High Speed Rail (Boston to... Texas?)

Eh, whatever it could be worse. Some of the terminals at Logan are dreadfully dreary.
 
Shepard said:
(Then we can get to work scaling this Disneyworld Express model: next up, Providence to Natick Mall!)
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Dont joke about stuff liek that.. i would have loved that line as a kid. my sister lived in natick, i lived in mass, just before the state line, and i went to providence about every weekend to hang out. I would have loved a train that made that trek so that i didnt have to drive so much.
 
What's the metric for this line's success?

Cars that are taken off the road? (But wait, shouldn't that primarily be the job of urban public transit and regional systems? i.e. aren't the vast huge majority of car trips local?)

Tourists that can fly into Orlando to visit Tampa? (And that helps anyone how? Also note that the line connects to downtown Tampa but NOT Tampa airport)

Tourists that can make it to Disney without renting a car? (Elegant, but do we need HSR for this? And then why go all the way to Tampa?)

Flights eliminated between the two destinations? (Oh, wait, there are virtually no flights between these two cities... hmmm...)

Transit oriented development? (Unlikely considering the highway median alignment, but anyway couldn't this be achieved by a cheaper commuter rail-esque solution?)

I think some of you understand the rationale behind this investment better than I do. Am I still missing something? (Wait, I think I am. Florida is a swing state, which makes it a far better investment than reliable blue California and Northeast Corridor. Perhaps I've just pinpointed the key success metric for this line: votes?)
 
We grow old, we grow old;
we shall wear the bottoms of our trousers rolled.
 
i would like to see some real us HSR before i grow old!
 
High Speed Rail U.S.

Hey everyone, we have been slowly launching a national High Speed Rail campaign with support from Amtrak, FRA, and other regional rail authorities. The website is about ready to launch. We recently moved our operations from NYC back to Boston ( Cambridge,) If anyone has any expertise in rail, infrastructure, policy, etc and wants to write for us, please visit us:

http://www.facebook.com/HSRUS
http://www.highspeedrailus.org

email me: ryan@highspeedrailus.org

We are going to open a small office in Kendall Square in the next few weeks, if you want to help out, EMAIL ME! We also recently signed on with fourbillion.com and are helping Transportation For America with their climate bill push. We'd love some extra brains and input.
 
Re: High Speed Rail U.S.

I sent you an email. Let me know what I can do.
 
Moved the posts here so we don't have redundant threads. I joined the Facebook page, let me know what you are up to (like a real website).
 
I used to be pretty hopped-up about high-speed rail in the US, but I read a series of fantastic articles by the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser in the New York Times' Economix blog last year that people here may find interesting:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Glaeser runs the numbers using some pretty fair (or even generous) assumptions, and it looks as if, outside of the Boston-DC route, the economics are pretty unlikely to work in the US.

Of course, money may be justifiably spent by the state if it does achieve some other, societal goals. Glaeser also looks at a number of supposed non-monetary benefits that supporters bring up -- the environmental angle or the geographical/urbanization angle of eliminating sprawl -- and knocks them down pretty well.

I have yet to see such rigorous, analytical thinking from the other side outside of claims about how the carbon footprint per person is much lower on a train than a car (as is fairly obvious), and while I have loved the experience of traveling on high-speed rail in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, Europe is a much more densely populated continent where the economics make much more sense. I do worry that high-speed rail here is unlikely to ever come close to breaking even or being (outside the Acela route) a viable option for the necessary critical mass of people in the rest of the country -- Ablarc already addressed this issue well in writing about the proposed Tampa-Orlando line. (Unfortunately, since Acela is run like a profit cow to make up for deficits incurred by Amtrak everywhere else, where trains are run as a government service rather than as a business, it's prohibitively expensive for most of us to ever use it.)

To that end, it seems that high-speed rail is being pushed by Obama with the goals Glaeser annihilates in mind (environment and sprawl) as well as as part of a "pissing contest" with China and using somewhat-dubious arguments about "creating jobs in the US" (even though trains, which are more likely to be made by non-American companies and in overseas factories, will be displacing automobiles and planes that are more likely to be made in the US) or capitalizing on technologies that arise as byproducts of HSR (though these haven't exactly happened in Europe or elsewhere, and if they were to happen there, US companies would still be able to leverage them). Is it not possible that while there are strong economic arguments for, e.g., improving freight-rail connections and expanding use of rail for freight transportation (it's currently 38% here, versus 8% in Europe), passenger HSR just doesn't make sense for the US?

