James Wimberly notes the debut of AVE service from Madrid to Barcelona and describes the joys of high-speed rail in France. Building some in the United States would, of course, cost a lot of money but the benefits could be large and it'd certainly be a better deal than building a ton of F-22s.
« Brother, Can You Spare $100 Billion? | Main | Strong Claim »
High-Speed Rail
20 Feb 2008 05:15 pm
Comments (84)
Monocle is a curate's egg of a magazine, but its recent look at railways is worth reading. (Also, Dan Hill on the potential for HSR in Australia.)
High-speed rail is generally worth pursuing. But note that it has some attributes that make actually building the lines more difficult.
First, it needs to be, actually be--high speed. So the high-speed rail line has to be separated from the street/road/highway system. Grade crossings slow everything down. This makes using existing rail lines problematic.
Second, the need for separating grade crossings makes running high-speed rail into big cities somewhat difficult. So many of the stations designated for high-speed rail are outside of the cities they serve. Which creates some problems.
Third, high-speed rail, to be successful, requires relatively few stops. Too many stops on a line leads to spending a lot of time getting up to speed and slowing down for the stations. Yet every community will want to be included. This is a real issue. There's an active movement to build a high-speed rail line between Chicago and Indianapolis, with a minimum of two stops (northwest Indiana somewhere and Lafayette). These stops will sow the train enough that it will lose much of its potential speed advantage compared with cars. (Of course, it'll still beat hell out of Amtrak, which takes 5 hours to get from Chicaho to Indy, an average speed of 30 mph, a result of an extremely meandering route).
Nothing is ever as easy as it sounds...
Modern, regional high speed rail networks in the United States would make an incredible amount of sense. It would be cheaper and use less oil than flying. It would be safer, and it would be more convenient (wouldn't need a taxi to the airport). It would reduce flight delays.
Obviously a cross-country system doesn't make much sense... nobody is going to take a train from coast to coast these days. But REAL high-speed rail in the Bos-Wash corridor? Yes please. Acela doesn't count. A west coast line running from Sacremento, through the Bay Area, down to San Diego. A Midwestern network with its central hub in Chicago and reaching out to St. Louis, Indy, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and cities in Ohio would make lots of sense, replacing driving or short hop flights with a couple hours' train ride.
The American rail transit system, in cities and between them, is truly pathetic. As someone who's spent a fair amount of time on European trains, I'd fully support this.
High Speed Rail is sexy but I think America should have a functioning passenger rail system of any kind outside BosWash before proposing fancy toys.
Building some in the United States would, of course, cost a lot of money but the benefits could be large and it'd certainly be a better deal than building a ton of F-22s
Or not.
Even rail fanboy Wimberley admits that "passenger rail makes sense in the USA only in urbanised blue-state corridors, not continentally," and it's arguable that passenger rail doesn't make sense even in those few places.
High speed rail? How about a high speed web site? I love the writing, but this has the slowest draw on the left.
High speed rail is a pipe-dream in this country. Where are you going to lay the tracks? In the corridors where it would make the most theoretical sense, it would require tornadoes of eminent domain to steal room to lay a mag-lev system. By the time the lawsuits were settled, we wouldn't need the system anymore, because we'd all be driving hydrogen-powered Jetsons cars.
I'm fairly convinced high speed rail makes sense for trips roughly in the 100-500 mile range (provided there are not an excessive number of stops, as noted above). Given that range to work with, you could string together quite a few regional high speed rail networks in the United States (maybe including parts of Canada). In fact, although continental service would indeed not make sense, you could link a Great Lakes network to the Northeast Corridor via Pittsburgh.
But unfortunately, there appears to be no way to recoup the costs of doing all this through the riders (too many of the benefits come through externalities). That means heavy public subsidies, and for whatever reason, heavy public subsidies for railways seem like a tough sell in the U.S. these days.
Why couldn't we do both?
Why couldn't we have a reasonable cost high speed stealth rail line which also doubles as a mobile anti-missile defense system?
That would be awesome.
it's arguable that passenger rail doesn't make sense even in those few places
Right, because the I-95 corridor is just SO efficient at moving people quickly. I really cannot help but get the impression that people who deride high-speed rail do not make these 100-500 mile trips through dense areas very often.
Fred,
Mag-lev is probably a losing technology, in part because of the need for all new tracks.
But high-speed wheeled trains can leverage existing tracks, or at least existing rights of way.
What do you do when you get off the high-speed train? European and Japanese cities are dense, walkable places. The train leaves you downtown and you can get anywhere easily. Only NYC, Chicago, Boston (sort of) and San Francisco (sort of) qualify in the US.
Americans, however, aren't moving to those cities, they're leaving them in droves. The cities they are moving to aren't walkable. Imagine getting off the high-speed train in Phoenix or Salt Lake City. Sure you can catch a cab, but taking twenty-five minute cab rides every time you want to go somewhere isn't probably what train enthusiasts have in mind.
Right, because the I-95 corridor is just SO efficient at moving people quickly.
So your argument is: Road is inefficient; therefore, rail would be less inefficient.
See if you can spot the fallacy in your argument, Tyro.
Re: So many of the stations designated for high-speed rail are outside of the cities they serve. Which creates some problems.
Airports are usually well outside cities too, yet this does not cause problems for air travellers. In fact, one solution for HSP would be to place the stations close to airports so that travellers could access the same ground transport options (rental cars, shuttles etc) that air passengers use.
Re: These stops will sow the train enough that it will lose much of its potential speed advantage compared with cars.
Why? I see no reason that any stop should be longer than 10 minutes under normal circumstances. (And no waiting for late passengers). I use a commuter rail train most days to go to work; generally the train stops for about 1 minute. Of course HSR passengers may have luggage but that can be self-stowed in the same cars they ride in (no need for luggage checking). I would think that 10 minutes boarding/deboarding time would be enough to accommodate disabled people (it generally requires 2-3 minutes for a wheelchair passenger to be accommodated on our commuter train).
