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Is a US High-Speed Railway Economically Feasible?
An anonymous reader writes "The federal government has committed at least $8-billion (and counting) for the development of a nationwide high-speed intercity passenger railway system in almost three-dozen states. Rail advocates have long dreamed of an extensive railway grid that will provide clean, speedy, energy-efficient travel. The high-speed rail program is also expected to create thousands of desperately needed jobs, while reducing the nation's dependence on foreign oil and easing gridlocked highways and congested air-space. However, this noble, ambitious, multi-year plan faces a multitude of obstacles — including costs that will no doubt escalate as the years pass by; and an American public that may be reluctant to relinquish the independence and convenience of their beloved automobiles for a train."
Once they're paying as much as people in any other first-world country, "beloved" will give way to "practical". And it brings in some nice cash too.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
...In that you can sleep in them, lying down. In Sweden, there's a six-bunk pullman car model, and a more expensive two-bunk model that's more like a proper "fluffy" bed. It's not all that nice to sleep with your boots on in a closed compartment with complete strangers (and they never get the heating right), but it's better than sleeping in a seat.
Emotions! In your brain!
A high speed rail network should be targeting air travel. There are many short haul air routes (e.g. New York to Washington) where high speed rail could provide an comparable door-to-door journey time (especially once you take check-in, security and all the other things into account). High speed rail has none of the big downsides of air travel like the need to get to the airport 2 hours before the flight to check in, the need to pass through 3 layers of security, bans on liquids and other things, cramped seats etc.
Now obviously trains cant compete with long-haul air travel such as New York to LA but for short haul, it could really work. (but only if its given proper high speed track and doesn't have to share that track with slow freight trains)
In some places yes, in other places no.
Next question?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Or they could design the train so that people could drive their cars onto it and park.
It'd kill the airlines in a week.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
If we just stopped subsidizing it, we wouldn't need to tax it, and we'd get the same revenue benefit without the infrastructure needed to enforce the tax. Bastiat has a lot of interesting things to say about both subsidies and taxes. I personally hate driving and flying, so I'd really enjoy a national rail system. I'd like a local transit system even more, but that is not something my city is even close to.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
My problem with trains in American isn't speed.
I'd rather have a train system that had a range of trains to different places at lots of different times, every day. But most importantly, I'd like to have a train system that actually follows the time table. Nobody wants to pay for public transportation when you have to arrive early, wait a long time, and then not leave on time... and probably not arrive at your destination on time.
Wait, we do that for airplanes. Nevermind. Go about your business.
http://www.tenjou.net/
"and an American public that may be reluctant to relinquish the independence and convenience of their beloved automobiles for a train."
The automobile is far more of a ball-and-chain than an independence-granting device.
I suggest you read this: Sewers and Storm Drains.
Yes, paying a million people to fix up our crumbling infrastructure (or in this case, to build a high-speed railroad) will be expensive. However, all those million people will no longer be unemployed, which means that they will go from being a drain on society to being a benefit to society. This sort of thing would lead to much faster economic recovery than your "everyone stop spending money right now" plan.
You overstate the case. In Britain, fuel prices are vastly higher than they are in the USA, and driving is still usually cheaper than taking the train.
People travel by rail in Britain when it's more convenient. For commuters it makes sense because you can work or relax on the train; of course, many US cities already have popular commuter rail services. For other people, it often boils down to things like the very poor parking facilities at urban destinations and the poor roads at rural destinations -- an expensive train ticket looks a lot more attractive if you know the alternative is going to be six hours stationary in heavy traffic on a narrow road, or an extortionate charge for commercial car parking. These latter problems tend not to exist so much in the USA, where there's plenty of room for wide roads and large car parks.
Maybe, but those rural areas create the food that the cities need to house and feed their populations. When you increase the costs of those areas, you greatly affect the cost of city life. Cities are also far, far more subsidized then any rural area is. The roads needed to truck in supplies, heavily subsidized food programs, and greatly disproportionate distribution of state tax income as well as federal aid.
I guess we'll just have to increase what we charge for production, then. You know, trivial things like:
* Corn
* Wheat
* Soy
* Fuel (yeah, we make a fair amount of it)
* Beef
* Chicken
* Pork
* Machinery (used to pave your roads, build your sky rises, construct your high speed rail...)
*
Don't get me wrong, I plan to move to a rural area as soon as economically feasible, but I don't think I should expect city-dwellers to pay for this luxury for me.
What luxury is that? Driving an automobile? Apparently you're not aware of what most "rural areas" in the US require. Yes, you can very easily die getting to work in the weather we've got out here without the protection of a vehicle. And when that's not a concern...
