Just to put this in perspective - we currently spend $12 billion a month in Iraq. For roughly that amount, one month's Iraq budget, we can have high speed rail.
You'd get less drive-by downvoting if you didn't say stupid things. Who knows, you might get less if you didn't keep complaining about it.
(Trains can be much faster than buses, carry much bigger loads, and use less fuel to do so. They are not useless. If the trains you've got in the US at the moment seem useless, that would be because they've been very poorly invested in over the last several decades. Oh, and that $12.8 trillion, while it's certainly a terrifyingly large figure, is not directly comparable with what's being spent in Iraq, e.g. because much of it is not spending but guarantees of the form "if institution X collapses, you'll get back at least the first $Y it owes you", and much of the rest is loans. Even in the present economic climate, what you lend you're quite likely to get back, not to mention that you get paid interest on it while it's lent.)
I'd rather have trains move people than cars. One can hold many more people than the other and doesn't clog up the highways and most likely produces less pollution...
You're comparing buses to current trains, which is a bit of a straw man, as we're talking about high-speed trains.
Additionally, trains are nowhere near as cramped as buses, at least the ones I've ridden. They're considerably roomier in terms of the seats and the areas to walk around in, and often have food and beverage areas as well.
Ok, you're correct on that point. Now here's what I want you to do...
Go on to Amtrak.com and configure a trip for yourself. You'll notice that riding on Amtrak costs MORE than a plane ticket. For a round-trip from Philadelphia to Austin, TX it's $500. I can go on Southwest.com right now and book the exact same trip for the exact same price. The difference? With Amtrak you're riding in a train for 56 hours.
Now tell me exactly how a high-speed train (one with advanced infrastructure) is going to be cheaper than Amtrak?
Trains are a lose-lose compromise between buses and planes. They cost way more than buses and for the price range you might as well use air travel which saves 2 days of seat time.
First, there is no point looking at current prices, because it is a service running on relatively unsubsidised ifrastructure. The point here is to subsidise infrastructure.
Secondly and even more importantly, yeah dude, if I want to go Paris to Shanghai I am better off flying than taking a train. Does that mean there is no point in building a high speed rail network in France? It's not Philadelphia to Austin that is the aim here, it is journeys at the 300 mile sweetspot where a high speed train is a more optimal solution than either car or plane.
I am really sorry but I am starting to think that anybody who doesn't see the benefits of a high-speed rail network has simply not been on one. And that's even before you throw in the environmental cost.
Sure it does. Traveling with a car is cheap. Cars travel on a massively subsidised infrastructure (they are called roads).
The purpose of subsidising an infrastructure is to make operating a service on it profitable.
I don't understand why people are objecting to high speed train networks as if they are a totally novel idea. They are a true and tested transportation solution - I have yet to encounter a country that built one only to regret it, or have it unused. We are not talking about putting a man on Mars here.
> Cars travel on a massively subsidised infrastructure (they are called roads).
Roads aren't subsidized and neither are traffic police. They're paid for by car- and truck-specific taxes and fees.
We've played this game before. You'll bring up a study that supposedly shows that cars have expenses that are not covered by taxes. I'll point out that said study ignores one or more large taxes paid for because of cars that pretty much covers the gap and then some. (The dumb version is that you'll point to the cost of building some road and assert that it couldn't possibly have been paid for without subsidies.)
> The purpose of subsidising an infrastructure is to make operating a service on it profitable.
In the case of train passenger trains, that almost never happens. The cost of running the train exceeds the revenues. Even the CA proposals don't claim that they'll run without subsidies. Instead, they argue "other job creation". (They also claim that folks will pay to build highrises in Fresno over the train station, generating enormous profits.)
Here's an easy test that almost every proposal fails. Take the projected revenue (which they never hit) and divide it by the projected number of jobs (which they usually exceed). Ask yourself if the average salary plus benefits is going to be that low. (The proposal will often tout "high paying jobs".) Notice that this figure doesn't account for non-salary operating costs.
