California Hits the Brakes on High-Speed Rail
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
One thing that bothers me, is that there is this narrative that high speed rail just somehow cannot work, and is a pipe dream, and not right for America.
We cannot afford /not/ to have high speed rail. We're already heavily subsidizing airlines to schedule flights to nowhere. And as of last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state.
Not building this line because of some NIMBY rich people in California is the sign of a crumbling civilization, where the elites are too concerned about their own comfort to prevent us from being left behind, technologically.
It's also ridiculous that we never built out BART to the original plans, since that could have done so much to improve the traffic situation, the housing situation, and increase property values. I never understood why wealthy land owners don't want trains; in every case I've seen, land by a train station goes up hugely in value.
Besides, wealthy land owners have drivers on staff. Or don't have to commute to work on a schedule, so an occasional small ferry is good enough (cough... Marin).
It's all pretty awful, but not that hard to understand once you look at the more tacit end of public behavior.
1 - if you want to spend $80B on public transport infrastructure, there are productive places in CA to do that. This project is not in the top 20. You could, alternatively, build out bart/muni/caltrain/vta/LA metro. I'm sure San Diego also has transit projects available.
2 - the ridership numbers for this project are created in what can only be described as a crack-aided manner. It's already $80/pp, up from $50/pp. By the time it's actually built, I'd guess tickets will be well over $100/pp. If you have even two people, you may as well drive. How many people need to commute between LA and SF? The HSR estimates are between 18m and 31m passengers annually [1] which seems unlikely. Also note the $86 far comes to about 20c/mi, while amtrak on the east coast charges 50c/mi and most european long haul trains charge 45+c/mi [1]. Which should make you suspicious that tickets will cost far more than $86, or the ridership numbers are farcical.
3 - when these projects are sold with transparently fake numbers, it poisons public support for all transport infrastructure projects. Currently the part of the project under construction is pure bait and switch rail construction for amtrak, which will use the track until at some unnamed date HSR starts using it.
4 - the local transit projects in sfbay, san jose, LA, or probably san diego have much less risk: we can reasonably project usage.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-bullet-fares...
Please note, I am in no way trying to imply that our current highway system works well, but that is a far different discussion.
The high speed live won't carry freight, but it will free up space on the slower railway, and the motorway.
Additionally, the HSR proposal explicitly promised not to require ongoing subsidies. I think that was foolish: HSR would have passed without making silly promises.
Especially since we really do need to transition to a post-carbon future. Effective transit would allow us to increase housing density and commercial activity while decreasing per-capita use of fuel, water, and other resources. Leading to higher revenue from income tax, property tax, and sales tax, that does not show up on the train’s own profit/loss statement.
We just have to be realistic about it. A problem of the California HSR is that the officials have been coy with the actual numbers. Perhaps they are spooked by the disaster that has been Amtrak: Slow, expensive to ride, yet still losing money. We need to recognize that a good rail system can be subsidized, and still give a net benefit to the community and the government.
imagine though that there's a fleet of self-driving cars ready to take you to HSR stops. best of both worlds?
Presenting self-driving cars and HSR as mutually exclusive is a false dichotomy.
The US is more spread out, tilting in favor of air, and local rail is less abundant + our interstate highway system is more mature + gas is much cheaper, tilting in favor of cars. The value of rail is squeezed from both sides.
Now comes along a great technology that can bootstrap off existing infrastructure (road), offers the same benefit of time not wasted focusing on the road, whose cost burden is shouldered by those that use it (purchasing cars), and can incrementally be improved over time (higher speeds, drafting, separate lanes, etc). That further puts the squeeze on travel between shorter distances, which can make the promised SF-LA trip in <6 hours (instead of 4* via air) that can be reduced to 4 over time with faster speeds.
Driverless tech doesn't even need to work in places outside the controlled environment of a highway for these benefits to appear. Politicians could make it happen a few years sooner by making it more appealing (much as they did with hybrid carpool stickers) by creating a special driverless car lane on highways, separated by cement barriers. Although I think that's not as elegant as just bootstrapping on carpool lanes, it is possible now and would definitely spur car companies to upgrade their driverless systems to whatever requirements would be needed for that environment.
Certain parts of the US (east coast corridor) seem to me to be the only places in the US that could actually benefit from the HSR equation, but they have big right-of-way issues and there's a lot of political coordination that needs to happen. Amtrak's been trying for decades.
* Air calculation: 1.5h pre-flight, 1.5h flight, 1h post-flight
The US shouldn’t be so spread out.
These rail projects are for the long term. In the long term, we should be looking at increasingly dense urbanization, some day decreasing ability to use debt financing to build and maintain infrastructure, and the end of large-scale use of petroleum fuel. We need to make less stuff work for more people.
I don’t see why I would want to be in an isolated cocoon for hours with no room to stand and no bathroom when there is a viable alternative.
