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Arithmetic-Challenged Favor High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
45 Comments

On Monday, the Washington Post published a devastating critique of high-speed rail written by journalist Robert Samuelson. In fewer than 800 words, Samuelson blows up just about all the arguments put forth in favor of rail. An 8-word summary: costs are too high and benefits too low.

One person who remains unconvinced is the popular innumerate, Matthew Yglesias. Normally I would not personalize an issue by calling attention to someone’s disability, in this case Yglesias’ inability to deal with simple arithmetic. But by describing me as a “car-subsidy shill,” Yglesias shows he is math challenged.

Apparently, if you believe, as I do, that all modes of transportation should be paid for by users, and not by tax subsidies, then you, too, are a “car-subsidy shill.” Here is a simple lesson in arithmetic: if users pay for all of something, then subsidies are zero. That makes me a “zero-subsidy shill.”

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More Money Wasted

By | | News commentary, Transportation
19 Comments

Just in time to influence the November election, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has granted $2.5 billion for high-speed rail to several states, including California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan. Underscoring the political nature of the grants, the announcements were not made by the Federal Railroad Administration, which doesn’t mention them on its web site.

Instead, LaHood phoned major politicians (all Democrats), who then announced the grants to the media. A formal announcement is expected on Thursday. Until then, announcements indicate that:

  • California received $902 million
  • Florida $808 million.
  • Iowa and Illinois received $230 million for a conventional-speed Amtrak line between Iowa City and Chicago.
  • Michigan received $150 million for a high-speed rail line on the vital Dearborn-to-Kalamazoo corridor.
  • Connecticut received $121 million to improve rail speeds between New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield, MA.
  • Virginia received $45 million to plan a high-speed rail line from Washington to Richmond.
  • Minnesota received $40 million to renovate the St. Paul Union Depot.
  • New York received $18 million for rail upgrades in the Syracuse area.

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Another County Heard From

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

Article on high-speed rail in the on-line edition of USA Today. Key point: “The history of transportation shows that we adopt new technologies when they are faster, more convenient, and less expensive than With applying the theory you can guess that it will cheap levitra prescription Source work on the soft muscles of body and heart. The ladies who prescription order viagra without are going through this problem, I am suggesting you to read my previous post and consult Dr. This has led to a growing disbelief in the minds generic cialis pill of the individuals. 2. Smoking causes hardening of blood vessels, while alcohol affects a man’s you could check here viagra 100mg no prescription ability for having a penile erection. the technologies they replace. High-speed rail is slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and far more expensive than either one. As a result, it will never serve more than a few marginal travelers.”

Report from Japan

By | | Transportation, Travels
42 Comments

On Monday, the Antiplanner rode a high-speed train from Tokyo to Nagano, probably the most expensive high-speed rail route in the world. According to one source, it cost more than half a billion dollars per mile in 1997 dollars, no doubt because much of the route is in tunnels. The train I was on was practically empty, and I understand that is the usual condition for that route except in high tourist season.

The Nagano high-speed rail route is a perfect example of why the U.S. shouldn’t build high-speed rail. Even if the Boston-to-Washington or California routes made sense (which they don’t), once a government starts on a project like this it can’t stop until all the most powerful politicians have one in their states and districts. The Nagano and other Japanese high-speed rail routes were built not because they make financial or transportation sense but because of politics.

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High-Speed Fantasy Land

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

One of the strongest arguments critics raise against California high-speed rail is that it will require huge operating subsidies. Promoters promised that not only would fares cover operating costs, the trains would earn such large operating profits that private investors would be willing to put up around 20 percent of the capital costs if they were promised 100 percent of the operating profits.

Though that appears increasingly dubious, supporters of the rail line continue to claim that it will pay for itself. Only not in the sense that it will actually, you know, pay for itself, but in the sense that its high costs will be justified by the environmental benefits.

This claim is made by a “study” published by the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Irvine. The Antiplanner uses the term “study” in quotation marks as this is not so much a study as it is a parroting of rosy projections from the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) combined with wildly optimistic projections of the benefits of transit-oriented developments that smart-growth advocates hope will be built along the route.

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High-Speed Rail Deathwatch

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
4 Comments

Will a high-speed rail line ever be built from San Francisco to Los Angeles? The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has less than 10 percent of the money it needs to build this line. The plan is increasingly under fire from local and state organizations. On one hand, President Obama’s vague and controversial proposal to spend $50 billion to “rebuild 150,000 miles of roads [and] construct and maintain 4,000 miles of railway” could keep the California project alive. On the other hand, if Republican Meg Whitman is elected state governor this November, she could kill the program.

Can’t afford to build it; can’t afford to run it. Maybe it isn’t needed?

