Should China rethink it? Only if they’re smart. Tom Friedman will be very disappointed.
Of course, the more important question is whether or not Congress will cancel the boondoggle before we waste much more money on it.
37 thoughts on “High-Speed Rail”
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Existing high speed rail in China isn’t being used at full capacity because the fares are double that of regular rail. How is the price of a ticket set for existing high speed rail? I wonder what would happen in the Chinese economy if they arbitrarily set the fare to zero (or maybe just the same as regular rail).
I see that you have missed the whole point Bob….The price for high speed rail in China (i.e. the fare) is being set by a ‘crat somewhere in their Ministry of Transport, not in anything even remotely approaching a market. Come to think of it, this is also how they decided to build the high-speed rail in the first place.
I wonder if there is any connection between the two?
Existing high speed rail in China isn’t being used at full capacity because the fares are double that of regular rail. How is the price of a ticket set for existing high speed rail? I wonder what would happen in the Chinese economy if they arbitrarily set the fare to zero (or maybe just the same as regular rail).
The China economy would explode, because the only thing holding them back is absence of cheap high speed rail.
In no way would we see a tremendous increase in government debt combined with negligible change in economic activity.
Maybe, but the Chinese government wastes money on all sorts of low-return projects, like planning the invasion of Taiwan. I wonder if there is a speed at which high speed transport (public or personal) really would make the economy take off. Say it was instant teleportation, but only within Chinese borders and for magical thought-experiment reasons, it would only work in China so you couldn’t sell it to other countries. If the cost of installing the teleportation was equal to the cost real world high speed rail, would you really need to set the fare such that the fares pay back the cost of the infrastructure? If you made the fare for teleportation free, wouldn’t there be an economic boom from instant transport that would more than pay for teleportation infrastructure? If so, then what is the problem with free high speed rail? Too slow?
My comment about Taiwan never got finished, because I was wondering about the economic effects of instant teleportation. I was going to say: better if China spends money on high speed rail, which surely offers some return in a nation like China (unlike the USA in a number of ways) than on planning for an invasion of Taiwan which would just wreck the economy if attempted. And yet they keep building up their military anyway….
Bob, most of business doesn’t give a damn about the speed of transportation. That’s why ocean freighters still exist, right? And trucks. The speed of transportation just affects your planning. If you need parts foo and bar to arrive on Monday, and foo comes from Seattle, a week by truck, while bar comes from down the street — that just means you plan on ordering foo a weak earlier than bar.
There are a some exceptions, of course: retail loves speed shipping, because it lets them spread out customers buying during, say, the Christmas season right up until December 24. Plus you can charge them a fortune in “special handling” fees. Niche markets in highly-perishable things, like live lobsters, flowers, or high-stakes contract offers also love speed.
But in general I think the big driver in transportation speed is when you’re transporting humans, because humans love speed, for the simple reason that the time of the trip for most of us, most of the time, is simply wasted. Unlike a diesel engine or steel truss, we can’t just put ourselves on ice for a week with no cost to our ultimate utility.
Id est, if you had instant teleportation at zero cost, you’d see tons of people moving around, but I don’t think you’d see all that many more goods. Now an interesting question, left to the class for homework, is whether that huge increase in movement of people would contribute substantially to economic growth and prosperity. I’m not sure. On the one hand, the success of video- and Web-conferencing services suggest there is still a premium for face-to-face business contact on essentially zero notice. On the other hand, it’s well known that at some point of frequency face-to-face meetings (e.g. within the office) become a net negative for productivity.
I actually think that all forms of rail are a pretty good investment for a developing economy. Just look at what the intercontinental rail road did for the developing USA. Anything that lowers the cost and (or increases the speed cost-effectively) of transit is good for trade; which is good for GDP; which is good for everyone.
And Rand, it’s worth noting that Megan did not answer her own rhetorical question (whether China should build). She merely noted that without pricing signals it’s a difficult question to answer. That’s obvious.
The problem with HSR in this country is four-fold:
1. Our wealth per capita means that land is expensive, especially in the suburbs surrounding city cores. That increases the costs of right-of-way.
2. The labor required to build the RR is expensive.
3. The EPA and NIMBY roadblocks are extensive. This piles up interest on the construction loans, and defers time to payback. This is the same problem nuclear suffers from.
4. Politicians in Congress insist on insane requirements, like stops in towns no one goes to, or a track layout that actually prevents high speeds from ever being reached.
You’ll notice that points 1 to 3 don’t apply to China at all, and while point 4 is a risk it doesn’t seem to have manifested yet. So far these HSR links are connecting the densest mega-cities within China. And the benefits of points 1 to 3 not applying can be inferred from China’s cost-of-construction of new nuclear facilities, which is less than half of the Western cost.
