Support Grows for a Seattle to Vancouver Bullet Train
nextcity.org
nextcity.org
One of the problems with the American rail debate is you have people who like rail and people who like low taxes. The two don't overlap. Thus, the former sees any opportunity to lay rail as an opportunity to hose taxpayers.
"China’s high speed rail with a maximum speed of 350 km/h has a typical infrastructure unit cost of about $17-21m per km, with a high ratio of viaducts and tunnels, as compared with $ 25-39 [million U.S. dollars] per km in Europe and as high as $ 56 [million U.S. dollars] per km currently estimated in California" [1]. The Seattle/Washington per-mile costs above translate to $78 to $625 million dollars per kilometre.
[1] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/07/10/co... 2014
US citizen here, in the highest of all possible US+California tax brackets, who is very enthusiastic about rail and non-bus public transportation.
It's not that I don't want to pay taxes for rail - I do - it's that we already ramped the tax collection all the way up to 11 without doing any rail.
Once you're at >50% effective tax rate[1], where do you go from there ? I can't possibly favor any tax increase - it doesn't matter what for - since we are already past (what I would consider) "peak" taxes.
[1] 53% - although in my case, closer to 48% due to minor things like 401k and HSA, etc. Yes, I am one of the suckers who is in the highest bracket but pursues no exotic tax avoidance.
I'm all for effective use of taxes, but your effective tax rate calculation seems way off.
If the average person buys a home that costs 3x their income, and property taxes are around 1%, that's an extra 3% added to your tax bill.
https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#7N9mE...
Edit: it was 5M not 4M. Calculator shows FICA not maxing out. It'll get closer to 50% the more they make.
I apologize for already going beyond the bounds of politeness, as far as discussing finances go - so forgive me for not going into further details ... but my calculation is about right on.
"And if that's the case you are still taking home nearly $300,000 per year."
That, on the other hand, bothers me greatly - this idea that at some level of income, the proportions stop mattering. The idea that, if one makes X income, it doesn't matter if that was 30 or 50 or 70% of what we made ...
"It ought to be enough for you".
The thing for me is ive never understood why the cost per mile is so freaking outrageously stupidly full retard high for rail. Road doesn't cost nearly as much.
Is it the material? Labor? There isn't much material per mile. Why is it so high per mile? Who has done extensive looking into this and can explain it?
You're in the "people who like rail" camp. So are many of my friends. (I'm the lonely S.O.B. in both.)
> Why is [our cost] so high per mile?
On why rail is so much more expensive here, we don't know [1]. "Many of the world's most expensive projects are in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, which, like the United States, have common-law systems," [2] so it might be that right-of-way costs dominate.
New York's MTA costs $4.11 per ride to operate [3]. The analogs for London and Paris are $2.61 and $1.93, respectively [2]. The cost difference appears to be explained by unnecessarily higher staffing levels in New York. So it might be that public-sector union and well-paid contractor costs dominate.
Measuring these things is hard, perhaps intentionally so.
[1] http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2015/03/31/high_costs_ma...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i...
[3] https://www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-New-Yorks-MTA-debt-pr...
There's quite a bit of working that goes into preparing and grading the land. There's also the added expense of building bridges and tunnels - with the speed a bullet train is travelling at, you want to avoid at-grade level crossings where road vehicles could get into the train's path. You also probably want side barriers to prevent cows and other large animals from wandering onto the tracks. This means you'll also need game tunnels or bridges to enable animals to get cross under or over the tracks, especially in wilderness areas. The Wikipedia article about TGV track construction [1] provides some helpful information[1].
Acquiring the land to build the track might also be expensive. Although governments have some power to expropriate land, there's often (usually?) significant cost involved.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_track_construction#Prepari...
First, regular railbed isn't nearly as hard to build because the standards are much lower. When you're building for 70mph max freight you have a totally different need than 186mph+ HSR.
For example, HSR uses a high alignment specification. This means a great deal of effort goes into ensuring that there are as few variations in the alignment as possible to ensure it is stable.
You also have cost of catenary (overhead wires), cost of bridges, tunnels and grading for a much straighter tangent and finally all the electrical and signaling infrastructure behind it.
(Note that the signals are in-cab signals but modern systems such as those from GE/Alstom or Siemens still require lineside equipment.
I agree with OP, though - even taking that all into account it seems like we're getting soaked.
Our society is afflicted by Baumol's cost disease :(
See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
1. The most realistic speed is actually 186mph (300kmh) max making for a ~90min trip between Seattle and Portland - which is still great.