No, roads are not paid for by car taxes and fees in the US. Car taxes and fees are nowhere near enough to build highways. (In Europe actually this is closer to being true due to massively higher car taxes, massively higher gasoline taxes, and ubiquitous toll roads).
Obviously depends on where in the US you are, but typically is estimated that there would have to be a 50c tax per gallon to make highways self-paying. For places where road construction is particularly expensive (mountains, Alaska and Hawaii, etc) that doesn't even come close.
Not that I think there's anything wrong with that - subsidising efficient transport is a perfectly legitimate role of government as it is vital for commerce.
> Obviously depends on where in the US you are, but typically is estimated that there would have to be a 50c tax per gallon to make highways self-paying.
Let's go with that number. But first....
> For places where road construction is particularly expensive (mountains, Alaska and Hawaii, etc) that doesn't even come close.
And in other places, 50c a gallon is way more than it takes to make highways self-paying. That's how averages of different numbers work - some are higher than the average while others are lower.
The cited document says that the average fuel tax in the US is 38c/gallon as of a couple of years ago. That does not include sales taxes, which in CA are currently around 20c/gallon, for a total of 58c/gallon, or 8c/gallon over the average required. In the past, CA got less per gallon because the prices were lower, and other states have lower tax rates, but we're not done counting the car revenues and we're pretty close to 50c/gallon.
Taxes on fuel purchases don't include car taxes, taxes on car goods, fines levied on car misuse (which exceed enforcement costs), income taxes on folks providing car services, and so on. (Rail advocates count taxes on folks whose jobs are enabled by transportation and property taxes next to train stations. I'm not counting that for cars, but will note that they would considerably increase the car revenue numbers.)
That document concedes that counting such revenues would mean that govts make money on roads. That's why said document goes to considerable lengths to argue that certain taxes and fees paid by car/truck folk to drive shouldn't be counted. The reasons range from that money is deposited in the general fund, which is curious since the supposed subsidies come from the general fund, to car drivers have to pay something if they did something else, in which case we'd consider those fees/taxes as being associated with some other cause.
Thanks for being a voice of reason in this thread.
People don't seem to understand that subsidized does not mean cheaper, nor do I get how exactly they think faster and better technology (aka extremely high-speed rail lines) are somehow cheaper to operate than their predecessor - standard Amtrak service.
Yet again, Southwest.com is $200 from Philly to Pittsburgh, and Amtrak is $110. Except then I'm spending 14 hours on a train round-trip. If I'm going to spend 14 hours on my trip, then I might as well drive to Pittsburgh which takes me 10 hours round trip and about $30 less, not to mention I have a car to get me around.
Of course we could build the high speed network and subsidize the benefits to cut that down to ~5 hours, but then we get to pay the additional cost anyway come every April 15th. Trains are still a lose-lose. The highway system is already subsidized and we lose money on that, there's no reason to subsidize more transportation.
Pardon me for trying to cut the fat when I'm going to be paying my country's debt for the next 20 years.
Do you not understand what highspeed means? The train you're booking today goes really slow. That's not being argued. The trains they want to build go much faster. There are other up sides too, such as internet access and phone service, not having to go through the TSA, being able to take your car for an added fee, etc.
It won't work for all routes, but considering how well Amtrak already does in NE, there's demand out there.
Let's count the cost of trains against the cost of airport expansions and highway expansions. We're already spending billions down in Tucson to move to four lanes, and we'll have to move the entire highway between Phoenix and Tucson to 3 lanes from two soon. We are trading costs in a case like that.
Remember, our population isn't going down in this country anytime soon. Highway expansion, without an alternative, is a given.
