Some readers seem to think I have an ingrained hatred of trains. Nothing could be further from the truth. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, I used the train as my exclusive mode of travel outside the Pacific Northwest. I made many trips to Washington, DC by train. I was over 30 years old before I flew in an airplane for the first time, and that was only because I was going to Alaska, which you can’t get to by train (while there, I rode both the Alaska Railway and the White Pass & Yukon Route).
If the United States had a true national high-speed rail network, I could see myself taking the train to DC now. Portland to DC is about 2,800 miles, which would be 20 hours in a 140-mph train (which is approximately the average speed of trains whose top speed is 220 mph, the speed the California High-Speed Rail Authority aspires to). That could be enough to get me to stop flying, especially if the train was timed to arrive in DC at, say, 8 in the morning.
Of course, no one but a few extreme rail nuts is seriously talking about transcontinental high-speed trains. Instead, the focus is on 100- to 600-mile corridors, which the Federal Railroad Administration considers optimal for high-speed rail (3MB pdf; see figure 1 on page 1, physical page 9). In fact, it is only optimal in the sense that rail has the least competitive disadvantage in such corridors.
The more I study high-speed rail, the more I realize just how bad an idea it is. It is extremely expensive. Only a few — mainly the well-off — will use it. And it won’t provide any environmental benefits.
In a previous post, I expressed skepticism of a report claiming that high-speed rail would save 6 billion pounds of CO2 emissions. I’ve done some additional calculations showing that high-speed rail will in fact be a net CO2 producer.
The report made several unlikely assumptions. First, it assumed that cars would be only a bit more fuel-efficient in 2025 than they are today (average of 23 mpg). Second, it assumed that the average car on the highway carries 1.6 people. Third, it assumed that the average train in every corridor would be 70 percent full.
As I noted in the previous post, under the Obama fuel-economy plan, by 2025 the average car on the road should get closer to 29 mpg. That presumes that manufacturers meet Obama’s 2016 target and that they fail to further increase fuel economy after that year. The average car on the road will still continue to become more fuel-efficient because people will replace older cars with new ones meeting the standard.
I also noted that, in intercity travel, cars carry an average of 2.4 people, not just 1.6.
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What I did not note is that the assumption that trains would be 70 percent full is also highly unlikely. In fiscal year 2008 — a banner year for Amtrak — the company’s trains were, on average, 51 percent full (see page C-1, physical page 65, divide contribution per seat mile by contribution per passenger mlle). The Acelas, Amtrak’s fastest trains, were only 62 percent full, while the moderate-speed Boston-to-Washington trains were just 48 percent full.
Other moderate-speed trains also fall far short of 70 percent. Chicago-Detroit trains, which reach top speeds of 110 mph, were 55 percent full, while Philadelphia-Harrisburg — also 110 — were only 34 percent full. The 90-mph Los Angeles-San Diego trains were 36 percent full. Only two trains, neither of them particularly fast, were more than 70 percent full in 2008, and they both fell short of 70 percent in 2007 (whose numbers are on page C-2 of the above-linked report).
So what happens to the conclusion that high-speed trains will save 6 billion pounds of CO2 if we correct these three assumptions? From data on pages B-2 and B-5 of the Center for Clean Air Policy report, it appears that 74 percent of the reduced emissions, nearly 4.5 billion pounds, supposedly result from taking cars off the road.
But if autos are 25 percent more fuel-efficient than the report assumes, and if they carry 50 percent more people, then autos will produce a little more than half the calculated emissions per passenger mile. Meanwhile, if the trains are only 51 percent full, instead of 70 percent, they will emit 37 percent more pounds of CO2 per passenger mile.
Instead of saving 4.5 billion pounds of CO2, the trains will add 6.7 billion pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere each year by replacing energy-efficient auto trips with energy-inefficient trains. Even if all of the report’s other assumptions are valid — and I suspect the assumptions regarding planes are just as questionable — that 6.7 billion pounds is enough to wipe out the savings from diverting people from other modes of travel to high-speed rail.