However, it’s still possible that the California HSR project is a terrible plan. It’s not that fast for how much it costs, and everybody’s saying it’s going to be even more expensive than the leaders are letting on. We really should be making airports less difficult to use. The terrorists won 9/11.
Driverless cars are a cool tech demo, with the possibility of decreasing the awful death toll of driving private automobiles and the tragic misuse of life in traffic, but it’s not a great long-distance option. The average car trip, with no carpoolers, takes too much space per capita. The normal commute should not involve lots of driving.
Blacktop does not last. The maintenance costs for our road system far outstrip our commitment to maintain them even today.
HSR, though expensive to install, has an advantage in longevity.
this country has modern infrastructure
That's incorrect. You mean a select few countries in Europe (Germany, Sweden and Switzerland != Europe). You're very clearly ignoring that Europe also consists of Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Albania, Hungary, Poland etc. 3/4 of Europe has a lower living standard than the poorest US states do and they have terrible infrastructure to go along with it. Greek and Italian infrastructure is piss poor as well.
The Eurozone for example is now spending significantly less on infrastructure than the US (how long will those roads hold up as infrastructure spending continues to decline?):
"Infrastructure spending in the euro zone has dropped to an average of 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 3.4 percent of GDP for the U.S. and 3.6 percent for Japan."
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-ha...
And:
"The dilapidated state of infrastructure in Belgium, home to the European Union’s main institutions, has become emblematic of a lack of investment that blights the whole continent and, according to the EU itself, is creating 'lasting bottlenecks that undermine productivity growth.'"
"Anyone taking even a short trip to Brussels would see evidence of this. Due to lack of maintenance over the last 20 years, all the city’s major tunnels have been closed on public safety grounds, creating the biggest traffic jams the city has ever experienced."
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-ne...
Rail moves more people over time than freeways in urban areas, but with less flexibility for destinations. Urban planning should prioritize building transit-oriented development around these rail corridors allowing for more people to live within a reasonable commute time to jobs.
Freeways should not continue to be built and expanded in urban areas. Wrong tool for the job.
A lot of America's deficiencies in infrastructure and public services can be attributed to the fact that many Americans don't know how much better those things can be.
with the price of air fares why would you not fly other than for the TSA? it was air travel that did them in the US simply because it started here faster and there weren't borders to worry about for the majority of travelers.
Rail is a romance that too many people never look past the haze to see the truth. Sadly even light rail is a boondoggle and the tens of billions if not a hundred or more in deferred maintenance is going to bite a lot of local transit authorities in the butt (it already smacks the Washington DC Metro)
What is really sad is this warning appeared on cato awhile back about the change to the contract presentation and most places blew it off because of the source
1) You can't build airports in downtown cores, which unavoidably adds 30 minutes at each end.
2) Boarding an airplane with one door is intrinsically slower than boarding a train with many doors. Again, that adds time at embark/disembark.
3) Extra weight on an airplane inherently costs a lot of money, which means that trains will always be more spacious and comfortable.
Can you expound upon this, or give examples of taxpayer dollars subsidizing flights to "nowhere"?
In a country with the size/spread/population density of the US, it's generally not possible to have a single-mode transportation network which reaches everybody (or to within reasonable distance of everybody) without subsidizing some routes that would be unprofitable due to low demand.
There are only two HSR lines that are profitable (one line into Tokyo and the Paris - [edit]Cannes line). The rest are all subsidized include the Acela Express (search for all the references on HN throughout the years).
The US decided to build cargo rail which has given us part of an amazing logistic infrastructure. In other words, the US picked cargo over humans.
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o is a survey of American domestic and foreign policy that goes into this question. The speaker is a distinguished US diplomat of the post-war era, who also served as Nixon's Mandarin interpreter when he first went to China. His short answer is that for interlocking reasons that make it hard to change, military spending is the only kind of stimulus spending that's politically feasible in the US, and infrastructure spending hasn't yet been able to break that lock, though it needs to.
Of course one needn't preclude the other, but give that both ends of the mooted HSR line would terminate in cities with terrible and barely mediocre mass transit systems respectively, it is pretty clear that there are higher priority needs which those dollars should be allocated towards.
PS: I'm from Silicon Valley, and I've heard about the mythology high-speed rail for over 25 years during the construction of the marginal-utility Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority light rail, which is demonstrably worse and far more inflation-adjusted expensive per mile than the municipal trains of the turn of the century that were ripped up previously.
Tangentially interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
And HSR at 10x the market price is never going to be a viable transportation option for California. It's best either to accept that HSR will never work there or to try to change the procurement and construction culture on smaller projects before trying to build.
The reasons for high prices in the USA are myriad and complicated. Spain and Korea have high wages for workers and stronger labor unions. Neither country is known for particularly effective anti-corruption practices. The simple answers people reach for first are not the key drivers of cost difference.