I have yet to see a transportation system that can pay for itself, stay profitable and still be useful. Measuring real benefits of transportation with current economics seems to be very hard. Almost everything has to be subsidized or accompanied by something that is, otherwise it doesn't work. And you're certainly not going to propose abortion of every transportation, as then you would maybe have less debt, but also no country, so it wouldn't matter anyway. Trains are a real thing that is going to work for 100 years or something, that n billions are mostly some meaningles number flying around... (well, yes, that's only my point of view)
Trains are not for trips like Philly to Austin. They are for trips between Houston, Austin, and Dallas. In those trips, there is significant overhead to air travel: the time it takes to go to the airport + go through security + take off + climb thousands of feet + descend + land + get your baggage + drive from the airport into the city. The cost to fly these short trips is disproportionate to their distance when compared to longer trips. That is why so most people drive instead.
With trains, you reduce/eliminate almost all of that overhead. If you have a train that goes only 120mph between Houston and Austin, you have reduced the travel time from 3.5-4 hours to 1.5 hours each way. That is a huge savings in time that makes a lot of currently-infeasible trips practical.
Will it be cheap? Based on my experience riding the trains in Japan, I would say it is going to be much cheaper than flying and more expensive than taking buses and/or slower passenger trains. If the high-speed train people were smart, they'd price it at exactly the price of driving (gas-wise) in the beginning in order to build demand, and then ramp up the price as trains start getting sold out.
You are arguing against something that no one is proposing. Cross-country rail trips rarely make sense. Short haul high speed rail trips are faster than plane flights (plus security, baggage checking, commuting to and from far-flung airports, etc) and pollute less. You're complaining about a $500 trip that no one is going to take. Try comparing Acela trips with flights between those cities.
(One important caveat to that map is that there's no way high speed rail will come to Texas without connecting Houston and Dallas, probably like this: http://www.thsrtc.com/)
Thanks for the link to the map. It looks pretty wonky to me. As you mentioned, Houston isn't connected to Dallas (or Austin or San Antonio). A huge portion of the proposed track is in southern states where there isn't a lot of wealth. Do the people who drew that map expect those routes to break even?
I'd love to see them re-draw that map color-coded to predicted profitability as a way of prioritizing the work. Also, we need to look at how much money we can get from private investors. For example, I bet L.A.-Las Vegas can be built a lot more profitably (for the U.S. government) than Little Rock to New Orleans.
Trains can have stops at smaller cities along the way making them more accessible to people who don't live in major cities. Case in point. My mother-in-law lives in Klamath Falls, OR. The planes costs more than the train if you do the regular train fare or about the same if you get the small sleeper. There are no direct flights from SF to KFalls, so that means I usually have to fly to Seattle or Portland and then transfer to a smaller commuter which can make trip time almost as long. With the train, I get on at 9pm, go to sleep and wake up in Klamath Falls the next morning.
I don't know what concept of time you're using, but if you're traveling from one city to another, I'm 99% sure a train will be faster simply because it doesn't have to deal with traffic. The time it takes isn't as important either. One train can hold many more people than a bus and that's much more important.
Buses cost less at first, but then you need many more of them to accomodate more passengers. Their speed is also limited and varies quite a lot.
Haven't you ever played that game Transport Tycoon Deluxe? You buy one train and it makes waaaaaay more money than 4-10 passenger buses!
My personal experience is that trains are much quicker, less cramped, much more comfortable, more reliable, and easier to catch. The main downside is they are more expensive and can't offer local services (although trams and the tube are preferable to buses if the option is there).
Since I don't drive I've been on plenty of coach/bus and train journeys, both long and short, and I can assure you given the choice I'd always choose train. This is particularly true for long-distance journeys: I wouldn't want to take the journey from London-Paris by coach again, but I've only had positive experiences taking the Eurostar and the TGV.
Your claim is of sync with reality at least with respect to travel between Boston and New York City. Acela Express is much roomier than a bus. Has laptop power connections. Some seats have desks/tables. You can get up and walk around. You can buy food or a drink. Completely different experience. And this is why they can charge airline-level prices (or even more). It beats the planes because you get on at South Station in Boston and you get off at Penn Station in NYC rather than some airport off in the hinterlands.
You might want to check out Bolt Bus. Between DC, Philly, NY, Boston it is now my preferred method of travel. Power outlets, wireless for the laptop, trips every hour, good city center locations, online booking, and super-low prices make it essentially unbeatable.