These are all examples of Bent Flyvbjerg’s optimism bias. Rail advocates are optimistic that automobiles and airplanes will not become significantly more fuel-efficient in the future. They are optimistic that ridership of high-speed trains will be especially high (or, to put it another way, that Amtrak will be able to attract those riders with relatively infrequent service). They are optimistic that people won’t notice that they applied the auto occupancy rate for all travel to intercity travel even though occupancies for the latter are higher than average and also that no one will notice the huge energy cost of constructing the rail lines.
Of course, you may ask, if the Antiplanner is skeptical about global warming, then what does it matter whether the trains produce more CO2? The answer is that President Obama prominently mentioned “clean, energy-efficient transportation” as one of his major reasons for supporting high-speed rail. Would he still support it if he knew that, instead of saving 6 billion pounds of CO2, high-speed rail would add billions of pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere and waste a proportional amount of energ?
If you support high-speed rail, would you change your mind if you knew it actually wasted energy and increased pollution and greenhouse gas emissions? If not, what would it take to change your mind? If rail supporters don’t have a clear answer to this question, then it is hard to consider them anything but religious fanatics.
You just want to argue sematics, had HSR stuff started in the 1950’s along with the interstate highway system things would have been different. Had the government prevented so many rail lines from being trashed things would have been different.
Time to time you bring up the 2nd Ave subway in NYC, that’s a subway replacement project for an elevated line that was once there. It’s not some thing new, it’s a very delayed by the government restoration of service.
Most “new” rail projects are not really “new”. They are very delayed restorations of service. The government made it hostile for the original private operator, with labor regulation & taxes. Mean while the government subsidized truckers & motorists. There is no profit or loss basis for the street in front of your house. The move to buses was a, if you can’t beat them join them thing. Why pay for my own infrastructure, when property taxpayers can pick up the tab, at the same time that was also a down grade of customer service.
O’Toole you are writing after the fact, that so much has been socially enigeneered towards higher auto use. The deck is already loaded in your favor & you’re complaining about it.
This is one area where I give those behind the Trans Texas Corridor credit, it’s a toll road/toll railroad project, although lot of people in Texas are fighting it on eminent domain grounds.
Randal, as a Jesus (religious) fanatic myself I think you give rail nuts too much prestige considering them to be religious fanatics.
I am also an Evacuated Tube Transportâ„¢ fanatic. I know that no ETT systems have been built yet, but the theoretical numbers for ETT energy efficiency, speed and carbon dioxide emissions look great compared to any form of transport except space travel. You should consider ETT, Randal; it could take you from Portland to DC in a minimum of one hour.
THWM,
The problem with the theory that HSR could have worked if only it had started in the 1950s is that Japan effectively did start its HSR program in the 1950s — actually the 1960s, but when it opened its first HSR line, autos carried only 5 percent of all passenger travel while trains carried 77 percent. By 1977, after a couple more HSR lines had been built, auto travel exceeded rail travel. Today, autos carry more than half of all travel, rail less than 20 percent, and HSR less than 5 percent.
Then there is another country whose railroads began providing high-speed rail service — 110-mph trains — in the 1930s. Those trains didn’t stop the growth of auto driving either. That was the United States.
Come out of your fantasy world and into reality.
I read the linked report. They cite the National Household Travel Survey for their 1.6 occupant per car number. Randall, you’re correct, that’s definitely wrong. Unfortunately, the government site for the National Household Travel Survey is down right now, but the report can be found cached on Google.
The 1.6 number is definitely the overall average of all automobile trips, found on page 31 (Table 16). Now, it’s true that it’s declined over the years as families have gotten smaller and can afford more automobiles. (At the same time, there can also be inconsequential changes; does it really matter if the kids come along to buy groceries for the family or not?)
I can’t find a cite for the 2.4 number, but it’s certainly very plausible that occupancy would be greater on intercity trips than for, e.g., commuting. Certainly I often choose to fly on trips of around 300-800 miles that I drive when I have someone to share the ride with.
The differing occupancy for intercity auto really changes the calculation, as noted, by making auto CO2 emissions much better.
