41 thoughts on “High-Speed Rail”

  1. Yes, but the reasons for the opposition are . . . silly.

    It is one thing to “accept the scientific evidence”, but he subscribes to an urgency to the CO2 emission situation that non-building-the-HSR is the least of what he has in mind.

    Mencius Moldbug (aka Curtis Yarvin before he went on blogging hiatus) addressed what this man has in mind, and the suggestion was to Google “Morgenthau Plan.”

    1. “Yes, but the reasons for the opposition are . . . silly.” Kevin Drum may be silly, but – 68 billion dollars. And we all know it will be more. And they won’t actually build it all the way; the current plans have an initial segment from ?/Nowhere to Fresno/Nowhere.
      It’s a really stupid idea.

  2. Whether or not express rail between SF and LA make sense or not, I certainly can’t buy into the neo-Luddite reasoning and phony deadlines for climate mitigation given by Mr. Drum.

    Suggest Mr. Drum set an example for the rest of us by lowering his own carbon footprint. I would recommend that he consider moving himself and family to a dung walled Yurt heated by composted printings of his previous articles.

  4. Tracks are not free, in either a financial or a “carbon” sense.

    My back of the envelope calculations say that it might be worth building high speed rail on a route once the volume of 737s/A320s on that route reaches one every 10 minutes, which would translate to a 500 passenger train every half hour.

    This is approximately the volume on the Paris-Marseilles route. Los Angeles to San Francisco is nowhere near it.

    The train is still 2 – 3 times slower than the plane, assuming comparable security theatre.

  5. I still think HSR is a good idea both on the Northeast Corridor and in California. If it gets built.

    The convenience of good quality public transportation system cannot be underestimated as a regional development force. If it gets built in California it would take a lot of the housing market pressure off places like San Francisco.

    1. good quality public transportation system
      Good quality public transportation? In California? I think you overestimate their chances!

    2. Here in Seattle we are building light rail. It is very expensive and we could easily have a much more elaborate bus system for the money. But lefties like to put people on trains because it forces them to make decisions in alignment with the Hive.

      Also, there is no evidence that people in cars will switch to trains. Most of the commuters on to trains are shifted from other means of mass transit.

      With a well-developed infrastructure, cars also take housing pressure off of places like San Francisco. Non-leftist, pro-housing regulations also take housing pressure off of places like San Francisco. I think you are just mouthing the message of the Hive.

      1. No the difference is with rail you can actually do work on the train. Try reading on a train and reading on a bus and see me the difference. I have. Here in Europe it is common for trains to have Internet connections as well too. You just cannot have that kind of ride quality on a bus.

        Also the bus is much less energetically efficient than anything on rails.

        2. Only if they improve the suspension and ride quality of cars a lot. Which I am not seeing happening any time soon. Reading on a car is a mess even if you aren’t the one doing the driving.

          The best car suspensions are hydropneumatic and even those aren’t as good as being on a train. Plus nearly no cars use them because they are too expensive.

          Also the high speed rail is a lot faster. Maybe they can raise car speeds once everything is computer controlled but it will still be slower than rail. Once maglev starts becoming common the rail speeds will increase even more.

        3. Don’t think your experience about bus rides translates to this side of the ocean, Godzilla.

          We have very good straight highways with long distances between places. Executive bus services have lots of legroom, Internet service, satellite TV.

          Most of us here would rather drive anyway.

          Yet even here in Alberta some people think an express train between Calgary and Edmonton would be somehow “better”. We get the same proposal every five years or so, and every time it gets shot down because of the immense cost and lack of users. Idiots.

          3. On January 14, 2015 at 6:05 pm Gozilla said:

            The bus is still a lot slower.Even without using maglev.

            Kansas City, MO to Chicago, IL via Amtrak — 7 hours, 32 minutes
            Kansas City, MO to Chicago, IL via Jefferson Lines/Burlington Trailways — 10 hours, 0 minutes
            Kansas City, MO to Chicago, IL via MegaBus — 10 hours, 20 minutes

            7.5 hours vs 10 hours.

