Unlike the California plan, this might make sense. No serious mountains between Dallas and Houston.
41 thoughts on “High-Speed Rail”
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Unlike the California plan, this might make sense. No serious mountains between Dallas and Houston.
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I doubt it makes sense there either. Population density is just too low.
Well, it’s a private venture, so it will be their problem.
“Jump off and walk around town.”
Well, walk around whatever’s in walking (or bus) distance, anyway. If you want to go anywhere else, you’ll have to rent a car.
Self-driving on-demand cars!
(Actually, if we had those, you wouldn’t need the train . . .)
Depends on relative speed. I’d be OK with taking the train to Houston and then getting on a car vs letting the car drive me to Houston if it saved me an hour.
Huston mayor was plugging it at the Conference of Mayors
http://www.texascentral.com/2017/01/20/houston-mayor-texas-bullet-train-game-changer/
With this big of capital investment, I just can not imagine that some sort of kick in by the feds and or state will not happen if not direct funding then taxes. If it happens.
I live in Houston. Flying to Dallas is so easy. Southwest Airlines has a flight about every hour from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM, and Love Field is very close to downtown Dallas. It’s going to be hard to beat that with a train. Of course on this end, Hobby Airport is further from downtown, but it’s still only about 10 miles. (IAH is about 20 miles from downtown.) I’m not sure I understand the fascination with a high speed train between Houston and Dallas. Especially since in both cities, your ultimate destination is often not downtown.
I’m not a huge fan of trains, but if the time to take the train equaled the commute to the airport, security, etc, and the commute from the destination airport, I’d take the train.
I doubt California is more mountainous than Japan.
While I agree that there can be such a thing as overbuilding HSR (the Chinese are now into this stage with the Lanzhou–Xinjiang High-Speed Railway and their latest expansion) mass transit in the Bay Area is just too bad considering the amount of people that live there. HSR to connect the cities in the California coast is something that should have happened a long time ago. If anything I think it will be harder to get the resources and the motivation to build HSR now that oil prices have gone back down. If battery prices go down like Elon wants to do with the Gigafactory it will be a LOT more likely that people will just switch to electric vehicles instead, if oil prices go back up or there is some mandate to remove ICEs from city centers, because it’s what requires less changes to the way infrastructure and urban planning have been done.
Still for longer ranged trips the rail transport would make sense since its more efficient and faster than a car.
I doubt California is more mountainous than Japan.
I’m not familiar with Japanese HSR, but I’d bet it goes around mountains, not through them. You can’t get from SF to LA without going through two mountain ranges.
Still for longer ranged trips the rail transport would make sense since its more efficient and faster than a car.
Not self-driving cars on smart roads.
I rode the Japanese HSR from Narita to Tokyo and back, back in 1996. It was a kick. And 100% on flat ground.
What amazed me was that the land in between the two stations was incredibly sparsely populated farmland. It was quite the contrast to Tokyo, which was the largest unbroken expanse of city I’ve ever seen (and that was from the Tokyo Tower main observatory deck, 492 feet above the city). One can’t see the end of the city from that vantage point in any direction (except the bay).
I often took the train from Tokyo to Sendai. I don’t remember any tunnels.
Not self-driving cars on smart roads.
Rail vehicles are more energetically efficient than those roaming over asphalt roads and I suspect they’ll always be faster in practice. The alternative is aircraft, I suppose, but even those have their own issues and are better over longer distances.
The self-driving cars on smart roads could easily replace taxis, buses, and interurban rail to some degree but not HSR. I can see them winning out in those areas in places like California, sure, but there are still issues vs rail in areas like speed or ride comfort. You have the vehicle to yourself, which is a plus, but the ride is a lot less smooth than a train. Reading on a car, for example, is a PITA and it is easily done in a train.
Rail vehicles are more energetically efficient than those roaming over asphalt roads and I suspect they’ll always be faster in practice.
You continue to say this as though energy efficiency is the only figure of merit. It is not.
Energy efficiency, speed, ride quality, want more? Cars aren’t going to become obsolete, quite the contrary, but HSR can’t be viewed in the same category as suburban or inner city rail.