The Antiplanner:“The problem with the theory that HSR could have worked if only it had started in the 1950s is that Japan effectively did start its HSR program in the 1950s  actually the 1960s, but when it opened its first HSR line, autos carried only 5 percent of all passenger travel while trains carried 77 percent. By 1977, after a couple more HSR lines had been built, auto travel exceeded rail travel. Today, autos carry more than half of all travel, rail less than 20 percent, and HSR less than 5 percent.”
ws:Air only carries 10.9% of US travel, compared to autos carrying 85%. Using your determination for what is an effective mode of transportation based on percentages, we should stop our investment of air travel.
The Antiplanner:“Come out of your fantasy world and into reality.”
ws:You should come out of yours. Japan’s cities are very dense, and mobility will be restricted if every person owns and operates a motor vehicle. There’s not enough real estate or build able land for parking and highway ROW. The automobile is very space consuming.
Antiplanner wrote:
“Some readers seem to think I have an ingrained hatred of trains… If the United States had a true national high-speed rail network, I could see myself taking the train to DC now. ”
I believe you. Personally, I would go by airplane. At a speed close to 600mph, this is approximately four times faster. It would also be a lot cheaper.
ROT:If the United States had a true national high-speed rail network, I could see myself taking the train to DC now. Portland to DC is about 2,800 miles, which would be 20 hours in a 140-mph train (which is approximately the average speed of trains whose top speed is 220 mph, the speed the California High-Speed Rail Authority aspires to). That could be enough to get me to stop flying, especially if the train was timed to arrive in DC at, say, 8 in the morning.
ws:I think you’re crazy. I’d fly. If I was going from Portland to San Fran or Seattle – I’d do HSR.
The Autoplanner said:
THWM,
The problem with the theory that HSR could have worked if only it had started in the 1950s is that Japan effectively did start its HSR program in the 1950s  actually the 1960s, but when it opened its first HSR line, autos carried only 5 percent of all passenger travel while trains carried 77 percent. By 1977, after a couple more HSR lines had been built, auto travel exceeded rail travel. Today, autos carry more than half of all travel, rail less than 20 percent, and HSR less than 5 percent.
Then there is another country whose railroads began providing high-speed rail service  110-mph trains  in the 1930s. Those trains didn’t stop the growth of auto driving either. That was the United States.
Come out of your fantasy world and into reality.
THWM: I don’t think trains are the be all and end all of transportation, but they are a vital component of a transport cocktail.
O’Toole, you can’t hate government that has provided so much road space for you, free of charge.
Take off your brown shirt & get back to reality.
First, while the government has certainly engaged in eminent domain abuse to buy land for roads, it’s definitely done the same thing for railroads, or given away federal lands.
Second, Randall is in favor of toll roads in general.
We should stop our subsidy of non-commercial general aviation, which is subsidized a lot, and also that of commercial aviation. But commercial aviation, while subsidized (and certainly subsidized compared to automobiles), is barely subsidized on a per passenger basis compared to trains or transit. See the Bureau of Transportation Statistics numbers.
John Thacker:
My post was not in regards to subsidies, but it should be noted that that is federal subsidies, and does not factor in municipal backed funding, etc. for airport infrastructure, nor does it address the taxation difference between air, roads, and rail.
To address what I meant about my post, it was debunking that the effectiveness of a transportation mode should not solely be judged on the percentage of share it has for the entire transportation model (passenger miles), but rather its role in transportation and moving people.
My example to this was air only touches 10% of transportation mode in the US. HSR in Japan supposedly is 5%. Not that much of a difference. I would never want to get rid of air travel; I like it and it serves its role quite nicely.
“…we should stop our investment of air travel.”
This comment really grated on me. It, and the highwayman’s endless carping remind me that there is no “we”. Socialists do not invest, they steal. “Hey, let’s you and him build that public transit with your money and his money”.
I doubt that any of the carpers ever invested in a thing. Their comments usually have the self righteous certainty of the truly inexperienced.
Investments are made by individuals directly, or by delegating their money to a corporation. Governments, having in a very broad sense, stolen all their money, cannot invest. There is no risk. When the government makes a bad deal, as it usually does, where are the consequences?
So let’s not talk of government investments that “we” make.
