This “news” is a couple of months old, but Caixin Weekly, a Chinese business magazine, has published an extremely critical article about that country’s high-speed rail program. This report probably inspired similar but shorter articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
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One theory is that China will continue to waste money on things like high-speed rail in order to persuade the U.S. to bankrupt itself trying to keep up. If the U.S. doesn’t fall for it–and it appears it has not–then China will have to stop building or end up contributing to its own bankruptcy. That’s not so hard to believe considering that Japanese National Railways piled up a $300 billion debt (in today’s dollars) in 1987, which the government was forced to assume and which contributed to that nation’s economic doldrums since 1990.
I wonder if the fascination with high-speed, cutting-edge rail in Japan, and now in China, is influenced by nationalistic Europe-envy. The European superpowers in the early part of the 20th century had a great deal of national pride in the speed of their trains, and that period had a great deal of influence on the intellectual class of Japan and China.
That suggests it would be interesting to see how India views rails and why.
In the U.S. air travel was once a national pride and then a high-status signal. Now that we have Southwest Airlines and stripping for TSA, private aircraft is now the high-status signal.
The Antiplanner posted:
One theory is that China will continue to waste money on things like high-speed rail in order to persuade the U.S. to bankrupt itself trying to keep up.
Randal, has anyone come up with a credible estimate of what the Obama Administration’s entire proposed high-speed rail network (the one promoted in 2009) was really going to cost?
Or what the patronage might be?
I wonder if the fascination with high-speed, cutting-edge rail in Japan, and now in China, is influenced by nationalistic Europe-envy.
This, IMHO, is as valid as the totally false yapping in the other thread about Planning education should treat NYC and SF as unique situations, not the model. and comical hokum Seattle … is mostly a suburban city, and even a light rail system is failing there. Is this a parody character created by a performance artist?
DS
About 350% more people live in Seattle’s “urban area” than in Seattle city limits. The statement is true for just about any American city. Were it not, there wouldn’t be debate over urban sprawl.
Only 22% of Seattle’s urban area lives in the city limits, making Seattle more suburban than the average American city.
“Back in 1996, voters were given a vision of 25 miles of light rail, costing $1.8 billion, finished in 2006, and with daily boardings in 2010 of 107,000. Fourteen years later, Sound Transit has only been able to build 17 miles for $2.6 billion, with weekday boardings of 21,766. As for the rest of it, Sound Transit officials have reduced the original scope of this first phase to 21 miles, and won’t be finished until around 2020, with total costs approaching $15 billion.”
“Low ridership also translates to higher costs-per-trip. Believe it or not, It costs $7.13 for every trip made on light rail. To compare, buses in King County average about $3.91 per trip.”
“A more immediate area of concern for Sound Transit officials is the poor on-time performance with light rail. Sound Transit officials told voters in 1996 that Light Rail ‘will provide significantly greater reliability than all other types of public transportation in the region.’ Typically, other transit modes have on-time performance of between 90-99 percent. Last quarter, light rail had a dismal on-time performance rate of 71 percent. This quarter saw a slight improvement at 77 percent, but still well below Sound Transit’s target of being above 90 percent.”
FAIL.
Dear Danny Boy,
Sounds like you had your mommy look up the word “ocean” in the dictionary, and now you have learned how wrong you were. I know that hurts like a boo-boo, and you afraid that all your friends think you are a stupid moron, but they understand that everyone makes mistakes and that this is the best you can do.
But it is not nice to lash out just because you feel hurt. Big boys know that when they are proven wrong, they don’t lash out like a bully. Instead big boys do what is called “taking responsibility”. Can you act like a big boy?
@CP, is it possible to come up with a decently accurate estimate that is as large as something like the HSR proposal?
That said did the administration put out a plan that was concrete enough to measure? Was it just the below ones? Did the plan include others like Chicago to Omaha? El Paso to Cheyenne? Minneapolis to Duluth? I’m curious since in trying to Google and find what the actual plan I couldn’t find anything concrete.
And, unfortunately, we would also have to clarify what is meant by HSR. Are we talking about the traditional definition or the FRA’s definition of merely 110MPH or above?
