Why Can't the United States Build a High-Speed Rail System?
citylab.com
citylab.com
1. High speed rail is an order of magnitude more expensive than interstate highways. The cost effectiveness of the mass moving people via train vs. via highways (buses, carpool lanes included) is still an active debate.
2. The author cites that many folks use interstate highways daily. That may be true but that vast majority of those commutes are 50 miles or less. High speed rail only becomes cost and time effective over much longer distances. Which fraction of the population need to frequently travel to cities greater than 50 miles away? It's a small subset of the population (and skewed towards wealthier citizens). Roads are much more democratic -- they are available to anyone with a car.
3. While his argument about traffic is correct... where is most of the traffic on interstate highways? Answer: around major cities. The traffic is mostly local commuter traffic that high speed rail would not solve.
Only when being installed. When operating, the true cost per passenger mile is much lower than for interstate highways and cars. It's best to avoid misleading economic comparisons.
A bus is more expensive than a car, but the cost per passenger mile is much lower.
A commercial airliner is hugely more expensive than a car, but an airplane ride from A to B is cheaper than an equivalent car journey for most trips.
> The traffic is mostly local commuter traffic that high speed rail would not solve.
False choice. Cities have sophisticated, multi-level rail and surface mass transit systems for a reason -- they make economic sense.
> Roads are much more democratic -- they are available to anyone with a car.
I have to ask -- who are you working for? Your arguments are all paper-thin, easily torn to pieces. Roads and cars are democratic? More democratic than a seat in mass transit?
Installation costs would be included in your cost per passenger per mile (though likely amortized over the usable lifetime or augmented with maintenance/upgrade costs). But overall I agree with you that perhaps the cost per passenger per mile works out favorably for high speed rail for trips of a certain length (I address that in a different point). I am just pointing out factors the author glossed over.
> False choice. Cities have sophisticated, multi-level rail and surface mass transit systems for a reason -- they make economic sense.
What false choice? I am pointing out that traffic around cities is NOT predominately inter-state traffic but local commuter traffic. I agree that city transit can be very cost effective and eliminate local road congestion. However this is all ancillary to the high speed rail argument. High Speed rail is not used for local commuter traffic which I am characterizing as 50 miles or less. High speed rail (and the national funding associated with it) will not solve local city congestion.
> I have to ask -- who are you working for? Your arguments are all paper-thin, easily torn to pieces. Roads and cars are democratic? More democratic than a seat in mass transit?
I work for a software company as a developer :) So clearly I am the authority on high speed rail. I disagree that my arguments are "paper-thin" and easily torn to pieces. As far as my democratic statement I will expound as it was used in a context that your quote eliminated. High Speed rail is useful for longer distance travel where speed (time) matters. The frequent (daily/weekly) users of this system are skewed towards the very wealthy who have commutes/business travel that travel distances where high speed rail is cost effective. Thus using federal subsidies (which are pooled for the entire population) to fund a service for a fraction of the population is a hard sell in a democratic government. Roads are an easier sell since most citizens own (or could own) a car and have travel needs that fall within the radius where car (or local mass transit) is cost effective.
I am sorry but this argument is not gonna fly. Saying that governments are infallible and make perfect decisions or trend toward perfect decisions is simply not correct.
And assuming you mean democratic governments this makes even less sense.
In that case, I'm glad only you said it -- I never did. Government is the art of the possible, and politicians generally know how to avoid being thrown out of office. Avoiding decisions that have no public support, choosing only those that have some public support, that's something politicians are good at. It's the political version of crowdsourcing.
> And assuming you mean democratic governments this makes even less sense.
You serious? Finding out what the voters want is even more important in a democracy than it would be in a totalitarian state. Political opinion sampling is why France and Japan have high-speed rail, and it's why the U.S. doesn't.
Politicians in a modern democracy do indeed need to stay elected but that is typically independent of what a true, unfettered democracy would produce. Some of this is by design -- a pure democracy would be largely unworkable. At best too fractured and at worst everyone would vote for more benefits and less (no) taxes at the expense of national debt for a future generation.