Murraymises,
Actually, there are a lot more American cities with pre-automobile era urban cores than the ones you listed. It is true many of those cities lost a lot of population in the second half of the 20th Century (to the suburbs or the boom cities of the Sun Belt), but recently many of those cities have roughly stabilized. And with the "new urbanism" trend taking hold among the "creative class", many of these urban cores are starting to be redeveloped and gentrified.
That said, I agree that high speed regional rail becomes more attractive if it connects directly with good local public transit.
I can haz high-speed rail?!? Wow. I haven't had this feeling since, like, 1978. Here we are, discussing social problems, almost as if there were a chance in hell that we might have the leaders in office, and the political will, to get them solved.
Let's savor the moment, because I expect it to last about sixteen months.
On routes up to about 300 miles, even moderately high-speed trains with a moderate number of stops (e.g., Acela) make sense if you consider users' time in addition to the usual economic and environmental factors. Air passengers currently waste huge amounts of time getting to airports, parking, checking in, security screening, pre-boarding etc. The flight is usually the shortest part of the journey. Very little of that time is available for reading, socializing, web surfing, working, talking (safely) on the phone, or just napping. Same for driving a car.
By contrast, you get a solid chunk of useful time once you board a train, and it usually delivers right into the destination's downtown. Most train stations can be reached by transit -- in contract to airports.
I travel frequently frequently from Calgary to Edmonton, a 180-mile trip each way. There's no train, but there is an express bus with comfortable, three-across seating and plug-ins for computers or head-sets. The newer buses have wi-fi. I bike over to the bus station, then read, sleep or work for three hours, and arrive downtown within a few blocks of my destination. I can't imagine why anyone goes to the expense and hassle of flying or driving.
Now there is a proposal for high-speed rail on this heavily traveled route. Worth many billions of dollars? I'm not totally convinced, but I would sooner invest in that than continual highway and airport expansions.
In addition to the often-mentioned Boston-Washington corridor, some others to consider are Vancouver-Seattle-Portland, Los Angeles-Las Vegas, Dallas-Houston, St. Louis-Chicago, and Atlanta-Miami. In Canada, the Windsor-Quebec corridor is the obvious target.
Airports are usually well outside cities too, yet this does not cause problems for air travellers. In fact, one solution for HSP would be to place the stations close to airports so that travellers could access the same ground transport options (rental cars, shuttles etc) that air passengers use.
Er, one of the alleged advantages of rail vs. air is that rail provides transportation directly between city centers, or at least close to city centers, eliminating the hassle and delay of airport-city transfers. If rail stations are located at typical airport distances from cities, much of this supposed advantage would disappear.
With what appears to be the successful deployment of the V-22 Osprey, I've started to wonder if continued dvelopment of the technology, and reduced per/unit cost through expanded production runs, might have a very positive effect on transportation in this country. It seems to me if you can get an aircraft that could be purchased for 50 million or so which could carry fifty passengers about 600 miles at a cruising speed of 300 m.p.h., which didn't need much more than a helipad to operate out of, it would be a very attractive choice, especially given the less intense political battles, compared to building out a new rail system in crowded areas, or expanding full blown airports. Hell, I've had one fly over me, and they aren't even that loud.
Houston to New Orleans downtown-to-downtown in an hour and a half - Spring Break 2020!
Mixner,
Efficiency calculations are complicated, but there is little doubt high speed rail at least helps with congestion. Conservatively, high speed rail has a passenger capacity around three times as much as highways (per width), and the ratio goes up as congestion gets worse.
JonF,
More stops also reduce high speed rail's comparative advantage versus airplanes, which affects the top end of the justifiable length of a route. Roughly speaking the break-even point from a consumer perspective is around three hours, largely because of the extra time you need for security at airports plus potential delays. With the upcoming generation of high speed trains capable of commercial speeds up to around 200 MPH, that three hours gets you out to 600 or so miles of competitive range. But each stop not only costs you time at the station, but time moving at a slower speed. And so each extra stop effectively cuts a chunk of range off your route.
Now if enough people want to travel to from your endpoints to the intermediate stops instead of the other endpoint, that isn't a big deal. So, for example, you would obviously put a stop at Cleveland for a route between Chicago and Pittsburgh, and probably stops at Toledo and South Bend too. But pretty quickly the additional stops start causing a lot of inconvenience to most of the passengers without servicing a lot of new passengers. And then passengers start switching back to airplanes, and then a lot of the value of high speed rail is lost.
Mixner,
The optimal location for a high speed rail station really depends on the circumstances. If the locality has a well-developed downtown, that may be the best place for the station. Alternatively, if it has good public transit, then just a convenient linkup to that public transit system may be optimal. If it has neither a well-developed downtown nor a good public transit system, then locating the station at the airport is something of a last resort. But it is definitely true that in such circumstances some of the value of high speed rail will be lost.
you know...as long as we're arguing, it might help to know a little more about what high speed rail offers. i got pointed to this link by my local newspaper (mercury news in san jose) and found it pretty helpful. the clip comes from kqed public broadcasting in san francisco.
http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/view/113
Efficiency calculations are complicated, but there is little doubt high speed rail at least helps with congestion.
So does building more highways, and building new lanes on existing highways, and increasing telecommuting, and increasing flexible work schedules, and increasing car-pooling, and any number of other possibilities that may produce the same benefits in reduced congestion at lower cost, perhaps much lower, than a hugely expensive rail system.
Conservatively, high speed rail has a passenger capacity around three times as much as highways (per width), and the ratio goes up as congestion gets worse.
Maximum-capacity-per-unit-of-width doesn't sound like a terribly useful measure of efficiency to me. I would also point out that new motor vehicle automation technologies have the potential to greatly increase the capacity of existing highways.
"But high-speed wheeled trains can leverage existing tracks, or at least existing rights of way."
DTM,
That was the plan with the Acela. It reaches its top speed of, if memory serves, 130 mph, on the Northeast Corridor for something like 10 minutes of its 4 hour New York-Boston leg. That's because it uses the existing tracks on which it can't go much faster than a regular train for most of its route.