Given that, you can't help but worry whether the hundreds of billions in government spending that would be necessary to really build high-speed rail in the US wouldn't be better put toward, e.g., cancer research at the National Institutes of Health. Similarly, it's tough to feel that the charge isn't being led by companies closely connected to the Obama admin and government in general (GE as well as European companies with big lobbying arms in the US like Siemens), and other lobbying groups.

I don't mean to be a spoilsport, but I can't help but think of the "monorail" Simpsons episode: HSR is sexy and hard to dislike. But if you move beyond the less-serious arguments of "green jobs are great!" and "China has HSR!" and run the numbers for the US, it seems like we may be headed toward a massively expensive flop.
 
itchy said:
I used to be pretty hopped-up about high-speed rail in the US, but I read a series of fantastic articles by the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser in the New York Times' Economix blog last year that people here may find interesting:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Glaeser runs the numbers using some pretty fair (or even generous) assumptions, and it looks as if, outside of the Boston-DC route, the economics are pretty unlikely to work in the US.

Of course, money may be justifiably spent by the state if it does achieve some other, societal goals. Glaeser also looks at a number of supposed non-monetary benefits that supporters bring up -- the environmental angle or the geographical/urbanization angle of eliminating sprawl -- and knocks them down pretty well.

I have yet to see such rigorous, analytical thinking from the other side outside of claims about how the carbon footprint per person is much lower on a train than a car (as is fairly obvious), and while I have loved the experience of traveling on high-speed rail in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, Europe is a much more densely populated continent where the economics make much more sense. I do worry that high-speed rail here is unlikely to ever come close to breaking even or being (outside the Acela route) a viable option for the necessary critical mass of people in the rest of the country -- Ablarc already addressed this issue well in writing about the proposed Tampa-Orlando line. (Unfortunately, since Acela is run like a profit cow to make up for deficits incurred by Amtrak everywhere else, where trains are run as a government service rather than as a business, it's prohibitively expensive for most of us to ever use it.)

To that end, it seems that high-speed rail is being pushed by Obama with the goals Glaeser annihilates in mind (environment and sprawl) as well as as part of a "pissing contest" with China and using somewhat-dubious arguments about "creating jobs in the US" (even though trains, which are more likely to be made by non-American companies and in overseas factories, will be displacing automobiles and planes that are more likely to be made in the US) or capitalizing on technologies that arise as byproducts of HSR (though these haven't exactly happened in Europe or elsewhere, and if they were to happen there, US companies would still be able to leverage them). Is it not possible that while there are strong economic arguments for, e.g., improving freight-rail connections and expanding use of rail for freight transportation (it's currently 38% here, versus 8% in Europe), passenger HSR just doesn't make sense for the US?

Given that, you can't help but worry whether the hundreds of billions in government spending that would be necessary to really build high-speed rail in the US wouldn't be better put toward, e.g., cancer research at the National Institutes of Health. Similarly, it's tough to feel that the charge isn't being led by companies closely connected to the Obama admin and government in general (GE as well as European companies with big lobbying arms in the US like Siemens), and other lobbying groups.

I don't mean to be a spoilsport, but I can't help but think of the "monorail" Simpsons episode: HSR is sexy and hard to dislike. But if you move beyond the less-serious arguments of "green jobs are great!" and "China has HSR!" and run the numbers for the US, it seems like we may be headed toward a massively expensive flop.
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You know what I always wonder about HSR critics? They must be the only people in the world who, when listing examples of the technology they oppose, inevitably come up with a list of incredible, nation-building success stories. HSR doesn't just work in other countries, it's AMAZING in other countries. Where would Japan be without its Tokaido Line? The existing railroads were over congested in the 1950s--I highly doubt Japan could have modernized fully without the Shinkansen investment. And look at Europe: the EU would be a joke without its efficient, increasingly well-connected HSR network. Now China and India are building modern HSR, and lots of it. Saudi Arabia and Russia are working on it too. Heck, China is working with 17 other countries to create a trans-Eurasian HSR system connecting Beijing with London in 2 days. If HSR can work in Central Asia, why can't it work in the US?
 
Because this country doesn't dream anymore, it just produces cost-benefit analyses, and is still further in debt than most of the rest of the world, anyway.

FYI though, HSR was once a difficult concept even in Japan. It took the Tokyo Olympics to get the first demonstration Shinkansen running.
 
Believe it nor not Europe really isn't THAT much more dense than America. Sure its cities don't sprawl like ours but many of its cities are actually further apart than many American cities that are proposing to link via HSR.
 
