Obama Unveils Plan to Fund High-Speed Passenger Rail
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Pretty mind boggling.
As a taxpayer, I think I'd prefer if we hold off subsidizing useless infrastructure like trains when we already have cars, buses, and airplanes.
Edit: Geez, this drive-by down voting is really getting out of hand lately.
Buses cost less, are equally as cramped, and take less time to arrive at their destination.
99% of people don't care about pollution when deciding to ride a train or bus. They're asking "how long will it take and how much will it cost?"
Additionally, trains are nowhere near as cramped as buses, at least the ones I've ridden. They're considerably roomier in terms of the seats and the areas to walk around in, and often have food and beverage areas as well.
Go on to Amtrak.com and configure a trip for yourself. You'll notice that riding on Amtrak costs MORE than a plane ticket. For a round-trip from Philadelphia to Austin, TX it's $500. I can go on Southwest.com right now and book the exact same trip for the exact same price. The difference? With Amtrak you're riding in a train for 56 hours.
Now tell me exactly how a high-speed train (one with advanced infrastructure) is going to be cheaper than Amtrak?
Trains are a lose-lose compromise between buses and planes. They cost way more than buses and for the price range you might as well use air travel which saves 2 days of seat time.
First, there is no point looking at current prices, because it is a service running on relatively unsubsidised ifrastructure. The point here is to subsidise infrastructure.
Secondly and even more importantly, yeah dude, if I want to go Paris to Shanghai I am better off flying than taking a train. Does that mean there is no point in building a high speed rail network in France? It's not Philadelphia to Austin that is the aim here, it is journeys at the 300 mile sweetspot where a high speed train is a more optimal solution than either car or plane.
I am really sorry but I am starting to think that anybody who doesn't see the benefits of a high-speed rail network has simply not been on one. And that's even before you throw in the environmental cost.
Yet again, Southwest.com is $200 from Philly to Pittsburgh, and Amtrak is $110. Except then I'm spending 14 hours on a train round-trip. If I'm going to spend 14 hours on my trip, then I might as well drive to Pittsburgh which takes me 10 hours round trip and about $30 less, not to mention I have a car to get me around.
Of course we could build the high speed network and subsidize the benefits to cut that down to ~5 hours, but then we get to pay the additional cost anyway come every April 15th. Trains are still a lose-lose. The highway system is already subsidized and we lose money on that, there's no reason to subsidize more transportation.
Pardon me for trying to cut the fat when I'm going to be paying my country's debt for the next 20 years.
It won't work for all routes, but considering how well Amtrak already does in NE, there's demand out there.
HIGH. SPEED. RAIL.
TGV does that distance in 2 hours.
Remember, our population isn't going down in this country anytime soon. Highway expansion, without an alternative, is a given.
Umm, if it's actually cheaper, it doesn't need subsidized infrastructure.
People don't seem to understand that subsidized does not mean cheaper, nor do I get how exactly they think faster and better technology (aka extremely high-speed rail lines) are somehow cheaper to operate than their predecessor - standard Amtrak service.
The purpose of subsidising an infrastructure is to make operating a service on it profitable.
I don't understand why people are objecting to high speed train networks as if they are a totally novel idea. They are a true and tested transportation solution - I have yet to encounter a country that built one only to regret it, or have it unused. We are not talking about putting a man on Mars here.
Roads aren't subsidized and neither are traffic police. They're paid for by car- and truck-specific taxes and fees.
We've played this game before. You'll bring up a study that supposedly shows that cars have expenses that are not covered by taxes. I'll point out that said study ignores one or more large taxes paid for because of cars that pretty much covers the gap and then some. (The dumb version is that you'll point to the cost of building some road and assert that it couldn't possibly have been paid for without subsidies.)
> The purpose of subsidising an infrastructure is to make operating a service on it profitable.
In the case of train passenger trains, that almost never happens. The cost of running the train exceeds the revenues. Even the CA proposals don't claim that they'll run without subsidies. Instead, they argue "other job creation". (They also claim that folks will pay to build highrises in Fresno over the train station, generating enormous profits.)
