doesn’t generate revenue. Look atAlameda Corridor, 20 miles of dedicated track between Long Beach and LA. 20 miles, and it generates revenue of nearly $100m/yr. Freight pays its way.
Mnemosyne
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Note that all of the cities you mentioned are west of the Mississippi. Most of the major metro areas east of the Mississippi have perfectly fine public transit and are walking friendly. We just got back from Chicago and the only walking-unfriendly thing about it was that it was 90 degrees and 80 percent humidity.
Living in Los Angeles, I can tell you that they could have good public transportation, but no one’s willing to pay for it because Those People will use it. The freakin’ train built less than 10 years ago at great expense stops one mile short of LAX because the residents didn’t want Those People hanging around. The fact that it would have greatly reduced car traffic in their neighborhood because people would have been able to take the train from home to the airport was apparently beside the point.
A lot of the small cities have great public transportation. If you can afford it, live in Santa Monica because their Big Blue Bus goes all over the Westside and takes you just about anywhere you want to go for 75 cents. But overall transportation sucks ass.
Brachiator
@Frank:
Comparing composite earnings of the entire airline industry to AMTRAK is comparing apples and oranges. And you could probably do better by taking all proposed rail subsidies and buy people fuel efficient (or electric) cars and use the money more effectively.
@jl:
More realistic studies are suggesting that SF to LA would cost much more than currently projected, eliminating the fantasy that high speed rail would be a lower cost alternative. What’s left is the appeal to going green, which may not be enough to sell it by itself. Also, because new passenger dedicated rail tracks are out of the question, the travel time will be slower than the glossier proposals.
Lastly, the high speed rail proponents are fudging on the number of direct LA to SF trips vs the trips that must have intermediate stops (Sacramento, etc) in order to sell high speed rail to the public. You can’t sell high speed rail as a benefit to the entire state if the only corridor served would be LA to SF.
The declining economy throws all these projections out the window, which were over-optimistic in the first place.
Yep, which is why the idea of rail as somehow replacing cars and the need for roads is a non-starter.
Of course they are. Rail would be an added cost with limited use. High speed inter city rail (especially in California) will be slower and more costly than air travel.
Commuter rail is obviously a great alternative in some places, not so hot in others. I think someone posted something about the rail system in Phoenix, which surprisingly has not been a hit with commuters, but which is very popular with students, shoppers and party goers (because it goes directly to a trendy restaurant area).
Wannabe Speechwriter
I think EDK brought up an interesting subject. For all of his talk of deregulation, this is one field where you need massive government intervention. Urban Planning (and especially Transport Planning) is one field where you need a major command and control government.
And, once again, we can blame good ol’ Ronnie Reagan and the Small Government boys for the lack of high speed rail. You can’t simply build a high speed rail track or a subway line or even a bus route out of thin air. As one transport planner I talked to put it, there is no “bus fairy” that will give us multiple modes of transportation. It takes years, if not decades, of planning and development to properly create the circumstances where people will ride a train with enough frequency to justify its cost.
I am a huge supporter of high speed rail and would love to see suburbia be torn down to make way for transit-oriented communities nationwide. However, I know this-the moment some poor government official says we need to “plan” differently, Glenn Beck is going to bust out with some Nazi Tourettes.
Hugin & Munin
So the we have a consensus: the greatest structural impediment to America’s future is Americans. Good to know.
suzanne
Bingo. I have been frothing at the mouth about how much I want high-speed rail (here in Phoenix, the most discussed potential lines are Phoenix/Tucson, Phoenix/L.A., and Phoenix/Vegas), but it’s never going to be as great as it could be without better city- and neighborhood-scale options working in concert. And the large-scale options will need to get better, too; as others have noted, it’s still going to be unlikely that someone would want to take a train across multiple states on a routine basis. So air travel will need to stop sucking so much ass, too.
Roger Moore
@Zifnab:
FTFY. The real Ronald Reagan would be run out of today’s Republican Party as a tax-raising, commie appeasing RINO.
Martin
@zzyzx: Wrong approach. You aren’t asking them to pay more taxes for rail. Right now, they think they pay no taxes for highways and airports. Change that first.
The reason the interstates aren’t tolled is that the legislation was passed as a nuclear attack defense plan, and once that pretense was given up, it was technologically impossible to reconcile high-volume, high speed auto travel with tolls. But that problem has been solved with things like FastPass. There’s no reason now why Congress couldn’t eliminate the highway subsidies, install electronic tolling nationally at appropriate intervals with congestion metering, and create a rebate system through either directly through the device or through your tax return so that everyone gets a certain amount of free travel (and transportation businesses can get more, etc.) which is covered with a reasonable level of taxation. It allows for an open federal road system up to a point, and above that point costs fall on the individual.
Once voters see a direct cost (so much per mile or per year, etc.) then they’ll have some context against which to gauge the cost of supporting rail or buses, etc.
But if legislators are serious about taxes and spending and deficits, then they need to make the cost of government more transparent to voters. They don’t need to shift the full cost to voters, but that awareness needs to be there. Right now it’s not. Education is a very powerful thing.
Stefan
passengers prefer to use cars between cities because it’s more convenient and so forth.
This is certainly why I drive from NY to Chicago. The convenience.
Alexander D. Mitchell IV
@MikeJ: That “Metroliner” (a term Amtrak hasn’t used in a decade, BTW) is not “high-speed rail.” If you’re going to appropriately compare, you have to pull up an Amtrak Acela fare. They seem to start at $125 and go up into the $200s for the same route.
Jay B.
When and how? That route doesn’t exist and hasn’t for years.
Erik Vanderhoff
@zzyzx:
But connecting major metropolitan areas to one another would be the most efficient use of a rail infrastructure. Connecting one side of the country to another via one or two lines really isn’t a high priority.
Frank
@Brachiator:
Why is it apples and oranges? AMTRAK is forced to keep losing routes. The airline industry can get rid of losing routes. I guess I don’t follow your argument.
