…the boondoggle:
I love trains. If moderate- or high-speed rails worked, I would be the first to support them. But all they will really do is subsidize the rich, while they do more harm to the environment than driving or flying.
These are religious policies, not rational ones.
Wow, talk about mis-information!
He mixes data points without defining them. What does he mean by an “average resident”? Of where? And why would an average resident commute on high speed rail?
He then mixes “moderate” trains with “High Speed” to say they’ll do more harm to the environment.
This one is a peach: “running trains at higher speeds will make them less energy-efficient.” What trains? What engines? What are the efficiency points on the new higher speed engines? Specifically what the emissions per passenger and traveled mile?
I occasionally like to go to Vancouver or Portland. Portland is about 110 miles from here. It’s a 2-3 hour drive (depending on the nightmare that is the 5 between Seattle and Tacoma) and should be 90 minutes on a train – it’s 3 hours on the train and the timetable is such you couldn’t even go for the day, let alone the evening.
When I lived in Bath (97 miles from London), I could go to meet friends in London for the night, it was 90 minutes journey including 3 stops. The last train would have me home by 1am.
In British evening traffic it would be a 3+ hour drive.
Randal is pretty much anti-rail. He has written many scathing pieces over the last few years. He seems especially displeased with Portland, Oregon.
The biggest problem I have with this particular piece of his, are his comments about European and Japanese rail. He appears to restrict the rail numbers to high speed only. Both countries have a huge rail network, and high speed isn’t the biggest part of them. (Of course here we’re talking about high speed rail only.) He compares France’s 400 miles of high speed rail to 7,600 miles of driving. It would be more accurate if the 400 miles of high speed travel was broken down to distance per trip, then extract the same trip distance mileage from the driven total. Or, since he is using total driven mileage, also include the total rail miles per year, not just high speed, even though this is about high speed rail.
Norm: he does a classic bait and switch with his use of “moderate” and “high speed” rail, using the terms when convenient to his rant and ignoring them if not. Most of the European Rail networks, even the inter-urban routes rate as “moderate” for the purposes of his rant.
I used to live in Surbiton, which is about 12 miles from Central London. Even late at night, in good traffic it’s a good 30-40 minute drive. The fast train service, could do it in 10 minutes and that cuts right through the suburbs at 60+ mph on a boring commuter train.
So, its our fault London sucks? To drive — to drive I mean….
If a city or a state is all for having a train to alleviate inner city congestion then I’m all for it. But I fail to see the need for the federal gov’t to be overly involved.
Josh: not at all. As Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman point out in Good Omens, London wasn’t designed for cars. Nor was it really designed for people…
“But I fail to see the need for the federal gov’t to be overly involved.” – do you REALLY fail to see the need? Or did you think that sounded good in your head?
The problem with rail in the USA will always be that when you’ve reached your destination on a train you don’t have your car – and very few American cities make that a pleasant experience. If more American cities were like New York or London I guess it would be fine, but they’re not.
The “other” problem is that it’s stupid to make major public investments in competing transport networks. Pick one. Since by result of history we have already “picked” cars and highways, it’s just not smart to also invest in medium- and long-distance rail + local subways/streetcars. There may be theoretical advantages to the later but we’ve already sunk trillions of dollars into our highways, gasoline (both refining and distribution) and automobile investments.
I fail to see the need, period. I even did the math a while back.
Jay: While I can’t argue that the number of available corridors is different in the US, I have to reject one of your data points.
“Assume a 2-hour penalty for using air travel, due to security check-in procedures and baggage retrieval, and that travel times to and from airports and train stations are identical.”
Travel times to airports v. train stations this is not usually the case. I can think of a few exceptions, usually smaller cities (San Diego, Las Vegas). But the larger cities often have just awful connections to the main regional city.
Brock: it’s not an either or. Cars and the road system isn’t going away because you have trains. They serve to provide relief on congested routes.
I meant to say: larger cities have just awful connections to the main regional airport/s.
Jay: one of the most depressing things about your tables and analysis is that the Acelea Express actually only averages 25 mph more than the standard Amtrak trains on the NYC-Philly route. No wonder nobody uses it.
Daveon said: “do you REALLY fail to see the need? Or did you think that sounded good in your head?”
There are great many wonderful things that happen inside of my head.
Who likes to be micromanaged? Why invent an entirely new policy direction for a project that already has existing financial support channels. Why artificially prop up a business that doesn’t have the proportionate demand to adequately sustain it?
I dunno those seem like some legitimate concerns. IMO I don’t favor increased intervention by the federal gov’t any more than necessary.