A map from this blog’s Aug 23, 2010 post.
http://ti.org/NewHSRRoutes.jpg
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/04/obama-lays-out/
The corridors, listed with some of their major stops, eligible for funding include:
California – San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego
Pacific Northwest – Eugene, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle and Vancouver, BC
South Central – Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Little Rock
Gulf Coast – Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, Birmingham and Atlanta
Chicago hub network – Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Louisville
Florida – Orlando, Tampa and Miami
Southeast – Richmond, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, Macon, Savannah, Columbia, Jacksonville and Washington, D.C.
Keystone – Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh
Empire – New York City, Albany and Buffalo
Northern New England – Boston, Montreal, Portland, Springfield, New Haven and Albany
Frank, Seattle proper (that is, Seattle) is fairly dense, as you know. The non-Seattle suburbs are like everywhere else, but the topic was Seattle, as in Seattle, which continues to densify and the Mayor just asked the CPD to increase allowed densities near the new planned TOD.
AS for the free market think-tank guy you quoted but did not cite, LR must be a huge failure, which is why the voters didn’t want it and therefore voted for more money for it in ’08. Yup. Fail. And my last trip there when I took the new Link right from the airport to my hotel – fail too. Sure was glad I wasn’t driving, because I hate Seattle traffic, and when the buses are stuck in the same traffic, well, what could be worse than that?
DS
Dear Danny Boy,
You are so right. If you don’t count the suburbs of Seattle, then Seattle probably wouldn’t be considered mostly suburban.
And if the light rail system in Seattle can take you from the airport to your hotel room, then it absolutely cannot be a failure. It is totally worth $15 billion so that you don’t have to ride in traffic.
Please don’t waste your brilliant ideas on this website. Save them up for your own book!
@Sandy Teal: India views rails with significance. Public transport still remains the primary mode of transport for most of the population, and India’s public transport systems are among the most heavily utilised in the world. Motor vehicle penetration is low with only 13 million cars on the nation’s roads but it’s growing. Compact cars, especially hatchbacks predominate due to affordability, fuel efficiency, congestion, and lack of parking space in most cities. According to recent estimates by Goldman Sachs, India will need to spend US$1.7 Trillion on infrastructure projects over the next decade to boost economic growth.
This map shows that “urban centers” occupy far less space than non-urban centers in Seattle. Certainly Dan knows that practically no one lives downtown Seattle. Well, except for homeless people. Seattle has massive lower-density “suburbs” such as West Seattle, Magnolia, Sand Point, Madison (with the non-mc-mansions), Queen Anne, Arbor Heights, etc., etc. This map shows that most of habitable Seattle is non-urban center.
As for the light rail comment, since you didn’t address any of the claims about how government lied and instead use an ad hominem, I can assume those claims by the biased blogger are indeed true.
Speaking of light rail, would you have lived in Columbia City and taken the light rail? I wouldn’t live there to save my life. Living in NE Portland was enough ghetto for me.
Thanks for addressing my comment, LazyReader. The discussion seems kind of stuck on old topics.
It does seem like rail would make a lot of sense in India. As far as I know, they don’t have an extensive highway system or do many people have access to autos. That is a lot like Europe in the pre-WWII days, so perhaps the importance of rail is tied to those factors.
Sandy Teal:
America long held most of the speed records for rail, unsurprisingly before the 1950 ICC order that put a halt to the dread operation of 80-125 mph trains without cab signals. Before that time, a number of railroads were known for very fast (100+ mph) top speeds, including the Seaboard Air Line, Milwaukee Road, Santa Fe, Illinois Central, and Burlington.
After 1950, France gradually began to take away speed records from the US as it electrified and improved portions of its system.
The great leap forward into High Speed Rail came from Japan starting the Shinkansen. Initial conceptual planning goes back to the 1930’s, but what became the modern line was fully fleshed out in 1958 and began service in 1964. Even before the start of service, interest in the US got to be very high, and studies were commisioned in 1963 of the Northeast Corridor to follow up and commercialize a series of experiments under taken by the Pennsylvania Railroad with the Pioneer railcars, and this became the Metroliner service in 1969 and the plans still underway to rebuild the line to 160 mph standards. The bankruptcy of Penn Central and the collapse of US government finance in 1971 put an end to the idea of rebuilding the Northeast Corridor for 160 mph speeds for that time, but we were up and underway with 120 mph operation.