So buy more cars and build more roads? Even if you give all the proposed rail subsidies to people to buy fuel efficient cars, it is literally peanuts when compared to what new roads, road repairs etc etc costs.
Chad N Freude
@Mnemosyne: I believe the urban myth that the Green Line didn’t go to LAX because the taxi and shuttle companies didn’t want the competition. I don’t think “Those People” had much, if anything, to do with it.
Cackalacka
@zzyzx:
How were the shows?
It should be noted that high speed rail would be developed to serve folks between large cities, not lugging thousands of Phish heads from Berkley to the remote areas of the Rockeys.
Think east coast, west coast, or the mid-west. The elevation of NY, Boston, Providence, DC, Philly, Baltimore, Hampton Roads, Charleston, Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa, etc are essentially the same, and the grades linking any of the above would involve altitude changes of 100 mph speeds were reached and essentially held. We’re talking about 88 mph (as ‘high speed’) a century after it had already be done. A century that included the space program.
I flew from NC to Newark two weeks ago. Would have taken the train, but there is only one train that leaves daily, early in the morning.
The plane was delayed by 2 hours. Why? Air conjestion over NY. Then, there was another 2 hour delay after that. Why? Heavy storms over my airport kept us grounded. We landed 4 hours after we were scheduled to. Mind you, this was an improvement over the last 1/2 dozen flights. Of the last 7 times I’ve ‘flown’ to the NY area, 2 were cancelled, and 5 were delayed by 4-10 hours. From my door, it takes 8 hours by car (without traffic) and 9 by train to get to Manhattan. Add in the security theatre we’re paying for, runway time, and deplaning/baggage time, and suddenly the airline industry’s raison d’etre is not there.
Now, I get that semi-regional hoppers do not have priority landing in JFK/Newark, we get bumped (rightfully) for trans-oceanic/continental flights. When we circled our approach two weeks ago, I saw literally scores of blinky lights; planes queing for their approach. A majority of those blinky lights were not trans-oceanic/continental. They were folks like me, hoping to span distances of <800 miles, but did not have the ability to spend a day in the car.
Suffice to say, my initial delay would not have occurred if there was a viable rail option that ran more than once a day, across flat terrain, the 500 miles to NY; most of those blinky lights wouldn't have been there, and I wouldn't have been sitting on that plane to begin with.
I suspect that is one reason there is no viable passenger rail throughout the east coast (keeping butts and dollars going to Continental/Delta/American/United)
The other principle reason is otherwise thoughtful people hate the thought of subsidizing infrastructure that benefits them, or find liberals/engineering projects too gauche (ahem cough cough, ahem) so they align themselves with the wealth-predator party, vote accordingly, and then blame the brown people when gas price makes a family trip 200 miles up the interstate prohibitively expensive.
jl
@Brachiator: Couldn’t resist checking back.
“More realistic studies are suggesting that SF to LA would cost much more than currently projected,”
Regarding your ‘more realistic studies’, one in awhile you do really need to provide links or references or people will stop taking your comments seriously.
“new passenger dedicated rail tracks are out of the question”
Definitely need a reference for that. If that is the case, why are they having hearings over dedicated routes in CA.
“Lastly, the high speed rail proponents are fudging on the number of direct LA to SF trips vs the trips that must have intermediate stops (Sacramento, etc) in order to sell high speed rail to the public. You can’t sell high speed rail as a benefit to the entire state if the only corridor served would be LA to SF.”
I don’t understand what your are saying at all. You saying SF to Sacto would not be attractive? Or that demand for intermediate stops would gum up the long haul transit time?
I said:
‘and much of the substitution would be from future increases in air travel to high speed rail.’
You responded:
“The declining economy throws all these projections out the window, which were over-optimistic in the first place.”
Now your are close to just saying stuff. The time horizon for large infrastructure projects is several decades (this is true for private investment projects too). You expect the declining economy to keep air travel static for 40 years?
Frank
@Brachiator:
Who is saying this? I am not aware of any country with excellent high speed train system that are also considering getting rid of cars.
Not long ago I was in France. I took the the train and then rented a car to get around the local area.
pragmatism
when will dagny taggart build this magnificent rail system? will it stop in the gulch?
Jay B.
That’s an assertion and not at all a fact. Getting to/from airport parking, paying for parking, shuttling to airports, going through security, waiting, boarding, flying, deplaning, getting your bag, finding transportation and then arriving at your destination from usually quite remote airports (compared to in-city terminals) and the costs and time is quite comparable.
Moreover, driving from Boston to New York takes roughly the same amount of time (though it’s closer in miles) as LA to SF. And yet, people still take the train, even though many also fly. Why is that?
Stefan
You would also still need road and cars or other vehicles, taxis and buses, to get people from rail stations to their final destinations.
And this is also why we don’t have planes.
Wait, what?
Mnemosyne
@Chad N Freude:
There was a very strong NIMBY movement to not have the line go all the way to LAX. The shuttle is actually run by LAX and the only shuttles that can go from the airport to the Green Line station are the LAX-run ones, so I’m not quite sure how much of a conspiracy can be built up there since LAX would still get a cut if the line ran all the way to the airport.
Bnut
I don’t see what’s stopping some rich Vegas type from privately building a HSR from LA to Sin City. Or they do it as a group to increase visitors to the city. I’m an idea man, what can I say.
zzyzx
@Cackalacka:
You say that like that’s an inefficient use of resources.
Other than that, I don’t see where we disagree. Miami -> Boston high speed? Do it up! I just think that people who don’t live out here and who mainly fly don’t understand quite what the mountain time zone is like. It’s why we need to stick to regional solutions in the short term, get people used to the idea, and then have folks start to complain that they can’t go NY->SF on the Supertrain.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, I’m familiar with transit systems in other parts of the US and the world, have lived there myself at different points in the past, and I know the western US has unique issues with regard to public transportation, because of the different history of urbanization in this region.