^^True but technically European continent is more than twice as dense as the US.
 
European Union:
1.7 million square miles
501 million people
~340 people / square mile

Japan:
.15 million square miles
127 million people
~830 people / square mile

China:
3.7 million square miles
1,338 million people
~350 people / square mile

U.S.:
3.8 million square miles
310 million people
~90 people / square mile

The U.S. is much less dense than other countries/regions that have high-speed rail; there's a reason that we haven't had a serious push for it until now that we feel we need to play catch-up. If there's no economic, environmental, urban-planning or industrial case to be made for HSR, then why would you invest hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in it? I can't help but feel that it's a mere fetish at that point.

I'd like to see the Acela made into true HSR; I think there's a realm in the multiverse where that would make sense (if Acela were broken off from Amtrak), and the population density in the Boston-DC corridor (potentially even stretching from Montreal to Richmond, with connections to non-HSR to Portland, Worcester/Springfield/Albany/Buffalo/Toronto, Pittsburgh, Virginia Beach, Charlotte, and so on) may be comparable to places in the world where HSR has been rolled out.

But the other "corridors" in the Midwest, West and South don't seem to make so much sense. The Tampa-Orlando route, which is apparently underway, seems to be the height of folly for reasons that Ablarc already pointed out; I'm fairly appalled that the Obama admin gave that one the green light. There and elsewhere off the Eastern Seaboard, nobody rides the existing rails; why would a ridership that the population density doesn't seem to suggest even exists stump up for a much more expensive train ticket? After all, even though densely populated places like Spain have HSR, it has only ever been profitable on two routes: Paris-Lyon and Tokyo-Osaka, both of which are in countries with high gasoline taxes and road tolls that make driving much less attractive than here. I'm not trying to be pro-auto, but if we aren't going to roll out high gas taxes and tolls to persuade people to ride the HSR, why spend hundreds of billions on something nobody (outside the governors who get the photo-ops) has proven they want?

HSR is sexy, and it's thus hard to argue against; I'd find it tough to argue against Megan Fox as well. But you need sounder arguments than sex appeal or an attractive-but-inchoate idea of "it'll be great for the country" to commit that sort of cash. You need to have a sense that, rather than being a long-term loss-making white elephant, it would yield real benefits to the people paying for it (i.e., taxpayers, since no private company seems eager to build this out). Curing cancer, for instance, is both sexy and yields very clear benefits to every American (and non-American); until it can be shown that HSR really is what the Kool-Aid says it is, I'd rather put the hundreds of billions toward that.
 
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California has a LOT of railroad ridership. LA-San Diego is Amtrak's most frequent service outside the Northeast Corridor (and much busier now under Amtrak than when it was privately run)

Chicago is another big hub of train ridership.
 
itchy said:
If there's no economic, environmental, urban-planning or industrial case to be made for HSR, then why would you invest hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in it? I can't help but feel that it's a mere fetish at that point.
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Clearly you're not paying attention to the well-established economic, environmental, urban planning, and industrial cases for HSR (well, for rail projects in general). Shall we go over them again?
  • Creates millions of jobs in construction and subsequent commercial development
  • Improves mobility while drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions
  • Promotes dense, sustainable development that reduces energy costs and improves community life
  • Creates demand for industrial products, which could be provided by American industry

Now, how would you propose creating jobs, reducing pollution, and improving mobility?

There and elsewhere off the Eastern Seaboard, nobody rides the existing rails; why would a ridership that the population density doesn't seem to suggest even exists stump up for a much more expensive train ticket?
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Gee, that couldn't possibly be because the existing rail system is pathetic, with a scarce collection of rarely-served lines. Maybe if they ran more than once a day, more people could ride them.

why spend hundreds of billions on something nobody (outside the governors who get the photo-ops) has proven they want?
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Have you actually seen the statistics about this? Apparently, 88% of Americans are receptive to HSR. Maybe you wouldn't call that proof, but I gotta admit, it's hard to prove people want something before it exists. I wonder what those statistics will look like once America actually has operational examples of HSR?

Curing cancer, for instance, is both sexy and yields very clear benefits to every American (and non-American); until it can be shown that HSR really is what the Kool-Aid says it is, I'd rather put the hundreds of billions toward that.
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Not to imply that we must choose between funding cancer research and funding HSR, but don't you at least think it's a more sensible investment when you actually know what you're paying for? HSR is a proven technology that has been in place since the 1960s. When you spend money on it, you know what to expect, and you know how long it will take to build, and how long people will have to wait before they can start using it. On the other hand, when you spend money on cancer research, you have no idea how long it will take (and how much more money it will cost) to cure cancer. Furthermore, while a cure for cancer would certainly benefit the world, the actual process of research and development would hardly provide the US with the sort of economic growth and job creation that HSR construction would.
 