A recent op ed in the San Francisco Chronicle succinctly points out that projected costs have nearly doubled since voters approved the plan, adequate funding is unavailable, and–“with 10 airports and six competing airlines”–the San Francisco-Los Angeles corridor doesn’t need high-speed rail anyway.

Perhaps most important, the measure approved by voters in 2008 forbade any tax subsidies for operations. Yet recent recalculations of ridership projections and costs make it clear that fares will never cover operating costs, so even if they build it, they would not be able to run it (at least, without changing the law and finding money for operating subsidies).

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We Want High-Speed Rail, As Long As It Is Free

By | | News commentary, Transportation
21 Comments

Americans want high-speed rail, as long as someone else pays for it. States are chuffed upset, for example, because the federal government now says it wants the states to put up 20 percent of the capital cost. The original Federal Railroad Administration grant guidelines issued back in 2008 suggested that the feds might pay all of the costs. Though they added that states that provided matching funds might be more likely to get federal grants, no doubt some states feel betrayed by this change of policy.

Someone is going to say, “but the federal government paid 90 percent of the cost of interstate freeways, so why will it only pay 80 percent of the cost of rail?” The crucial difference is that both the federal and the state shares of the interstates were paid out of gas taxes, in other words, user fees. (Though called a “tax,” the gas tax was a user fee because it was imposed only on purchasers of gasoline–98 percent of which was used for driving–and because state gas taxes from the start, and federal gas taxes after 1956, were dedicated to highways.)

The interstates were also built on a pay-as-you-go basis: no borrowing in anticipation of future federal gas tax revenues. This introduced feedback into the system: if people didn’t drive, there was no money to build roads. That’s why it took longer than expected to complete the systems: not because people didn’t drive on the interstates–they drove on them like crazy–but because neither Congress nor the states indexed gas taxes to inflation.

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California High-Speed Rail in Trouble

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
118 Comments

New reports have raised questions about and spurred opposition to California’s grandiose high-speed rail plans. First, last April, the California state auditor reported that the state’s high-speed rail authority suffered from “inadequate planning, weak oversight, and lax contract management,” which is not exactly what you want to hear about an agency that is about to build the most expensive state-sponsored public works project in history.

Second, a new report from the University of California found that the state’s ridership forecasts “are not reliable.” Based on a re-assessment by economist David Brownstone (who is fast becoming one of the Antiplanner’s favorite economists) and two UC engineering profs, the fares needed to cover the trains’ operating costs would have to be more than double the original projections, which is also more than the cost of flying. Since the measure approved by voters in 2008 forbade any state operating subsidies, such high fares would doom the project.

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LaHood Acts Like a Hood — Again

By | | News commentary, Transportation
32 Comments

Not content to just threaten any airlines that might oppose heavy subsidies to high-speed rail aimed at putting their unsubsidized operations out of business, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood is now threatening railroads that are supposedly dragging their wheels in response to federal plans to run moderate-speed (up to 110 mph) trains on their freight lines. As previously noted here, three of the nation’s four largest railroads have stated that they do not believe that passenger trains can be safely run faster than 90 mph (79 mph in the case of one of the railroads) on the same tracks as freight trains.

Apparently, LaHood has been making “thinly veiled threats” to apply “punitive measures” to railroads that aren’t getting on board the 110 mph trains. Obama’s expectation was that the railroads would eagerly accept money to improve their tracks because the improvements would benefit the freight trains as well as passenger service. But the reality is that the typical freight car spends far more time standing still than in motion, so speeding a freight train from, say, 50 mph to 60 mph has almost no effect on the amount of time required to deliver payloads.

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More High-Speed Spending

By | | News commentary, Transportation
11 Comments

Here’s a brilliant idea from a disappointing governator who ran as a fiscal conservative but then helped his state run up tens of billions of dollars of deficits: build a “demonstration” high-speed rail project from Los Angeles to San Diego. The trains would use existing tracks and so would be moderate-speed rail, not true high-speed rail. Schwarzenegger hopes to see it completed before he leaves office so that people can see the benefits of California’s true high-speed rail project that won’t be completed before 2020.

The top speed of Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner from L.A. to San Diego is 90 mph. Schwarzenegger could spend a billion dollars on this route, but BNSF would still restrict the top speed to 90 mph.
Flickr photo by Snap Man.

Other than the fact that nobody has any money to do what Schwarzenegger proposes to do, one major problem is that the BNSF Railway, whose tracks the trains would use, has a policy that passenger trains may not go more than 90 mph on its tracks. CSX has a similar policy; Norfolk Southern’s limit is 79 mph. Of the nation’s four largest railroads, only the Union Pacific has agreed to allow trains as fast as 110 mph on its tracks, and then only if the government spends billions adding new tracks for both passenger and freight trains to run on.

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