The thing is, if you want to get anything, anything at all, through the US Senate, then you’re going to have to drum up a lot of votes from the western and the midwestern states, because those are the political swing regions. The northeast and southeast are more polarized between Dems and GOPers. At this point anything that the Dems want, even if it means curing the common cold and giving everybody free apple pie and cute kittens, nobody from the states of the old Confederacy is going to vote for. And the Yankee NE doesn’t have the votes. Basically, if westerners and midwesterners don’t want it, and want it really badly, it isn’t going to happen. Unfortunately that includes fixing our transportation system – so we either get a very western-city-friendly system, or we don’t get any new system at all.
It sucks and I don’t like it, but nobody asked me when they were making up the rules.
zzyzx
@Jay B.:
You answered your own question with, “even though it’s closer in miles.” If a trip takes a long time because the roads are congested, that’ll get people more excited to get off the roads than a trip that takes a long time because it’s just a long way.
jl
I said
‘You don’t need a bus or tax, or a car, to and from the airport?’
You said:
“Yep, which is why the idea of rail as somehow replacing cars and the need for roads is a non-starter.”
You misunderstand. I have the need to travel between SF Bay, Sacto, and sometimes LA for my job. The problem is NOT driving around Sacramento, the problem right now is how to get from SF to Sacramento on schedule and on budget. Getting from SF to Sacramento by freeway is the problem, not driving around Sacramento or SF, or getting a taxi or renting a car in either place.
I said:
“Roads are not subsidized from general funds?”
You said:
‘Of course they are. Rail would be an added cost with limited use. High speed inter city rail (especially in California) will be slower and more costly than air travel.’
Well, here we need some numbers. Taking into account time to and from airport, and security hassles at airport, frequent flight delays, flying from SF or Sacto to LA takes far longer than the advertised flight time of about an hour.
Stefan
But it [high speed rail] is definitely slower, less efficient and potentially more costly, since a commuter would also have to pay bus or taxi fares to complete a trip.
Unlike buses and taxis to and from the airport, which are free.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
It’s worse than that. There really aren’t any homes or shopping directly around the airport that anyone would want to go to. Shuttle companies and the few taxi services (even though they have always been crappy) fought hard to kill direct Green Line service to the airport.
Now, there should have been two Green Line spurs, one to the beach, the other to the airport. And here is where people fought to prevent Those People from being able to get to the beach. And so, the Green Line stops at a place inconvenient to everywhere. There used to be a free shuttle bus from the Green Line stop to LAX, but it was never advertised or promoted.
Apart from this, I don’t know if you can have good public transportation in LA. It’s too spread out and transportation officials totally lack imagination. And there is the corruption, which goes under-reported because public transportation is a small part of total LA transportation. It took heaven and earth to get the contract for replacement rail cars for the Gold Line cancelled. The Italian company that transit officials preferred could not deliver an acceptable number of cars on time and wanted insane monetary guarantees. In addition, the cars were smaller and less reliable than the original rail cars, and yet were heavier and damaged the Gold Line tracks.
A new company has not been selected, and the rolling stock is getting old, even as they work on expanding the system along Foothill.
Yep, the Big Blue bus is great where it services a smaller area. If you have to take the Big Blue from Santa Monica to Century City or downtown LA, it’s not so hot.
HyperIon
@Hugin & Munin wrote:
we have seen the enemy.
and it is us.
Pogo
Cackalacka
@zzyzx:
I don’t disagree, I’m just jealous of the ‘Cities’ you got at the Greek.
But point taken, I’ve been up those passes before; Denver -> East would be practical. Vancouver to Tijuanna would be somewhat practical. SFO-JFK, not so much.
Chris
Personally, I’d like to be able to drive the car to the train, ride the cartrain for the 300, 600, 900, whatever miles, then drive the car off the cartrain once I’m in the right general area. Sort of like driving on to the ferry to cross to the island, etc.
But that’s not going to happen, because it’s too obvious. :-)
Stefan
I think comparisons to Europe sorta miss the mark, simply because the US is soooo much bigger; the distance from SF to San Diego is almost twice that as London-Paris.
Umm, the continental US is not much bigger than continental Europe when you include European Russia, Ukraine, etc. Why compare apples (London-Paris) to oranges (SF to San Diego)? The London-Paris distance is more akin to the Boston-NY-DC corridor, and that’s totally doable by train. And while it’s about 500 miles from SF to San Diego, it’s about 450 miles from London to Hamburg, and I’ve done that trip by rail and it was wonderful.
Moreover, there’s long distances in Europe as well — for example, it’s 2425 miles cross-continent from Lisbon to Moscow, which is just about exactly the distance from NY to LA.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
That’s not why. It didn’t get built to LAX because the taxi drivers and Super Shuttle didn’t want competition. Similarly part of the reason we haven’t done more with trains is because the fucking Bus Riders Union doesn’t want trains because they think that they’ll primarily serve wealthy suburbanites rather than the BRU’s urban poor. I’m just happy that Prop R passed, so we’ll get some improvements to the system. If Villaraigosa can get his 30/10 initiative through Congress, I’ll forgive him for all his personal failings.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
The Big Blue isn’t bad to downtown — there’s an express that goes straight to Union Station, and you can transfer from there.
Trying to get to Beverly Hills or Century City? Pain in the butt. That’s because many of the small metro bus companies are good, but they don’t coordinate with each other. It’s virtually impossible for me to get from Glendale to Burbank by bus and the frickin’ cities border each other.