Wouldn't an intelligent response to the the week without flgihts after 9/11 have been that we are way overdependent on civil aviation for air travel. Build rail networks along the length east coast, the great lakes area, major texas cities and New Orleans, and the west coast. Balance out our transportation ifnrastructure between planes, trains and automobiles. Minimize the environmental degradations caused by planes and automobiles. Use trains to encourage denser and more liveable cities.
But no. We encouraged people to lease and shrea private jets so they wouldn't have to deal with post 9/11 security.
As the economy tanks and the goverment explores how to put people to work while investing in our infrastructure, let's hope fast train service is part of the mix.
Wouldn't an intelligent response to the the week without flgihts after 9/11 have been that we are way overdependent on civil aviation for air travel. Build rail networks along the length east coast, the great lakes area, major texas cities and New Orleans, and the west coast. Balance out our transportation ifnrastructure between planes, trains and automobiles. Minimize the environmental degradations caused by planes and automobiles. Use trains to encourage denser and more liveable cities.
But no. We encouraged people to lease and shrea private jets so they wouldn't have to deal with post 9/11 security.
As the economy tanks and the goverment explores how to put people to work while investing in our infrastructure, let's hope fast train service is part of the mix.
Mixner, the only long term solution to congestion is to have several parallel sets of high-quality infrastructure in place, rather than only improving one type of infrastructure (roads) and hoping that things just work themselves out from there.
My experience with air travel is that the potential for delays on short-haul flights in dense parts of the country more than justify the case for rail, even when the end-point is not a walkable city, especially when the alternative-- driving a over-trafficked highway corridor -- is considered.
Now, look, I appreciate that a bunch of people from Texas and Kansas might not appreciate using public funds for rail as opposed to, say, the war in Iraq, but for the rest of us, do not bother us with your vapid cultural prejudices you seem obsessed with imposing on regions of the country where people, you know, actually live. Not all of us have empty highways and not all of us ended up getting work within a half-hour's drive of our family and friends, and we see every day how the national infrastructure isn't up to snuff. The "ghetto mentality" that seems to affect Mixner and Fred is no different than the guy who says, "I manage to deal without heat and hot water in my apartment just fine!"
Mixner,
Well, for somewhat obvious reasons, passengers/hour/width is a good capacity measure when your alternative is doing something like building new highways or expanding existing highways. Basically, a high-speed rail service conservatively can supply as much capacity as a six-lane highway, at about 1/3 the width. When you add up the costs of acquiring the land, building the road or track, and then maintaining it, the costs pretty quickly swing in favor of the high-speed rail line.
By the way, you also mention a number of other possible solutions, some not yet in commercial service. I am open to discussing those, but since you raised them I would suggest the burden is on you to provide a few more details on why you think they are viable and cost-effective solutions. Note, for example, that telecommuting is already possible, but apparently not currently capable of substituting for enough physical travel to eliminate congestion in many areas.
Fred,
Acela of course is not the only wheeled high speed train service in the world. Countries like France and Japan are using wheeled systems and achieving far higher commercial operating speeds than Acela.
It is true, however, that to achieve the highest commercial speeds, you generally need new tracks. However, you often can use the existing rights of way for those new tracks. And you can use both the existing rights of way and existing tracks in places where you don't intend to hit your maximum speeds, such as in the approaches to downtown stations (e.g., TGV in France does quite a bit of this).
Getting back to Acela, they opted to use an awful lot of the existing infrastructure, which saved upfront costs, but also limited the speeds on several sections which could support higher speeds on the existing rights of way. Gradually these sections are being upgraded. But I do think if we opted for more high-speed rail in this country, it would make sense to invest more upfront to immediately get higher-speed service.
"With what appears to be the successful deployment of the V-22 Osprey..."
The Osprey is going to need a lot more development before it's ready for the civilian market. In hover mode, it has a natural tendency to develop low pressure vortexes under the fuselage. Low pressure *over* a wing, good. Low pressure *under* wing/fuselage, bad. McDonald/Douglas (now Boeing) put a lot of computer code into the flight control computer to avoid that, but it's still largely up to the pilot to avoid the situation.
In defense of the Osprey, by the nature of their missions, military aircraft often have their flight control system tuned to within an inch of their lives for more performance.
However, the point is probably moot, since the slot the Osprey might fill has been open to the likes of the big Sikorsky S-92 helicopter for years. The few attempts to use it for scheduled routes didn't pan out.
BRAND NEW: This is one of the better Clinton adds I've seen. Certainly better than "Yes We Can."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxtN0u23Tdc
BRAND NEW: This is one of the better Clinton adds I've seen. Certainly better than "Yes We Can."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxtN0u23Tdc
Yeah, well the s-92 only seats 19 passengers, only has a ceiling of less than 14,000 feet, and a cruising speed of 180 mph, although the 900 mile range is quite good. I'm not saying the V-22 is ready to be converted to civil aviation. I am saying that the technology turned out better than I expected, albeit at staggering development cost. If the four rotor models now on the drawing board can expand capacity to 50 passengers, expand range just a little, and just keep the same speed as the V-22, it may have real application in civil aviation, with a huge worldwide market.
Tyro,
Mixner, the only long term solution to congestion is to have several parallel sets of high-quality infrastructure in place,
Another obviously false claim. Obviously, even just one "set of infrastructure" is a solution if it provides sufficient capacity to meet the demands of the population it serves without causing congestion. I suspect that there is far less overall congestion in the U.S. public transportation systems than there is in the European ones even though the U.S. has only a very limited passenger rail network. This is because our population density is relatively low and we have much more available land to build highways and airports.
My experience with air travel is that the potential for delays on short-haul flights in dense parts of the country more than justify the case for rail,
Well, sorry, but your subjective eyeballing is no substitute for serious scientific study of transportation policy.
Osprey certainly won't solve the energy problem.
As near as I can tell from Boeing data, Osprey's fuel economy works out to 0.5 miles per gallon, i.e. 10 passenger-miles per gallon. The average for conventional civil aviation is around 67 passenger-miles per gallon. Buses and trains are generally in the 100-200 passenger-miles/gallon range, depending mainly on load factors. Chartered buses, carrying an average of 33 passengers, work out to about 230 passenger-miles per gallon.
