…that is high-speed trains in California:
Those hoping to ride the state’s high-speed train next decade will have to dig much deeper into their wallets than officials originally thought, a harsh reality that will chase away millions of passengers, according to an updated business plan released Monday.
The average ticket on the bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles is now estimated to cost about $105, or 83 percent of comparable airfare. Last year, the state said prices would be set at 50 percent of comparable airfare and predicted a ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles would cost $55.
As a result of the higher fares, state officials now think the service will attract 41 million annual riders by 2035, down from last year’s prediction of 55 million passengers by 2030.
Finally, the cost of the project — recently pegged at $33.6 billion in 2008 dollars — is now estimated at $42.6 billion in time-of-construction dollars.
The voters were crazy to approve that bond issue. Does anyone really believe that those numbers aren’t going to continue to rise, and ridership fall, into a death spiral that will turn it into a subsidized Amtrak (with subsidies probably coming from airfares between northern and southern California)? And this was supposed to be stimulus? Your government at work, and the country’s in the very best of hands.
The cost of the ticket is too high as well.
I just priced a ticket on Southwest between LAX and SFO with a four day lead and it was $73.00
And think of getting an environmental impact statement approved – and of the hordes of environmentalists that will oppose every possible route. The cost and schedule is enormously underestimated.
Aren’t you glad you moved back? You’ll be paying and didn’t even get a chance to vote on it.
I am SO glad I left.
Yeah, I was about to say. You can get a faster, cheaper ticket on southwest.
There’s a simple solution to this problem. Kick out of the major airports all the freeloaders that offer prices that are too low. With the meddlesome competition eliminated, then 50% of comparable airfare will be easy to meet.
My bride of 19 years went to visit kids and grand kids in Nevada twice a year. She always wanted to do the trip on Amtrak (not so much when the bridge across Mobile Bay collapsed!) and we always followed the rates. The cheapest over all those (federally subsidized) years was half again as much as 1st class air fare. We looked at main terminals, some 400 miles away, just for the experience. The very best 10 years ago cost enough for BOTH of us to travel 1st class air not including the “service fees” Amtrak requires.
Amtrak and all gummit managed “services”, well, what can I say?
The airlines themselves have been bailed out and subsidized to death. Why should you expect the high speed rail service to be any different?
Rail is more energy efficient, less polluting, can go right into city centers and requires no check-in times. Electric rail does not need oil either.
There will be a study. Someone’s brother-in-law will be employed for a few years.
Then the environmentalists will demonstrate against it. Someone else’s brother-in-law will be employed for a few years.
Then the two brothers-in-law will get together to work out the problems. They will be employed for a few more years. With a little luck they will make it to retirement and a fat pension.
In the end the high speed train will not be built due to insurmountable issues related to engineering and the environment.
Best stick with Southwest.
Per Mapquest, the distance from San Francisco to LA is 381 miles. Per Google, the distance from London to Paris is 308 miles. Somehow, Eurostar managed to dig a tunnel under the English Channel and turn a profit.
This does not mean that US-high-speed trains will be profitable, merely that profits are possible.
Eurostar dug the Chunnel? Who knew?
And why do you think that relative distance has any relevance?
The airlines themselves have been bailed out and subsidized to death.
Huh?
Relative distance matters because it drives travel time. Trains have an advantage for relatively short hauls, especially for city-center to city-center travelers.
I don’t know that the airlines have been subsidized to death, but they have been subsidized – airports are built by governments, not private enterprise. In truth, all modes of transport are subsidized, be they roads or ocean freight. What we should be arguing about is the relative level of subsidy between various modes.
If only they had heeded the wisdom of the ‘Monorail’ Simpson’s episode.
Trains have an advantage for relatively short hauls, especially for city-center to city-center travelers.
LA/SF is a longer haul than London/Paris, and it has driving opportunities that don’t involved loading and unloading your car to and from a train. It’s a useless comparison.