As a thought experiment, consider how cool it would be if HSR links already connected all of America’s cities with a population of 500,000 or more. Because it was built back when labor and land was cheap, tickets are low-cost. Time to your destination is nearly as good as a plane, and trains leave every half-hour because they don’t have to wait for as many passengers as a Boeing does to break-even.
So none of the above answer’s Megan’s question (because we can’t without market prices) but I’d be willing to bet the answer is “Yes.” Especially since today’s market prices don’t capture the benefits to economic growth a good network can create.
Glenn Reynolds had a link to Nick Cavanaugh at Reason who had a link to the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which front-and-center reminds people that taking a trip from Fresno to LA, 225 route miles, will take a mere 84 minutes and will save the polar bear by not emitting 191.25 lbs of CO2 (yes, the emission savings of HSR is known to 2 decimal places).
I calculated from my Freshman Chemistry that 191.25 lbs of CO2 corresponds to the savings from not burning 10.3 gallons of octane (C8H18). My Camry gets an average 35 MPG on road trips or about 7.3 gallons on that trip. So not only is the HSR relying on power plants that don’t burn any fossil fuel, the HSR must be using a plant that removes from the air of the CO2 equivalent of 3 gallons of gasoline for every person travelling from Fresno to LA.
That 84 minute trip also assumes a station-stop to station-stop speed of 170 MPH, and are we to assume that the train that stops in Fresno is the limited express (Kodama) instead of the express (Hikari)? Do people average 170 MPH on HSR on the limited express trains making intermediate station stops?
That HSR sure sounds like something that will bring prosperity and stop to rise of the oceans, but do you think, maybe, just a little, that it is being oversold?
Just about everything wrong with high speed rail in America is captured in this one article.
California’s high speed rail project could be shaping up as the awesomest catastrogeddon of 2011.
The California High Speed Rail Authority is committed to breaking ground on a leg of the train that will serve passengers between the unincorporated town of Borden and the half-incarcerated town of Corcoran.
Whether you call it the train from nowhere or the train to nowhere, nobody will be riding it even when it’s done. That’s not libertarian cant: The actual plan for the $4.15 billion leg is that upon completion it will sit idle until other sections of track are completed.
Nobody likes this plan.
That last sentence I included can’t be accurate. Those who are pushing high speed rail at any cost (likely because they stand to profit handsomely from it) probably love this plan.
Carl, that’s why the following quote from Megan’s article is key:
HSR is lousy in the USA because our rail network is optimized for freight (slow but efficient). China is essentially building a second network for people. That means each network can be really good at what it’s supposed to be good at.
At least in theory, but I don’t have any doubts the Chinese could do this well if they’re paying attention.
Most likely answer: “Yes”.
Cities create wealth faster per capita than rural areas. More patents per capita too. It’s the population density, creating all sorts of efficiencies.
From The Guardian:
The studies into the the connection between population density and wealth creation have discovered a positive feedback loop and no natural limit. The larger and denser the population of a city, the faster the economy grows and the more technology is invented.
To pull a number out of my ass, it’s not crazy to imagine nation-wide HSR links adding 1% to the GDP growth rate of China.
Carl, I’m not sure that’s 100% correct. Inventory costs money, and so does planning in general. I think the more you compress lead time, even for nothing parts and components, you make things more efficient.
Time to your destination is nearly as good as a plane, and trains leave every half-hour because they don’t have to wait for as many passengers as a Boeing does to break-even.
Are the per-passnger operating costs for a train really that much lower than a plane to justify this assumption? I don’t know, but I’m skeptical.
I don’t know, Brock. I’m amenable to the argument. I do enough business with widely-separated markets to know that face-to-face can be invaluable. I have, myself, flown from LA to DC on a Thursday and back on a Friday, blech, so that I could score a few hours with some very key people. Costs a fortune, but worth it.
But I also know we do a fair amount of stuff now by Web conference, where you have voice, you can get facial expressions, and you can share desktops and stuff. In many cases this is good enough, and it’s really essentially Bob’s teleportation, because it can be set up instantly, and I get back from the “trip” instantly, too.
So I think there’s a strong case to make that virtual face-to-face is getting to be almost as good as physical face-to-face, and the former will essentially always be much cheaper.
It could be that the Chinese, like most Stalinists, are very effectively fighting the last war, surging ahead in yesterday’s technology. You know, Stalin thought the future was all about concrete plants, canals and high-rise apartment buildings — so Eastern Europe was covered with those in the 50s and 60s. He completely missed the highway, not to mention the information service economy. The Chinese are now surging forcefully in state-funded rockets to orbit, and talking about going to the Moon. They’ll have Apollo back, and on steroids, faster than we do. I bet they have a “heavy lift” vehicle under development, too.
Carl, just focusing on moving people and not goods: people travel to other cities for more than the kind of business meetings that video conferencing can replace, and once at a distance city, they spend lots of money while doing those other activities.
people travel to other cities for more than the kind of business meetings that video conferencing can replace
Er…such as?
once at a distance city, they spend lots of money while doing those other activities.