Daveon, I think you miss Brock’s point. We already have the gasoline/road infrastructure, a growing part of which is in bad shape. We don’t need to spend billions of tax dollars adding unneeded rail infrastructure, we need to fix up and expand what we have.
It’s like the Monorail episode from The Simpsons.
“Randal is pretty much anti-rail. He has written many scathing pieces over the last few years. He seems especially displeased with Portland, Oregon.
The biggest problem I have with this particular piece of his, are his comments about European and Japanese rail. He appears to restrict the rail numbers to high speed only. Both countries have a huge rail network, and high speed isn’t the biggest part of them. (Of course here we’re talking about high speed rail only.) He compares France’s 400 miles of high speed rail to 7,600 miles of driving. It would be more accurate if the 400 miles of high speed travel was broken down to distance per trip, then extract the same trip distance mileage from the driven total. ”
From the EU statistics I have looked at, driving is 80 percent of total passenger miles, and the remaining 20 percent of passenger miles is pretty evenly split between trains (high-speed or otherwise), buses, ferry boats, and airplanes, with trains showing a slight decline in market share over time and airlines showing a slight growth. This is not broken out by trip length, so naturally, for the longer trips, cars will have a smaller share.
The thing is that there is a contingent who gets all worked up that we don’t match the EU countries in trains or high-speed trains, but I don’t know of people complaining that as Americans we should be ashamed for our lack of commuter boats or lack of intercity buses.
Yeah, yeah, Randall is anti-rail, but the people who are for rail can be equally enumerate.
The thing is that people who are for trains are for them because they think that something is intrinsically good about trains and then they look for arguments in support of trains rather than looking at the transportation picture and saying, hey, this is a problem that can be solved with trains, and no, this other situation does not suit trains very well.
The main concern I have about trains is that the energy saving of trains is a lot less than most people realize and the amount of monetary subsidy per passenger mile is a lot more than realized, so as an energy policy, trains are a rather expensive way to go. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that however you feel about giving tax credits for hybrid cars, they are 10 times more cost effective than Amtrak, and presumable hybrid cars are “on a glide path” to becoming cost effective to not need subsidy but if you suggest such a thing to train people they get all huffy about how attempts to make Amtrak pay its way are attempts to do away with it.
Having lived in Japan for 10 years, I can tell you some about their rail system. The local rail networks around the Tokyo area are very efficient and tend to be profitable, particularly what are called the “shi-tetsu” lines (JR is not quite so good). The high speed trains are called shinkansen and there are five lines of these. The only one that is profitable is the Tokaido-sen, which runs between Tokyo and Osaka. The others, Sanyo-sen, Tohoku-sen. Joshinetsu-sen, and Hokuriku-sen are subsidized by the national government.
Train lines need a very high traffic density in order to be profitable. The Tokaido-sen shinkansen runs a train every 5 minutes between tokyo and Osaka. Each train has 15 carriages, each carriage seating about 100 people. Thus, 3 jumbo jets worth of passengers travel between Tokyo and Osaka every 5 minutes!
The only traffic corridor with even close to this much traffic is the NYC-DC corridor. No where else in the U.S. has anything close to this much traffic.
A shinkansen network for the rest of the U.S. is a wet dream.
JP Gibb: I didn’t miss his point. I think, and this is one of the few good things about the current situation, you really ought to be doing both. While, as others point out perfectly well, trains aren’t a panacea, they would relieve pressure on certain corridors where driving and flying over short/medium distances 200-450/500 is becoming a nightmare due to congestion and the state the airports are in.
The roads and bridges need a lot of work that needs to be done but that’s not going to make the 5 between LA and SD any easier to drive on, the fecking thing already has a dozen lanes in places and it’s still a car park for a lot of the time.
Even if they only improve the rail network in the North East corner it would be a good start. At least there people do and are using the trains even though, based on my experience of them, they really suck.
Jay should make the dead stop time difference for
passenger rail versus air travel about 3.5 hours.
when i drive to the airport i always allow 60 minutes
to drive plus about a half hour to park and get to
the terminal, and an hour to clear security and check in
plus an hour on the other side to fetch bags and
get a rental car.
But that said, The freight companies BNSF and UP are
investing heavily into high speed rail freight.
they define high speed as 75-90 MPH, but,
a consistent program of grade separations and
improved signaling in return for passenger
train access will provide dramatic improvements
to the passengers.
90 MPH consistent DC-chicago makes a 7 hour
run, a long trip but tolerable because i can
work in my seat and catch up on reading.