PATRICK
to me, building a dedicated HSR infrastructure makes way too much sense, especially looking long term. from where I live (~3 hours north of chicago in MI), I see it as a replacement for intracontinental air travel. I’d much rather take a train to minneapolis or dallas to visit family than a plane or drive, but for mid-length trips (say, Grand Rapids, MI to Minneapolis), the train takes ~12 hours because of a 3 hour layover in chicago, while I can drive it in 9. I’d much prefer to take a train than drive, but the time issue with current trains for routes I’d use, plus the cost (round trip of the aforementioned trip was within $20/person of flying, and driving, even with all of our ancillary driving at $3/gal, ends up being about the same price as 1 ticket (family of 4 here)….
using it to replace domestic air travel makes a lot of sense, IMHO. once peak oil gets here, what will you fuel planes with? with HSR, they could conceivably be driven with electricity from the tracks or some other means, and that electricity could be generated via wind, solar, hydroelectric, nuclear, or geothermal……
can you make a biodiesel like jet fuel out of plant or algae based stock? I don’t know
Bob
“Furthermore, the only reason driving is cheap and convenient is because fossil fuels are heavily subsidized by the government, and roads – for the most part – are public and funded by tax dollars.”
Yep, and with all that governmental help pretty difficult to maintain the “free trade” fiction. But not if you favor government getting out of the above mentioned.
zzyzx
@Cackalacka: That Cities was the turning point. Before that, it was kind of meh. From there through T-Ride it was a LOT of fun.
So I guess the answer is to find a city, find ourselves some cities to build train lines between.
PATRICK
yeah, ideally, that’s what I’d like to do now that you propose it…such a great idea, I’m mad I didn’t think of it….
DontTaseMeBro
Good one! And true!@CalD:
zzyzx
@Roger Moore: One difference though is that you don’t have one government building the whole thing. Germany only has to pay for the part of the rail across its country whereas the US would have to pay for the whole thing.
zzyzx
@Chris: The one flaw I see in that idea is that it takes a much longer time to load up cars on a train than people. Unless you’re just having expresses, that might eat up most of the time savings that you gain from high speed rail.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
What trains really need is sex appeal. Literally. Cars and planes are both associated with getting some in the popular American imagination, but trains are a relic of the Victorian period. What we really need is for some enterprising adult films director to crank out lots of steamy pr0n flix showing hot young things getting shagged on the supertrain, intercut with scenes of bullet-nosed engines zooming through tunnels, whistles blowing, etc. Then the next time some travelling saleman from Indianapolis, tired out after a long day of travelling through airports and highways, is sitting around late at night in the Days Inn or Motel-6 watching pay-per-view pr0n (piped in from Provo, Utah) on the TV, he’ll think to himself: dayyyam! Next time, maybe I’ll take the train!.
That’s where the votes are.
Stefan
I’d love to hop a train from Albuquerque to LA or Phoenix or Denver, but what the heck am I going to do to get around within anyof those cities once I get there, without a car? Very few of our major metro areas today have good enough public transit or walking friendly architecture to make them attractive to visit without a car.
Hey, I’d love to hop on a jet plane and fly from NY to LA or Phoenix or Denver, but what the heck am I going to do to get around within any of those cities once I get there, without a car? It’s not as if I can rent a car or take a cab or….oh. Never mind.
Chad N Freude
@Mnemosyne: There was a NIMBY component, but I’m not convinced it was class/race based. (For one thing, it would have made it easier for the maids to get to their customers.) I believe that the existing private transport companies lobbied very hard to prevent it. Also,this @Brachiator.
Stefan
What trains really need is sex appeal. Literally.
A long bullet-nosed high-speed train thrusting its way into a deep dark tunnel doesn’t have sex appeal? Really?
slag
@Chris: Intermodal. Seriously great word.
Mnemosyne
@Chad N Freude:
I lived on the Westside for 15 years. It was class/race based. It was not the sole factor, but that was one of the ways they got people ginned up to oppose it.
Chad N Freude
@Mnemosyne: And @Roger Moore also, too. I don’t think Blue to Century City is so bad since they turned SM Boulevard into a racecourse, but it certainly is the outer limit for convenience.
Chad N Freude
And you moved to Glendale?!
Chad N Freude
@Stefan: And another keyboard is drowned in coffee.
someguy
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Indeed. Until Congress is insulated from outside money and political influences, there is zero chance that they will take the long view and act in our interest.
Mnemosyne
Here’s a map of the neighborhoods the Green Line runs through.
The NIMBY-ism was all about class and race. They didn’t want people from Crenshaw and Inglewood hanging around El Segundo and Redondo Beach.
Mnemosyne
@Chad N Freude:
Tell me about it. The things we do for love.
And then I married the guy, so I guess I’m stuck here. :-)
russell
To me, the arguments against intercity high speed rail are dumbassery.
Here is a map of the interstate highway system. We built that, WTF is so impossible about building an equivalent network of high speed rail?
People wouldn’t ride it? Denver to LA, frex, is about 840 miles. If you do that at average speed of 150 mph, you’re talking about 5 and half hours.
My guess is that a f**k of a lot of people will line up to go downtown Denver to downtown LA in under six hours. Trains are generally more comfortable than a plane, and they don’t get cancelled when there’s a thunderstorm.
Other long hauls:
Salt Lake to Seattle, 700 miles.
Chicago to NYC, 710 miles.
Santa Fe to Indianapolis, 1110 miles.
These are all same-day trips on high speed rail.
You would get to a rail hub the same way to get to an airport. And for reference, here are the major US passenger airports. Not a lot of coverage in the mountain west for air travel.
Need to go to Pierre SD? You’re going to go to Denver first, then you’re going to take the turboprop regional puddle jumper. It seats twenty and flies once a day. Pierre regional airport can service about 750 commercial passengers *a week*. Not does, *can*, because that’s how many seats the scheduled airplanes have.
Rail is the most efficient means of public travel by passenger mile. It’s reliable, well-known technology. It’s not rocket science. It’s more comfortable than flying, and less prone to delays and cancellations. It’s more convenient than driving *because you don’t have to freaking drive*.
And some folks either can’t fly, or are extremely uncomfortable with flying. So, if we had good intercity rail, those folks could go places too.
I don’t really care if it’s profitable or not, just like I don’t care if highways are profitable or not. It’s broadly useful, creates lots of benefits to the public at large, and gets us less dependent on oil for travel.
