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Making a Virtue of Failure

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner makes no secret of the fact that I love trains, especially passenger trains. Yet I know that passenger rail transportation is obsolete because it is expensive (compared with either autos or air), slow (compared with air and often with autos), and inconvenient (compared with autos). Unlike some people, I don’t believe taxpayers should subsidize my hobbies.

Despite this, rail advocates far and wide proclaim the virtues of high-speed rail and rail transit. Yet all too often, the virtues they claim are really faults in disguise.

One high-speed rail blogger, for example, criticizes the Antiplanner for endorsing an emerging technology that will significantly increase everyone’s mobility, not just those who have a driver’s license or who can afford to ride high-priced trains. Why dream about new technologies, the blogger says, when we can spend hundreds of billions on an obsolete technology instead?

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Not So Fast for High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
10 Comments

Over most of Obama’s so-called high-speed rail network, the administration proposes to run passenger trains at top speeds of 110 miles per hour on the same tracks as freight trains. But CSX says it will not allow passenger trains to run faster than 90 mph on the same tracks as its freight trains. If the government wants to build new tracks, they must be at least 30 feet from CSX freight tracks.

Since New York, among other states, was counting on using CSX tracks for some of its moderate-speed rail routes, the Empire state has unsuccessfully pressured CSX to change this policy. Last month, the director of the state’s high-speed rail program quit in disgust because she felt other state officials were lying to CSX and not negotiating in good faith.

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Why We Can’t Go Back

By | | Transportation
32 Comments

Last week, the Antiplanner attended a meeting about high-speed rail sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislators. One of the speakers represented Amtrak, and though she spoke for about 10 or 15 minutes, her entire presentation could be boiled down into one statement: “What Amtrak needs is money, money, and more money.” (Yes, she actually said that.)

This reminded me of a statement made by a representative of the New York City Transit authority last fall at a Federal Transit Administration conference about the deteriorating condition of older rail transit systems. Even though New York’s rail system is in much better shapes than the ones in Boston, Chicago, or Philadelphia, the official admitted (in the last slide) that “there will never be enough money” to bring New York’s rail lines up to a state of good repair.

Rail transit and high-speed rail have bottomless appetites for tax dollars, partly because they are politically driven rather than being funded out of user fees. But there is an even more critical difference between modern passenger rail and past transportation innovations.

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Nix on Rocky Mountain High-Speed Rail?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
6 Comments

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The Future of French Rail

By | | Transportation
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Even as President Obama wants to build an American high-speed rail network to match the one in France, the French have begun to question the wisdom of their own high-speed rail system. French trains are operated by a government-owned corporation known as SNCF (short for the French translation of National Railway Company of France).

By 1997, building high-speed rail lines had put SNCF €28 billion — about $38 billion in today’s dollars — in debt. Although this debt was backed by the full faith and credit of the French government, it was pretty clear that rail fares would never repay it. Since the European Union requires that member countries not subsidize transport or other things that would give companies in those countries an unfair advantage over those in other members of the EU, in 1997 France separated SNCF into two companies: SNCF would continue to operate trains, while a new company named Réseau Ferré de France (RFF, which translates to French Rail Network) builds and maintains the tracks.

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Wisconsin’s High-Cost, Low-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
18 Comments

Wisconsin was the fourth-highest (after California, Florida, and Illinois) recipient of federal high-speed rail money, receiving $823 million to initiate Milwaukee-to-Madison service. The state’s application proposes to use this money to operate six trains a day between the two cities as a continuation of service from Chicago to Milwaukee.

The proposal does not call for high-speed (faster than 125 mph) or even moderate-speed (faster than 80 mph) rail. Instead, the top speeds will only be 79 mph until even more money is spent improving signaling to allow for “positive train control” (which insures trains will automatically stop when necessary even if the engineer fails to stop the train).

With three stops between Madison and Milwaukee, the average speed will be just 58 mph. That’s a bit higher than the current Badger Bus, which averages 42 to 52 mph depending on which bus you take. But the rail route is longer than the bus route, which means the train will take longer (1 hour 40 minutes) than the fastest bus (1 hour 30 minutes).

In addition, the bus stops in the middle of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, while current plans call for the train to terminate at Dane County Airport on the edge of town, with transit connections to downtown and the university. This gives even the slower (1 hour 50 minute) buses a huge competitive advantage.

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Rail Jobs Overestimated

By | | News commentary, Transportation
2 Comments

Remember all those jobs that high-speed rail was going to create? Turns out, not so much.

Wisconsin, for example, had claimed that its share of high-speed rail funds would create 13,000 jobs. In fact, it is only going to be 4,700— and then only at the peak of construction.

So how did 4,700 turn in to 13,000? If you have a job this year, and a job next year, they counted that as two separate jobs. And if you have a job the year after that, that’s three jobs.

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One More Strike Against High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

At last, a new reason why high-speed rail won’t work: bad architecture. According to this Chicago Tribune architecture critic, Chicago’s Union Station once had a beautiful, skylit concourse between the waiting room and trains, but it was replaced by a couple of skyscrapers. Now travelers have to walk through low-ceilinged tunnels that are confusing, apparently because you can’t see the sun. This means high-speed rail is doomed to failure — unless, of course, we spend a few more billions on beautiful new stations.

Actually, I’ve been to Union Station many times and never got confused in the tunnels (there are really only two directions to go). But leave it to an architect (or architecture critic) to say that we can make high-speed rail work by spending more money on building design.
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Chicago used to have six trains stations — Central, Grand Central, LaSalle, Northwestern, Dearborn, and Union — and now it is down to one (though remnants of some of the others still exist). But I suspect that, even if we spend a trillion or so on high-speed rail, that one will still be adequate to handle the traffic.

High-Speed Raildoggles

By | | News commentary, Transportation
28 Comments

A day after proposing a spending freeze (that everyone from Glenn Beck to Paul Krugman thinks is stupid), Obama gleefully announced $8 billion in federal grants for high-speed rail. But Obama knows full well that the final cost will be much, much more than $8 billion.

How much more? The Antiplanner once estimated $550 billion in capital costs (not counting cost overruns). BNSF CEO Mark Rose guesses $1 trillion (he must have included cost overruns). Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio compromises at $700 billion.

“The thing is unimaginably expensive,” admits DeFazio. But, he adds, $700 billion is “the same amount of money that Congress gave in one day to Wall Street!” In trying to make high-speed rail sound cheap, he is hoping you won’t remember that Congress didn’t give Wall Street anything; it was almost all loans and most, if not all, will be repaid. That won’t happen with high-speed rail.

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HSR as Wasteful in U.K. as in U.S.

By | | Transportation
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Rail advocates argue that high-speed rail makes the most sense in 300- to 600-mile corridors, so some think that the United States is too big for it to work. Conversely, English columnist Simon Jenkins argues that Britain is too small for high-speed rail to make sense: what the country needs, he says, is more reliable trains, not faster ones. “In rail terms, England is one huge metropolis in which the chief constraint on time is not technology but the number of stops.”

Jenkins writes with authority (and a bit of sour grapes), as he was on the board of British Rail in the 1980s before it was privatized and also on the board of London Transport. He thinks the “pseudo-privatization” of rail services has made it less reliable and more bureaucratic than ever (against which it has to be pointed out that Britain is the only European country where public transit is gaining market share).

But his arguments against high-speed rail are right on: it is a “gargantuan project” that “will cost a lifetime of money” and mainly “serve a few rich travelers.” Nor is it “particularly green.” Instead of investing billions in building brand new tracks, the money should be spent on making the existing tracks work better.

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