90 MPH NY- boston makes a 2.5 hour trip.
90 MPH NY – DC makes 2.5 hours trip.
Certainly key elements of the system need improvement
and, its’ far more productive then pouring
this money into Iraq.
Daveon: I disagree. You really ought not do both. Both roads/cars and rails/trains are means for moving people from points A to B. They also both require HUGE up front costs to move the first person and incredibly small marginal costs to move each additional person. Therefore once you’ve paid that “HUGE up front cost” for one system or the other, improving that system is always more cost efficient than building the other system. We (America) have paid the cost for cars and roads; it’s just smarter to build on that.
One of the biggest hurdles any non-car people-moving solution always has to beat though is that no two people are going to the exact same place from the exact same place. Trains only get you to within a certain distance of your destination, and unless you’re one of those lucky few within a pleasant walk of both train stations (or living in Manhattan) it just doesn’t get you close enough. There needs to be a “last mile” solution once the train is built. What do you propose, and how much more will that cost?
The easiest and cheapest solution is just to open up competition in taxis and buses. We already have the roads and gas stations paid for. Chinatown bus companies charge ~$15 (last time I checked) for a bus ticket from New York to Boston, leaving hourly. Imagine how cheap taxis would be if New York didn’t charge $350,000 for a taxi medallion …
“Jay should make the dead stop time difference for passenger rail versus air travel about 3.5 hours. when i drive to the airport i always allow 60 minutes to drive plus about a half hour to park and get to the terminal, and an hour to clear security and check in plus an hour on the other side to fetch bags and get a rental car.”
These estimates are, to be exceedingly polite, generous. My airport drive time is less than 40 minutes (to cover a distance of 30 miles). Parking takes 5 more minutes and getting to the terminal takes, at most, another 15 — usually only another 5. It has never taken me more than 20 minutes to clear security and usually the delay is well under 10 (at Dulles, 3 months after 9/11, it took 5 minutes). Baggage and rental car at the other end, maybe 30. Total is less than an hour and a half.
To the train station: drive time is 20 minutes. Parking and walking to the boarding area is again another 10. Baggage and rental car at the other end is rather more difficult to estimate but at least 20 minutes is a good guess.
Total actual penalty for using air travel is therefore well under 1 hour vs the 2 hours I used when working the problem, serving to even further underscore my key point, which is that unless train travel is given away for free it cannot be competitive with air travel outside the Northeast for anyone who places any monetary value on their time.
Train travel should be marketed as a tourist experience, not in head-to-head competition with airlines. Trains truly competitive with air travel will have to move at the speed of airplanes, which probably means evacuated tunnels. These could be constructed relatively quickly with shaped-charge nuclear explosives, but the mindless conservatism (not to say Luddism) of today’s political class is, at present, an insuperable barrier.
(Oops, was I supposed to say we should spend the money on Iraq instead?)
I have seen studies that show that the one place a high sped rail line might make sense would be allong the I-15 corridor from LA to Las Vegas, and it only works due to the huge number of folks headed to The Strip.
Ridership calculations are also very dependend on security hassles. If rail has a TSA type security component, no time is saved over flying, and people will just drive or talk Southwest.
Other than that, rail is for freight, not people.
Jay, some people like using “numbers” like fact, when hyperbole is more like it. This morning, I left my house at 7:40am. Caught my flight at 9am. Landed in Orlando at noon local, and was at KSC by 1:30pm. No time spent picking up baggage, but I suspect that trains would have the same problem (if you checked baggage on them, like you would a plane, then again, if you’re doing that, then you are talking a different kind of rail for a different purpose than most of the discussion here).
I agree with Brock here. I have used rail in several cities, and while it took a little getting used to, I liked it. But rail doesn’t work in a place like Houston. When you have a large flat expanse that was built up by roads, there is no natural corridors that causes train loads to congregate.
High speed rail could be put in place in Texas like France. Travel between Houston, San AntonioAustin, Dallas/Fort Worth would be great by rail. That is, until you get to your destination and then don’t have a car. Again, because the existing infrastructure requires a car.
On that last note, I’ll actually help Daveon on a point he seemed unwilling to make; opting to be annoying and arrogant. Without a federal initiative to push infrastructure change from road to rail (such as when it went the opposite way with the Eisenhower Interstate System); then money will continue to go to road.
Nobody seems to notice that the North American rail net is optimized for FREIGHT, not passengers. And a lot of that freight is hauled in unit trains: over 100 cars all going from the same source to the same destination (coal, grain and containers).