No-brainer.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, it was a great system. But I was pointing out how the regional commuter rail service took a hit because workers could not get reliable local service from the train station to their jobs. This is a weakness of many commuter rail proposals that seek to reduce the number of cars on the road. They don’t consider how to efficiently get rail riders to their final destinations.
But while I think that the California high speed rail proposal is a waste of time, I am not in any way against regional public transportation. But I am also saying that the weak economy and state budget issues are beginning to cascade into slowly strangling existing public transportation options.
In California, we are now 50 days without a budget even though you would think that they clowns in Sacramento would realize how important it is to get something done.
But the structural deficit is $20 billion and I have not seen anyone, Democrat or Republican, that has any plan that is going to make up the difference. It’s easy to say, “raise taxes!” It’s harder to actually find the money.
Also, any proposals for public transportation has to take the state of the economy into account. And in Southern California, it may soon get worse. If there is not some magical solution coming out of Sacramento, which appears very unlikely, in December there will be major cutbacks in Metro bus and rail service including, for the first time I’m aware of in many years, layoffs of mechanics along with some cutbacks in bus driver staffing.
@jl:
I usually try to provide links, but I am having browser problems with a borrowed laptop. But google is our friends, and I think that anyone who is seriously interested in the subject (instead of just being reflexively for or against rail) can do a little work themselves.
Dedicated routes is not the same thing as laying new track. Other posters in this thread have posted good stuff on freight vs passenger track issues.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Stefan:
Just driving your car instead of flying isn’t really an option when you are talking about cross-continental trips (NY to western cities, etc.) It is an option in the examples I cited. I can make it to either Denver or Phoenix in about 9 hours, cutting out the expense, delay and security theater of air travel and the additional hassle of renting a car, and as a bonus I have my own vehicle to use locally rather than one I’m not familar with. That’s close to a break even proposition (i.e. trade about 4 hours of time for a few hundred $ saved) and I know a lot of folks in my region who choose to drive, when they could be taking a train instead.
Trains could be providing a middle scale solution for intra-regional trips, between short distance driving and long distance flying. And that sort of trip is more common in my experience than the cross-continental variety.
Chris
@zzyzx:
It does now, and the ferries have not yet solved it, but I am not convinced it is un-solve-able. To make it work well, we’d want something like the automated parking systems that people are still experimenting with.
In any case, the point of using the cartrain to get me to Vegas, or Boise, or whatever, from here in Salt Lake City, would not mostly be “to save time” but rather “to save my personal effort”. Somewhere between two and four hours, a long drive can get quite boring, and I’d rather be Internet-ing, reading, napping, or whatever.
Roger Moore
@Chad N Freude:
Glendale isn’t that bad. It’s not like she moved to Lancaster or something.
Chad N Freude
@Mnemosyne: I suppose that’s a better reason than moving to be closer to Ikea.
Wile E. Quixote
@Ethan Epstein:
Sounds like someone’s still pissed that he wasn’t able to afford to go to the Netherlands and had to hang around boring old Portland all summer long.
Chad N Freude
All the Southern Californicators who’ve been posting on this thread, take note. I’m old enough to have ridden the Big Red Cars in LA, and can attest that “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is a documentary.
ed drone
@MarkJ:
A couple of the worst parts of the beltway are aligned the way they are because the real estate was too expensive & well-protected (can you say Mormon Tabernacle?) and they had to change the route of I-495. Thus the downhill turns and curves my son and his friends dubbed “Big Jackass” and “Little Jackass” (I-95 to I-270, westbound on the ‘outer loop’). Always surprising traffic and unexpected backups in any kind of traffic.
I, too, recall the “Three Sisters Bridge” affair, and know well the section of Interstate that slips under the Capitol and empties onto city streets just beyond, where it ran out of public support.
Ed
Seanly
@slag:
The rail frieght companies are more powerful than God. Unless you develop separate tracks for the faster passenger trains, CSX or Norfolk Southern get priority since they “own” the rails. “own” in quotes because much of the original rail lines were built with 19th century & early 20th century government money.
Amtrak can already go much faster than it typically does. Issues are at-grade crossings and the majority of the country where there is now only one line along a given corridor. So the Miami to NYC train has to go slow through most of the SE so it can stay in it’s place along the tracks.
I do know that the railroads think that rail will be making a comeback as they are actively protecting their right-of-way from DOT’s. CSX made a highway project I’m working on more expensive by about $3 million on the pipe dream that they’ll be adding 3 parallel rail lines coming into Charleston SC.
Wife & I took the rail from Columbia SC to NYC last year. It was a great way to travel but very expensive for the sleeper berth. But get it up to 150, 200 mph and get the cost competitive to flying and it’d be a winner. And increased ridership means less federal subsidies.
And just like Greyhound, the non-reserved area was filled with Republicans’ favorite people.
Chad N Freude
@scarshapedstar: And do you know who made the trains run on time? (Hint: Not you-know-who, but his ally)
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
RE: If you have to take the Big Blue from Santa Monica to Century City or downtown LA, it’s not so hot.
Uh,no. The weak point is that the Big Blue has to get on the freeway and compete with all the cars on the road. There is no dedicated busway along the 10 freeway. I used to ride it during a commute to a contract job in Santa Monica. I would have to take an earlier bus than I would have preferred because otherwise, if there were delays I would miss my transfer and be late to work. Going home, on some days, the freeway traffic was so bad that the driver moved over to Pico and other surface streets, turning the Express into a Local.
Yep, and some of this is turf war battles between transit agencies, with little concern for commuters.
By the way, I have to note and agree here that class/race was not the sole factor. Not all beach people are rich by any means, but there is an insularity with respect to the way that they view the world. I knew a woman who lived in Hermosa Beach who had never been east of Sepulveda Blvd until she got a job with the LA Times.
In a related way, the good people of South Pasadena have fought an extension of the 710 freeway for all kinds of reasons, not because they are concerned that people will stop off in their neighborhoods, but because they see themselves as special and fight off anything that they think may detract from their little world.