Instead, at every level of operation the USA system fails to use its resources wisely and there is no responsible party that drives efficient construction and operation. Agencies and governments work at cross purposes impeding each other's progress and everyone with authority in the system uses it to extract concessions by blocking the others instead of cooperating. Until that changes, trying to build HSR in the USA is foolhardy.
[0] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...
LA->SF is a terrible route because of geography. SF is northwest of LA, but the first thing the train does is head 50 miles East.
The quoted fares were laughable. The proponents were claiming the fare would be somewhere around $50 when existing San Jose->Sacramento service (a much shorter route) cost $40.
The insistence on running HSR all the way into SF is a bad idea as part of the initial plan. San Jose makes a better terminus: San Jose is served by Caltrain, Amtrak Capitol Corridor, and ACE, which provide connections to most of the Bay Area.
The plan should have started with an MVP and gone from there. "Merced to Bakersfield" is not useful. I would have gone with Los Baños to San Jose which could have served commuters. Then extend it to Merced and the rest of the Eastern Central Valley to help solve the Bay Area housing price problem.
I would personally love to see high-speed rail. SF->LA feels better to me but your observation that San Jose is connected to the bay area already and makes a great terminus is really good. Plus, I live in Oakland so I'd like it even more if it came right into my backyard :)
Other strange 'curves' in the path are for cost reasons: it's cheaper to crest the Tehachapi mountains southeast of Bakersfield than to follow I-5 up the Grapevine through Tejon Pass and through difficult terrain down to Santa Clarita. Similarly, both the Altamont and Pacheco passes were considered to cross from the Central Valley into the greater Bay Area, with the Pacheco Pass (Gilroy - Los Banos) having won out because it was a more direct path between LA and SF.
[1] http://hanfordsentinel.com/news/local/kings-tulare-counties-... [2] http://www.mercurynews.com/california-high-speed-rail/ci_248... [3] http://www.cahsrblog.com/tag/visalia/
http://www.hsr.ca.gov/docs/newsroom/maps/Statewide_Topo_2016...
However, getting anywhere from San Jose to the rest of the Bay Area is pretty slow. Yes, a considerable number of jobs do exist in the San Jose & Santa Clara valley area, but commuting to the peninsula, city, or east bay is slow.
Frankly, it is insane that the Caltrain takes more than an hour to go from San Jose to San Francisco in 2016 and only runs a handful of times during the day.
I wonder how the HSR MVP would have looked local to the Bay Area travel from Stockton/Tracy to either SF or SJ would be in less than 30 minutes, opening up San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties for housing.
Which is a pressing issue, since Caltrain needs to replace its equipment at the very least, and probably straight-up needs to electrify its entire line.
http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...
On May 5, 2016, the Caltrain Board of Directors adopted an agreement that invests an additional $211 million in the Caltrain Modernization Program. The seven-party agreement increases funding commitments from Caltrain’s state and local partners, including an additional $113 million commitment from the California High Speed Rail Authority.
(from http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...)
That's a significant chunk of change to be relying on from the HSR.
The "initial plan" covers a lot beyond what is planned for the first operational segments. Notably, neither of the proposed initial operation segments extend to SF.
> San Jose makes a better terminus
San Jose is the proposed northern terminus of one of the two proposed Initial Operating Segments for CalHSR (IOS-North, San Jose to Bakersfield -- the other is IOS-South, Merced to Burbank.)
> "Merced to Bakersfield" is not useful.
Merced to Bakersfield isn't an operating segment, it (well, not-quite-Merced on the North end) is the initial construction segment and test track, its also the overlap between the proposed IOS-North and IOS-South segments, so that the track laid for that is used for either Initial Operating Segment.
1) You can put a train station in the city center. Yes, getting the right of way is a huge pain but it simply isn't feasible to put an airport in the center of a city. This means minimal commute times to the airport—in contrast I have twice spent more time in traffic from LAX to downtown LA than on the plane from SFO to LAX.)
2) HSR requires far less security theater because, you know, a train isn't a deadly projectile (or if it is, it's got a pretty limited set of uses). Couple this 1) and it means that you can arrive at the central station ~10 minutes before departure. I budget 90 minutes these days when flying out of SFO.
3) Volume! A 10 car TGV Thalys train, for example, can carry 370 people. That's almost a 747-400 worth of people. And that's with seating arrangements in 2nd class that are more generous than US business class. With airplane-like density I think you could get 600-650 per 10-car train.
4) Trains are more robust to weather events: thunderstorms don't shut down train stations; snow and ice can be dealt with pretty easily.
5) Electrical outlets are standard in every seat. I know that US air carriers are trying to roll this out now, but this has been standard for a while in trains.