You also realize that if someone is being taxed more for the "luxury of driving" - this tax money going towards the construction of rail, which said people are not being given - then it's the rural people who will be getting gouged, right?
It's been shown time and time again that urban dwellers have a (significantly) higher carbon footprint because it takes more energy to maintain that way of life. It's been true since the first person grew his first field of corn and realized "hey, I can support a lot of people with this". While people in an urban area are in malls buying things, playing laser tag, eating at a restaurant, and doing whatever it is urban people do, people in rural and remote areas are spending time outdoors, cooking their own food and having simple social pleasures.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The comment about air travel being the real competitor is right on the money.
Survey after survey has shown that people would much rather take a train (where they can get on easily, walk around during travel, not get slapped suddenly into their seats for an impromptu ride on the biggest roller coaster on the planet, drink a beer or eat a sandwich for a reasonable price, not have to wait in long lines for a restroom, and "land" within a short cab ride of their actual destination) than suffer through the growing indignities of air travel. Even adding in proper security screening, it's still no contest. But the obstacle to high speed rail is economic and political -- the extensive government subsidies to auto travel are dwarfed by those offered to private commercial air carriers (the whole TSA thing, but also the airports themselves and air traffic control, not to mention the weather service and other such incidentals that are nominally for other purposes). Investment in high speed rail directly undercuts the most lucrative air travel market: short haul trips. That's why the hub and spoke system all the air carriers use exists, and why you can hardly ever find a direct flight to where you're going if you aren't lucky enough to live in a hub (but also notice that if you leave directly from a hub, you'll pay a big mark-up compared to people who are simply transferring there).
So the bottom line is that there is a gigantic, lucrative industry whose whole existence depends on never having effective rail transportation (such as high-speed rail that connects urban areas as well as major airports and provides competitive, timely, cost-effective, weather-insensitive service for trips ranging from 200-500 miles). So you've got a bunch of noble idealists without a dime to their name lobbying for high speed rail, and you've got all the airlines hell-bent on preventing it from (so to speak) getting off the ground. It's a miracle the current administration thinks they can beat those odds, and I wish them all the best. But this is sort of like trying to outflank the medical industry with health care reform, and unfortunately there's probably just as little chance of substantial success.
Trains win in every densely populated region, hands down.
There are other issues besides subsidies. For example, here in California wealth NIMBYs in southern Marin County (near San Francisco) have successfully lobbied to have the proposed high speed rail line either routed around or tunneled under their wealthy suburban communities, at great additional expense, so as not to disrupt their perfect neighborhoods or negatively impact their property values. They have also lobbied to have the "high speed train" substantially reduce speed on many parts of the route, essentially defeating the purpose. Here in the United States, unlike in Europe and Japan, it much easier to be a NIMBY and essentially kill a project with lawsuits, environmental impact studies and other political chicaneries as long as you have money to burn. The price of your train rapidly escalates as decades of legal wrangling, planning commission hearings, and environmental impact studies make the final cost of your rail line completely uncompetitive.
You can't turn America into Europe by simply taxing fuel at the same rate.
There are many on the left who, out of a desire to see "good" things done quickly, reflexively support higher taxes and increased government spending, regardless of the prevailing economic circumstances. In response to their claims of concern for the plight of the common man, Milton Friedman once said, "I admire the softness of their hearts, but unfortunately it very often extends to their heads as well."
We have to stop sabotaging mass transit in the US.
Mass transit is made hard-to-use. Consider, for example, arriving in Chicago via train at Union Station. Chicago's got a good subway system, but to get on it, you've got to leave the station and walk several blocks outdoors. Metra? Somewhat better, if you're lucky enough to be leaving on a train from Union or maybe Ogilvie, but LaSalle and Van Buren are quite the hike. God forbid you want to take rail into Chicago so you can get to O'Hare for an international flight. If you come into Union, you're faced with hauling your luggage down a dingy concrete stairway to a subway station for a long el trip to the airport.
Mass transit is made second-class. Amtrak has for years struggled to be on-time, even though they're supposed to have priority over freight, they're using the rails of the freight railroads, and it's quite common to be waiting for some freight train to do its business before you can continue on your way. The tracks are poor and the trains wobble. People who suffer from motion sickness sometimes get sick from them, especially on the upper deck of a Superliner. Train speeds are low, meaning that a long haul trip is probably overnite, and if you want to be able to sleep in peace, that means paying for a roomette on the train, at substantial extra cost.
