Joel Kotkin follows up on Robert Samuelson. When will these religious fanatics understand that this makes no economic sense? Well, if this Congress doesn’t pull the plug on this lunacy, the next one (in even more dire financial straits) surely will.
13 thoughts on “The Religion Of High-Speed Rail”
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In an interesting and somewhat related article, it’s reported that the head of the Chinese high-speed railroad system is now the subject of scandal:
The prospective threat to Chinese airlines from fast trains may lessen substantially or at least slow down after the arrest of the railways minister on suspicion of corruption.
The arrest is a blow to the railways ministry’s political independence and therefore to its ability to propel its own massive programs with little restraint from other departments, above all the transport ministry, which represents airlines.
Chinese airlines are facing the greatest assault ever launched on commercial aviation by high-speed trains as the railways ministry builds a colossal system of 25,000 km (15,500 mi.) of super-fast passenger lines in direct competition with air carriers. The trains, most running at up to 350 kph (220 mph), are the fastest in the world and will blanket the most heavily populated parts of China. Moreover, they are being laid directly under trunk air routes.
The economic viability of this program has been questioned, but the railways ministry has been so powerful that it has been able to resist incorporation into the transport ministry and has therefore been free to plan, build, finance, operate and regulate its lines with minimal outside interference.
That status may come to and end now that the rail industry has been disgraced by the arrest of its minister, Liu Zhijun. Liu and his family are being investigated for corrupt behavior involving 12.2 billion yuan ($1.86 billion), says the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the body charged with keeping Communist Party members in line. Moreover, of 28 railways officials responsible for buying foreign equipment, 19 were found to have foreign bank accounts, 12 at Swiss banks, says the commission.
As much as anything, “high speed rail” represents massive amounts of taxpayer and borrowed money going to politically connected people. It is yet another wealth transfer, with the money going to favored contractors and political entities.
[darmok] Queeg and his Strawberries [/darmok]
And the lesson from China should be that when making a profit is replaced politics, going broke gets replaced by being arrested by the guys with more pull.
High speed trains!
The problem isn’t how fast the train can go, it’s how many stops it ha to make. You can drive a much greater distance faster in a car, beacuse you know have to stop every 5 hours or so for fuel, or the occasional potty break.
So a train can travel twice the speed of post speed limits for cars, but it has to stop ever 20 miles to pick up new people, that’s like saying a dragster is a more efficient way to commute, you only have to stop 4 times to travel one mile, but thost are 4 fast quarter miles.
“So a train can travel twice the speed of post speed limits for cars, but it has to stop ever 20 miles to pick up new people, that’s like saying a dragster is a more efficient way to commute, you only have to stop 4 times to travel one mile, but thost are 4 fast quarter miles.”
Actually, there was a technical paper from Denmark on that question. Electric powered trains with regenerative braking can help — electric power means a high HP per ton for acceleration (and regen braking), and the regen braking helps with the energy consumption.
Ultimately, high speed rail is not a question about how fast you can run a train but how fast can you run a train economically. The same question comes up with airliners — we have pretty much given up on supersonic transports because of cost, and even for subsonic jets, we are flying them slower than when Howard Hughs’ TWA was buying Convair jets to fly a little closer to the sound barrier and save 20 minutes on some runs.
To run fast, you must maintain the track as if it were component in a precision machine, and you must also maintain precise wheel profiles and tolerances on guides in the truck frames for the wheelsets. All of this costs not only an initial expense buy an ongoing expense.
The original Japanese Shinkansen (what we call the Bullet Train) was pretty much a rapid transit train, which is ultimately an electric-powered streetcar, built to very high engineering standards. Perhaps the one “tech” was to place some resistance to truck rotation to suppress the “hunting” that creates that characteristic sway of railroad travel but becomes dangerous at high speed.
My poppa who worked at GATX in the 60’s and 70’s, a time of the US Metroliner project on the Northeast Corridor, had first-hand knowledge of what was done in Japan, and he spoke of the train sets (jargon for the assemblage of coaches and power units making up a train) going into the wheel shop every night to “dress the wheel profiles on the lathe” and of track gangs going out every night between midnight and 6 AM when they shut the line down to check the alignment and gauge of the track.
What I would be curious to know from the various proponents of HSR and the talk about how much more advanced other countries are and how the US is being left behind, have there been technological advances in either simplifying or automating the maintenance or development of train cars and track that need less maintenance? Or is HSR what it has been for 40 years, essentially fighter-aircraft levels of maintenance being poured into these systems to operate at the speeds involved?
To help draw an analogy nearer and dearer to folks around here, the Shuttle is successful in providing a (semi) reusable crewed spacecraft. Every time it goes up, I marvel at the technology involved. But it is insanely intensive on maintenance, that is, if you don’t want an accident every 50 flights or so, and even then it isn’t clear that helps.
HSR has a strong safety record (perfect in Japan, to my knowledge, Germany has had fatal accidents), but is it economic?
@Titus Quinn
Ahab and the White Whale.
There is an underlying premise for high speed trains in the U.S. This premise is that cars are obsolete due to the price of oil and that the only way to keep things going “for a while, ignoring everything else effected” is by trains.
The costs are beyond astronomical. For the stop in Mountain View where we live, it was going to cost $2 billion just to construct it due to the much larger footprint required. It would also take out about half the businesses in the area.
That is just one stop. The city has since removed all of the marketing materials associated with the trains after people saw the damage that would be caused.
@JP, Vader’s sad devotion to that ancient religion.
In many ways the advocates for High-Speed rail are similar to Space Advocates in that they believe that if only the federal government will retire the high start-up and development costs the private customers will come…
“In many ways the advocates for High-Speed rail are similar to Space Advocates in that they believe that if only the federal government will retire the high start-up and development costs the private customers will come…”
NASA is Amtrak in spaaaaaaayyyyyce!
In many ways the advocates for High-Speed rail are similar to Space Advocates
One of these things is not like the other, unless there is some need for a high-speed rail to support ISS and government satellite and space probe delivery.
Rand,
Nope, the ISS is just an excuse, just as Disney World is for the high speed rail advocates in Florida. But there are other options for reaching both.