Frederic Bastiat called, bob. He wants his broken window replaced. Less cryptically, let me point out that if businessmen made the journey by horse and buggy, they’d spend even more money in the many towns and hamlets along the route in which they’d need to stop overnight.
But Carl, the monorail salemen tell us that monorails are the wave of the future. The 20-Year-Plan is going to create “sustainability” along with a s–tload of windmills and something called “Walkable Urbanism.” I don’t know what that is, but it must be SWPL — no photos of the Crenshaw District.
Well, if teleportation were cheap, one could live where living is cheap and work where work is expensive. For example, they could commute from formerly industrial Pennsylvania or rural Mississippi to Silicon Valley, Washington, DC, or Manhattan Island.
Grandparents who still work Monday – Friday want to visit their sole grandkid on the weekend. On the first full day of their visit, they get in a taxi, take the kid to the zoo, another taxi, a museum, a toy store, and then meet up with mom and dad to take the whole family to a restaurant, a bakery, and maybe a movie. If transport is fast and cheap enough, they don’t even have to wait until the weekend. If transport is by horse and buggy, they don’t travel at all.
(On second thought, the zoo and the museum might be state-run — substitute them with two attractions run by entrepreneurs who need to hire people and pay vendors to run & maintain the attractions…)
Wow, I remember that, T! I mean, I remember visiting Tomorrow Land in Disney World circa 1973, riding the monorail, and having a recorded sententious voice tell me that everyone would get around cities that way In The Future.
I don’t what it is about people who love trains. It’s probably just an affaire de coeur, like me and spaceships. They need to be treated gently and kept from sharp objects when landing airplanes spew noise and smoke overhead.
Bobbity bahb, I asked about business meetings that have to be done in meatspace. You do know, I assume, that most air travel is business? Anyway, laudable as is the goal of letting gramma and grandpa zap over 500 miles for a weekend, and profitable as it may be to have happy serfs, I think we ought to let gramma and grandpa decide where to put their resources. It could be they would prefer to be taxed less than have a high-speed rail line at their disposal, Neanderthal as that might be.
Parenthetically, I’d like to know where these hypothetical grandparents who jet to see their grandkid(s) for the weekend might be. Geez, my parents never did any such thing. You get to be 62 and air travel is a big pain in the…well, lower back, at least. You might fly at Christmas, once a year, if you can stay for 4 or 5 days to recover.
You must be thinking of Boomer grandparents, who still ski and take yoga and various pills to keep their youthful zip and zest, the ones I see in Viagra ads all the time, with delightfully unlined faces.
I hate trains! Well, for personal transport, I hate all public transportation. I like my car. But my love for fast transportation greatly exceeds my dislike of public transport.
Anyway, don’t a lot of these arguments apply to Ike’s Interstate project, as well as to most public roads? Obviously road building in America received price signals, but hey, no fares on most Interstates. And isn’t there is a lot of debate about what tolls on toll roads really pay back?
But Karl, what if wages on Wall Street are so high only because it costs so much to live in Manhattan, and not because they’re as smart and as necessary as they think they are? The very Earth trembles at this heretical thought, I admit…
They might, Bob. That may be why Interstates were first built to fill a perceived military need. It’s an interesting question what would have happened had there been no such thing. Would some enterprising soul have designed a very effective car-train, where you drive to a terminal, put your car aboard a long-distance express, and relax in the bar car tippling on fine whiskey while overtipping the hot waitress in the hopes of a Titanic steamed-windows moment back in your jalopy, while you and your car are whisked at 80 MPH from downtown here to downtown there, where you resume control of your transportation for final docking procedures? We’ll never know, alas.
Carl, continuing to focus on transporting people (although actually I think transporting goods quickly and cheaply is more important), you can reverse who is visiting who if you like. The last few times I’ve traveled across the country, it has been for family reasons. Once I arrived at my destination city, I spent a lot more than I did on long-distance transportation, despite not having to pay for a hotel. That’s all I was getting at.
In Europe, I found that taking both trains and planes was much less painful than in the USA, while driving was sometimes far more painful. I wonder how business vs personal travel numbers compare there.
“Would some enterprising soul have designed a very effective car-train, where you drive to a terminal, put your car aboard a long-distance express, and relax in the bar car tippling on fine whiskey while overtipping the hot waitress in the hopes of a Titanic steamed-windows moment”
Um, someone already designed such a thing (see US Patent 3,285,194 Combination Railway and Passenger Automobile Transportation Systems along with 3,707,125 Railway Trucks). It was a project at GATX (the name you see stamped on railroad tank cars) called “RRollway”.
I remember as a child seeing an HO-scale model of the thing which operated automatically and had solenoid-operated loading doors.