DTM,
Well, for somewhat obvious reasons, passengers/hour/width is a good capacity measure when your alternative is doing something like building new highways or expanding existing highways. Basically, a high-speed rail service conservatively can supply as much capacity as a six-lane highway, at about 1/3 the width.
Transportation efficiency is not the same thing as "passengers/hour/width." Transportation efficiency obviously involves all sorts of other factors as well as the efficiency of land use, such as cost and flexibility. I question your capacity claim above, anyway. Do you have anything to back it up?
When you add up the costs of acquiring the land, building the road or track, and then maintaining it, the costs pretty quickly swing in favor of the high-speed rail line.
Show me your calculations supporting this claim.
By the way, you also mention a number of other possible solutions, some not yet in commercial service.
New highways, new lanes on existing highways, flexible work schedules, carpooling and telecommuting are all in widespread use in the United States as methods of relieving transportation congestion. Increased automation is also beginning to have an impact.
I am open to discussing those, but since you raised them I would suggest the burden is on you to provide a few more details on why you think they are viable and cost-effective solutions. Note, for example, that telecommuting is already possible, but apparently not currently capable of substituting for enough physical travel to eliminate congestion in many areas.
Sorry, but if you're advocating an expansion of our rail system, the burden is on you to show that it is a superior solution to our transportation needs than any of the alternatives.
Mixner,
I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about "overall congestion in the U.S. public transportation systems." In part that is because the U.S. has radically different population densities in different regions. For comparative purposes, the population density of France is about 114/km2. There are actually ten states with a population density over 100/km2: NJ (439), RI (387), MA (313), CT (271), MD (209), NY (155), DE (155), FL (114), OH (107), and PA (106). But the overall population density of the United States is only around 31/km2, and it is actually under 10/km2 in nine states.
So, it is not implausible that a different mix of transportation means would make sense in different U.S. regions, or that a more "European" mix would make sense in some of the denser regions of the U.S. even if it does not make sense in more sparse regions.
I left out personal motor vehicles. Carrying an average of 1.6 passengers, they currently work out to somewhere in the 30-40 passenger-miles per gallon range. Four people in a Prius, however, would be competitive with the other modes.
Matt, where are you on this one?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/politics/21mccain.html?hp
You don't have to comment. Just linking to it will do.
Re: Very little of that time is available for reading, socializing, web surfing, working, talking (safely) on the phone, or just napping.
Huh? Most of that time is spent sitting in the waiting area until your plane boards. So yes, you can read, socialize, even web browse (if the airport has wi-fi and you feel like paying for it).
Re: In Canada, the Windsor-Quebec corridor is the obvious target.
Or better still: Chicago-Detroit-Toronto-Montreal-Quebec.
Re: Er, one of the alleged advantages of rail vs. air is that rail provides transportation directly between city centers, or at least close to city centers, eliminating the hassle and delay of airport-city transfers.
That asusmes you want to stay in the city center. In NYC or DC (Montreal or Toronto), maybe so. But usually when I visit a city, even a large one like Chicago or LA, I want and need a car so I can travel about to places not within walking distance-- and buses are wildly inefficient, not to mention unpleasant, while cabs (on a multi-day visit) are generally more expensive than car rentals.
Re: But each stop not only costs you time at the station, but time moving at a slower speed. And so each extra stop effectively cuts a chunk of range off your route.
I agree-- to an extent. But two stops between Chicago and Indie as suggested would not seem to be a problem. Too many most certainly would be though.
Mixner,
As an aside, I think there are limits to what sort of discussion we can carry out in this format, so I wouldn't claim to be able to present a complete argument for a specific public investment program in high speed rail. I should also note I am also not an expert in this area, and mostly working off my memory of things I have read mostly out of curiousity. Finally, I think it is not quite right that I should have to prove that high-speed rail is more efficient than any other possible alternative you merely mention. Rather, I think my task is to show why it could compete with what I claim it can replace (additional highway capacity), and if you want to propose what you claim are even better substitutes, you should have to do the same.
Anyway, after a quick search, I found rough equivalents to the capacity calculations I mentioned here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_speed_rail#Automobiles
I don't have something handy for the cost calculations, and obviously that depends on things like local land costs. What I am going off is various studies I recall seeing for places like California and the Northeast Corridor, comparing expanding highways to using existing rights of way to build out high speed rail.
I think a high speed cross-country system with special traincars to hold cars or storage cars. It could substantially increase movement cross country. Al
I live in Japan, and make intermittent use of the shinkansen. It's expensive, and if you're traveling in a large group not economical, but it's not all that much more expensive than taking the highway if you're driving alone. Factoring in maintenance costs for owning a car, it's even more competitive. Part of that is due to higher fuel and toll costs than in the U.S., but current U.S. prices for those aren't going anywhere but up.
Cars cause thousands of deaths each year, are enormously inefficient consumers of fossil fuel, entail high costs in time, money, and hassle, and are easily delayed by weather, congestion, road construction, accidents, etc. The same is true of planes, with the exception of the number of deaths, which is paid for in safety-related travel delays. Both have their place in a well-developed transportation infrastructure, but are poor alternatives to rail for short-to-midrange travel if the latter is a viable alternative. Start up costs for high speed rail would obviously be high, but in densely populated parts of the country, it would eventually pay for itself IMO.
European and Japanese cities are dense, walkable places.
True of some, but hardly of all or even most. Have you ever tried to walk across Tokyo? Or London? It'd be no easier than walking from the upper west side to the Nassau County line in NYC; in other words, practically impossible. What these cities do have is world class subway and regional rail lines. That's really the only way they're different from older U.S. cities (NYC, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, SF, etc.) in my experience.
Sure, nouveau cities like Phoenix and Houston are supremely un-walkable. But that's ALREADY a problem if you're flying to them; it's not like it will become more of a problem if you take the train instead.
I live in Japan, and make intermittent use of the shinkansen. It's expensive, and if you're traveling in a large group not economical, but it's not all that much more expensive than taking the highway if you're driving alone. Factoring in maintenance costs for owning a car, it's even more competitive. Part of that is due to higher fuel and toll costs than in the U.S., but current U.S. prices for those aren't going anywhere but up.