            Is that “a lot slower”, or only marginally slower?

        5. I used to commute into London on a train. If I was lucky enough to get a seat, any attempt to ‘work’ would be continually interrupted by those who had to stand banging into me as they wobbled from side to side as the train moved. And it I had to stand, well…

        6. My wife has the choice of driving, taking the company bus, or taking the train. When she can, she takes the bus.

          Driving is the fastest–maybe an hour, depending on traffic. She can go anytime and stay as late as she has to.

          The company bus is nearly as fast as driving. It makes no stops, but there are only a couple of departure times. If she has to stay late she can’t take it. The bus has wifi and comfy seats but she usually sleeps rather than works. People do work on the bus.

          The train takes about twice as long as the bus. Its top speed is a bit higher than the bus but it has to stop every couple of miles. Even so, it doesn’t take that much longer than the bus. The problem is the final stage–she has to wait for a shuttle to take her from the train station to her work, which can take half an hour or so. The train runs until midnight, but after commute hours there’s only one train an hour. The train station is also not a particularly nice place to hang around in.

          I suspect that the bus ends up using less energy per passenger mile than the train–it is usually full when it runs, whereas most of the time the train is fairly empty.

  6. One more time.

    For the (current) advertised HSR cost of $68 billion, one could: 1) build an airport at LA and at San Fran for $9 billion each; 2) Buy 28 brand new 747-400s plus 14 spares; 3) Fly the 28 aircraft on two-hour centers (6 round trips per day); and 3) Carry 31 million passengers per year for 40 years, and not charge any of them a penny.

    If HSR looks like a good deal by comparison, I have lots of stuff to sell you…

      1. The more stops, the less “high speed” High Speed Rail becomes. Once you get to the end of the line, you’re still not at your destination (unless you just like visiting train stations).

      2. If the HSR has more than two stops, then there is deceleration, stop time, and acceleration to be considered, at a cost of about five or ten minutes for each stop you add, thereby increasing the time of the full trip, which is already longer than a plane journey.

        Naturally, the politicians along the route are going to want to do just that: bring in the high-speed rail for their constituents. You know – grandstanding. The more stops, the better. And if doing that puts the original goal – rapid transit from downtown to downtown – that much further out of reach, I promise you they will not care.

        Yes, doing the math is helpful. So is political calculus, which is the real driver here anyhow.

        1. Of course what will happen is that you will have more stops than just at the two endpoints. San Francisco to Los Angeles is just too far away by HSR to justify not having any stops in the middle. Too many stops and it is too slow but any well conceived HSR line will have intermodal connections with regular rail, buses, airports, etc.

          1. Actually, you probably will have express and regional train services operating on the same track, but the HSR service (the “express”) will not stop along the way. It would defeat the purpose of building it. Eurostar has only 13 total stations, only three of which are “main” stops. But going from London to Paris (~281 miles, 2 hr 15 min), they don’t stop. LA to San Fran is 381 miles, and there’s less in between those two cities than between London and Paris.

            In any event, I the airport cost I used was twice the actual cost of Denver International (which in turn was about twice the originally projected cost). The reason I did this is that a large airport handles about 15 million passengers a year, and the HSR traffic model calls for 31 million – so you might need a really large airport. (That traffic model is a little optimistic, I think. Eurostar hasn’t yet reached 10 million passengers a year. ) Putting in a couple of smaller regional airports along the way, and adding some 737-800s to the fleet might mean that you could offer free flights for only 20 years instead of 40.

          2. Eurostar is a special case because the line originally wasn’t as fast as it could be. It used legacy tracks in the beginning. Only recently did they speed it up in Britain by building a set of new tracks. It was kind of like the Accela in that regard even if the trainsets were designed for faster trips the tracks were not up to it. A lot of TGV lines in France run to a large degree on old tracks which don’t allow travelling at high speed either.

            If there was a lot of traffic in the line you could use double-decker trains like the French use in their high traffic lines (TGV Duplex) to avoid building more track.