Edit: I'm not arguing bus over train; just trying to help folks out by presenting an interesting alternative
Try traveling those routes on a holiday weekend when traffic on the highways is barely moving. Even without heavy road traffic, though, the train is faster. Plus you can get up and walk around on the train, there's more legroom, and food service.
The only issue I ever ran into was finding a group of seats together; in that case you might want to reserve seats(otherwise you get to hotbox with a cigarette smoking Japanese businessman!)
In the UK at least, trains are more roomy, you can easily walk around, have a shop, multiple toilets, and get there in less than half the time of buses. The same things apply in Australia when you're travelling any significant distances.
Yes, within large suburban sprawls the trains are often inferior in some ways to buses, but for longer distances, trains win in most countries. Japan, Australia, France, Gernmany, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, etc.
Mostly they can also use power supplies that are getting cleaner and more efficient as time goes by.
And just imagine the infrastructure we could have had for the cost of the Iraq war + the bank bailouts!
Anyway one thing I'd like to mention that never gets highlighted is that buses are BY FAR the cheapest public transportation solution. Its not sexy but the good old fashioned bus is great since it can use the road infrastructure already built whereas trains need right of way and a lot of construction before they can be used.
You're right that new bus routes have a very low marginal cost, and that buses move more people per transportation dollar than other forms of public transportation, but without expensive dedicated lanes they are certain to be slower than cars, and therefore most otherwise merry takers of public transportation avoid using them.
Another unfortunate problem with buses is that changing the bus route is pretty much trivially easy, with the consequence that they do change an awful lot (at least here in Boston), which means that buses generally provide really unreliable transportation.
Montreal has a great bus system, iirc. Dedicated roads, dedicated, clean, underground tunnels. Probably super expensive. Alas.
Granted it might be hard to sell a rail project like the space race, but looking back on just how much of our GDP we where spending to play golf on the moon was insane.
I'd argue the USSR was the imminent threat. According to wiki, Khrushchev openly & repeatedly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. The space race was a bid to regain technological supremacy after sputnik.
Also back then it wasn't clear that it would be just the one trip.
I used to travel by bus instead of train all the time when I was in Thailand because the bus was always faster and cheaper than the trains. The only way trains are better is if they are much faster than buses.
High speed train is more of an alternative to flying then to buses. Taking into consideration time spent to get to/from the airport, security checks and occasional delays, trains are better under 1000 km, and may be worth it for a lot more.
Eurostar checks are very tight and even on busy days it won't take over an hour of queuing at Gare du Nord. Usually there aren't so many trains to board so it's much easier to organize. I suffered a whole station lock-down on a busy Sunday night due to a large piece of luggage left near the security checkpoint. It delayed my trip only 2 hours, including the delays of not being on time for the cleared route. Another thing is trains don't usually have busy schedule of airplanes so they usually wait for people if something like that happens.
Also there's no fuel around to use as explosive material.
Spain had its share of train terrorist attacks, and at least in the rest of the Europe you can't tell. I don't know about inside Spain, though, but I imagine it's still not much difference.
To make buses work in a modern city, you need dedicated bus lanes. Mexico City has em, and they are amazing. Without bus lanes, buses suck for inner-city travel. They are slow, and traffic sucks.
Like everything, its all about tradeoffs: upfront costs, ongoing costs vs profit, time, environmental impact, convenience and capacity. All the transportation systems we should invest in (and all of them are somewhat subsidized by the government) should be the ideal balance of these tradeoffs for that particular distance range.
I believe there is a sweet spot in travel distance where high speed trains are the optimal solution over cars in the smaller distance range and planes in the longer distance range. Few would think to travel from LA to NY on a train but when you are talking about LA to SF, it makes a lot of sense. Time and destination wise it's more convenient, the environmental impact is less, frees up plane capacity at LAX and SFO for long distance flights, ongoing costs are similar, and the only question remaining is do these benefits outweigh the very large upfront cost? Would love to see how much these costs compare (a new high speed train route vs a hypothetical new airport + enough planes to service the route)
The sweet spot absolutely exists. When I went to school in DC, and wanted to go home to north NJ, taking Amtrak was about the same cost as a flight, about the same time (because of airport overhead, and because the airport was further away than the train station), and more comfortable.