2. There's a completely alternate alignment for a good chunk of the Seattle-Portland distance (former Milwaukee road branch lines and the old chela is western). There is also a rebuilt alignment of the old Tacoma western that will just went in service that will cut 30min off then trip from Tacoma to Olympia anyway.
3. Interestingly, it shouldn't be thought of as a mid-distance intercity train. It's a commuter train at higher speed. In Japan a huge number of people commute on the Shinkansen. Imagine if you could commute in 20min from Everett to Seattle or Olympia to Tacoma.
Cost by distance is reasonable for talking about construction (the supply side). See https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r... for an overview. Even $125m/mile places the project a little high on that list, among mostly-tunnel and all-tunnel projects, and $1b/mile is in the WTF zone.
Cost by passenger or passenger-trip is reasonable for talking about utility (the demand side).
186 mph today, 350 mph in 50 years, which will make the cities commutable. At some point in this century, maglevs will become popular in all those countries that built high-speed rail. In the US, it will be too expensive to build because we thought cars were a better mode.
I hear people complain about light rail and high-speed rail being boondoggles because of their expense, but if the same right of ways needed to be purchase for new road construction, wouldn't road construction cost be pretty close to the cost of the rail line? This doesn't even include the amount of underfunding across the country for road maintenance and the fact that property tax and gas tax don't come close to funding the maintenance needs.
The fundamental law of road congestion [0] states that you can't build your way out of a traffic jam.
This is because adding a new mile of road creates new supply X while simultaneously inducing demand Y, where Y > X in almost all transit markets where anyone wants to live. In e.g. the Seattle area, Y >> X.
As the name suggests, this is the most salient fact about highway construction. Yet it is widely ignored in urban planning circles.
[0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.6.2616
Cities are powerful because of ease and variety of people and businesses you can interact with. A fast point-to-point transportation system where one can travel with up to 40 tons stuff seems to me to be a great system. Cars and trucks have large external costs that we should vigorously try to reduce (physical pollution, noise pollution, land use for roads and parking, energy use, time wasted driving, etc.) but forcing people to use less desirable modes of transport by having the desired mode suck more due to traffic seems quite regressive. If we had instant teleportation from point to point, but the machine took up a city block and belched sulfur dioxide, I would hope the impulse for society would be to research decreasing the size and pollution of the machine and not to just restrict by law that there is to be only one machine per city.
As awesome as this sounds, it sounds almost delusional in the current planning/cost/funding climate to price this at $20-30 bn and 15 years.
The US spends well over $1 trillion dollars on transportation every year, to put it in context.
Going from Capital Hill to UW in under 5 minutes on the train, versus a 10 to 20 minute drive is amazing!
One of the benefits of rail would be that you have the ability to have downtown to downtown service and you potentially take a lot of cars off the road. Seattle is dramatically improving its transportation system and it's pretty reasonable to think that in the near future it could be totally viable to travel between Vancouver, Seattle and Portland without a car, leveraging public transit and bike share (oh wait Seattle killed theirs...) to get around.
Another big advantage of the train is that it's pretty simple and easy to take a bike along. Pretty useful if you want to go on a bike touring trip in Washington or Oregon or just dash into Portland for a weekend but have your bike along so that you can move about the city easily.
Vancouver is currently undergoing the a planning process for the Flats industrial neighbourhood, which includes the old central rail station. I was the nerd that went to the transportation meeting and stuck the "keep the door open to HSR" post it note on the ideas board. I was happy to see that there was a mention of the potential for HSR in the area in the draft plan, though I doubt city planners really believe that strongly that it's a potential reality.
Sorry, but it's true. These things come up over and over again, only to be killed root and branch by whatever means necessary.
Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, and surrounding areas have a lot of enthusiasm for new transit. The traffic is getting outrageous, and people are genuinely interested in investing in alternatives to cars.
Heck, I take the light rail back from the airport nearly every time now. Plus, every time I drive to Portland I get trapped in Olympia traffic, and there's literally no highway to Vancouver proper. Fast, reliable rail would be a godsend!
The appetite is definitely there, we can't build or zone our way out of traffic, and short of Trump killing Microsoft and Amazon like he did Boeing recently (with the spate of canceled 777 contracts and all), the city will keep growing.
How long the travel takes is not the only metric.
We have flights, trains (with different speeds/comfort) and busses in Germany between the same cities. And all of those modes are used! And it's not even a money issue, very often flights are cheaper than trains but still people take the train. :)
It's not black and white.