Here's an easy test that almost every proposal fails. Take the projected revenue (which they never hit) and divide it by the projected number of jobs (which they usually exceed). Ask yourself if the average salary plus benefits is going to be that low. (The proposal will often tout "high paying jobs".) Notice that this figure doesn't account for non-salary operating costs.
Obviously depends on where in the US you are, but typically is estimated that there would have to be a 50c tax per gallon to make highways self-paying. For places where road construction is particularly expensive (mountains, Alaska and Hawaii, etc) that doesn't even come close.
EG. see
http://pubs.its.ucdavis.edu/download_pdf.php?id=1139
Not that I think there's anything wrong with that - subsidising efficient transport is a perfectly legitimate role of government as it is vital for commerce.
Let's go with that number. But first....
> For places where road construction is particularly expensive (mountains, Alaska and Hawaii, etc) that doesn't even come close.
And in other places, 50c a gallon is way more than it takes to make highways self-paying. That's how averages of different numbers work - some are higher than the average while others are lower.
The cited document says that the average fuel tax in the US is 38c/gallon as of a couple of years ago. That does not include sales taxes, which in CA are currently around 20c/gallon, for a total of 58c/gallon, or 8c/gallon over the average required. In the past, CA got less per gallon because the prices were lower, and other states have lower tax rates, but we're not done counting the car revenues and we're pretty close to 50c/gallon.
Taxes on fuel purchases don't include car taxes, taxes on car goods, fines levied on car misuse (which exceed enforcement costs), income taxes on folks providing car services, and so on. (Rail advocates count taxes on folks whose jobs are enabled by transportation and property taxes next to train stations. I'm not counting that for cars, but will note that they would considerably increase the car revenue numbers.)
That document concedes that counting such revenues would mean that govts make money on roads. That's why said document goes to considerable lengths to argue that certain taxes and fees paid by car/truck folk to drive shouldn't be counted. The reasons range from that money is deposited in the general fund, which is curious since the supposed subsidies come from the general fund, to car drivers have to pay something if they did something else, in which case we'd consider those fees/taxes as being associated with some other cause.
With trains, you reduce/eliminate almost all of that overhead. If you have a train that goes only 120mph between Houston and Austin, you have reduced the travel time from 3.5-4 hours to 1.5 hours each way. That is a huge savings in time that makes a lot of currently-infeasible trips practical.
Will it be cheap? Based on my experience riding the trains in Japan, I would say it is going to be much cheaper than flying and more expensive than taking buses and/or slower passenger trains. If the high-speed train people were smart, they'd price it at exactly the price of driving (gas-wise) in the beginning in order to build demand, and then ramp up the price as trains start getting sold out.
High speed rail corridors designated by the Federal Railroad Administration: http://www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/203
(One important caveat to that map is that there's no way high speed rail will come to Texas without connecting Houston and Dallas, probably like this: http://www.thsrtc.com/)
I'd love to see them re-draw that map color-coded to predicted profitability as a way of prioritizing the work. Also, we need to look at how much money we can get from private investors. For example, I bet L.A.-Las Vegas can be built a lot more profitably (for the U.S. government) than Little Rock to New Orleans.
The only issue I ever ran into was finding a group of seats together; in that case you might want to reserve seats(otherwise you get to hotbox with a cigarette smoking Japanese businessman!)
Buses cost less at first, but then you need many more of them to accomodate more passengers. Their speed is also limited and varies quite a lot.
Haven't you ever played that game Transport Tycoon Deluxe? You buy one train and it makes waaaaaay more money than 4-10 passenger buses!
Paris to Marseille by road: at least 7 hours
Paris to Marseille by TGV: about 3 hours, can arrive in center of city
Paris to Marseille by plane: 1:15 to 1:30 hours + 1 to 2 hours spent at airports and travel time to and from each airport
High speed rail is more comparable to flying but without the hassle, and it's definitely far faster than a bus.
Since I don't drive I've been on plenty of coach/bus and train journeys, both long and short, and I can assure you given the choice I'd always choose train. This is particularly true for long-distance journeys: I wouldn't want to take the journey from London-Paris by coach again, but I've only had positive experiences taking the Eurostar and the TGV.