Anyway, it’s all crap, there is no global warming (I live in Canada and any fool can see it’s getting colder). If there is any ‘climate change’, and there is, there must be as we live in a dynamic system, mankind has shocking little to do with it. Try not to be jumped up little egomaniac twits. You are but a bacterium on Gaia’s prodigious butt. Finally, if the climate is warming, the net effect is good, not bad, and in any event can be measured in money, and the simplest present value calculation says all you climate change folk are mad.
Forgot to ask, where is D4P with his rhythmic, musical and much beloved shouts of “Dishonest!” at the antiplanner’s arguments?
1. I think there are a dozen differences between the US and Japan that makes rail more practical in Japan.
2. It would be hard for rail to beat airlines for any medium to long distance travel if the flight was a direct flight. All things being equal, I would like to take rail over flying too, but there are very very few times that rail’s schedule is even practical. Plus, airlines you can re-route overnight, while rail lines are very hard to adjust.
3. According to Godwin’s Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law), the Antiplanner won the thread in comment #8.
Borealis said: 3. According to Godwin’s Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law), the Antiplanner won the thread in comment #8.
THWM: That’s bullshit cop-out, even for you guys!
http://www.reason.com/news/show/32944.html
Hands Off Hitler!
It’s time to repeal Godwin’s Law
David Weigel | July 14, 2005
A month after the fact, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is still getting kicked around for his speech on the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The speech itself was nothing new for the anti-war Durbin; the shellacking started when he read from an FBI agent’s e-mail alleging ugly prisoner abuses, and said that if anyone had read this e-mail out of context, they’d “most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regimeâ€â€Pol Pot or othersâ€â€that had no concern for human beings.”
It was downhill from there, as every war-supporter with a microphone or blog howled for Durbin’s blood. His crime: invoking the Nazis. Though the Durbin story calmed down after the Senator’s craven apology, other sets of loose lipsâ€â€on the anti-war left and in totally unrelated areasâ€â€have kept the flame war hot. In the last four months, Sens. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) and Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) had tried to mix Third Reich metaphors in with speeches on the judicial filibuster, and both had been smacked down hard by political enemies and the Anti-Defamation League.
Durbin’s thoughts about Gitmo weren’t extremeâ€â€even some Republicans have worried about abusesâ€â€but his political pantsing should raise a question about our public discourse. Why are Nazi metaphors always out of bounds?
It wasn’t always thus. Nazis were fair game in World War II. Red-blooded slanderers could slap the Nazi label on public figures like Father Charles Coughlin, and movie houses ran hilarious (and Oscar-winning) cartoons lampooning the Third Reich, including “Herr Meets Hare” and “Der Fuhrer’s Face.”
In the 1960s, members of Young Americans for Freedom protested with black umbrellas to mock people who were soft on the Soviet Union, a reference to Nazi-enabler Neville Chamberlain. Throughout that decade, while the generation of Americans with direct experience of the Nazi regime held all the power positions in politics and media, Hitler allusions flowed like lager in a Munich beer garden. “I was killing fascists when you punks were in diapers,” Alabama Governor George Wallace shot back when some hippies called him a Nazi. The big screen featured conscientious Nazis like Omar Sharif(!), playing a perplexed Wehrmacht detective in Night of the Generals, while the small screen kept Americans laughing at the antics of Sgt. Schultz and Col. Klink. Oddly, it was only with the passing of the Greatest Generationâ€â€the only group of Americans with a dog in this fightâ€â€that Nazis became sacrosanct.
Rules against the N-bomb in Internet debates were formalized after 1990, when the propensity for long arguments to end in Nazi analogies led Mike Godwin (now a Reason contributing editor) to post his famous law: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Although “Godwin’s Law” was initially conceived as a physical constant rather than a guide to good behavior, it was quickly adopted as a social rule, with general agreement that the guy who fell back on a Hitler analogy had lost the argument.
The rules of snippy online debates, though, are nothing compared to public discourse. The Anti-Defamation League has beaten the hell out of anyone who’s dared use a Nazi analogy over the last decade. A Republican state senator got it for calling abortion a “holocaust.” Wal-Mart got it for running a newspaper ad that showed a book burning. Critically, the ADL launched a complaint in 1997 when the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary got hip to slang and expanded the definition of “nazi” to include a person who’s “fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specified activity.” ADL President Abe Foxman raged: “If someone can be a ‘soup Nazi’ or a ‘traffic Nazi,’ how bad could the real Nazis have been?”
