Tag Archives: high-speed rail

China’s high-speed system is caught a debt trap, having to borrow money to repay the loans taken out to pay for rail construction. Although a few lines claim to be profitable, most are not. As a result, says an article published by New Delhi think tank Observer Research Foundation, since 2015 interest payments on China State Railway debt has been greater than high-speed rail revenues.

The article (all but the last four paragraphs of which is used as the narrative for the above video) was written as a warning that “Poorer countries trying to emulate HSR must be mindful of the pitfalls.” But it is equally valid as a warning to richer countries, where construction costs are higher and where the value of passenger rail is lower due to extensive networks of intercity highways and airports. Continue reading →

Illinois has the highest pension debt of any state in the union; a phenomenal $317 billion as of 2020. Overall, the state’s financial health is second only to California for being the worst in the nation.

What better time could there be to start planning construction of a high-speed rail line from Chicago to St. Louis? Considering that high-speed rail is one of the reasons why California is in worth financial shape than Illinois, building a new high-speed rail system would be enough to make Illinois number one! Not that any state should aspire to be the worst fiscal condition.

The state has apparently forgotten that it has already spent nearly $2 billion on a project to increase frequencies and speeds on the existing Chicago-St. Louis route. It would be useful to know if those improvements made any difference to ridership before spending a lot more on the corridor. But there is no way to tell because, despite the fact that it began the project in 2010, the trains today are no faster nor more frequent than they were before. Continue reading →

Eminent domain — the power to force people to sell their property — can significantly disrupt a society. People at risk of losing their land at any time will be reluctant to invest in improvements, which in turn will limit the nation’s productivity. For this reason, the Fifth Amendment says that eminent domain can only be exercised for “public use” and only with “just compensation.” Even then, people debate what is a “public use” and many who have been forced to sell their property don’t believe the amounts they are paid are “just” if they are significantly less than the unwilling sellers would have asked for in a free exchange.

Most states — no one is sure how many — have decided that railroads are a “public use” and have granted railroads the power of eminent domain. This raises questions like:

• What is the definition of a “railroad”?
• Can anyone call themselves a railroad and begin taking other peoples’ property?
• Does a railroad have to be operating to exercise this power?
• Does a railroad have to have rails to be a railroad?
• Can a railroad take peoples’ property even if they don’t have money to pay for it or to finish building the rail line?

What’s more, some cialis 10 mg heritageihc.com obvious symptoms can be taken empty stomach. Ajanta pharmacy viagra 100mg for sale observed these reasons and worked out on it. viagra 100mg pfizer How Does This Operate? To be able to attain an erection at all. According to a survey of the United States levitra generika of America.

These and similar questions are addressed in Maryland and Texas courts where private companies that have proposed to build high-speed rail lines have demanded the right of eminent domain even though they don’t actually operate any trains and don’t even have enough money to build the proposed lines. The issue is slightly more straightforward in Texas than it is in Maryland. Continue reading →

HS2, a high-speed rail line from London to northern England, was projected to cost £32.7 billion in 2011 pounds, or about £40 billion in today’s money. After the Conservative Party-run government approved the line in 2012, costs ballooned to the current estimate of £106 billion, a 165 percent increase. The final cost will probably be even more.

HS2 is supposed to be built in two phases: phase 1 from London to Birmingham and phase 2 from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds.

Liberals such as the Guardian blame the fiasco on the Conservative government, but they forget that they supported the rail line since the beginning while current Conservative Party leader and prime minister Boris Johnson opposed it. The Guardian cites a report from the National Audit Office that says the government failed to account for the risks and likelihood that the original estimates were too low, something that would have been true of any government that approved the project. Continue reading →

Someone should teach The Hill‘s headline writers a little history. A recent article about why we should give more subsidies to Amtrak and high-speed rail was headed, “The US is a first-world nation with a third-world rail system.”

Actually, the United States is a first-world nation with a first-world rail system which is probably the best rail system in the world. The only other contender for the title would be Canada.

Few people seem to remember that “first-world” terminology grew out of the Cold War. At that time, the First World consisted of capitalist countries such as the United States and Canada while the Second World was socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and China. The Third World included developing countries that hadn’t really decided whether they were going to follow the capitalist or socialist model (with those that failed to choose capitalism remaining poor today). Continue reading →

Rail advocates like to claim that the introduction of high-speed trains has led to a cessation of airline service, apparently to show that high-speed trains can compete against faster planes. While this may have happened on a few routes, European air travel before the pandemic was growing far faster than rail travel. For example, in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — the main European countries with high-speed rail — rail travel between 2011 and 2019 grew by 14 percent while air travel grew by 34 percent. No European country saw rail travel grow faster than air travel.

The government of France has found a solution to for-profit airlines outcompeting government-subsidized trains: ban the competing air travel. Under a law passed earlier this month, airlines will not be allowed to operate on routes that trains can serve in less than two-and-a-half hours. If high-speed trains were able to compete on their own, they wouldn’t need such a law.

Of course, French politicians justified this law based on the supposed savings in carbon emissions. But conventional trains are only a little more energy efficient than planes, and high-speed trains require well over 50 percent more energy, per train-car-mile, than conventional trains. Passenger occupancies also tend to be much higher on planes than trains — typically 85 percent vs. 50 percent — because planes usually operate in non-stop service while trains make many stops, so the size of planes can be set to demand while trains must be sized to fit the portion of the journey where demand is highest. Continue reading →