If we had high speed rail that was interconnected intelligently with subways, regional rail, buses, airports, etc., it'd be a great incentive to leave the car at home. I for one have driven enough miles that I'm happy to let someone else do the driving, but it also has to be convenient. For me, driving to O'Hare for an international flight and paying to park the car for several days is still more compelling than taking Amtrak, walking to the subway station, wrestling our luggage down the stairs and through the turnstiles, then taking the hour long trip to O'Hare.
I don't expect the current high speed rail proposals to address this sufficiently, so it isn't clear to me just how many people would start to take the train.
How you're modded "Troll" is beyond me.
Perhaps the moderator should have posted a dissenting view instead. I recommend something like "Fifty years from now, your van will be long gone and its replacement replaced by other vans, but those tracks, built once, would still be in service and paying energy dividends."
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
Thank you. Where are your positive moderations? (Answer: I don't have any at the moment, so I'm posting.) Why so much hatred for the rural folks on Slashdot? I would love to live more in a more urban setting, but there are more complicating factors that prevent that. So to all you "tough shit" city-dwellers - thanks for nothing, assholes.
Dark Reflection
All the posts talking about rail (hsr/intercity/commuter/LRT/RRT) vs other modes of transportation have got it wrong. It's not about supplanting one of the current modes with trains (although that may happen), it's about providing regional (and local) transportation options where it makes sense to. A HSR system linking a village in Wyoming with another village in Wyoming probably doesn't make much sense. A HSR system linking major metro areas in regional spots like CA, the midwest, the Pacific NW, New England, etc makes perfect sense given that those are spots with the density to support rail and who's highway and air infrastructure are overburdened.
Is it economically feasible? It's gonna be expensive, no doubt. However expanding our current roadway/air infrastructure will also be expensive. The other issue is that the longer we wait, the more expensive it will become. If you feel that our current transportation system is adequate for our current and future needs, then fine; if you don't than you have to accept that "pricey" rail is also going to be part of the mix.
If you are someone who loves your car, you should be backing rail wholeheartedly for one reason: every rail passenger means one less driver on the road, which will make driving easier for you. It only takes a couple percent reduction in traffic to go from level-of-service F (stop-and-go traffic) to LOS D (traffic slow but moving)
(ftr I'm someone who does consulting for the rail industry and I'm also a member of a rail advocacy group)
... Cities can not support themselves. They require trains, trucks and ships to get food and supplies. A city without a transportation network is a tomb.
Rural areas are generally capable of becoming self sufficient if need be in practically no time at all.
You're looking at an illusion you seem to think of as being efficient.
Cities are in no way efficient, pretty much everything about them is inefficient.
You think because its only a short distance to where YOU get your supplies that it is efficient, and that is ignorant.
You have to supply water, food and energy from the city. In rural areas where density is sustainable, one can provide all 3 for themselves. A major city on the other hand has to ship in all of those things from remote areas.
Its not that I'm going to 'get you wrong' its that you are wrong because you have no concept of how quickly your life would be over if you had to use the same set of resources as those that you are seem to think you're paying for luxuries for.
You pay a tiny increase on a phone bill to a company that is completely ripping you off ... and in exchange, they get Internet and phone ... and you don't die in 3 days because they stopped giving a shit about feeding your ignorant selfish ass when they stopped communicating with you.
You are so utterly disconnected from reality I'm surprised your even in the same universe as the slashdot I'm on.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
That would make sense, except that government size and the current scale of spending is the result of folks on the right, largely. It's always boggled my mind to hear people call for smaller government and then vote in favor of things like the patriot act and new government departments like the DHS and TSA. The left may be accused of tax and spend, but the right is definitely about spending *and* tax cuts. Pretty amazing stuff.
Cut subsidies for all forms of transportation. Then, tax in proportion to carbon emissions. Trains win in every densely populated region, hands down.
Why the hell can't we just have taxes for the purpose of paying for government? Rather than these "I don't like what you do with your life so I'm going to try to hinder you from doing it through a passive-aggressive tax measure"
When you don't have the Constitutional or popular backing to ban something, Tax it.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The NIMBYs are not peculiar to California. Indeed, the aforementioned tactics and their assorted variations work just as well in many other states. There are reasons why the waste water treatment plants, garbage incinerators and oil refineries are rarely located next to wealthy enclaves with property values to protect.
Around here, the farmers tend to do pretty well. They generally hire Americans, things are generally harvested and handled by machines operated by well-paid Americans, and the machines are serviced locally by companies that also employ Americans who seem to be doing pretty well.