Pretty bad. To recap, the Nazi party took over Germany via a violent rigged election, then banned all rival political parties. They systematically shut down all voices of opposition, killing journalists, creating Nazi churches, and exiling academics. While gearing up for a war of conquest, they introduced eugenics into their school system, took all rights away from Jews, and brutalized other non-Germans. For dessert they launched a six-year war that killed millions of people, enslaved millions more, and systematically exterminated entire ethnic groups before retreating to a bunker and demanding their citizens commit mass suicide.
You can’t really downplay this stuff or cheapen it through overuse. Think about this another way: You can say your sandwich tastes like a urinal cake. This emphasizes that the sandwich is truly awful, and gives your listener an idea or image of exactly how awful. But you don’t lose sight of how bad the urinal cake can be. It’s a poisonous sanitary product, and nothing will ever change that.
Politicians understand this, and they get away with the N-Bomb in the one arena where it’s allowed to go unchecked: bullshit saber-rattling. George H.W. Bush dubbed Saddam Hussein the “new Hitler” while building support for Desert Storm. Bill Clinton’s national address on intervening in Bosnia included Murrow-esque passages on “skeletal prisoners caged behind barbed-wire fences, women and girls raped as a tool of war, defenseless men and boys shot down into mass graves, evoking visions of World War II concentration camps and endless lines of refugees marching toward a future of despair.” Politicians and pro–Iraq war opinioneers repeatedly said letting Saddam Hussein remain in power would amount to a new Munich pact. The British Daily Telegraph editorialized that 1938 and 2002 were mirror images because “both Saddam and Hitler demonstrated a fondness for chemical weapons and saw Jews as part of the problem.” Different chemicals, different quantity of Jews, but who’s counting?
These Nazi analogies were baldly ridiculous, intended to dredge up the oomph of the Holocaust for conflicts with five-digit casualty numbers. But these uses of the N-Bomb are actually looked on favorably. In fact, the United Nations took heat when it hedged whether to call the slaughter in Sudan’s Darfur region “genocide” or “crimes against humanity.” They went for “crimes,” because there wasn’t actually a policy to exterminate an entire group of peopleâ€â€certainly the right call to make if you don’t want to gloss over how bad the Nazis were.
But obviously, Nazi analogies in humanitarianism and foreign policy aren’t intended to cheapen Nazism and the Holocaust. They’re meant to put underreported, ugly stories into a frame that everyone immediately understands. It’s the same thing with the workaday Nazi arguments, and with situations like Durbin’s.
Thus, despite all efforts at regulation, the market has repeatedly decided in favor of the N-bomb. There simply isn’t any other tableau, in history or fiction, that offers the same variety of evil and oppressive examples as the Third Reich. Why compare some propaganda to 1984 and some slaughter to Srebrenica when you can double down and link both of them to Nazism?
Rarely remarked is the way prohibition has inflated the N-bomb’s valueâ€â€not as an outrage (that would hardly be possible), but as an ironic, farting-in-church punchline. There can be little doubt that the unnacceptability of a Nazi costume led directly to Prince Harry’s thinking it would be a sweet thing to wear to a 2004 Halloween party. You can’t say something is out of bounds and not expect it to lose meaning or become ironic. We live in a time when, days after 9/11, citizens were directing Flash animations about killing Osama to the tune of “Day-O.”
The Nazi taboo was flawed before the Durbin affair, and it’s only deteriorated since. Recently, armchair general Victor Davis Hanson took to the Chicago Tribune to assert that the swarthy enemies of freedom grow bolder “each time a public official evokes Hitler to demonize the president.” The chorus demanding Durbin’s apology included Rick Santorum, who’d apologized just a month before for comparing Democrats’ filibuster arguments to Nazi war plans. The effort of keeping up the ban has become more convoluted than Charlie Chaplin’s last speech in The Great Dictator. We’ll be better off rolling back Godwin’s Law and admitting the all-purpose usefulness of Nazi analogies. It’s exactly what the Germans wouldn’t want.
ws said:
John Thacker:
My post was not in regards to subsidies, but it should be noted that that is federal subsidies, and does not factor in municipal backed funding, etc. for airport infrastructure, nor does it address the taxation difference between air, roads, and rail.