Cars cause thousands of deaths each year, are enormously inefficient consumers of fossil fuel, entail high costs in time, money, and hassle, and are easily delayed by weather, congestion, road construction, accidents, etc. The same is true of planes, with the exception of the number of deaths, which is paid for in safety-related travel delays. Both have their place in a well-developed transportation infrastructure, but are poor alternatives to rail for short-to-midrange travel if the latter is a viable alternative. Start up costs for high speed rail would obviously be high, but in densely populated parts of the country, it would eventually pay for itself IMO.
European and Japanese cities are dense, walkable places.
True of some, but hardly of all or even most. Have you ever tried to walk across Tokyo? Or London? It'd be no easier than walking from the upper west side to the Nassau County line in NYC; in other words, practically impossible. What these cities do have is world class subway and regional rail lines. That's really the only way they're different from older U.S. cities (NYC, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, SF, etc.) in my experience.
Sure, nouveau cities like Phoenix and Houston are supremely un-walkable. But that's ALREADY a problem if you're flying to them; it's not like it will become more of a problem if you take the train instead.
JonF,
To be clear, I have no particular opinion about the right stops on that route. I just wanted to note it is a possible problem that various authorities might seek to impose stops on high speed rail networks which would impede their competitiveness.
DTM,
Of course a different mix in different regions of the U.S. makes sense. A commuter rail system makes much more sense in, say, New York, than it would in, say, Phoenix, because the New York metro area has a much higher population and population density. But a European-style intercity rail network serving the nation as a whole, or even just large parts of it, does not make sense. And even a very limited intercity service between, say, Boston and Washington, or Los Angeles and San Franciso, may not make sense.
JonF,
That asusmes you want to stay in the city center. In NYC or DC (Montreal or Toronto), maybe so. But usually when I visit a city, even a large one like Chicago or LA, I want and need a car so I can travel about to places not within walking distance--
Then, as I say, rail becomes even less competitive with air travel. Factoring out the supposed time disadvantage of travelling to and from airports, the much higher speed of planes vs. trains dominates the comparison.
"Acela of course is not the only wheeled high speed train service in the world."
Your straw man aside, it is the most relevant system for the purposes of our discussion. That's why I mentioned it.
"Countries like France and Japan are using wheeled systems and achieving far higher commercial operating speeds than Acela."
I don't doubt that, but as I said before, the legal and property rights obstacles to doing that here would be prohibitive.
Cars cause thousands of deaths each year, are enormously inefficient consumers of fossil fuel, entail high costs in time, money, and hassle, and are easily delayed by weather, congestion, road construction, accidents, etc. The same is true of planes, with the exception of the number of deaths, which is paid for in safety-related travel delays. Both have their place in a well-developed transportation infrastructure, but are poor alternatives to rail for short-to-midrange travel if the latter is a viable alternative.
You just admitted that you only make "intermittent" use of the high-speed rail service in Japan, even when travelling alone, and that the train is still more expensive than driving even when there's just one person in the car. So it's hard to see how driving would be a poor alternative for most trips even in Japan.
And yes, train travel has--or, at least, can have--certain advantages (safety, environmental impact, etc.). But so does car travel (cost, flexibility, etc.).
I've travelled extensively by intercity rail in Europe. My admittedly unscientific impression is that most first-class passengers are either business travelers (whose tickets are paid by their employer) or American tourists, and that most second-class passengers are lower-income people, most often seniors or young adults, who probably don't have a car. Middle-class Europeans, and especially families with children, tend to drive or fly, just like their American counterparts.
Mixner,
I have already agreed a nationwide high speed rail system would make little sense. But I'm not sure yet why you think a set of more limited regional systems would not make sense, however. Again, there are regions in the U.S. comparable in density to countries in Europe where high-speed rail is already in commercial operation.
Fred,
Your original comment was about maglev trains, which I agreed present a fundamental problem of requiring entirely new rights of way. But I'm not sure why you think a TGV-style approach would present the same problems. I'm also not sure why you think Acela represents the limit of what can be done with wheeled systems in the United States without acquiring new rights of way. In fact, Acela is already in the process of upgrading the existing rights of way, so we know that is incorrect.
Finally, I think it is not quite right that I should have to prove that high-speed rail is more efficient than any other possible alternative you merely mention. Rather, I think my task is to show why it could compete with what I claim it can replace (additional highway capacity),
I don't expect you to "prove" rail is more efficient. I do expect you to present some serious evidence that it is. You haven't done that. You've just asserted.
Anyway, after a quick search, I found rough equivalents to the capacity calculations I mentioned here
Yes, that citation does support your land-use claim. But, again, that's only a small part of the efficiency calculation. For example, if the maximum capacity is needed only rarely, and the rail service usually operates much below full capacity, the cost of that wasted capacity may negate any land-use advantage rail has over highway under a full-capacity comparison. Ditto for differences in non-land capital costs between highways and rail networks. Or the value attributable to the greater flexibility of highways. Or many other variables.
Mixner,
Actually, I believe high speed rail has replaced a substantial amount of short distance air traffic in Europe. In fact, if you click the AVE link above, it includes a cited claim that now 80% of people travelling between Madrid and Seville use the train rather than an airplane.
Again, that just makes sense for distances where a high speed train is likely to be roughly as fast or faster than an air flight or driving by car. In those cases, unless the train trip is much more expensive, many people will choose to take this as fast or faster (and usually more pleasant) mode of transport. Of course, some people will not for various reasons, but no one is claiming high-speed trains will replace 100% of air and highway traffic over such distances.
But I'm not sure yet why you think a set of more limited regional systems would not make sense, however. Again, there are regions in the U.S. comparable in density to countries in Europe where high-speed rail is already in commercial operation.
Well, there's the Acela between Washington and Boston. Anything else? And even that route is highly controversial. I wonder how much of the cost of each passenger-mile of transportation along that route is being paid for by the passenger himself rather than by taxpayers.