Mostly politicians vote for what keeps them in office. Which as we see in the US is typically special interest groups and powerful lobbists.
True crowdsourcing occurs in free market economies. We could go there :) The libertarian would say if high speed rail was so in demand and made such economic sense then why arent companies scrambling to take advantage of a market inefficiency to make gobs of money?
Well, the interstate highways are already installed.
This is not at all constructive. And I believe the author probably meant "individualistic" rather than "democratic."
There are no sound reasons for investing in passenger rail in the US now. The current system is already meeting demand, and on a national level all lines except the North East Corridor requires heavy subsidy.
If there were a pent up demand for it, it would have happened. We could artificially create demand by jacking up the price of petrol, but then we are taking choice away from the consumer.
Building better, faster trains is hardly a guarantee that they will be used. My experience (which I admit is purely subjective) is that people who want nicer trains already use them. I live in a major transit corridor to NYC, and the folks who already ride the train would love it to be faster and nicer, but would they pay the higher prices? Why are they all taking slow NJ Transit instead of high speed Amtrak?
Jacking up the price of petrol doesn't take away choice. It may be internalizing the massive externalities associated with the use of petroleum based fuels and making the choice better reflect net utilities (including disutilities experienced by people outside of individual purchase decisions as a result of those decisions), or it may be artificially creating a new externality so that the decisions less-accurately reflect real net utilities, but in either case its not removing choice.
There are no viable political reasons to invest in high-speed rail. Americans love their cars, the interstate highway system is in place, that's a lot of inertia to overcome with economic arguments.
In Europe and Japan, on the other hand, high-speed rail is booming. One of the reasons is that the prior infrastructure was substantially destroyed in WWII, allowing more options than we Americans have. Also, it's possible that Europeans aren't quite as crazy about cars as we are.
> Building better, faster trains is hardly a guarantee that they will be used.
That's certainly true, and it's probably a big argument against high-speed rail, especially when you read the recent history of Amtrak, which has always struggled to find riders. On the other hand, Amtrak has always been a "Me too" mode of transport, a niche, a novelty for the curious.
If we were deciding this without an interstate highway system and a huge, well-established car culture, I think it would be a different debate.
"Why are they all taking slow NJ Transit instead of high speed Amtrak?"
1. There are few stops in NJ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Amtrak_stations_in_New...
2. It doesn't go much faster than the regular train.
Anyone with a family knows this blatantly false. Family of four form SFO to SAN ~$700 - 1K on a plane. Gas at 30mpg is $132 round trip. Add in a $100 each way if you are renting a car for one day, one direction, and you are barely at half the cost of the cheapest flight.
So it's not so much blatantly false as dependent on the size of the group traveling. Not to mention to really compare apples and oranges you would have to compare the airlines costs to transport an average airplane load vs the equivalent number of people traveling by road.
I have no idea what that comparison works out to but it would not surprise me if the plane wins there.
The constant financial troubles of all of the rail systems in the Bay Area seem to tell a different story. It's almost as if everything is not as black and white as you believe...
Than single-passenger automobile (the point above): Only if the bus is empty.
This is about high speed rail.
How many people needed cellphones in the 1950s?
You can't measure how many people travel to cities greater than 50 miles away today and extrapolate that to a future with high-speed rail, because it may be that the reason they don't do it is: they don't have an affordable way to do it.
the problem is hard though...you could pay for long bureaucratic studies on whether this would pan out or not
or you just do it
problem is that building the cell phone was several orders of magnitude cheaper than plopping down $100B for high speed rail infrastructure. Definitely not the business model of "launch fast and iterate". Which is probably why its hard for this forum to debate it.
I'm just messing with you. Do people ever stop and think before adding noise to the conversation? You seriously don't have a point.