Yes, within large suburban sprawls the trains are often inferior in some ways to buses, but for longer distances, trains win in most countries. Japan, Australia, France, Gernmany, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, etc.
Mostly they can also use power supplies that are getting cleaner and more efficient as time goes by.
Edit: I'm not arguing bus over train; just trying to help folks out by presenting an interesting alternative
(Trains can be much faster than buses, carry much bigger loads, and use less fuel to do so. They are not useless. If the trains you've got in the US at the moment seem useless, that would be because they've been very poorly invested in over the last several decades. Oh, and that $12.8 trillion, while it's certainly a terrifyingly large figure, is not directly comparable with what's being spent in Iraq, e.g. because much of it is not spending but guarantees of the form "if institution X collapses, you'll get back at least the first $Y it owes you", and much of the rest is loans. Even in the present economic climate, what you lend you're quite likely to get back, not to mention that you get paid interest on it while it's lent.)
Anyway one thing I'd like to mention that never gets highlighted is that buses are BY FAR the cheapest public transportation solution. Its not sexy but the good old fashioned bus is great since it can use the road infrastructure already built whereas trains need right of way and a lot of construction before they can be used.
Another unfortunate problem with buses is that changing the bus route is pretty much trivially easy, with the consequence that they do change an awful lot (at least here in Boston), which means that buses generally provide really unreliable transportation.
Montreal has a great bus system, iirc. Dedicated roads, dedicated, clean, underground tunnels. Probably super expensive. Alas.
Edit: easily :)
Also there's no fuel around to use as explosive material.
It's impossible to sell such a huge plan without an imminent threat/disaster. It makes no sense to think of other things we could do with that money.
See: Sending a man to the moon.
Granted it might be hard to sell a rail project like the space race, but looking back on just how much of our GDP we where spending to play golf on the moon was insane.
Also back then it wasn't clear that it would be just the one trip.
But this is about connecting cities in densely populated regions, not transportation within cities: http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/Research/hsr_corridors_2009...
Buses between cities is a terrible way to travel. I know, I took buses from east/west coast repeatedly as a teenager.
I believe there is a sweet spot in travel distance where high speed trains are the optimal solution over cars in the smaller distance range and planes in the longer distance range. Few would think to travel from LA to NY on a train but when you are talking about LA to SF, it makes a lot of sense. Time and destination wise it's more convenient, the environmental impact is less, frees up plane capacity at LAX and SFO for long distance flights, ongoing costs are similar, and the only question remaining is do these benefits outweigh the very large upfront cost? Would love to see how much these costs compare (a new high speed train route vs a hypothetical new airport + enough planes to service the route)
However, many who are over-reliant on their cars will continue to be so, as they are less likely to be the people traveling frequently by plane. Also, people will have no incentive to reduce their car dependence so long as they still have to drive everyday for work/groceries/practically everything, unless they are lucky enough to already live in one of the rare (at least in the USA) cities with public transportation that could be rationally argued as superior to individual cars.
So, I would argue that massive investment in intra-city public transport infrastructure would have a more significantly positive long-term effect, as its availability would be relevant to more people, and has a the potential to cause a significantly larger reduction in the number of miles driven per person in the USA.
Unfortunately, the negative stigma that seems to linger over public transport in many parts of this country would likely retard these benefits. The real utility of the simple bus systems that would be a reasonable first step, as opposed to metros/subways, would not become apparent until the use of mass-transit reached a critical mass, at which the density of cars on the road would be reduced to a point allowing buses to travel quickly. Though, the importance of reaching this critical mass, which creates a sort of chicken<->egg problem, could be reduced by dedicated bus lanes, as some others have already mentioned.
(PDF link) http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-625.pdf
"Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110- to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take fewcars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future.
Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by a mere 0.7 to1.5 percent—but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions.
These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?
As megaprojects—the California high-speed rail is projected to cost $33 to $37 billion—high-speed rail plans pose serious risks for taxpayers. Costs of recent rail projects in Denver and Seattle are running 60 to 100 percent above projections. Once construction begins, politicians will feel obligated to throw good taxpayers’ money after bad. Once projects are completed, most plans call for them to be turned over to private companies that will keep any operationalprofits, while taxpayerswill remain vulnerable if the trains lose money.
