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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?
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)
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.
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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.
... 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.
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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.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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