The biggest problem with Amtrak is that it does not own the rails on which it operates, and the companies (BNSF, UP, CSX and NS) which do own those rails would prefer that its cattle cars not get in the way of them doing their job.
So if you really, really want “high speed” passenger service, the first thing you should do is completely ignore the current rail system,and the fantasies of somehow retrofitting something faster over it. That means you need to acquire a new right of way (or Kelo an existing one…) and build your high-speed infrastructure from scratch. That does have an advantage, in that you would be building curves suited to your desired speeds and not curves and bridges left over from the Age of Steam. You’d also be able to put your stations somewhere people want to go. (One suggestion would be the local airport, as they’ve already got the infrastructure for getting in and out already in place. See South Bend, Ind.’s airport and the South Shore RR for an example of that.)
Personally, I wouldn’t subsidize rail. I also don’t believe we should subsidize road building either. I would even go so far as to say federal, state and local roads ought to be auctioned off and converted to tollways.
Economist, Walter Block has done a pretty definitive treatise on the topic here:
http://mises.org/books/roads_web.pdf
Jay
Last time i flew out of BWI from Downtown DC it was 1:45
minute travel, of course, i was trying to crawl through PM Rush hour.
Usually when I want to go from DC to Dulles it’s 60 minutes
unless i am going late at night or in between rush hours.
going from DC to National can take an hour unless i take
the metro. Crossing the bridges is a tough drive during rush hour which runs 3 to 7 PM.
Going from San Francisco to SFO takes an hour if there is traffic on the 110.
Going to LAX from anywhere can take an hour if i have to
fight traffic. Morning trips from Santa Monica to LAX
can be brutal. Same with Afternoon trips.
Driving to JFK is no fun at all, i’ve tried that.
as for security delays, that’s a wash to check in, most of the airlines will cancel your seat if you aren’t there 60 minutes early if they have oversold the seat.
That’s really the same thing but i have spent 90 minutes
in line at BWI to clear security, and after 9/11 used to
see lines of 3 hours at BWI.
I’m of the point that i usually drive if the trip is 300 Miles
or less, because the utility of having my own car is high.
I don’t mind an hours trip penalty for trains because
i can get a huge amount of work done, or even better
catch up on some sleep.
consequently for trips up and down the east coast,
Amtrak works out quite well.
Where Amtrak fails, is weekend trips, where it’s
quite hard to get a rental car at many of the stations.
Philadelphia 23rd st station is the only place where i
can rent a car on a friday night and return it sunday PM.
Hartford station makes you get there before 7
and return it monday which is of lower utility,
same thing with Dallas and LA.
Now, When I go out of Union Station, i can often times
walk there or grab a taxi or even take the subway,
and i do the same thing when i’m in manhattan, which
is quite convenient.
I don’t believe Amtrak needs to go as fast as a plane
to have excellent service, but, it does need to improve.
A small investment into the tunnels at Baltimore,
Newark and NYC would allow the double deck fleet
to run, and allow the Acela’s to run at full speed
on the DC-NYC route which would be averaging
150 MPH. The Bos-NYC route needs improvements
to the power gear, there is insufficient current
to supply power over 75 MPH, plus there are
some winding curves in Connecticut which
speed limit them to 55 MPH. Redo the Right of way
and bank the rail, and you should be able to
average 125 MPH through CT.
an all electric run along the NorthEast corridor would
pay off in reduced operating costs and pollution reduction.
Now a San Diego to San Francisco Run would
also be able to manage 150 MPH, which would
be highly competitive, for business.
A national system would never make sense but some
good regional networks would. Providing medium
speed service connecting certain corridors, would,
dramatically improve business.
But i digress.
And should that money be spent in Baghdad first?
Ask the mayor, George W Bush.
I have wondered if there would be value in building high speed rail feeders to a “megaport” super-regional airport located out in the middle of nowhere where land is cheap and it isn’t land-locked by the surronding neighbors?
There is value in converting Air travel to be an East-West
kind of thing, and to invest into North-South Rail Hubs.
If you had high speed rail going San Diego, LA Santa Barbara.
San Francisco, through the central valley and servicing
Vegas, you could have air links to Denver, Chicago,
Dallas, Atlanta, new York.
Then have a high speed rail link Denver/Colorado Springs/
Santa Fe/Phoenix.
have a Rail hub Chicago/Minneapolis/Detroit/St Louis.
Have a rail Hub Dallas/Ok City/Houston/New Orleans
Have a rail hub Atlanta/Huntsville/Miami
and the Northeast corridor Richmond to Boston.