          3. Last time I took it (admittedly several years ago) from London to Brussels, it was medium fast through England, not very fast through the Chunnel, and didn’t really seem high speed until past Calais.

          4. I took it in 1997, and the train could never get over 30 mph in Britain (and then it rattled our teeth). In France, it got up to about 165 mph. I’d rather not go that fast on the ground unless I’m about to leave it with wings…

            Speaking of which, my original point is still valid. This is a dead loser compared to air infrastructure.

          5. I did it in 2007, so they’d probably improved the track in England in the intervening decade. It was unnerving to be going that fast on the ground, watching the French countryside flying by. I spent most of the time hoping that nothing found its way on to the track in front of us.

  7. Gosh. My mother lives in California and never opposed a liberal cause in my memory. She opposes HSR, thinks it’s a waste of money. I haven’t followed the issue, don’t know how it could possibly be so hard and cost so much money, but whatever. Once it becomes clear that a plan is that much worse than expected, sensible people drop the plan. See Vermont single-payer health care.

    2. The biggest problems with it are at the two ends. It’s cheap and easy in the Central Valley, but the density of the Bay Area (and NIMBYism), and the mountains north of LA make it difficult verging on impossible to make it high speed there, which vitiates the whole idea.

  8. I’d add, if a private entrepreneur (Elon Musk?) thinks he can build a good profitable train at a good price, let him do it. There is no sense in the State of California or the federal government pretending that they are Japan.

    1. Even Elon does not have enough money to make that line. The problem is the right of way costs not the cost of constructing the line proper.

      1. Get rid of the David-Bacon act and then we can talk about price. Get rid of unions requiring every project have so many people involved and we can talk about price.

  9. I have been following this issue for several years and have noted a few things usually skipped over in the arguments. First, the proposed rail system does not go to the airports, they go to the train stations. This means the continuation of travel from other airports needs a connection from the airports to the train station. Anyone calculating the relief on air travel needs to include this. Second, the cost never seems to include the lost property taxes from converting private land to government owned right-of-way. (Amtrak along the Bakersfield-Sacramanto route currently leases trackage rights from commercial railroads) Third, I have yet to see a firm proposal on how to get through the mountains north of L.A. I *have* seen proposals that assume a long tunnel from Bakersfield to Palmdale and more long tunnels from Palmdale to L.A. The cost numbers include Bakersfield and north, but not south, and tunnels are expensive. Fourth, there are no car rental agencies at the train stations.

    All these issues can be addressed, but at additional cost or lower user acceptance.

    1. Long tunnels – that’s just brilliant. In southern California, the land of fault zones. Brilliant.

    2. Yes the high speed rail system should have stations at the major airports or at least some sort of connecting system between the airport and the high speed rail station. In some cities in Europe the high speed rail passes though the center of the city while the airport is quite far away and then they connect the two using some sort of light rail system. I guess they figure out they get more passengers by stopping in the center of the city and the extra stop at the airport would be a waste of time. I don’t know the particulars on that. In Paris the Charles the Gaulle airport has a high speed train station but the connection is less than convenient since it is not a hub station. In fact you are often better off catching the regular train to Paris and getting into the high speed rail train stations inside Paris proper.

      I agree that they need to have multimodal stations for the thing to work with connections to regular rail, subway, bus lines, taxis, or car renter where appropriate for the thing to work well. As for the properly taxes the places with stations will actually increase in value and there is nothing preventing reasonable land development close to the lines. In Japan most of the financing of the railways does not come from the ticket sales but from property development like shopping malls near major train stations.

      1. In Japan most of the financing of the railways does not come from the ticket sales but from property development like shopping malls near major train stations.

        Are you referring to the bullet trains? Since we’re talking high speed trains, I’ll have to assume that you are. If so, most of the funding comes from the national government and the prefectures, with additional funding from the local municipalities. The Japanese have sunk so much money into public works projects (of which the shinkansen are an important part) over the past twenty years that they have a debt to GDP of over 200%.

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