By the way, one of the Red Line expansion proposals would have had a stop directly at Universal Studios. This was bitterly fought. Now there are shuttles that run from the Red Line Stop to Universal.
Sometimes people fight stuff just because it is different, even if they would benefit from the change.
Wile E. Quixote
@Roger Moore:
Well the BRU is right. LA’s train system is designed to get white liberals who don’ t want to ride the bus (because it’s full of negroes and mexicans) out of their cars. Seattle has something similar. The Sounder heavy rail trains that run from Everett to Kent on the Burlington Northern tracks cost around $100 per passenger and only serve white suburbanites who want to work in downtown Seattle and live in McMansions in Kent and Marysville. Seattle’s light rail solution isn’t any better. One of the reasons the route through the Rainier Valley was chosen was because the Seattle City Council wanted light rail to gentrify the area by bringing in lots of white professionals who would live in new condominiums built along the route and then commute to downtown Seattle.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
True, but at least it’s a straight shot, which is the way I was thinking of it. To get from Glendale to Westwood, I would have had to take three different buses, and that was using the Commuter Express system. There are very few direct routes from one part of the city to another.
I had a friend who had to take the bus from Culver City to Studio City for a screening. It took him about three hours and four buses to do it.
wmd
It seems like having private car carrier cars available on HS trains would be a win. You get to your destination and have transportation there for you. People want to be mobile after they’ve finished the long haul part of the trip.
Granted rental cars and improved intracity public transit is another solution.
lou
Wrong answer. The reason Amtrak survives is a combo of blue state/red state interests. One of Amtrak’s biggest proponents used to be Trent Lott because there are communities in Mississippi where the *only* access to the outside world is the train. I think that’s true in other rural Southern states as well. It’s western red-state senators that hate trains, like John McCain.
Which is why, Brett (#59) Amtrak will never shut down those unprofitable routes. It’s red-staters who want them.
And @stefan. You haven’t been to Phoenix in a while, have you? there’s a terrific train that takes you from the airport to downtown Phoenix. Granted downtown Phoenix has a long way to go, but there’s a ballfield, a concert venue, and an extensive college campus. A lot of students commute between Mesa and downtown Phoenix.
Can’t comment on Denver, but IIRC, friends have told me Denver is becoming more public transit friendly.
Martin
Another variable for car vs mass transit pricing is the size of the traveling party. Mass transit costs to the consumer are per-passenger, but for vehicular travel the costs are relatively fixed per vehicle. For me to take my family of 4+dog from CA to Iowa by air is more expensive than doing it in the car, even with two evenings in a motel factored in, assuming that we have the 2 extra travel days to play with.
This has overall shifted consumer value from cars to mass transit over the last half century as the size of households has diminished. There aren’t nearly as many families trying to haul their 5 kids cross-country as there used to be, and a lot more single/couples traveling now.
El Cruzado
We don’t need transcontinental high-speed rail. Those kinds of distances are better served by airplanes.
However what we need is 1) Double railway as much as possible for the whole transcontinental routes (electrifying it is probably too much) and 2) Make the railways public. As long as they are privately owned the pattern will be for the owners to let them decay while reaping the profit and then dump them on the government when they stop working. At least if they are kept public all the time the same people who bear the costs anyway will also have more of a say about how they are maintained.
Other than that, agreed with it all.
Brachiator
@Wile E. Quixote:
Bullshit. The BRU are a bunch of transportation luddites who believe that every poor person should have his own bus to personally ride him around LA County 24 hours a day. And they myopically focus on local lines without any sense of transportation serving the wider public.
The BRU has never come up with any ideas to improve bus service. They make a fetish of the idea that public transportation is “supposed” to be for poor people, which appears to be noble, but masks a stupid parochialism.
I don’t see too many white liberals on the Gold Line Extension from Union Station to East Los Angeles. I do see a lot of Asians and Latinos. Going the other direction, the Gold Line services the majority Latino community who board at the Highland Park Station. The Blue Line ridership also includes large numbers of Latinos, and excellently serves students, and includes a dedicated stop at LA Trade Technical College.
Upscale suburban commuters don’t depend on rail. When they use the bus, they tend to use the Commuter Express lines and Metro Express bus service, as well as the Dash lines downtown and in a couple of other locations.
Bnad
Railroads are more vulnerable to bombing than roads.
PurpleGirl
@Roger Moore: We were able to build a trans-continental railroad using mid 19th Century technology, so there’s no reason we can’t build a high speed cross-country railroad using early 21st Century technology.
This! Yes, we did it once, we can do it again, we must do it again if we are to have an even moderately comfortable future.
Mnemosyne
@Bnad:
Again, depends on where you are. After the Northridge earthquake, the state had to work literally day and night to repair the freeways because the collapse of one or two parts basically ground east-west traffic to a halt.
You’d kill more people bombing a train, but you would do a hell of a lot more damage taking down a bridge.
PurpleGirl
In January 2009 I had a friend visiting NYC from LA. He flew here. When we were planning his trip home, I mentioned that he should find a way to see his mother (in Indiana). That was best accomplished by his using Amtrak. By plane he would have had a number of short hops with a lot of backtracking. By train, we were able to find much more direct routes, NY to IN and then IN to LA. It was also cheaper. The next time he visits we’re going with the train again.
PurpleGirl
@Perry Como: Thanks for that link. Those pictures and the trains were beautiful.
Zuzu's Petals
@zzyzx:
I just took the Southwest Chief over the Raton Pass last year. Granted it wasn’t high speed, but I don’t recall it feeling especially dangerous.
Which is not to say it doesn’t make sense to start with the high-density routes first.
Zuzu's Petals
@PurpleGirl:
And if he got a 15 day (or longer) pass, he could fit a few more stops in along the way. A real plus.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
FAA is the vehicle for grants to community airports, perhaps, but not because we love airport welfare. It’s because building a safe and proper airport is too expensive and complicated for most localities to attempt on their own, and without this assistance, the safe airports would not be built and the smaller localities would not be served.