Energy efficiency, speed, ride quality, want more?
Flexibility in destination. A self-driving car can go anywhere. A rail car has to stick to the rail.
You could get between LA and San Fransisco following the coastline, but that presents it’s own set of engineering difficulties for high speed rail.
Godzilla, the problem is, in part, geography and physics.
Sure, you could build a rail line along the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Heck, there already is one. So, upgrade the existing bed to HSR… except that’s useless, because the track route is very winding in most areas due to terrain. You can’t go high speed there without subjecting passengers to high G-loading, similar to what you’d experience in a maneuvering fighter jet.
The Japanese Shinkansen system uses a LOT of tunnels to mitigate this issue, and the cost is astronomical. They also route around mountains when they can, and have to reduce speed in some areas. A purely coastal route from Los Angles to San Francisco would entail more tunneling and viaducts than the entire Shinkansen system.
Going the inland route they currently plan adds mileage – so much so that the total mileage (with one track in each direction) is about equal to the total Shinkansen system in track mileage.
The big problem though is a high speed train from Los Angles to San Francisco (and especially the currently planned mostly-not-high-speed line) make zero economic sense; they just cost too darn much compared to flying (and building new terminals and runways is a lot cheaper than high speed rail, as well as vastly more flexible). Those economics hold true even if oil prices go back up, so there just no reason to go HSR where it makes no sense.
If they were really interested in transit, they’d uses a common sense approach; extend city subways or commuter rail to the airport, like San Francisco did. That’d be a great boon for tourists as well.
A Dallas/Houston HSR that’s actual high speed (unlike the California boondoggle) might make sense, if the economics are there. If its privately funded, great, give it a try – so long as no federal funds are involved. I doubt it’ll work though; the capital investment is enormous, so it would be exceedingly hard to bring per-ticket price to parity with air.
Sure it makes sense to build in the places where it is most economically efficient to build it first.
To the other comments here, that the Japanese HSR doesn’t go through mountains, I would like to mention the maglev Chūō Shinkansen, currently under construction between Tokyo and Nagoya and eventually to Osaka, is supposed to run through the Japanese Alps. Even now there are some pretty long tunnels in service like the Daishimizu Tunnel on the Jōetsu Shinkansen.
Yes, and trains could tunnel through the Tehachapis, north of LA. THe issue is whether or not there would be sufficient demand to justify the cost. The most credible studies say “no.”
Rail already goes to LAX. Locals are just pissed because they have to take a bus the last two miles to the terminals. That will soon be fixed with the Metro Extension and people mover (though I think it’s a waste of money).
If it’s anything like the rail I’ve seen elsewhere in the US its a slow as molasses converted diesel freight train, on a non-electrified track, with old style signaling, and road intersections along the way. Then again a suburban train is never going to be fast anywhere in the world.
That’s thanks to the nationalization of the rails into Amtrak. Things went to hell after that.
Admittedly, rail traffic was declining thanks to cars, but some would have survived.
Trains – a 19th century solution to a 21st century non problem.
Pretty much everything the Progressive Left wants to inflict on us is a 19th century solution, starting with Socialism, but also including education factories and Bismarckian pensions and Victorian prudery.
(Marxism is to economics what Creationism is to evolutionary biology. If the book says it, it must be true.)
Sheesh. How about cars? Those are XIXth century too. What’s the problem with the XIXth century and the First and Second Industrial Revolutions.
How about the maglev the Japanese are building is that XIXth century too? Transportation is a non-problem? That’s news to me.
Sheesh. How about cars? Those are XIXth century too.
They’re 20th century. And self-driving cars are 21st century. Inflexible rail has done nothing to advance except to get faster, in some places.
There were cars in the XIXth century. They became popular in the XXth century. Still, modern HSR has little in common with a steam locomotive, and its disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
If we’re going by that standard, trains are 18th century.
Just barely. They matured in the 19th. Only widespread major improvement in the 20th was diesel.
“Wenning said he would absolutely become a customer if high speed rail becomes a reality. ‘Cheaper alternative to flying,’ he said. ‘Jump off and walk around town.'”