Proposed HSR times from SF->LA are about 2.5 hours. If there is no security and you are comfortable arriving a few minutes before the train leaves, thats that. Realistically, I'd think you'd need to arrive 15 mins ahead of time or more.
Flights from SF->LA take about an hour. In my experience 30-40 minutes is plenty of time for "airport BS", but even if you give it an hour, you're at 2 hours, not over 2.5.
I am all for HSR, but saying that it is faster than air travel is a baseless argument.
Rail tends to have stations actually in the actual cities, which is an awful lot more convenient.
Maybe the distance of those commutes are related to the times it takes? Would the average commute grow in distance if the time decreased?
It has all sorts of implications for life/work, where it could open up options for smaller towns; however, the problem becomes one of efficiency for the rail, as it can't slow down at every small town with a minor population unless it really was a feeder to the big city. I think it just reinforces travel between hubs (metropolitan areas, which still might have last-mile problems that Google, Uber, Lyft, etc. focus on).
I think it also increases the viability of what a "local ecosystem" entails. Suddenly, a manufacturing town that's normally an airplane away is a couple hours, so it's easier to establish a relationship and coordinate between two currently disconnected sectors.
So look at Japan. Japan is 152,000 ish square miles.
The United States is 3,717,000 sq miles that are already crisscrossed with Interstates, plus a great deal of air travel infrastructure, plus low-speed rail.
It may not be obvious, but rail crashed in the U.S. More than once. There were worthless railroad stock certificates in many attics. These now have actual numismatic value. Then it crashed again after Eisenhower built the Interstate.
China is 3,704,000 sq. miles but doesn't have Interstates to the same extent that the U.S. does.
The U.S. does pretty well with low speed rail for freight and to a lesser extent, passenger service. But the infrastructure in the U.S. is based on 50 year old technology. China should be able to do much better and by doing so, the U.S. should develop a twinge of envy and possibly emulate them, if it makes sense.
The U.S. should ( IMO ) do a lot more "moon shot" things but it didn't work out. I watched this in real time after the moon landing. The shuttle was cool and all, but it was nothing compared to what could have been. We said "BTDT" and went to the disco.
When it comes down to it, the U.S. is a lot about granite countertops and not much else. I will not say why I think that is.
But the geometry of the way the U.S. is laid out means that you can spend a great deal on air transport before you get to break even with high-speed rail.
High speed rail from NYC to LA, while it may be cool and might be a nice big engineering challenge, really just doesn't appeal to most people. But if I, in central NJ, could take a train into Manhattan in under 2 hours, that would actually be incredibly useful and I'd love to be able to. Right now the time and cost of me taking a train from here to DC is prohibitively high compared to driving or taking a flight. These regional cases are where high speed (or at least higher speed) rail would really shine in my opinion.
While the time in the air between NY and DC is 35 minutes, the hassle of arriving at the airport early for check-in, actually getting to LGA, JFK or Newark and getting from Dulles, BWI or National to your location, make traveling by rail (Acela 2 hours 45 minutes) a real competitor.
The argument, I suppose, is that high speed rail could increase this competitiveness to other cities outside the northeast corridor.
That's definitely not true. Just look at the ACA.
> California's high-speed rail progress—its proposed San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line remains the only truly fast train project in the country—is the exception that proves the rule; that state's size makes it no example for the rest of the nation.
Yeah let's just pretend that California's train to nowhere is an example other states should emulate.
We can't build high speed trains because: (1) the government is corrupt, incompetent and beholden to interest groups and (2) the public doesn't really want them.
The best example of public transportation the US has is probably NYC and it really isn't all that great. It's dirty, slow, unreliable, crowded and surprisingly expensive. (at 100$/mo owning a car in almost any other city in the US is cheaper)
You obviously don't live in NYC for saying such things.
I love the subway and love the fact that I don't have to take a car to work. It's green (runs off of electricity). I don't have to worry about oil changes, tires, gas, insurance, the initial outlay of a lot of cash for a car... etc. Did I mention its faster than a cab?