Whether you think smaller localities should be served is another topic, but the fact is that modern transportation systems, whether highway, rail, or air, require infrastructure that only the Federal government can afford to pay for.
I am not sure that high speed rail is a good solution in most cases … or that it is not. But I am sure that arguing against subsidies for transportation in general is just nihilism in this day and age.
Seanly
Oh, since folks are mentioning railroad ROW, it is probably not that much of an issue in the West. You only need 15′ center to center of rail for two tracks. Outside clearance is another issue, but as long as the existing corridor is at least about 65′ wide, it can accomodate 2 tracks. Here in SC, most of the RR ROW I’ve run across is 150′ to 200′ even in congested Charleston. Can’t imagine they would’ve skimped on ROW out west.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Thanks for ripping the BRU; you did a much better job than I could have. I’d just add that the BRU misses a major strategic problem with their idea of public transit being exclusively for poor people. As long as public transport is seen as being something that’s only used by poor people and the occasionally DFH, it will always be a low priority for local government. They may not allow it to decay completely- the poor people have to be able to get to their jobs serving the rich, after all- but it will never be treated as a priority. It’s only when public transportation starts being important to the middle class that it will become a serious priority and service will move from “as bad as we can get away with” to “good enough to get us re-elected”.
les
If you really want the answer, look to who gets the subsidies now, and who might on a switch to rail. Current winners: big oil, the auto industry–major corporate profits. Where have subsidies been declining? Hmm–maintenance/infrastructure; too much money to regular workin;’ folk? Who would win with rail? Well, actual travelers would save big compared to either auto or air (assuming equivalent levels of subsidy). Less pollution, less illness, less motive for urban sprawl (subsidies to developers, etc.) But you don’t replace rolling stock every couple of years, and you don’t sell bazillions of gallons of fuel in cute little stores with massive profit margins on schlock, etc. The lobbies are all out of whack; after all, all most of us can do is vote.
PurpleGirl
@Chris: I don’t know if Amtrak still has cartrain service to Florida (maybe that also included destinations below DC) but they used to.
PurpleGirl
@Zuzu’s Petals: One thing that I found great about the train was that we were able to cancel his reservation only a few hours before it’s time when he developed a migraine and couldn’t leave. I mean like two hours before his train, and the whole transaction was canceled.
Stefan
And @stefan. You haven’t been to Phoenix in a while, have you? there’s a terrific train that takes you from the airport to downtown Phoenix. Granted downtown Phoenix has a long way to go, but there’s a ballfield, a concert venue, and an extensive college campus. A lot of students commute between Mesa and downtown Phoenix.
No, my post was sarcasm. I was responding to people who said that it made no sense to take a train to Phoenix because you still needed a car to get around by saying that, in that case, why did it make any more sense to take a plane?
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I would argue that’s one of the reasons the Big Blue Bus is as good as it is: lots of middle-class old people ride it, and they vote. Keeps the prices down and the quality up.
Elaine
Usually when people quote the cost of a high-speed rail line, they pretend that the alternative is doing nothing at a cost of $0. The reality in California is that the alternative to our high speed rail line will be adding a third lane each way to highway 99 for 300 miles, and probably building out two more airports. The cost of those might be less visible, but it adds up to about the same $40 billion that the HSR system will cost.
HSR also saves lives, and makes transportation and locations accessible to people who don’t or shouldn’t drive. In California, HSR will link 8 of its public universities together, making it easy for college students to visit home or for business people to consult with academic experts.
Finally, because unlike airports, HSR stations can be located adjacent to downtown buildings, HSR can be a lot faster and more convenient doorstep to doorstep than short haul air travel.
CarolDuhart
@Luthe: I’m not so sure that land is much of a problem anymore. A lot of inner cities in the east have become almost deserted, and cities like Detroit could easily become a hub due to the reduced population. Add some never-to-be paid for subdivisions and I think we would have what we need nearly in toto. I’d also like to see some tracks laid right on the right of ways of our expressways: the land has already been cleared, so why not use it?
Draylon Hogg
Trains are alright but you could end up with a really fast one crashing in a tunnel with terrible consequences that could drive one into the embrace of fanatical Objectivism.
Ironic that Ayn Rand loved banging on about trains. Didn’t American railroad barons take full advantage of huge parcels of cheap public land and whopping government subsidies? Parasites.
It’s the year 2010. Why aren’t we all flying around in Tom Strong style gyrocopters by now?
CarolDuhart
@Bnad: But bombing would be mostly futile. Unless there’s some massive group behind it, blowing up one train would only stall that train: the rest would be routed around the scene rather easily while there was rescue and repairs. Notice that when India has a massive derailment, the rest of the system keeps going anyway. And if we were mostly a rail nation, September 11th wouldn’t have paralyzed our transportation system so readily: while the planes were down, the rest of us would have been able to get around as usual.
Draylon Hogg
@CarolDuhart
Come to the UK and try and find a litter bin in a railway station. They aren’t any. Thanks in no small part to the NORAID assisted antics of the Provisional IRA.
Draylon Hogg
@russell
I’ll extend you the same invitation as I did Carol Duhart.
Here in Britain trains get cancelled because of leaves on the line (they make the wheels slip), and the wrong type of snow on the line (it makes the wheels slip).
And should you choose to expand the rail network it may have grave consequences for American society. Namely…Trainspotters. If you want tartan thermos flasks, wooly bobble hats, trousers higher than Simon Cowell’s, and scarves in the middle of high summer wrapped around the necks of blokes you wouldn’t leave your kids with then keep calm and carry on.
E.D. Kain
@Roger Moore: And amnesty granting RINO also.