European HSR came AFTER the Japanese Shinkansen and American Metroliner. Germany approved the first new line in 1973 (Hannover-Wurzburg), and France followed with the Paris-Lyons line in 1976. America also restarted the Northeast Corridor project in 1976 although the fiscal crisis of 1981 again stopped the program when only half way done. All the rest of European HSR is a follow up to those initial projects and did not commence until they provede themselves in the 1980’s.
Randall:
One theory is that China will continue to waste money on things like high-speed rail in order to persuade the U.S. to bankrupt itself trying to keep up.
As opposed to bankrupting ourselves buying foreign oil and fighting wars in the desert to control the oil supply in order to ensure the US can continue to consume over 20% of the world oil supply?
Imagine the horror of us spending only a few hundred BILLION over several decades on trains and transit when there is an opportunity to spend TRILLIONS on wars in Arabia and foreign oil purchases every decade to ensure our continued use of internal combustion engines and the deaths of 30-40,000 Americans per year (1 in 1000!) in crashes on the road. Thank God we haven’t fallen for that devious Chinese ploy!
Frank, the issue was Seattle proper, not just downtown. There is no reason to try and mischaracterize the issue, even though some complain of occasional stroller congestion in Belltown. If you want some densities, I can calculate them on GIS for you, as I have the entire Seattle parcel dataset. Give me your assertion – make an assertion. That is: state something like ‘the majority of neighborhoods in Seattle proper have similar densities as the average suburban density in X’. Let me know what your assertion is and I’ll calculate the densities for you. This is not to say I think Seattle is like totally dense. Simply that an assertion made upthread is hokum.
Secondly, there is no reason to mischaracterize my LR argument either. You didn’t properly cite, you used only a free-market think tank as a source (a paper that selectively quotes and somehow gets readers to pretend that the quotes were lies), and no one has bothered to notice that the public wants the failed service. And LR coming from the airport to the Bus Barn means you can connect to many places.t m
Let us know your assertion and I’ll find the time to calculate some densities to help you understand the city.
DS
Please excuse me, Frank, because this is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Danny Boy, please use your elaborate GIS database to calculate how far you walked from the “Seattle airport” to ride the “Seattle light rail”, given that you think “Seattle” can only be the City of Seattle and the Seattle airport is several cities away from Seattle.
It’s amazing how the train above appears like the very jets they thought they could compete against.
@Andrew “As opposed to bankrupting ourselves buying foreign oil and fighting wars in the desert to control the oil supply in order to ensure the US can continue to consume over 20% of the world oil supply?”
Oil markets are world markets, we don’t just buy oil from the Middle East. We purchase oil from Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, South America, Africa, litterally over a hundred countries. America is the largest oil importer, and one of the world’s largest oil exporters. Even if we were to drill more on our shores, it wont have a significant difference in gas prices.
The length of your daily commute is the other key factor that strongly affects the amount of gas you burn. But if you live 10 miles farther from your workplace, you may save yourself thousands a year in property taxes and other carrying costs on the house you want, that translates into a dollar a mile in savings. If it takes an oversize gas-guzzler to make those extra miles bearable, or even pleasant, you’ll buy it. Personal energy cost’s matter less and less. The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it’s risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta. The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren’t.
LazyReader:
Obviously we are fighting in Iraq to stabilize world oil markets for the benefit of our own outsized consumption by continuing our influence and control over the center of OPEC.
If America consumed oil more in line with western Europe and Japan (which are hardly beknighted isles of poverty), we’d need somewhere around 6+ million barrels per day less of the stuff, and we would be far closer to energy independence.
And the issue isn’t even our consumption so much as our failure to pay for it except by gradually selling off our national assets to the Arabs as they have nothing better to do with all the Petrodollars they earn.
Andrew, as Lazyreader pointed out, oil would be available for sale whether the US was in the Middle East, or not. It’s a world market. The Middle East needs to sell their oil, and we need to buy it. The US’s obsession with maintaining military personnel in the area is a misguided desire to exert political influence. In reality, it has little effect on the flow of the oil.
Though we wouldn’t need to buy so much oil if there was more electric rail transit. That would mean more money staying in the USA.