Pro tip: Whenever somebody’s talking bout “walking around” Dallas or Houston in the summer, it’s because they’re insane. Not as insane as the city planners in Austin, who thought that they could substitute a “walkable downtown” for a, you know, whaddaya callit… a road system, but still not to be trusted with heavy machinery.
“Whenever somebody’s talking bout “walking around” Dallas or Houston in the summer, it’s because they’re insane. ”
Baloney. Until my bike was stolen and I haven’t gotten around to replacing it yet, I used to take couple-hour rides regularly for exercise. Even now I walk regularly, although not as long.
Dallas heat is pretty easy to deal with: wear a hat and stay hydrated.
Would you go directly to a business meeting afterward?
I know somebody who was on Bob Kruger’s staff when this came up while he was RR Commissioner back in the ’90s. Even the liberals (at least those who didn’t stand to make bank) admitted that the numbers never added up.
The proposed train would have needed to charge over $100 a seat and sell out every seat on every trip just in order to pay off the interest on the bond that would have been required to fund the thing. The math never worked, and that’s before you factor in Southwest’s daily bus-schedule of flights between DFW and Houston.
In addition, the sheer magnitude of takings required to provide the land for a high-speed line would have caused a firestorm. Because of the straight-and-level grade that HSR has to follow, and the larger-than-normal right-of-ways required for safety, a massive number of farmers and even towns would have been severely disrupted. As in, in addition to their lost land, they would have been forced to drive up to dozens of miles just to make what would have been a half-mile trip before.
The whole thing just doesn’t work. You need massive population density with conditions (usually societal, in places where HSR actually works) that cause large numbers of people to not own–or desire–their own vehicle.
Again, if it’s privately funded, it’s their problem. As a non-Texas resident, I don’t care, as long as it doesn’t get federal funds.
“In addition, the sheer magnitude of takings required to provide the land for a high-speed line would have caused a firestorm.”
That’s sorta the whole point, isn’t it?
Same for light rail transit. Never economical, but a whole lot of land gets expropriated.
So it’s a feature, not a bug? How does that work?
Oh and about the length of the California HSR, Wikipedia says its proposed length is 1300 km. The Chinese Lanzhou–Xinjiang High-Speed Railway alone is 1776 km long and I bet its economic viability is way, way, more dubious. It runs across the middle of a desert. The only advantage is the terrain is probably worth next to nothing while the California HSR is going over some of the most expensive real estate around…
I was talking about length of track, not length of route. That figure you have is for length of route. If it’s double-tracked as proposed, that doubles it.
Can you make a case that the California HSR is economically viable? Given the capital cost, I can’t see any way that tickets, even if we assume the impossible 100% capacity all the time, could be cheaper than air tickets. Air travel will remain faster, as well as cheaper, and thus better.
The only attraction I can see for that HSR route is not having to go through airport security (and the associated time due to the needed early arrival, etc). However, last I heard, they plan on airport-style security (and thus time) so there is no advantage – it’s just a slower, more expensive way to get from point A to point B.
The Chinese railway I mentioned goes both ways with double track. If it didn’t it would kinda defeat the purpose of using HSR. Look at the distance between Lanzhou and Ürümqi on a world map. It’s longer than the coast of California. The terrain isn’t exactly forgiving either:
https://youtu.be/gBsVmFAewpE?t=275
I don’t have the numbers and, in any case, for these kinds of investments any kind of study is going to be fudged somehow. How can you even predict demand for something like this? It’s a dynamic system with an untapped market. Any estimates will be a long way off the mark. It’s a political strategic decision to invest in HSR or not pure and simple. That particular Chinese railway, for example, makes absolutely no economic sense whatsoever. Nor does the Channel Tunnel for that matter.
Looking at other places with similar population density in Europe and elsewhere I think it would be economically viable to build the HSR in California, unlike those other two, but a lot of it depends on the construction and land costs, interest, and how practical are the multi-modal connections at the train stations. i.e. the cost and ridership.
Someone raised the eminent domain issue. This alone could sink a project like this. That’s what happened to the Trans-Texas Corridor proposal a few years back.