Mixner,
Well, sure, a given high-speed rail route will require a certain minimum level of demand to be economically justifiable. If you already have congested multi-lane highways along a route of suitable length, however, that is at least a promising route to look into serving with high-speed rail. Similarly, if you have a congested airport (like Chicago's O'Hare) with a lot of flights serving cities a suitable distance away, that is again a promising situation in which a high-speed rail network may make sense.
Frankly, I am not sure what we are arguing about any more. I for one am perfectly willing to admit high-speed rail only makes sense in certain circumstances, and not in others. As a result, high-speed rail is not about to completely replace air and auto as important modes of transport in the United States. On the other hand, I personally think there are some existing circumstances in the U.S. which seem promising for high-speed rail (we have mentioned several here). But obviously one would want to do a pretty thorough study of any proposed routes before getting started.
In fact, if you click the AVE link above, it includes a cited claim that now 80% of people travelling between Madrid and Seville use the train rather than an airplane.
The claim doesn't make sense as stated, since obviously some travellers travel by car, and possibly bus. In fact, I suspect motor vehicle travellers outnumber both air and rail travellers. Perhaps it meant to say only that rail travellers outnumber air travellers by four to one. That may be true, but at what cost? How much is the government subsidizing each rail trip vs. each air trip? And are any low cost airlines serving the route? If Iberia had a monopoly on plane service, and charged correspondingly high fares, then it wouldn't be surprising that a rail service would take some of that traffic, but that may obviously change if EasyJet or Ryanair or some other low-cost airline begins service.
You just admitted that you only make "intermittent" use of the high-speed rail service in Japan, even when travelling alone, and that the train is still more expensive than driving even when there's just one person in the car. So it's hard to see how driving would be a poor alternative for most trips even in Japan.
I only make intermittent use of it because I only travel medium-to-long distances in Japan intermittently. When I do so, I use the high-speed train, or sometimes long-distance buses. I don't drive or fly. Driving is, as I said, almost as expensive for a lone traveler, and is a much, much larger hassle. Flying is more expensive and much more time-consuming.
In my observation the only people who drive long-distances here are families on vacation and commercial truckers. Business travelers use the shinkansen, or if supremely pressed for time, they fly.
But so does car travel (cost, flexibility, etc.).
Flexibility, yes. But that advantage could be lessened with better, more comprehensive public transportation options, at least in areas of the U.S. densely populated enough to support them. Cost, not so much. Add up maintenance and fuel costs, tolls, the portion of paid taxes that goes to maintain heavily trafficked auto infrastructure, etc. and I suspect you'll find that cars are more expensive, which only makes given that they are unquestionably less efficient on a unit-of-weight-moved per unit-of-distance-traveled per unit-of-energy-used basis. And that's saying nothing of ripple effect costs produced by greater air pollution, demand for fossil fuel, etc.
I've travelled extensively by intercity rail in Europe. My admittedly unscientific impression is that most first-class passengers are either business travelers (whose tickets are paid by their employer) or American tourists, and that most second-class passengers are lower-income people, most often seniors or young adults, who probably don't have a car. Middle-class Europeans, and especially families with children, tend to drive or fly, just like their American counterparts.
Whether that's true or not (I don't have enough experience in Europe to say, though I've both driven and taken trains when I've been there), nobody's suggesting that high speed rail would completely replace cars - rather that it would supplement them, and be a potentially better option for precisely the kind of people you suggest - lone business travelers, tourists, etc.
Cut in half the number of businesspeople on I-95, and you seriously reduce congestion, environmental impact, etc. even if the number of vacationing families using it remains the same.
Mixner,
First, we are overlapping posts.
Anyway, as I noted above, there is very little chance ridership can pay for the fixed cost investment required for high-speed rail. On the other hand, my understanding is that ridership is paying for the operating costs in countries like France while high-speed trains remain competitive with air and auto. So, while I don't know about Acela in particular, I don't see why that European model couldn't work in the United States. Of course, that leaves the public paying for the fixed costs, which would have to be justified by externalities.
As for possible routes outside the existing one in the Northeast Corridor (which is really not a true high-speed route, by the way), the ones I usually see mentioned are along the California coast, between the major cities in Texas, in Florida, and a network with a hub in Chicago (possibly connected to the Northeast Corridor through Pittsburgh). Other possibilities would link up bits of Canada as well.
Again, the basic logic is usually the same: look for routes stringing together major population centers somewhere between 100 and 500 or so miles apart. That is where high-speed trains can be competitive, and the routes in question potentially fit these requirements.
Mixner,
You'll have to look up the citation to see what they meant. I really have no idea how people get from Madrid to Seville, although I personally don't find it implausible most people would use the train (I took it once, and it was fast, relatively inexpensive, and comfortable).
As for subsidies and pricing competition among the various modes on that route, I have no real idea. But obviously, one has to analyze all the modes the same way. That would mean, for example, looking at all the ways in which air and auto travel are also subsidized by the public in Spain.
But I didn't offer that tidbit for evidence of the economic justification for high-speed rail. I was just using it as an example of a case in which high-speed rail had competed effectively with airplanes for travellers over a medium distance, which I believe is quite typical in Europe. So, I am not entirely sure it is only business and carless people who choose to use trains in such situations.
The lack of decent public transportation in America is inexcusable and embarassing. The entire Eastern seaboard, at a minimum, should be connected with a best-in-the-world rail network.
Instead, Amtrak is a cruel joke that costs 3 times as much as anywhere else in the world and provides all the comfort, cleanliness and service you'd expect from a deteriorating third-world train system.
Instead, most Americans are content to let poor people ride the bus in squalor while they parade around in their monstrous SUVs as if New Jersey and Massachusetts were Iceland or Zimbabwe.
I don't doubt that, but as I said before, the legal and property rights obstacles to doing that here would be prohibitive.
If we could build the interstate highway system, we can build a fast rail network. You're exaggerating the obstacles to rail, which don't require anything close to the corridor demands multi-lane highways have made and continue to make.