Comparing the density of the entire US v. the EU is meaningless. The eastern third of the US is at least twice as dense as the west, and rail ridership is mostly dependent on the distance between two hyperdense points anyway. You could theoretically run a very profitable LA-Vegas line, for example, even though there is nothing but desert between the two cities, and even though the combined population density of CA and NV is low.
 
Give the money to the Northeast!!! Who cares about the Sunbelt states anyway?

Florida Governor Rejects Tampa-Orlando High-Speed Rail Line
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: February 16, 2011

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida on Wednesday rejected plans for a high-speed rail line linking Tampa and Orlando, in the process turning down $2 billion in federal funds and thwarting a critical piece of President Obama?s goal of building a national high-speed rail network.

Mr. Scott is the third Republican governor elected in November to turn down a portion of the administration?s national rail network, joining John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Each of the three governors replaced a Democrat who had lobbied for the funds.

The Obama administration has called for spending $53 billion on passenger trains and high-speed rail projects over the next six years as part of the president?s goal of making high-speed rail accessible to 80 percent of Americans within 25 years.

But critics ? including the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, which has questioned the White House?s rail strategy ? say the need to link Tampa and Orlando, separated by about 84 miles, pales in comparison with the need for high-speed rail serving places that have received relatively little in federal economic stimulus funds for transportation projects, like the busy Northeast corridor between Washington and Boston.

In a statement Wednesday, Mr. Scott said cost overruns related to the Tampa-to-Orlando line could leave Florida taxpayers with a $3 billion tab. He also said he believed ridership and revenue estimates for the rail line were too optimistic, and that state taxpayers would have been left to pay for subsidies to keep the line running because it would be unable to pay for itself.

Mr. Scott said that although one study had projected that three million people would use the Tampa-to-Orlando line annually, he pointed out that only 3.2 million people rode Amtrak?s Acela trains in the Northeast corridor in 2010, even though the population centers along the Acela route have as much as eight times the population of the area serviced by the proposed Florida line.

Mr. Scott also said that if Florida had started the project and then decided it was too costly to continue, the state would have had to return $2.4 billion to the federal government.

?The truth is that this project would be far too costly to taxpayers, and I believe the risk far outweighs the benefits,? he said at a news conference in Tallahassee.

Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, said in a statement Wednesday that he was ?extremely disappointed? by Mr. Scott?s decision, but that the money would most likely be redistributed to other states.

?We worked with the governor to make sure we eliminated all financial risk for the state, instead requiring private businesses competing for the project to assume cost overruns and operating expenses,? Mr. LaHood said. ?There is overwhelming demand for high-speed rail in other states that are enthusiastic to receive Florida?s funding and the economic benefits it can deliver.?

Representative Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, said the governor?s decision would keep Florida from adding thousands of potential new jobs related to the project at a time when the state is in dire economic need.

?Turning down these jobs and investment dollars does nothing to reduce the nation?s deficit,? Ms. Castor said. ?Instead, the billions of investment dollars and thousands of jobs will simply go to other states ? states whose governors understand the jobs and economic benefits that are at stake.?

The decision Wednesday was not the first time a Florida governor has scuttled efforts to bring high-speed rail to the state.

In 1999, the governor at the time, Jeb Bush, canceled a 325-mile line that would have run connected Tampa, Orlando and Miami. The next year, voters approved a constitutional amendment that required the state to build the link. But in 2004, voters repealed that amendment.

The current proposal for a high-speed Tampa-to-Orlando line, which was supposed to eventually link to Miami, was one of two high-speed lines approved by Congress. The other would connect San Francisco and Los Angeles. That project has received federal pledges of about $3 billion, though the cost has been estimated to be $43 billion.

Gary Fineout contributed reporting from Tallahassee, Fla.
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Even as a showpiece, this was always a rather absurd project aside from the relative ease of making it happen. Yet, I think it's also absurd for a state to throw away this opportunity. I'm not sure whether to boo this man or applaud him.

More for the Northeast corridor? Let's hope...
 
I don't mind seeing this line canceled. I hope the money goes to either NEC, CA or Cascades line. Amtrak picked a grand time to announce the gateway project, lol.

Paid $3.30 for gas today btw.
 
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