I'll give you that it's dirty and crowded (depending on the time). But nothing else.
Even if you assume parking is free on both ends of your journey and that the car was given to you for free, there is no way you are spending less than $100 a month. Gas alone probably gets you close to $100. Then you add on registration and insurance and ongoing maintenance costs. I want to live in this fantasy world where cars are "cheaper"
Where do you live where gas is free and so is maintenance and car insurance and parking?
$11k: insurance ($1200/yr, a bargain for a 20-something male)
$8k: depreciation (bought at $18k, sold at $10k)
$4k: gas (~50k miles @ 35 mpg, ~$3/gal)
$3k: maintenance (very good luck on this one)
$2k: tolls, parking, etc. (infrequent for me)
> That's definitely not true. Just look at the ACA.
Well, if the author studied history he would have known that our political system is that where states came together and decided to devote some decision-making power to the federal government. As time passed this federal government usurped as much power as it could but apparently for some people it's still not enough.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The Constitution creates a framework; almost all political decisions are majority votes (as interpreted through our political institutions). I don't agree that the federal government has usurped too much power in general (though there are specific cases); which one of us is right is decided by majority vote.
> That's definitely not true. Just look at the ACA.
The ACA devolves most power to the states, who run their own exchanges, including the ability to not participate at all. Compare that to other countries (which have much less expensive and more effective health care systems).
> We can't build high speed trains because: (1) the government is corrupt, incompetent and beholden to interest groups and (2) the public doesn't really want them.
I disagree on #1, at least in a relative sense. The US government is relatively clean compared to most, including others that build and manage train systems such as Russia and India.
The problem, IMHO, is the demonization of government by a small group. Due to our political structure that small minority can block government from acting, bringing such gridlock that it can't even raise revenues or pay bills reliably. That reduces the general public's confidence in government's capacity to solve problems, not because something is generally wrong with government but because of the gridlock. Until we solve that problem, nothing else will happen.
I'll disagree here.
If you live in Manhattan, public transit is fast and efficient. As for "dirty", well it wasn't white glove immaculate, but it isn't covered in filth or human waste.
As for $ of owning a car, I drive very little (my commute to work is a paltry 4 miles!), but just going around on weekends to meet with friends costs me an easy $40/week, making gas alone more than $100/month.
> Yeah let's just pretend that California's train to nowhere is an example other states should emulate.
Hyperloop makes more sense. Personally I'd love to see Hyperloop running down the entire west coast.
Which in turn is because of the 2-party oligopoly. Instant run-off voting, to give 3rd parties a viable chance of winning, is part of the solution.
> Which in turn is because of the 2-party oligopoly.
We were able to accomplish a lot in the 20th century with that 2-party oligopoly. I don't support it, but it's no excuse for our inability to get things done.
Its very different from IRV, which is a forced-ranking method which elects the candidate with the majority of first place rankings if one exists, and if not throws out all votes for the candidate with the lowest number of first place rankings (leaving the next-ranked candidate first on those ballots) and then tries again, repeating until some candidate has a majority of first place rankings.
Neither is, IMO, a particularly good single winner election for candidates for political office (though there are some other uses of voting for which I think Approval is a good method -- for instance, in social situations where opting out of an activity is permissible and an approval vote has a crystalized meaning of "I opt out unless one of the alternatives I've marked is selected, and I commit not to opt out if one of those alternatives is selected"), but they are the most commonly recommended alternatives to the US's more common methods of plurality and majority-runoff vote-for-one elections, probably because they are the alternative mechanisms that are structurally most similar (AV can be viewed as a generalization of plurality -- he who gets the most # of votes wins -- without a vote-for-one restriction, and IRV is simply using a ranked ballot to allow a simple generalization of majority-runoff to be done off a single balloting.)
http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://ScoreVoting.net/AppCW.html
Are other cities public transportation better? I haven't found any that are close to as convenient as NYC.
Go visit Tokyo if you really want to see what you're missing out on. US public transport is a sad joke.