Actually, Rand, one could always drive to a Channel ferry. But the original comparison wasn’t “train v. drive” it was “train v. fly.”
At any rate, Paris – Brussels is also driveable – I’ve done it. Or Paris – Marseille. High-speed rail makes money on those routes. There are in fact a number of medium-haul high-speed routes in Europe.
The proposed high-speed routes in the US are based on those types of runs. So the argument that US high-speed rail is doomed has to account for why the European experience is different.
The European experience is different for many reasons, and will remain so. Anyway, I didn’t say that US high-speed rail is doomed — it’s possible that there are runs that make economic sense, but clearly, based on these numbers, LA/SF isn’t one of them.
Electric rail does not need oil either.
No, it needs electricity, which like as not is generated by burning either natural gas or coal. The tradeoff for not having a little smokestack on each locomotive is having a great big smokestack far away. So don’t try to tell us that electric rail is somehow cleaner.
Dunno. It seems that people on the Right have a knee-jerk aversion to trains, but it also seems that people on the Left have an affinity to them whatever the facts.
As far as I see it, the high-speed train is simply another kind of bus, just as the plane ride from LA to SF is a bus ride of a sort. As a bus, it is a common-carrier mode. As a common carrier, you don’t have to fight traffic, but you may have to bustle through crowds of people on foot and sit cheek-by-jowl with sneezing strangers. As a common carrier, you have to pay for a ticket, but your car still uses gas and has a lot of hidden costs.
The tradeoff is not between car and train but rather between private carrier (car) and common carrier (various kinds of bus). The question is whether a train or a high-speed train is a better kind of bus than the sorts of bus we have now.
The bus function has largely been taken over by air transport in the US — airlines have taken riders not only away from trains but from Lamers/Greyhound.
Air transport has two things going for it: speed and speed. Speed means that the amount of time you need to park your backside into a bus seat is mercifully short (is LA-SF 1 hour by air?), although the quality of the bus seat has declined, both in terms of leg and elbow room as well as in terms of how we as Americans deal with each other as strangers in crowded quarters.
The other part to airline speed is the number of “turns” you can get out of the airplane compared to the rail and road-borne bus. The plane travels so much faster that the pilots and flight attendants are much more productive in the number of passenger miles they “produce” per hour on the job. The airliner is expensive and has expensive maintenance, but it too is much more productive in passenger-miles per airframe hour. Strictly on the basis of operating cost, airplanes have driven the passenger train into oblivion, and this was reviewed by Trains Magazine back in the early 1960’s. When the Boeing 727 came out, the airlines had the trains and eventually the long distance bus beat on cost let alone the appeal of faster travel.
What the airplane has going against it is fuel consumption, but until now, fuel has been cheap, and even now, it is not the majority cost in common carrier transport.
But if you want to save on gas, the way to go is a proper Greyhound-type bus. Amtrak fuel consumption is remarkably high, and on average, not much a reduction over modern planes having the seats packed together. For Amtrak to save much in the way of fuel, they would have to start packing in the seats the way they do on proper buses and on airliners.
The high-speed train is another story. It is almost as fast as a plane, perhaps faster when you consider the security screen and the downtown-to-downtown time, but then how many people travel downtown-to-downtown these days anyway? It is claimed to use less energy than a plane, or perhaps electric energy from benign sources, but I have yet to see convincing figures on that. Anytime you travel fast like a plane, you start consuming energy like a plane, and the relative energy intensity of the train depends on how well streamline the train, how many stops or how hilly the route, how heavy the train, and how many seats are crammed in. And also how full are the seats, and if people are willing to play the capacity-demand-fare game of the airlines to have the seats full along with the inconvenience of the crowds that go with full seating.
Finally, the high speed train requires a precision-machined and maintained guideway over the entire route whereas the plane only needs ground contact at each end on a runway. Highspeed trains require frequent and constant adjustments to the rails and machining of the train car wheels and rail head profile of the tracks for safe and smooth operation.