Now, we generally grow just soy, corn, and wheat around here (and lots of each), and all of those things are easily mechanized. Other areas that grow more hands-on crops (tomatoes, perhaps) might behave differently, but unlike you, I won't speak for them because I don't have any first-hand knowledge of them.
Where I come, farmers have money. Agriculture in these parts builds cities. Not the other way around.
Kid-proof tablet..
That's funny, because if you look at where federal tax revenue comes from vs where it goes, you'll see that it's primarily the more densely populated areas paying federal taxes, and the rural, less densely populated areas receiving taxes. That particular link is tilted as a red vs blue thing, but it also shows that more densely populated states receive more in federal tax money than less densely populated states.
So if cities are far, far more subsidized, where's that money coming from? It doesn't seem to be from the federal government, and if it comes from the state where does the state get that money? Cities are still the main source of income for state governments, after all.
Face it, rural areas are highly inefficient. Yes, they create the food that the cities need - but in practice, that means a couple of factory farms owned by an agro-megacorp and manned by maybe a thousand people out in the boonies where nobody can smell the manure. The rest of it is just people who drive too much to get to their day job in the city.
And Sweden is larger than California (449,964 km^2 vs 423,970 km^2), but only has a third of the population of California (9.3 million vs 36.9 million).
What are you smoking, that makes you believe that California couldn't sustain as extensive a train network as Sweden?
Because banning something is a blunt instrument for policy, while taxing it has the effect of discouraging the undesirable action, at the same time allowing somebody who really needs it to still do it. For example, if you suddenly need to pick up your child from across town, you can either sit in traffic with everybody else, or be there quickly because congestion pricing (that you were willing to pay for in your emergency) kept most of the others off the road. If we simply banned driving, we'd end up ban your urgent use as well.
Pollution is not about simple minded disapproval of anyone's lifestyle, it's what is known as the "tradgedy of the commons". There's only one sure fire way to halt the tradgedy and that's to retool the free market such that it becomes painfully unprofitable to pollute.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Sure, if by 'self sufficient' you mean 'living in stone age conditions'."
I don't.
"Sure a rural region can provide all three 'for themselves' so long as they have an industrial base to provide the tools and implements, otherwise it's back to the stone age."
Are you under the impression that "rural area" means "only farms"? You know more electricity is generated in rural areas than urban and suburban, and that there are factories in rural areas?
We're talking about the rural United States. We're not talking about Somalia.
Have you been on AMTRAK lately? They have made no secret of the fact that they want to eventually emulate the same security system as airports.
He's talking personal carbon footprint. You're talking per capita (and defined by a limited geographic area). You're penalizing the farmer and any manufacturing (like steel and aluminum, usually done outside of cities near power plants in rural areas) against the rural area, when they are lopsidedly providing for the city folk, but counting the emissions per capita against the farmer and manufacturing.
Your study is crap. It's using the geographic boundaries of city and rural to cheat. Most rural carbon emission is for urban consumption. For example, trucking the city food in from the rural area, counts against the farmer. The farmer being product for the city works against the farmer, since running his tractor to work his 1,000 acres to support 200+ city folk, contributes hugely to his emissions.
(And honestly? Air samples? Not calculations based on economic flow of material and goods serving the communities by weight of who the end users area? Methane? That's the best you could find?)
Moving his steers to be slaughtered counts against him. Not the city folk for which they farted and were slaughtered for.
The concrete for the highway to get the goods in, counts again the farmer, not the city folk.
etc. etc.
Simple analysis--to get his work done, the farmer receives hydrocarbons. For city folk to get their work done, they require food. A tanker of diesel is more efficient than 2 semis hauling corn in to the city.
Look at the tea-party platform, and you'll see it's primarily economic: they've dropped the 'moral' aspect of the right and have focused mainly on cutting deficits by cutting spending.
Hardly. The libertarian right views its form of meritocracy as a moral issue. It's immoral to give healthcare to the needy because you take money from those who "earned" it. I haven't seen any tea-partier actually support reducing the size of the government by cutting funding to the largest military in the world. I haven't seen a single tea-partier come out in favor of personal liberty through marijuana reform, or legalizing prostitution, or really any other actual limits on our liberty. The tea-party platform is total bunk. It's the same old conservative, right wing, republican platform dressed up in colorful rhetoric.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Then honestly, you don't know what you're talking about.
Yes, I know both. And I know neither will function long without industrial support for fuel, materials, and spare parts. This is the real world, not a game, and factories aren't fungible. If you're talking a scenario in which cities vanish, but long distance transport remains intact (economically impossible BTW), then you aren't using a definition of 'self sufficient' that has any reasonable meaning.