I did a quick search and it looks like FRA to AMS return is about $400 by train, $164 by plane.
Train rides in western Europe are not that expensive and certainly not worth the hassle with airplanes over such short distances. Also, you can buy 25% and 50% discount cards for all tickets for a year for only a few EUR's. (25% for a year = 62 EUR, 50% for 515 EUR for inland travel in Germany).
Within individual countries is where rail has the most market-share in Europe, and advance-ticket purchases are priced like planes, with steep discounts from full-fare prices, varying with demand. People take high-speed trains on routes like Barcelona–Madrid and Lyon-Paris, and without the German ICE network. And many people do prefer the train on those routes: the Barcelona–Madrid air shuttle lost half of its passengers after the AVE line to Barcelona opened.
And, actually, for longer routes (e.g. Boston to Chicago), even regular trains are only competitive with planes at best--and if you want a sleeper car for a 20 hour trip you can be looking at $1,000 one way.
High Speed rail might have some applications in some congested corridors, most likely only in the North East, but for the rest - air travel isn't that expensive.
I would argue that air travel has become very expensive. I hardly can get a ticket, even for hour-long flights, for less than $400.
Most Americans cannot afford that (take your two kids, and its $1600). Combine it with the increased price of gas, and many Americans cannot afford to travel outside their hometowns. We need better public transit.
Why waste money on a rail system when the whole country is going to look like the car scenes in Minority Report in a couple decades?
Neither of these has any chance of being true. Highways near any sort of metropolitan area, or near a spur leading to a metropolitan area, or even often near a connector leading to another major highway, are already massively congested. Autonomous automobiles making even more people want to use them will only make it that much worse.
And even safe, self-driving cars operating outside of traffic can only travel at a fraction the speed of rail.
What I can say is that driving from my house in Massachusetts to Manhattan today is both cheaper and faster than taking the Acela by the time you count getting to the train station and getting to my hotel on the other end. I still usually take the train as it's more pleasant--at least if it's just me. If I had a driver (AI or otherwise), probably not.
Trains don't have a monopoly on this.
Northeast Corridor (Boston - Washington DC)
LA - SF
Chicago - NYC
and possibly Seattle - Portland
Beyond that, the traffic densities present are not enough to justify high speed rail - not to mention, even nonstop at 200 mph from LA/SF/Seattle to Chicago (or any eastern point) is a minimum of 10 hours in transit, versus 3ish to fly.
Remember that building transit infrastructure will also create new traffic!
As an example, park and rides an hour out from Seattle are packed full of cars every day. Busses are then packed full of people every day heading into the city from as much as 40 miles out.
IMHO what would be more interesting would be Vancouver BC --> Bellingham --> Midway to Seattle --> Seattle --> Tacoma --> Portland
Of course going across the boarder makes this impractical. :(
80MPH doesn't save that much time!
I dont think you can add enough traffic by going cross country, not to Chicago to tie to the eastern network.
[1] The kind of engineer who designs trains (and related systems), not the kind who drives them.
Think of all of the state/municipal level governments and unions that have to be satisfied before any deal is struck. This would essentially mix NYC, Jersey, Philly, Baltimore, and D.C. politics into one huge pile of WTF.
We couldn't even get a riverfront project going in Philadelphia because not enough (of the powers that be) palms were greased.
Only way this could be possible is if some benevolent Palpatine-esqe dictator comes along and makes shit happen.
In order for an intercity rail network to work, it needs to link dense urban cores that also have useful transit systems. A train between Omaha and Kansas City does no good if you get off the train then face a 14 mile journey through the suburbs to your destination.
2 things need to happen before a rail network makes sense:
1. Urban infill. I know Denver has a policy for this in place, I'm sure others do too. But sooo many city cores have huge tracts of land that are derelict, or unused. New development should be incentivized to make use of this land.
2. Growth boundary regulation. Portland is the best example of this. With out this you get the exurbs and sprawl (sorry to point out Kansas City again, but it is one of the worst offenders here) which demand a car to traverse.