The train could be the answer to the transportation needs of California for the future, or it could be an expensive boondogle. Some PBS Nova program had this episode showing an animation of highspeed trains gliding over the landscape, powered by wind turbines dotting the hills. Yeah right, that you are going to power the 24/7 power demand of the train line with the ups and downs of wind currents. If this is the kind of make-believe green understanding of the thing, it is probably more in the boondoggle category.
Rand, regarding airline bailouts:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031201-549004,00.html
“Remember the airline bailouts following 9/11? Less than a month after the 2001 attacks, Congress rushed through a $15 billion bounty of subsidies and loan guarantees for U.S. carriers”
I note Eurochannel has also made a profit recently. Not just Eurostar. But so did Iridium. Annual profits do not mean the initial sunk cost has been paid.
Bryan:
Nuclear power does not do any smokestacks. Coal and gas power plants are more efficient than a train combustion engine because they run at a higher temperature and can have a water stream as a cold reservoir. Carnot efficiency. Ever heard about it? I am sick and tired of hearing this pathetic argument.
Paul:
As far as I see it, the high-speed train is simply another kind of bus
No it is not. For several reasons. Railways can withstand heavier vehicles. Hard and smooth tracks provide lower friction increasing energetic efficiency. Rail traffic is more efficient than road traffic. Shipping traffic is more efficient still.
I am hardly surprised that you think this way. People are fascinated for wheeled vehicles for reasons I cannot fathom. They are not better in all regards. One manifestation of this fascination was Donald Rumsfeld’s inane insistence on wheeled vehicles for the military. This gave us abortions like Stryker and Stryker Mobile Gun System. This was against decades of military knowledge accumulated from WWII, Korea, and elsewhere. Tracked vehicles were used by the military because tracked vehicles can withstand more weight without sinking in the ground or getting stuck. The additional weight capacity is useful for carrying more armor and ammo. After Iraq suddenly the M1 Abrahams seems to make sense again. Turns out armor has its uses after all…
Well, if people ride the train from London to Paris maybe it’s because flying is so expensive. Here are the best round trip ticket prices I could find for a single adult round trip departing Fri Jan 15 and returning Mon Jan 18:
San Francisco – Los Angeles
$127 – United Airlines
London – Paris
$206 – Air France
$111 – Eurostar (train)
Airline tickets are not likely to stay cheap.
And yes, electric rail is cleaner ( co2 per passenger mile ) than diesel, and can only improve if/when the power mix shifts away from coal.
“Remember the airline bailouts following 9/11? Less than a month after the 2001 attacks, Congress rushed through a $15 billion bounty of subsidies and loan guarantees for U.S. carriers”
I didn’t say that they got no bailouts or subsidies, so I’m not sure what your point is. My “Huh?” was in reference to your strange claim that they had been “bailed out and subsidized to death.” They seem very much alive to me.
“Paul:
As far as I see it, the high-speed train is simply another kind of bus
No it is not. For several reasons. Railways can withstand heavier vehicles. Hard and smooth tracks provide lower friction increasing energetic efficiency. Rail traffic is more efficient than road traffic. ”
When I called the high-speed train another kind of bus, I meant from a user standpoint. By that measure, an airliner is just a bus. Instead of driving your own car where you get to select your traveling companions and when and where you go, you have to observe the dictates of a schedule and sit in close quarters with strangers who don’t keep colds or worse to themselves.
But from an energy efficiency standpoint, a Lamers/Greyhound type intercity bus is almost an order of magnitude more energy efficient than Amtrak — go look it up.
People think steel wheel, steel rail, low rolling friction, high energy efficiency. That works when you are moving very dense cargo like steel or coal at slow speeds. It doesn’t work the way you think for passengers.