Yeah, I know, Paul. I recall such things from my youth as well. I always thought they were a neat idea. I mean, once you’ve done your Jack Kerouac drive across the country in the beat-up VW amazed at the simple plain natives harvesting the crops while singing their colorful native songs, smoked a little dope, pontificated late into the night about free love, long-distance Interstate driving is the utter pits. I sure like having my car on this end and that — but I’d be delighted to stick it on a flatcar for the middle 800 miles of the journey and snooze, play Scrabble, read, or recreate teenage experiences in the back seat with the missus. These days, with broadband WiFi, I could surf or work, too. What’s not to like?
And it’s not like you would need more than, say, 8 or 10 major trunk lines across the United States to perform the service for most long-distance travelers. You can easily afford to drive 50 or even 100 miles to reach the railhead. (For the same reason, you can put 100 miles between stops, too.) Plus, you don’t really need high speed. A steady 100-120 MPH would do just fine. You would need on-board potties, though. And I like the idea of a bar car. Maybe a ball-pit car for the kids, too.
you can reverse who is visiting who if you like
Ah ha ha, Bob. How old is your wee one, again? There is this blackout period between when they’re willing to sleep for 8 hours wrapped in blankies and when they have the mental maturity to keep a dire threat in mind for 8 hours, during which only crazy people fly with children with less than a 2 to 1 ratio of adults with lion-taming skills to little darlings.
Anyway, you’re screwing with the goalposts, old man. You were talking about the economic benefits of high-speed rail, remember? If you or your parents want to spend your hard-earned shekels for speedy tickets to wrap glad arms around each other, be my guest. I shall smile indulgently. But please do not propose to raise my taxes to subsidize your personal life goals, inasmuch as that would provoke me to attempt to raise your taxes to subsidize my personal goals, which may be distasteful to you and perhaps illegal under various antiquated anti-sodomy laws. Detente!
If I’m not missing a nuance, these are used in the Chunnel among the other places in Europe mentioned here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_shuttle_train
The Titantic sex scene aspect sounds great, so I hope I don’t sound unappreciative if I say that I would also like the American version to allow me to drive my car off the train and onto the interstate whenever an exit ramp strikes my fancy.
Whoops, as the article warns me not to do, I’ve confused the shuttle with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorail Needs to go faster!
The value of someone’s time is related to how much they earn. Your average Chinese earns much less than your average American, so even given the higher population density there I don’t see how high speed rail can make sense for them.
Paul, here’s the counter-argument: if someone is earning barely enough to survive, very fast transit is essential, lest time be taken away from their life-sustaining work. In contrast, if someone earns millions per hour, they can afford to take a few weeks to meander across the country aboard a luxury blimp or whatnot. Obviously this assumes that high speed rail fares are being set arbitrarily, and not by the market.
Not in China, Paul. That’s McArdle’s point, that the price signals are completely whacked in China, due to the dominance of reasoning much like bob’s here. As it happens, it’s likely that the average Chinese person earns far less than his labor is actually worth, i.e. what he would be paid if the government didn’t manipulate the currency, et cetera, with some big chunk of the real value of his labor being skimmed off by the government for Great Pyramid boondoggles like — high speed rail!
If the Chinese peasant were paid the true value of his labor, then he would himself decide whether superfast trains were worth the price, and vote (with his wallet) accordingly, and then we would know whether high-speed trains generated more value than they cost, in China. But right now, Joe Liupack doesn’t have control of his earnings. Some bigwigs in Beijing are deciding for him what should be done with the wealth he creates.
Bbbbob, that’s the maddest spoof I’ve ever heard. Yoicks!
I don’t what it is about people who love trains.
I don’t know either, but I’m one of them. Perhaps it’s because I once got a marriage proposal in Chicago from a cutey going to her sisters wedding in Los Angeles?
There’s just something about train travel that beats hell out of a 747. If ya got the time, highly recommended.
(Again my first post didn’t appear. Rebooted internet, reloaded page and posted w/o attempting duplicate.)
Maybe you’ve been demonized, ken. I mean, if you really rebooted the entire Internet just to post to TT. That’s awesome power! Use it only for…uh, wait a minute, never mind.
Did you accept?
I was tempted, but still rather sane (of all the things I’ve lost I miss my mind the most.) I continued on toward Seattle. I do think about that identical copy of me in the multiverse going to a double wedding and growing old and gray.
I have other awesome powers as well… if I close my eyes I can make other people disappear… well, until they start poking me.
Hell, ken, your mind you can easily do without, as long as you keep your sense of humor. That’s what being the parent of teenagers has taught me, at least.
Raising one teenage stepson taught me that the school system isn’t what it was when I was a kid. We really need to fix it or the fundamental changing of America will probably continue.
Humor is a real difference between types of people isn’t it? I certainly appreciate the many great personalities that Rand has brought together here.