I recommend reading Anthony Downs' "Still Stuck in Traffic," which evaluates various measures metropolitan areas can take to ease congestion. There are pros and cons to every measure, and no one feasible measure would have more than a small effect. A combination of measures is necessary.
It's also important to note that easing congestion isn't the only reason to improve transportation systems. Improving air quality and accessibility (and other things) are important, too, especially when you consider that while you and all your friends may drive, there are plenty of people who don't or can't drive for various reasons --- too old, too young, disabled, can't afford a car, etc. If driving is the only way to get around your city, you're shutting out a pretty substantial portion of the population from meaningful participation in the economy and social life of your town if you add it up.
Of course, the considerations for intercity travel are different from those for intracity travel, but they are related. I'm not saying high-speed rail is a panacea, but it is something that should be seriously considered in some corridors.
You're exaggerating the obstacles to rail, which don't require anything close to the corridor demands multi-lane highways have made and continue to make.
Right. In the middle of the desert or the plains, yeah, land is cheap and obtaining rights of way is a relative cinch. In an urban or suburban area, the cost of obtaining rights of way can be a substantial factor, and the difference in width of the different corridors necessary can be major.
"You're exaggerating the obstacles to rail, which don't require anything close to the corridor demands multi-lane highways have made and continue to make."
David W.,
The problem is that the places where high-speed rail would theoretically make the most sense (e.g., Boston-New York) are densely populated and densely built. It's not like laying highway across Montana. Even the interstate highway system was unable to get as large a corridor as it needed in some of these densely populated areas -- see, for example, the part of I-95 that is the Cross-Bronx Expressway.
Hmm. Given the congestion of our air transportation system and the level of road traffic in certain areas of the country it would seem that high speed rail would make sense at least in the NE corridor (not the ACELA) and in California. Maybe not anywhere else, not sure.
There are other considerations such as the use of fossil fuels and subsequent emissions that occur with heavy use of road and air transportation. I think this points to a larger issue of what kind of transportation we want in this country 20 years from now. Many of our nation's bridges are reaching the end of their useful life. Commutes are getting longer. Flight delays were the worst in 7 years in 2007.
The problem is there is no agreement on anything, so as a Nation we do almost nothing. If there isn't enough political will to fix the infrasture that is obsolete, how are we going to build a new high speed rail? Glad to here the presidential candidates talking about it. Oh wait, they aren't
Okay, one more point for this discussion: Train, bus and plane are all 10-20 times as safe per passenger-mile compared to private autos. It's amazing this is not a bigger factor for a populace that seems, in other contexts, to be obsessed with health and safety.
One of my favorite quotes:
"The motor car reflects our standard of living and gauges the speed of our present life. It long ago ran down Simple Living, and never halted to inquire about the prostrate figure which fell as its victim." -- Warren G. Harding, 1922 State of the Union address
The longer quote is actually germane to this discussion:
"…Manifestly, we have need to begin on plans to coordinate all transportation facilities. We should more effectively connect up our rail lines with our carriers by sea. We ought to reap some benefit from the hundreds of millions expended on inland waterways, proving our capacity to utilize as well as expend. We ought to turn the motor truck into a railway feeder and distributor instead of a destroying competitor.
"It would be folly to ignore that we live in a motor age. The motor car reflects our standard of living and gauges the speed of our present-day life. It long ago ran down Simple Living, and never halted to inquire about the prostrate figure which fell as its victim. With full recognition motor-car transportation we must turn it to the most practical use. It can not supersede the railway lines, no matter how generously we afford it highways out of the Public Treasury. If freight traffic by motor were charged with its proper and proportionate share of highway construction, we should find much of it wasteful and more costly than like service by rail. Yet we have paralleled the railways, a most natural line of construction, and thereby taken away from the agency of expected service much of its profitable traffic, which the taxpayers have been providing the highways, whose cost of maintenance is not vet realized.
"The Federal Government has a right to inquire into the wisdom of this policy, because the National Treasury is contributing largely to this highway construction. Costly highways ought to be made to serve as feeders rather than competitors of the railroads, and the motor truck should become a coordinate factor in our great distributing system…."
Full text at http://tinyurl.com/dzofl
To a degree, bullet trains are vanity projects, flagships of vast passanger railways systems.
A bullet train can proceed at 150 mph or more. Say that a high-speed train can proceed at 125 mph or less. I recall a very normal train going at 125 mph on a straight good track (in former East Germany). Tilt-car technology can introduce high-speed trains even with some curves, Italian Tempolino is a classic example.
So, it takes ca. 3 hours on fast speed train from Rome to Venice. Would it be nice to cut it down to 2 hours? Perhaps, but 3 hour time makes it very competitive with planes. (Except, why the train buffet serves the worst sandwiches I ever seen in Italy?) Comparably, consider 2 hour Boston-NYC, 2 hour NYC-DC, each with, say, 2 stops. I understand that cutting it down to, say. 1h 20 minutes each would require many extra billions of dollars.
Now, the trains make a LOT of sense if they are integrated into more complex transportation system. High-speed trains can be coordinated with local trains serving many stations and buses. They can have stops at the airports. Imagine high-speed train stopping at O'Hare airport, plus 20 minute express-subway connection to downtown and suburbs. And the train connects to Kansas City, Minneapolis, Milwauki, Detroit etc.
And the Detroit connection would continue throuh Cleveland to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia/NE corridor. Consider going from Pitt to Chicago. Train, 4 hours, plane, with security checks and moving on the tarmac, nearly 3 hours. At this point the frequence is the key, we need a train every hour. There are one or two plane-loads every hour. If we combine the traffic of other cities on the way, we could fill 500-1000 seats every hour.
Opponents to high speed trains are those who haven't seen how it works. That may be a generalization, but I think not too much of one. It really is very good, practically non-polluting, fast, convenient, comfortable, you name it. I'd like to add one aspect: the noise (a reason for opposition to high speed rail). I used to live about 50 yards from one of the French high speed railway tracks, and a slightly smaller distance from a minor road with a car or truck passing every five minutes or so. The road caused more noise pollution than the railroad.