This is the wrong way to go. I would guess that high-speed trains will only reduce people's reliance on airplanes, which are themselves a form of mass-transit. This particular change should be easy to effect, as many casual travelers will be swayed by the (hopefully) greater convenience of train travel versus the airport hassle.
However, many who are over-reliant on their cars will continue to be so, as they are less likely to be the people traveling frequently by plane. Also, people will have no incentive to reduce their car dependence so long as they still have to drive everyday for work/groceries/practically everything, unless they are lucky enough to already live in one of the rare (at least in the USA) cities with public transportation that could be rationally argued as superior to individual cars.
So, I would argue that massive investment in intra-city public transport infrastructure would have a more significantly positive long-term effect, as its availability would be relevant to more people, and has a the potential to cause a significantly larger reduction in the number of miles driven per person in the USA.
Unfortunately, the negative stigma that seems to linger over public transport in many parts of this country would likely retard these benefits. The real utility of the simple bus systems that would be a reasonable first step, as opposed to metros/subways, would not become apparent until the use of mass-transit reached a critical mass, at which the density of cars on the road would be reduced to a point allowing buses to travel quickly. Though, the importance of reaching this critical mass, which creates a sort of chicken<->egg problem, could be reduced by dedicated bus lanes, as some others have already mentioned.
I just did a quick text search both on the article and here in the comments, and I can't believe that no one has mentioned maglev? Please, Barack -- don't build your plain old wheel-based trains, no matter how fast; skip directly into 22nd century and mak a nationwide network of the fastest, most efficient and safest trains known to man.
"Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110- to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take fewcars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future.
Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by a mere 0.7 to1.5 percent—but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions.
These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?
As megaprojects—the California high-speed rail is projected to cost $33 to $37 billion—high-speed rail plans pose serious risks for taxpayers. Costs of recent rail projects in Denver and Seattle are running 60 to 100 percent above projections. Once construction begins, politicians will feel obligated to throw good taxpayers’ money after bad. Once projects are completed, most plans call for them to be turned over to private companies that will keep any operationalprofits, while taxpayerswill remain vulnerable if the trains lose money.
In short, high-speed rail proposals are high cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits."
And with that, I'm going to get a pseudonym. Hacker News users aren't just random people on the internet, they're people I'd like to work with someday. And I usually avoid discussing contentious political issues with my colleagues unless they bring it up first and seem thick-skinned. If there's going to be politics on hacker news, then I, as me, must go.
"These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?"
The author who wrote that has in all likelihood never traveled by train in Europe. At least in Germany, high speed trains are a huge success and often overcrowded when I use them.
So facts from people we don't like are to be ignored?
I just know that you're not making the case that there are special groups that we can trust with statistics and special groups we can't. Because that's an insult to our intelligence. Sources have bias. We multi-source to eliminate them. No need to impeach the source. Argue the facts.
Edit: I can't seem to connect to the Japanese statistics page, but that too is sourced, and I can't imagine they'd just flat out lie about the contents of a publicly available document...
Thanks for the link. This statistic does not have a separate category for high speed trains and consequently cannot be used to make statements about them.
The relative drop in rail traffic is much more likely due to the fact that local short distance routes have been closed down aggressively in the past 20 years. In Germany, also medium speed trains routes (160km/h), like the ones serviced by the InterRegio, have been cut.
Using this statistic to make any claims about high speed trains is naive or intellectually dishonest.
Cato produces some of the best work in the Think Tank world. I've seldom seen anyone out-argue them with evidence. As far as conflict of interest goes, they famously turned down a donation from Fannie Mae during the bubble because they didn't want it to look like they were not legit.