To address what I meant about my post, it was debunking that the effectiveness of a transportation mode should not solely be judged on the percentage of share it has for the entire transportation model (passenger miles), but rather its role in transportation and moving people.
My example to this was air only touches 10% of transportation mode in the US. HSR in Japan supposedly is 5%. Not that much of a difference. I would never want to get rid of air travel; I like it and it serves its role quite nicely.
THWM: Then there’s the USAF. KC-10’s are just modified DC-10’s.
No point again, highman, nor any relevance.
Are you just happy that you learned something about the aircraft industry in your special class today? What else are 707s used for in the military? Don’t answer.
Please only type items with solid points that cover the issues.
That doesn’t mean to agree, but please only bring up valid ideas that relate.
Why should non-users pay for HSR?
The amount of “subsidy” will be over $40 billion.
Half that amount could build an 8-lane freeway (same length), and would be more useful, and handle more passenger-miles. Moreover, it could be paid by toll or a higher gas tax.
How realistic is the CA HSR? Ridership is over-estimated. Cost is under-estimated.
Estimates assume [the equivalent of] each person making a round-trip every year & each vacationer making 1 trip. That man people just don’t have the desire to travel along the HSR as is claimed.
For revenue, here are some rough generalizations:
At $100 tickets, it will take a ridership of over 30 million just for debt service.
What’s the likelihood of then ever covering operating costs?
And people even paying $100 a ride?
(For lower priced tickets, adjust ridership higher.)
Why would HSR replace many car trips?
Once at your destination, a car is usually needed.
Why then pay for a rental, when can use one own’s car, w/just a few more hours of driving?
Well, the “highwayman” has officially jumped the shark.
The long incoherent diatribe in this thread says there is no reason at all to read anything from him now.
Hey I’d like to see more Auto-Train service for that matter, though that is some thing else.
Though RJ, Scott, O’Toole, you’ve made your selves clear, you just want to drive every where and that’s fine.
Though don’t tell other people how they should travel.
Why do some people think that some of those who prefer cars & many freedoms try to restrict others from transit?
We don’t want to prevent others from using transit.
(Keep in mind that choices in using transit are very limited, due to geography, math, & low demand/ridership.)
We don’t like these $10billions/year in general taxes going to <4% of people.
We would also like more highway-lanes, paid by users.
I’m not against congestion charging.
Good for you highman. What are your favorite vegetables?
Again, I just blew your assertions out of the water & you ramble on about irrelevance. It’s not even a tangent. Just because a topic is under the broad category of transportation does not mean there’s a connection.
My favorite vegetables, are those found in wheel chairs.
“Though don’t tell other people how they should travel.” from the highwayman is the best lefty comment ever.
He seems incapable of understanding that lefties forcing various forms of antiquated, inefficient transportation on us is the epitome of telling other people how to travel. Is he disingenuous? Does he truly not understand that we want our planes and cars and loathe his preferred ways to travel, taking them only when we must? Does he not understand he is stealing from us through the tax system to support his preferences, which he is unwilling or unable to pay for himself?
Is he a Nazi? (Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Yeah, soup nazi.
“You just want to argue sematics, had HSR stuff started in the 1950’s along with the interstate highway system things would have been different. Had the government prevented so many rail lines from being trashed things would have been different.” — HIghwayman
The problem with rail wasn’t just the government taking on the risks of building out highway networks. Part of it was the peak for rail passengers occured long before roads were well built out (IIRC 1918-1920). Yet only something like 50-60% of housefolds even had a car. But rail passenger service was never much of profit center, if at all, for most any railroad. Naturally there are some exceptions such as the inter/intraburban bubble that had occured in the 1910s. That is, rail passenger service was rarely ever enough to justify keeping lines open. In the vast majority of situations, freight was why the line was built, where profits could be made and it was freight’s decline on the line that made them no longer viable.
