Obama Unveils Plan to Fund High-Speed Passenger Rail

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123989461947625407.html

by ph0rque • 17 years ago

65 98 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

tjake• 17 years ago

... That better have High-Speed Wifi!

rjurney3• 17 years ago

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.

Pretty mind boggling.

kirse5• 17 years ago

Just to put Iraq in perspective, the government has already spent or committed $12.8 trillion this year alone to hold off a deeper recession: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=armO...

As a taxpayer, I think I'd prefer if we hold off subsidizing useless infrastructure like trains when we already have cars, buses, and airplanes.

Edit: Geez, this drive-by down voting is really getting out of hand lately.

omouse5• 17 years ago

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...

gjm11• 17 years ago

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.)

jobeirne• 17 years ago

I'm with you. We should be talking about knocking out our incredulous debt before we even think of expanding infrastructure.

chadmalik2• 17 years ago

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.

jcdreads• 17 years ago

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.

omouse5• 17 years ago

If you're going to talk about buses you have to distinguish between intercity travel and innercity travel.

radu_floricica2• 17 years ago

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.

Herring3• 17 years ago

"And just imagine the infrastructure we could have had for the cost of the Iraq war + the bank bailouts"

It's impossible to sell such a huge plan without an imminent threat/disaster. It makes no sense to think of other things we could do with that money.

rjurney3• 17 years ago

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.

But this is about connecting cities in densely populated regions, not transportation within cities: http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/Research/hsr_corridors_2009...

Buses between cities is a terrible way to travel. I know, I took buses from east/west coast repeatedly as a teenager.

asdf333• 17 years ago

i am about as pro-green as it gets.

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)

chadmalik2• 17 years ago

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.

thingie3• 17 years ago

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.

CWuestefeld• 17 years ago

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.

omouse5• 17 years ago

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.

mnemonicsloth• 17 years ago

Check your facts. The UN has data here:

http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=30&...

The urban population in the US is 80% of the total. In Canada, it's 81%. Interestingly, Australia is near the top of the list (92%).

natrius22• 17 years ago

No one is proposing high speed rail for the sparse parts of the country.

http://www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/203

briansmith6• 17 years ago

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.

cschneid• 17 years ago

The front range of Colorado & Wyoming is pretty decent a spot too. That's at least a purple area....

jimbokun• 17 years ago

The fact that most of Obama's constituency is in blue states (by definition) probably has a lot to do with why we are hearing more about this now.

joeyo2• 17 years ago

  > In most countries they are subsidized.

As if highways are not!

anamax4• 17 years ago

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.

As I mention above, we've had this discussion.

donw• 17 years ago

Is it bad that I was thinking that Obama had gotten into Ruby? I really need to get out more...

aswanson• 17 years ago

Aye, I thought the Engine Yard was up for a TARP injection.

miked• 17 years ago

What does this have to do with software development or startups?

triplefox• 17 years ago

Make a high-speed train startup?

davidw2• 17 years ago

You're supposed to just flag it and move on. To another site that takes banishing politics discussions seriously?

DanielBMarkham3• 17 years ago

"Economics of the Laffer curve and how it relates to taxation" -> flagged

"Obama adminstration installs Apache servers" or some such -> not flagged

That's what I love so much about standards. Everybody has them.

yish• 17 years ago

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)

endtime• 17 years ago

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.

gills• 17 years ago

Taste the Rainbow

BerislavLopac• 17 years ago

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.

qazwsxedc• 17 years ago

Please don't jump on the bandwagon of the obsolete maglev technology - we need to put this money toward research into teleporters

jacoblyles3• 17 years ago

Since no discussion is complete if it is one-sided, I offer an alternative perspective:

(PDF link) http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-625.pdf

"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.

sfk3• 17 years ago

"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.

jacoblyles3• 17 years ago

I usually assume that a statistic is more accurate than an anecdote, unless you have done some research that shows his statistic to be wrong.

systemtrigger• 17 years ago

Map of today's Amtrak network: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Amtrak_ne...

psb217• 17 years ago

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.

Obama Unveils Plan to Fund High-Speed Passenger Rail

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