However, I am really uncertain about whether passenger trains are a good idea. In most countries they are subsidized. the upkeep costs are high...the US is a very geographically sparse place...
I'd much rather have them spend money on alternative energy, electric cars and funding startups at an arms length by investing in VC firms. (or running an independent VC arm)
The best way to do it is to have regional train networks, and use planes for inter-region travel. For example you would have train networks like L.A.- S.F., Chicago-Minneapolis, Chicago-St. Louis, Austin-Houston-Dallas-San Antonio, N.Y.C.-Boston-D.C., etc.
Unfortunately, that won't work politically. It basically treats red states like oceans that should be flown over, and puts all the high-speed rail in blue states (except the Texas network). It is probably more fiscally responsible to finance these networks at the state level than at the federal level.
Compared to Canada, the US is more densely populated and high-speed trains could connect many more cities than in Canada.
The airlines are also subsidized and use a lot of fuel and the upkeep costs are high. I think every year there's one airline somewhere in the world that's declaring bankruptcy.
I didn't check if his facts are correct, but you haven't disproven them. Population density is people divided by land area, not percentage living in urban areas.
Actually, they're not, at least not in the US. Some places they're close to break-even, but that's often because they're subsidizing other forms of transit.
Doesn't it seem like having a high speed train network that connects the major metro areas is at least somewhat of a good idea? This is a good hedge against peak oil since trains can be powered by electricity.
Also, arguably if the trains are used to move goods they can get trucks off the road and really decrease road maintenance costs. If you look into the wear and tear vehicles make on pavement, each extra pound is exponentially more damage. Trucking companies actually are heavily subsidized by the road infrastructure but nobody notices it ;)
I do wonder if we need high speed trains. Regular trains might be a better long term bet.
Actually, railways in USA already has much higher portion in freight transport than in EU (40% to 10%). It is not that big surprise, as big parts of the rail system are almost freight-only.
High speed rail might work to connect nearby metro areas, but almost certainly, trains across half or whole US will not work. It's simply too far away, and it wouldn't be any competition to airplanes. Even EU high speed rail are mostly, in their current state, few scattered islands connecting large cities within a single country.
> ... big parts of the rail system are almost freight-only.
Rail can be a very cheap way to move freight. Slower than truck, sure. But quite inexpensive. I'd love to see more rail freight.
The problem however is that in many parts of the country the same lines are shared by both passengers and freight. This means that for starters those lines are not going to be suitable for high speed passenger rail anyway. But beyond that, Amtrak gets second priority on those lines. This is one of the reasons for the frustrating delays that rail travel in the US always seems to have.
German high speed rail lines are also shared by passengers and freight, it is not problem. Old rail lines can almost never be used for high speeds, all high speed rail lines are built completely new. Original constructors never thought about speeds around 300 km/h. For example, HS line can afford slopes with steeper grades, because high speed train units have more powered axles and have less problems with them than one or two engines with 20 cars. On the other hand, you need curves with much higher diameters. So HS lines are different from the ordinary ones.
Well, if we base a decision on historical performance of Amtrak, then it's not a good idea. Amtrak is a huge loser.
If we're really worried about "green" efforts these days, we should consider strongly what modes will move people most efficiently. This is one of the areas where common knowledge differs badly from reality. See, e.g., http://eapblog.worldbank.org/content/comparing-the-fuel-effi...
Trains are much less efficient than, say, buses, due largely to problems in filling the trains fully. And since this is all so political, you can expect this train to be worse thanks to the political wrangling that will force the decisions about stations and schedules to overwhelm efficient routing plans.
I flag pretty much everything that even remotely smacks of politics, and most economics, no matter which side it comes from or how much I agree with it.
I just enjoy watching the double-standards people employ. For example, in this discussion I'd love to see somebody bring up the point that passenger rail in the U.S. is a political idea and not a practical business idea -- take a look at Amtrak pricing. But by actually diving into the business side of the article, they'd call the resulting discussion political!
I think "political" just means "stuff I don't agree with that has some sort of tangential relation to politics"
Pretty mind boggling.