I find the comparison with self-driving cars odd: high speed rail is currently 20 times as efficient, but obviously it doesn't work for final-mile transportation. Maybe that will drop to 5 or 10 times with traffic control / convoying / etc., but really the right comparison for HSR in the transportation ecosystem is plane travel.
When the richest country in the world can't get this kind of infrastructure project off the ground, it's a sign of serious dysfunction. There are way too many interest groups that are able to block development of infrastructure and housing projects in this country.
After the NE Corridor, a Chicago hub network would make the most sense for high speed rail. The Northeast Corridor is already profitable (in isolation), but is also the best spot for HSR, so for another network one shouldn't expect profitability from day one.
The land is extremely valuable farmland, plus the Central Valley leans fairly right politically.
So, California hasn't done anything yet, and the thing it is considering doing isn't anything remotely like hitting the brakes on HSR.
I've never understood why people frequently describe transit spending as a "government subsidy" but would never say the same thing about the much larger highway spending.
If you don't insist on adding tolls everywhere to make highways break even, why hold transit to a higher standard?
Eisenhower had two sources of inspiration when pushing the interstate highway system. The well-known one was seeing the autobahn in Germany, but the second one was an experiment he was put in charge of in 1919, to see, using the existing US highway system, how long it would take to get a military convoy from one side of the country to the other. The answer was 23 days, with many bridges broken and having to be repaired, with an average speed less than 6 mph. This was obviously inadequate for defense purposes, so even if the most common purpose today of the EIS is private car and commercial truck transport, it was worth building for its defensive role.
Repurposability: the EIS is useful in more ways than HSR would be. HSR is useful only for passenger trains. The EIS works with cars, cargo trucks, tanker trucks, buses, tanks, and in an emergency many parts can be used as runways. In addition, it's connected with the rest of the North American road network, something which would not be true of CA HSR. The best you could get would be intermodal stations, probably at the terminal stops. HSR can't carry freight of any type, and the tracks are meant to be grade separated from the existing freight rail network.
Capacity: At the peak hour, 12,000 people cross the bay bridge westbound vs 28,000 through the BART Transbay Tube westbound. Seems like a win for rail, right? That's with 2.5 minute headway on packed commuter trains feeding from 4 different lines. HSR trains won't have the capacity of BART trains, nor the frequency. Even if each individual's trip is faster, the total throughput is lower. CA HSR specifies 900 seats on a 12-car train (or rather, 450 seats on each of 2 6-car trains which can be joined together). Just to have the capacity of I-5, (which we'll take to be 2/5 of the Bay Bridge capacity for simplicity (2 lanes vs. 5)) there would need to be a train every 11 minutes 15 seconds. Worse, to meet the "expected" ridership of 33.1 million people/year, trains will have to run with an average of 708+ people, assuming the trains run 24/7 (which seems extraordinarily unlikely).
In terms of construction costs, a rough estimate puts the cost of the 375 miles of interstate freeway between SF and LA at $4B (assuming costs of the entire EIS were spread evenly over every mile, but they weren't; the actual cost was lower, excluding the bay bridge, which is tolled). HSR is currently trending towards $62B. Ongoing subsidies are, using the same metric, $321M/year vs. ??? The HSR group claims it will break even before phase 1 completion (they estimate millions of people/year want to go between San Jose and Bakersfield, which seems pretty ridiculous), and be operating-and-maintenance profitable throughout in 2029 when the SF-LA line is brought online. It's hard to find in the 2016 business plan, but the O&M estimates are there: ~$1.1B/year in 2029 (excluding trainset lifecycle cost averaging). The state is on the hook for all of that that doesn't get covered by fares.
So that's ultimately why we should hold transit to a higher standard - more uncertainty, less utility.
We can do "The Innuendo"
We can dance and sing
When it's said and done we haven't told you a thing
http://www.metrolyrics.com/dirty-laundry-lyrics-don-henley.h...
It is an editorial -- in other words, opinion not news -- and the strongly worded title really does not fit with the content. This should not be getting taken so seriously here.
This sort of contradicts this editorial claiming high speed rail makes no sense and will not fly.
Are they profitable?
https://calmatters.org/articles/long-neglected-road-maintena...
But, though the dollar amounts are similar, this comparison is not direct, because the HSR would not cover anywhere near as many miles as all California state roads.
"The high-speed rail project is a classic example of how concentrated benefits and diffused costs shape public policy, even when the general public has a direct say."
Clearly the general public isn't doing enough to help our poor starving elites get even more elite.
This does show an interesting business model, try to find something blindly loved by social media signalling, then cash in with no intention of ever doing it. There are people making millions off the CA HSR phenomena.
http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-hyperloop-is-10x-ch...
http://www.vta.org/sfc/servlet.shepherd/document/download/06...
Additionally, this measure was kicked off with a voter-approved bond measure.