E.D. Kain
@Bob: Free trade and government are not incompatible. Government often is responsible for creating the infrastructure that makes the market possible. Roads, rail, etc. as well as enforce the legal disputes, safety regulations, etc. Remove as much government as possible to avoid rent-seeking, protectionism, cronyism and so forth and you have pretty free trade. Much of Northern Europe is very liberal in its trade policies – very free trade – while maintaining plenty of government assistance, rule making, infrastructure etc.
Wile E. Quixote
@Bnad:
Bullshit, what an incredibly stupid thing to say. Here’s a gedankenexperiment for you. Take a city like Seattle and park a truckload of ANFO on the Ship Canal, George Washington, 520 or I-90 bridges and watch what happens when you’ve taken that link out. Instant fucking gridlock. Hell, when the Alaskan Way Viaduct was closed down after the Nisqually quake in 2001 it took me two hours to get from my house in Burien to downtown Seattle, that’s a distance of 10 miles, because one of the major north south arterials into and through the city was shut down.
You don’t even have to blow anything up. About seven years ago a fuel tanker crashed into a bridge abutment on I-5 up by Lynnwood and caught fire. It was quite impressive, you could see the smoke from West Seattle, 20 miles south of the accident, and I-5 was jammed up south of the accident almost to Tacoma and north of the accident almost to Bellingham. Hell, last Saturday there was a five car accident on I-5 southbound just before the West Seattle interchange, traffic was backed up all the way to Lynnwood because of that.
Hell, take the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. What did better, BART or the road system? A deck collapsed on the Bay Bridge and the Nimitz expressway pancaked and killed a dozen or so people. BART was back to normal before the roads were repaired.
Mnemosyne
@Draylon Hogg:
Too late.
Cain
@Mnemosyne:
In Portland, people want more light rail. I’m not a big fan of the light rail because it makes too many stops. It usually takes me about 30 minutes to get to downtown from the west suburbs by car, and it’s about an hour to go by light rail.
If they want to reduce congestion, they need to make that a 25 minute trip. Their main problem was that they built no express rail. We were lucky with what we got I guess, republicans were trying to fight the light rail saying it would affect small businesses. Not realizing that our fast paced culture and gas prices has already stopped the cruising. Nobody can afford to cruize around anymore and check out small shops.
cain
jake the snake
We won’t get this done unless the MotU decide they can make a bundle off it and get their servants in congress to
subsidise it. (See Union Pacific Railroad, building of)
I was thinking of how extremely unlikely that the human race would ever build a Dyson structure.
However if we ever meet a species who would do it, I hope they would have an interest in keeping humans as pets, because otherwise I see extermination.
Bnad
@Wile E. Quixote: Cities aside, if you bomb a rural interstate highway, freight can route around it on the side roads. Not that there aren’t also railroad rerouting possibilities, but I’d bet there is an order of magnitude greater alternative paved road network than alternative rail network.
piratedan
@Chris:
TY Chris….someone gets it. It’s about more options, isn’t that what the great free trade folks all babble on about? choices?
As for the problems with nature itself, we blow tunnels through the mountains to put the roads through, not sure how much different that would be for a train.
It would give our civil engineers something to do and people something to build. There are plenty of people moving about from one location to another and goods doing said same, is it beyond our logistics to add and subtract cars that carry people, goods and vehicles as traffic allows?
Kaptain Kirk
You can’t optimize for both, whereas a hundred years ago they were much more similar, and you could have decent freight and passenger transport on the same track system.
Wrong! I help build, repair & inspect Railroad track for a living. The options are many.
Yes, 180+ mph bullet trains may require dedicated tracks with few but gentle curves, gentle grades, and no highway grade crossings, but are they what we truly need?
On the Northeast corridor from Boston – New York – Washington D.C. the Acela train reaches 140 mph on the few stretches of Amtrak owned track that has been upgraded. Yet, on the older stretches of track, they are able to travel at 90 – 110 mph depending on the signal systems and the curves. (Acela uses “tilt-train” technology to compensate for sharp curves that are insufficiently banked, read “super-elevation”, by having the train suspension lean into the curve much like a motorcycle rider.) In any case this sure beats 55 – 80 mph on a crowded highway. Besides, you only need two “designated drivers” for several hundred people.
Elsewhere in America, Amtrak trains still beat the highways. Most routes still travel on tracks owned by the freight railways. West of the Mississippi Amtrak trains travel at a maximum of 79 mph, slowing for some curves and urban areas. Less than 30 miles from where I sit is a curve where one rail is about five inches higher than the other so that the “California Zypher” only has to slow down to 60 mph to negotiate the sharp curve safely. This same trackage also hauls intermodal freight (containers & piggy-backs) and heavy-haul unit grain trains and even the occasional Coal train!
On several of the major freight rail transcontinental routes, the railroads have built two main tracks for most of the route. They are already experimenting with designating one main for high speed and one main for “Heavy-Haul”. The speed limits are higher on one main and it carries Amtrak, Intermodal, and empties. The other main carries coal, grain, ore, and freight at slower speeds. Both lines take the same maintenance costs, but with different emphasis. High speed requires smoother track and more curve elevation, while heavy-haul has the wear & tear costs associated with the massive tonnages.
Telluride — you can’t drive even 50 mph safely on most of the road there. So why expect a train that travels 180 mph? And don’t get behind a truck going up hill on the way there, you’ll be lucky to reach 35 mph. When mining towns like Telluride, Ouray, Silverton, and Durango were founded, they were served by narrow gauge railways. One still runs between Silverton and Durango.
name
@The Grand Panjandrum:
The terms of politicians ought to be reduced. When a politician (Senator, etc) stays in office for years, he/she settles into a comfortable role and enjoys the power it offers. The longer they are in power, they more connections they can make to get re-elected once their term is up.
Rarely are politicians in a rush to pass anything – including unemployment benefits as we have recently seen in the US Congress. I see President Obama rushing to pass as many reforms as he can but that sentiment is not shared by everyone.
Shorter terms (and greater competition) for these important roles may bring about greater long-term progress in society and less politics.