Consider the climate impact costs. Part of the problem is that airlines and car owners externalize a significant cost, making those modes of transportation seem relatively less expensive. In reality, everyone else covers those costs.
California's rail plan is a lie and a joke. It won't end up being "high speed" rail. It's a waste of taxpayer money. It's another way for politicians to line the pockets of their contributors.
Rail line won't meet target travel time.
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/27/local/la-me-bullet-t...
It will cost more than proposed to the voters.
http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/cost-high-speed-rail-...
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_22929875/california-high-speed...
The USA does not need a high-speed rail system. The interstate system and airport network is sufficient. Between high trafficked short-distance corridors? Fine.
What the USA needs is modern commuter rail supported by a network of private short-trip mini-buses. This would have the most significant impact for lowest cost.
However, the barriers to commuter rail in much of the country are stupid and entrenched. In Raliegh, NC, the main barrier to commuter rail is a county commissioner who believes in some absurd conspiracy theories [1].
[1] http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive....
High speed rail is great for population centers that are 300 miles apart, but not so great for ones that are 1500 miles apart. The competition there is primarily the airplane, and the time difference grows with distance. So does the cost difference. (You only need an airport in each city, no matter how far apart they are, but you need a mile of railroad for each mile of distance.)
The problem, then, is that the US doesn't have enough population centers that are big enough and close enough to each other. The northeast corridor (from Boston to Washington DC) is really the only one that fits.
Hence everything has to be privatized, and if something gives little or no incentive for profit, it should not exist (like municipal fiber or proper universal health care).
With the big exception of the army and the police of course, where it's handy that the multitide of common citizens fund the resource-grabbing and property protection of the few.
Really? By whom? Where?
Trust in government hasn't collapsed due to a sudden lack of people advocating government solutions for everything in the past 50 years. In a nutshell, it's collapsed due to government not being able to deliver on a great deal of what it promises. It's simply irrational for the public to pretend that the government has some sort of spotless track record over the past 50 years.
Given how many of those failed promises have been infrastructure projects themselves, it would bode poorly for trying to fix this distrust with yet another one.
And remember, if you're inclined to start making excuses for why the public may not trust the government, you simply end up explaining why the public doesn't trust the government, it doesn't make the mistrust go away. Consider that a list of problems to be attacked before the government has the moral capital to spend again on such infrastructure projects. (One rather potent way of looking at the government's trust problems is its repeated willingness by government officials to spend that trust without putting a lot of effort into depositing into that account.)
By the prevalent public discourse ever since the 50's at least.
>* In a nutshell, it's collapsed due to government not being able to deliver on a great deal of what it promises.*
Seems to be able to deliver just fine in Germany or Denmark for example. It might no be infallible, but then is there any private entity that is?
>And remember, if you're inclined to start making excuses for why the public may not trust the government, you simply end up explaining why the public doesn't trust the government, it doesn't make the mistrust go away.
If you change "making excuses" to "finding the causes", then it's actually the very first step to "making the mistrust go away".
What do you compare it to? The Auto-bahn in Germany? That's like 1/100 the length.
Heck, even Route 66 is mighty fine compared to other places, and that's not even officially supported anymore, nor the main road.
A train is 10% better than a jet from SF to LA. A train is much worse than a jet for SF to NY. All other pairings -- or so one might argue -- are so much lesser in density that the elasticity of roads is vastly preferable.
I think there are many other possibilities, and also many people live in cities of hundreds of thousands, all over America, and they'd like to travel too.
* The NE corridor, from DC to Boston, of course. Maybe south to NC
* Chicago - Indianapolis - Cincinnati - Columbus - Pittsburgh - Cleveland - Detroit (- Toronto) (That would include a spur or two, of course.) And what about people in Green Bay and Grand Rapids?
* The Florida cities, maybe up to Atlanta or West to New Orleans
* Texas cities