In terms of freight service, the government heavily regulated it in every aspect from employment law to dictating exact freight rates to keeping lines open. Yes, the government did things to force railroads to continue operating lines they no longer wanted to operate. Yes, historically there were also elements in the government that wanted to see lines abandoned. But the regulations were already in place that railroads had to file for permission to do so which allowed for political opposition to build to oppose it.
But it wasn’t just roads and trucking that brought about the demise of many of these lines. Some of it was simply corporate culture. Heavily regulated railroads were long used to having their rates dictated and profits restricted. Most railroads for decades upon decades offered anemic rates of return, if there was one at all. For example, in the 1950s United Airlines , Greyhound, TWA, Delta and others had better rates of returns than almost every railroad at the time (Rio Grande, N&W a couple others out of a few dozen RRs were the exception to the rule). Those companies were all competing with roads and cars but did well because they had other advantages to offer. As for freight, the problems were not only regulations and corporate culture but that the operations were still too ineffecient. Despite that there was still large opposition from the ICC and others to consolidation. That is, opposition to dropping lines (aka preventing lines from being dropped).
So it’s not as though the gov’t. didn’t do things to keep these lines around. Nor did they simply contract because of the gov’t. taking on risks in building those highways. Rail passenger service was never much of a profit center for RRs to justify keeping it around. And they didn’t need all those lines to carry the freight they had. Many of those lines were no longer needed as railroads productivity improved over the years. We can see that today as RRs are carrying near all-time highs in freight despite the recession. And just as the gov’t building roads created problems for the RRs, being forced to accept anemic freight rates, operate unprofitable lines, keeping zombie railroads alive and blocking mergers, other heavy-handed and convoluted regulations over operations, labor and other aspects all did huge damage to the railroads over time.
You forgot about over head costs that air lines, trucking companies and marine operators don’t have, compared to railroads.
If an air line goes under, you are not going lose LAX.
If a trucking company goes under, I-95 is not going to be closed.
If a marine operator goes under, you are not going to lose the Mississippi River.
So now you are focusing on that basic infrastructure/pathway, which, in your case, are the rail tracks.
There is much more to the railroads running than just track.
Most areas need more freeway lane-miles.
There are many miles of unused or under-utilized rail track.
How many passenger-miles are there by highway, air & rail?
Rail has, by far, the least.
A century ago it had all. People have freely chosen other modes.
Rail transit now is ~2/3 non-user supported, much higher than other forms.
Scott, do you even under stand what you write?
You want rail paying all of it’s costs, but then you want road, air & marine, paying for some of their costs.
Highman, I don’t necessarily want all transit to be wholly supported by ticket prices.
That would need 2-3 times increase for that. The details of “what should be” are unclear.
However, increasing transit [beyond the current avg bus load of ~11 & rail of ~20]
capacity is not a realistic option, & is only going to be much more expensive per passenger-mile.
Who’s gonna pay? Is it moral to pay for what one receives?
New [pork] projects are usually unjustified in a cost-benefit analysis, such as new LRT or any major new infrastructure build. A good “basis” is to keep transit where it’s at; perhaps expand, where there’s demand. Possibly, add & cut bus routes. Cutting route times-of-operation is more likelyâ€â€for when there are few passengers. Imagine paying a driver & bus operating costs when there are fewer than ~8 passengers, regularly. That occurs often & is expensive.
Let the “market” build around hubs (no tax deducts), such as TODs. There is sufficient transit for those who want [or cannot afford/want a car] to locate by a stop, albeit limited options for destinations from there & longer travel times. About every city above 400,000 people has transit, & many of its suburbs. Sure, service can be sporadic, but high density is needed for wide coverage.
Why cannot you pro-transit people realize the low demand & the requirements for there to be sufficient supply?
I’ve never mentioned water or air transport.
Those do have $ problems.
It would would be fairer for airline ticket prices to cover those costs, rather than extra gov expenses.
Scott, you are complaining after the fact. You’ve made things harder for transit to compete, such as zoning, there is always a trade off some where.
The government has distorted things by favoring roads since the time that income taxes were started.
Buses cost more to operate than rail to per passenger mile.
That’s why there is a need to restore rail service in so many places.