- Toronto to Winnipeg -- 2300km via Chicago, Milwaukee; 20h by car non-stop. -- 2h30 by plane, plus 120 min check-in and TSA buggery
- Munich to Berlin -- 530km, 6h by ICE train -- 1h10 by plane, plus 60 min check-in
In Germany we're talking the difference between a pleasant afternoon reading a book and eating pastries, versus the hectic boarding and deplaning from an airport out of town. Consider instead:
- Dortmund to Moscow -- 2300km, 36h by train (ICE and whatever ancient rolling stock eastern Europe uses). -- 3h by plane.
Are you really going to take the train?
I used to live in a little village in the UK. I could walk 200m from my house to the village train station, and from there I could be in the city centre of any city in the UK in a few hours, with the only changes being strolling from one platform to another a couple of times inside a nice train station.
I could have lunch on the train and then work at a big desk with a power socket and WiFi for the rest of the journey. No need for a taxi or bus or anything at either end. I'd be deposited right in the city centre ready for whatever I needed to do. There was almost zero impact on my day compared to being at my home desk. You can't say that about flying.
I think I was remembering the discussions about SF->LA or Boston->NY->Washington when writing my comment.
It says Munich<->Berlin will be around 4h in 2017 thanks to new high speed tracks. The "vde" is supposed to be a Germany unification traffic project. I can't believe this is only happening after 27 years of East+West :-)
I used to take the train everywhere that I could when I lived in Ottawa and the Hamilton-Montreal side was quite a bit better, but still ghastly. If Canada ever gets serious about rail, they need to do something about the rail infrastructure and the Via monopoly. Don't think it will ever happen though.
That being said, I never have understood why we can't get support for a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
The light and high speed rail companies put on a very good dog and pony show to representatives. They shower them with money, explain the economic incentives and all sorts of other items. The government will then actively try to sell it to the tax base. Any person speaking out against it is called as a Luddite or sponsored by the oil industry (although these are contrived, as they are actually representatives of a economic think tank). The head winds for rail is always heavily supported by a directly benefiting industry. So, I am genuinely interested in your source for the automotive statement you made. Also, please do not use l up the unproven "conspiracy" from prior to world war 2.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/17/feds-delay-caltrain-el...
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/02/03/abe-says-japan-to-show-u...
Firstly, the US has a massive budget deficit and with upcoming corporate tax cuts the question will be where the money is going to come from. Secondly, the US is approaching full employment at ~5%. Now sure there is significant underemployment but you have to wonder if (a) there is enough people to build out all this infrastructure and (b) if the states even have enough shovel ready projects. Because they sure didn't during the GFC when Obama was looking for an infrastructure stimulus.
If Trump can stop kicking Boeing and others in the teeth we might even retain those jobs in the industrial sector that have remained thus far. Trump blowing up contracts Boeing has with airlines overseas bodes poorly for that though.
I predict we'll see another bubble since Trump removed most of the financial restrictions put in place by Dodd-Frank, lining us up for another 2007 bubble collapse all over again. Go Trump!
Most of the rain seems to run on a bridge from the top of the country to the bottom.
In the process of drilling a tunnel over 100' under ground (because the existing elevated road can't withstand another earthquake) several older buildings began to shift at the surface. Downtown Seattle is extremely unstable and I'm not confident that the structures in the city are prepared for the type of quake we are about to face. Japan has had a lot of wake up calls and as far as I know has done a lot more preparation.
Before we spend a few billion dollars on a train maybe we should spend some of that cash on making sure our apartments and offices don't end up in Lake Union or Elliott Bay.
(I did the research on this last year after I had a nightmare about tsunamis.)
If we're going to build such a train it needs to be engineered to be safe from the faults along the cascadia subduction zone - that may be no small feat.
Earthquakes sure, volcanoes...Rainier popping its top could take out the whole city. But it is pretty safe from giant waves.
Large parts of Seattle are fill and are at a significant risk of land slide in case of a major quake.
* Almost nobody.
StClaire did not suggest a tsunami risk to Seattle.
1. Their labor cost per mile is a tiny fraction and their work safety standards are far different.
2. Iirc (not 100% sure) the cost per mile is lower as well because they are not taking into account property acquisition costs.
3. The actual equipment they use comes from companies either not selling at a profit or at a steep discount.
I still don't have an accurate enough picture here, but it doesn't seem apples to apples at least.
It affects demand for travel to the U.S.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742033
And the difficulty of crossing the border could deter some passengers:
$2 billion per mile is a lot of money.
If only I had the balls to put down Gerbil Rancher for profession.