The funny thing about passenger trains is that passengers are a lightweight “commodity” taking up a lot of space in a train, and passenger trains tend to have much more weight per passenger than planes and proper buses. Part of the reason of this is that a train, is well, a train, and in the US especially, there are strict Federal rules on the strength of train cars that they don’t “telescope” into each other in a wreck, inflecting mayhem or worse on the passengers. That weight negates some of the low rolling resistance advantage. It also consumes energy if one is making frequent stops or is climbing hills (of which California is hilly and even mountainous along much of the LA-SF route).
The other thing is that if a train is run fast enough, it becomes like an airliner in that parasitic aero drag dominates energy usage. A train is hard to streamline because wheels need to contact the rails and there are gaps between train cars. If the train collects power from an overhead wire, it has the pantograph current collector sticking out along with rooftop electrical gear such as insulators, circuit breakers, and perhaps dynamic braking resistors. Airliners also have the advantage is that they climb to higher altitudes where the air is thin and drag is less — the reason airplanes are most efficient at somewhat longer routes is that the fuel to climb to altitude is balanced by the efficiency at cruise.
Trains are great and grande. Especially with some cotton candy in your hand. Then, the train stops and you get to feed the giraffe outside your window. Oh the charms of a train. Well at least the one I got to ride the zoo that one time.
Here’s an essay on public transportation that’s worth reading. The name alone is a classic: A Desire Named Streetcar.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5345
As I see it, the problems with public transportation, both short-haul and long haul, include:
* Inflexibility — You can’t go where you want, when you want. And you can’t easily change your mind. (“Did I leave the stove on?”)
* Expense — If you have to own a car for any reason, there is nothing that public transportation can do that your car can’t — so you don’t need public transport. Similarly, if someone else will oerate an airline and sell you a ticket that gets you where you want to go, why pay taxes to build a railway system that does the same thing in twice the travel time, or ten times the travel time? Why pay for infrastructure you don’t need to use?
* Storage — It isn’t easy to go shopping. (This is a short-haul concern, but I thought I’d throw it in for completeness.) It’s damn near impossible to shopping at multiple locations … what do you do with four bags of groceries while you’re in Home Depot?
* Monoculture vulnerabilities — Public transport is operated by … public employees! Public employees who are almost certainly unionized! Public employees who go on strike at their convenience, not yours. What a good idea! In addition, it’s a lot easier to bring a railway system to a screeching halt than it is to shut down a highway system or an air travel system. Any spot on the track is a critical failure point. If the LA/SF bullet train ever gets built, how often do you think that merry pranksters will find new ways to shut it down?
Well, at least I voted against this boondoggle; I was agast a year ago when I woke up, checked the election results, and saw what my fellow Californians had done…
Also, Southwest got no gov’t bailouts to my knowledge. They also consistently turn a profit, and I consistently choose them for short-haul trips over any other airline due to their superior level of customer service, no charging for checked bags, etc.
The high speed rail will be a fiasco.
Mike:
* The inflexibility problem will always exist with any form of mass transport. It has nothing to do with being public, or not public. The same problem exists in an airline, train, bus, boat ride, or whatever. People use these services either because their personal transport cannot do the ride due to range or whatever limitations, or because it is inconvenient, because of speed limits, driver fatigue or whatever.
* Regarding expense, a train can travel faster than a car, and is more efficient at doing it. High speed rail travel is not ten times the travel time of an airplane (a Boeing 767 has a cruise speed of 530 mph, TGV has done trips with an average speed of 173 mph), if you count the time it takes to do airplane check-in and check-out, the train is often faster and more convenient in the short routes. The airlines have government support in several ways. Airplane R&D is subsidized, airplane construction is subsidized, airport construction is usually subsidized as well, carriers have been bailed out, etc.
* Regarding storage, people need less and less personal transport since they started buying stuff online. Larger packages can be home delivered. Besides I never said rail mass transit was a replacement for everything. Why does it have to be everything or nothing? Rail makes sense in dense and relatively close metropolitan areas, while airplanes make more sense for transcontinental, intercontinental, or lower intensity routes.
* Regarding “monoculture” you can allow a number of companies to sell train services over the same railways.