I now live in Toulouse, which is supposed to be the airplane capital of Europe. Notwithstanding that economic interest, the local population has repeatedly shown in polls and elections that it does not want a second airport to handle congestion and vastly prefers being linked up to the national high speed rail network.
In short, when there is one high speed link, there will be more because people will be asking for them.
most second-class passengers are lower-income people, most often seniors or young adults, who probably don't have a car. Middle-class Europeans, and especially families with children, tend to drive or fly, just like their American counterparts.
That's not correct. It's hard to generalize on a diverse place such as Europe, but a second class train compartment is a good place for meeting the European middle class. There is no way to clearly break down and compare the costs, because there are simply too many factors involved, even if you only take into account the cost for the individual.
The cost for an individual journey on a train is generally higher than that for a car journey and increases for obvious reasons, if you are traveling in a group. Owning a car, on the other hand, requires an initial investment, but that can be as low as, say, $2500 for a used one or as high as $100.000 for a luxury car. Then you have to add taxes, insurance, MOT, repairs and parking. Cash strapped students use car sharing a lot, because it's the cheapest way, while many middle class car owners use their cars for daily errands and short distances only, preferring the train for longer distances. So it's a very complex picture.
What can be evaluated quite objectively is the convenience factor and in this regard the train wins hands down: If you go by car from Frankfurt to Berlin, you'll be facing rows of trucks on the slow lane while BMWs going at 140 mph will constantly try to kick you off the fast lane. There also will be numerous stretches were construction work is going on, leading to traffic jams so that your journey time can range from anything between 4 to 8 hours. Driving on country roads in Tuscany is lovely, but if you just want to get from A to B on the highway you'll encounter hordes of overpowered little Fiats and the like passing you at breakneck speed and with little regard for safety. If you live in inner London and plan to go to the countryside by car for the weekend be prepared that it'll take you up to two hours just to pass the city limits and make it onto the motorway.
Fred,
You've actually got the logic the wrong way around. Compared to highways, high-speed trains use much less land for the same capacity. So the fact that the NE corridor is so built up actually makes high-speed trains more, not less, attractive when compared to trying to add capacity to the highway system. And again, in many cases the rights of way needed for a true highe speed train system already exist (e.g., Acela), and it is just a question of investing in infrastructure upgrades.
Ben,
As piotr implies, a pretty strong case can be made for a high-speed rail network centered in Chicago. There the problem is not so much highway congestion, but airport congestion, and currently it is a pretty darn serious problem which tends to have ripple effects for the entire country.
Moreover, this area is actually nearly an ideal situation for high-speed rail. You have all these medium and large cities at about the right distances from each other for high-speed rail to be competitive. The build-up in between these cities is usually not too bad (often it is a lot of farmland), and for the most part you won't have a lot of problems with grades and tunnels.
Incidentally, this network would also really expand the options for international travellers to and from the U.S., since a lot of the airports in this network would have excess capacity in their international terminals and the ability to serve markets in Europe or Asia (via a polar route). It doesn't do our congested airport system much good if those people would have to fly over to Chicago if they originally arrived in Detroit. But if they could fly into Detroit and hop a quick train to Chicago, that suddenly become a viable alternative.
Some reason for passenger rail:
Peak oil. Electric trained can run on electricity from nuclear (or wind, solar) power stations.
Stable convenience. The evolution of air transportation seems to involve an increasing amount of humiliation, inconveniences and nickel-and-diming. Seats shrink while the size of humans expand (especially, the area needed for comfortable seating). Second-class train seats is about as convenient as bussiness class seats on planes, and there are no particular reasons why it should be getting worse (like pressure of fuel prices on airline budgets).
Pricing convenience. Ordinarily, if you want to take a train trip, you go to the station, embark a train and off you go. Onboard you pay for the ticket. For an Euro or two less you could buy the ticket on the station, and for 10-15 Euro less, 3 days in advance. Getting a decent price of air ticket on short notice, hohoho! And with long planning, the good price requires non-refundable ticket.
National security. Try as you might, you will not hit any strategic building with a highjacked train. Hence, the security measures at train stations will never reach paranoid levels of airports.
Reliability in declement weather. It takes a serious snowstorm or a flood to stop trains.
No flat tires and waiting 5 hours on a roadside for help. This is American bus riding experience.
Limits on the current modes of transportation. Highways and airport are subject of congestion.
Additional airports and highways are multi-billion dollar prepositions, so at that point, railroad can be actually a cheaper alternative. And worth to have, give other advantages.
Flexibility. One you have fast-train track in place, you can play it that way: fast train goes every 90 minutes, accelerates for 5 minutes, goes full speed for 40-45, deccelerates, stops, and together with the stop it covers a distance of ca. 100 miles. 2 minutes after its departure, a shuttle car/short train comes and travels between stations ca. 20 miles apart, or you hop on light-rail connecting various points in a metro-area. Mind you, getting from fast train to local train or light rail can take 2 minutes.
These claims that rail is competitive with car or plane travel have not been substantiated. Rail can obviously be made competitive in the marketplace with air or auto if it is subsidized heavily enough. That does not mean it would be competitive if rail passengers were required to pay the true cost of their journeys. So pointing to nominally competitive rail routes in Europe and Japan without taking subsidies into account is not a persuasive argument. Even where rail is nominally competitive with car travel for single-person trips, it's not even nominally competitive with multi-person ones.
I seriously doubt that Americans will be very receptive to the argument that taxpayers should pay billions of dollars in capital infrastructure costs to build or expand rail networks whose ridership would consist primarily of business travelers and yuppies.
For piotr:
I mostly agree. But:
the pricing politic is changing in Europe, they want to imitate the airlines. It is not so flexible anymore, especially for the HSR lines (they create special subsidiaries, jack up the price for business people needing flexibility...)
As a technical guy, if you give me single shot, I would hesitate between shooting the lawyers or the marketing people of the transportation companies.
And a minor correction : it is the pendolino, not the tempolino.
Mixner,
Again, though, if you want to talk subsidies, you h
Or missle defense shield. Remember that stupid waste of money Bush insisted on?
Posted by freddiemac | February 20, 2008 5:31 PM