In short, high-speed rail proposals are high cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits."
And with that, I'm going to get a pseudonym. Hacker News users aren't just random people on the internet, they're people I'd like to work with someday. And I usually avoid discussing contentious political issues with my colleagues unless they bring it up first and seem thick-skinned. If there's going to be politics on hacker news, then I, as me, must go.
The author who wrote that has in all likelihood never traveled by train in Europe. At least in Germany, high speed trains are a huge success and often overcrowded when I use them.
I just know that you're not making the case that there are special groups that we can trust with statistics and special groups we can't. Because that's an insult to our intelligence. Sources have bias. We multi-source to eliminate them. No need to impeach the source. Argue the facts.
http://ec.europa.eu/publications/booklets/eu_glance/44/en-3....
Look near the bottom of page 52...
Edit: I can't seem to connect to the Japanese statistics page, but that too is sourced, and I can't imagine they'd just flat out lie about the contents of a publicly available document...
The relative drop in rail traffic is much more likely due to the fact that local short distance routes have been closed down aggressively in the past 20 years. In Germany, also medium speed trains routes (160km/h), like the ones serviced by the InterRegio, have been cut.
Using this statistic to make any claims about high speed trains is naive or intellectually dishonest.
However, I am really uncertain about whether passenger trains are a good idea. In most countries they are subsidized. the upkeep costs are high...the US is a very geographically sparse place...
I'd much rather have them spend money on alternative energy, electric cars and funding startups at an arms length by investing in VC firms. (or running an independent VC arm)
Also, arguably if the trains are used to move goods they can get trucks off the road and really decrease road maintenance costs. If you look into the wear and tear vehicles make on pavement, each extra pound is exponentially more damage. Trucking companies actually are heavily subsidized by the road infrastructure but nobody notices it ;)
I do wonder if we need high speed trains. Regular trains might be a better long term bet.
High speed rail might work to connect nearby metro areas, but almost certainly, trains across half or whole US will not work. It's simply too far away, and it wouldn't be any competition to airplanes. Even EU high speed rail are mostly, in their current state, few scattered islands connecting large cities within a single country.
> ... big parts of the rail system are almost freight-only.
The problem however is that in many parts of the country the same lines are shared by both passengers and freight. This means that for starters those lines are not going to be suitable for high speed passenger rail anyway. But beyond that, Amtrak gets second priority on those lines. This is one of the reasons for the frustrating delays that rail travel in the US always seems to have.
If we're really worried about "green" efforts these days, we should consider strongly what modes will move people most efficiently. This is one of the areas where common knowledge differs badly from reality. See, e.g., http://eapblog.worldbank.org/content/comparing-the-fuel-effi...
Trains are much less efficient than, say, buses, due largely to problems in filling the trains fully. And since this is all so political, you can expect this train to be worse thanks to the political wrangling that will force the decisions about stations and schedules to overwhelm efficient routing plans.
The airlines are also subsidized and use a lot of fuel and the upkeep costs are high. I think every year there's one airline somewhere in the world that's declaring bankruptcy.
http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=30&...
The urban population in the US is 80% of the total. In Canada, it's 81%. Interestingly, Australia is near the top of the list (92%).
Look at the corridors. They only exist where people are dense.
Unfortunately, that won't work politically. It basically treats red states like oceans that should be flown over, and puts all the high-speed rail in blue states (except the Texas network). It is probably more fiscally responsible to finance these networks at the state level than at the federal level.
> In most countries they are subsidized.
As I mention above, we've had this discussion.
"Obama adminstration installs Apache servers" or some such -> not flagged
That's what I love so much about standards. Everybody has them.
I just enjoy watching the double-standards people employ. For example, in this discussion I'd love to see somebody bring up the point that passenger rail in the U.S. is a political idea and not a practical business idea -- take a look at Amtrak pricing. But by actually diving into the business side of the article, they'd call the resulting discussion political!
I think "political" just means "stuff I don't agree with that has some sort of tangential relation to politics"