You can also actually work while traveling in a train because of the nicer ride and not actually having to drive. You can say read or write on your laptop while riding a train, which is something you can also do in an airplane, but is certainly not as doable in a bus. These small efficiencies add up.
Also, Southwest got no gov’t bailouts to my knowledge.
Having friends in high places certainly helps. Our good friend Senator Richard Shelby being one of them. Who do you think pays for all those airports needed by their so called superior point to point travel model?
What on earth makes you think you need fewer airports for a hub-and-spoke operation than you need for point-to-point?
Mike – many short-haul mass transit users are going to and from work, and don’t need to shop. For example, I used to work in the Loop (downtown Chicago). Driving took from 30 minutes to an hour plus, depending on weather and accidents. Parking downtown was expensive.
The train took 45 minutes, rain or shine, and all up was a third the cost. Plus I got to read the paper or a book.
To Gerrib or Godzilla,
Is there currently a passenger train service in the US that is turning a profit. Please site links.
I have used both the transit systems in Boston and DC and found them to be useful but not always practical.
As far as loading time train vs airplane – you might want to go to the DHS website and do some searching. I think you will find that DHS is planning on similar screening for long haul passenger tarins. It is slowly being implemented with AMTRAK and will only accerlerate as other passenger tarin systems come online. We don’t want and suicide bombers on our trains.
Supposedly Amtrak has a couple of lines that make a profit. The Boston to New York City run and maybe the similar stretch between NYC and Washington, DC. There might be some small scale trains serving airports that make a profit. I think that’s it in the US.
If I were to want to ride the DART train here in Dallas to work I’d have to: get in my car and drive halfway to work and stop at a park n’ ride, walk the half mile from the back of some huge parking lot to the train station (cold winter/really hot summer be damned), stand around for the train to arrive (I’d be at work already by this point), let the train whisk me away on a romantic ride next to a bum that asks you for change 5 different times, get off the train, and then wait for a shuttle to take me to my job. This is even while working for a company that get dedicated shuttle service directly to the front door. Most people would have to wait for a bus and then walk some more.
For a year, I was commuting via public transportation to the other side of Sacramento once a month (the sacrifices we make for the L5 Society). I’d walk to the bus stop (a little over a mile), ride the once an hour bus to downtown Sacramento from Woodland (about 10-15 miles), hop on the light rail (every fifteen minutes), and walk the rest of the way (about half a mile). The trip typically took around 2-3 hours. There was also the risk on the way back of getting trapped in Sacramento when the busses stopped running. I almost had that happen to me a couple of times (once I had to chill out in Davis where I had a graduate student office because the bus didn’t go any further).
Later when I got a car, I was able to cut that down to 45 minutes without speeding, paying for parking, or sleeping on the streets.
Josh & Karl – I don’t recall saying anywhere that somebody had to commute by public transportation, or that it was somehow more moral. What I did say was that, for some people, the commute makes sense. In Chicago, which has higher population and a much denser downtown than Dallas or Sacramento, it makes sense.
If the choices are:
1) Expensive plane ride
2) Cheaper but only slightly slower train ride (with fewer weather delays)
3) Lengthy car drive (with weather and traffic delays)
Some people are going to choose option #2. I don’t know how many – that’s what a market study is supposed to figure out. Reading past the part that Rand quoted, the market study still suggests that they have enough people choosing option #2 to make money.
So what, Chris? Even if a transportation system has no utility whatsoever and no one ever uses it, it’ll still be loved by its mother/contractors paid to build it. The problem here is not that public transportation won’t get used, but that the use won’t justify the cost. An indication of this problem is simply that in too many case public transportation isn’t even remotely competitive with other options for most people.
The problem with market studies, and this is a problem that crops up elsewhere such as in CBO budget and economy predictions, is that the estimate is sponsored by the people who are going to benefit from the spending. They have a strong incentive to distort the results of these studies, and they do distort the results of these studies. A doubling of the cost of the tickets is just a symptom of a deeper problem.