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Texas Central Project May Be Dead

By | | Transportation
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After promising that their Dallas-Houston high-speed rail project would be built solely with private funds, Texas Central backers are sending out feelers about getting a federal guaranteed loan to build it. A letter from the company chairman to Texas state senator Robert Nichols says the project “hit a snag” due to the coronavirus, but “monies we hope to receive from President Trump’s infrastructure stimulus” could make it “construction ready this year.”

The fact that President Trump doesn’t have any infrastructure stimulus money is just a minor detail. Company officials cited possible loans through the Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing (RRIF) or the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) programs. However, neither of these loan programs are large enough for the kind of project contemplated by Texas Central.

Texas Central was originally supposed to cost $10 billion. Then it was going to cost $20 billion. But the letter to Nichols now admits that the project may cost $30 billion. Continue reading →

Glaring and Frequent Errors

By | | Transportation
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A supposed “analysis” of a proposal for high-speed rail between Vancouver, BC and Seattle is full of “glaring and frequent errors” and is more of a “promotional brochure” than a serious analysis, says transportation accountant Tom Rubin in a report published last week by the Washington Policy Center. Rubin’s first clue that the so-called analysis was more like political propaganda was that it was proposing not just any old high-speed rail but ultra high-speed rail — a term, Rubin points out, that has never been previously used but that is defined in the analysis as trains going more than 250 miles per hour.

The second problem Rubin found is that the trains in the proposal didn’t meet this definition, having actual top speeds of 220 miles per hour. Rubin speculates that the company doing the analysis used the term “ultra” to try to distance its proposal from the California debacle, even though that plan was also for trains going at a top speed of 220 miles per hour.

The analysis was prepared by a company called WSP, which itself has earned $666 million on the California project and could reasonably be expecting to earn more if Washington decides to build a high-speed rail line. Rubin suggests that maybe this indicates that the company has a conflict of interest when preparing this analysis. Continue reading →

Not the Best Timing

By | | Transportation
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A group called the High-Speed Rail Alliance was pleased to announce that Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton is proposing that the federal government spend $240 billion on high-speed rail lines. This is, says the Congressman, “a vision worthy of the moment.”

Is it worthy because ridership of Amtrak is down 95 percent? Or is it worthy because Americans are rethinking their use of mass transportation?

No, apparently it’s worthy because President Trump started a trade war with China that was exacerbated by accusations over COVID-19. China, says Representative Moulton, is expected to “invest” (meaning spend) $46 billion a year on high-speed rail between 2020 and 2030. So, since China is doing it, we have to do it too in order to stay “competitive.” Continue reading →

Closing the Gap

By | | Transportation
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China is building a magnetically levitated (maglev) train that will “fill the gap between high-speed rail and air transportation,” says CNN. This new train may have a top speed of 370 miles per hour, which “could narrow the gap between high-speed rail and air travel,” says Republic World.

What is this preoccupation with gaps? The only gap I see is between the ears of those who think maglev makes sense either in the United States or anywhere else in the world.

Here’s the gap: high-speed rail costs a lot more and goes a lot slower than flying. Maglev will cost even more and still go slower than flying. How does that fix the gap? Wake me up when someone comes up with a technology that costs less and goes faster than jet aircraft. Continue reading →

1. A Tale of Two Train Disasters

By | | Policy brief
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In 2004, Denver-area voters approved a sale tax increase to pay for “FasTracks,” a plan to build 119 miles of rail transit lines in the metropolitan area. In 2008, California voters approved the sale of bonds to pay for the construction of a 520-mile high-speed rail line between Los Angeles/Anaheim and San Francisco/San Jose. FasTracks is within a metropolitan area and high-speed rail is supposed to connect several metropolitan areas, yet there are a lot of similarities between these two projects.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Both rely on technologies that were rendered obsolete years before they received voter approval. The agencies sponsoring both projects ignored early warning signals that the projects were not cost effective. Both had large cost overruns. Advocates of both lied to voters about the benefits and costs of the projects. Due to poor planning, both projects remain incomplete. Despite the failure of the projects to date, both have adherents who hope to complete them. Continue reading →

Illinois Megafollies

By | | Transportation
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An article in the Wall Street Journal this week uses the Chicago-St. Louis corridor to explain why high-speed rail “remains elusive” in the United States: it’s expensive; it takes a long time to plan and build; and it gets few people out of their cars or off of airplanes. Yet the article misses a lot of important points and could leave readers feeling that “if only we made a few changes, high-speed rail would work here.”

The article says that the planned top speed of the Illinois project is just 110 miles per hour, but it fails to note that the average speed will be just 63 miles per hour, if that. I say “if that” because (as the article also fails to mention but as the Antiplanner observed in January) the project was supposed to be done five years ago, yet today all the state is promising is that it hopes to get trains running at top speeds of 90 miles per hour this year.

In any case, according to Google, the drive time from Chicago Union Station to the St. Louis Amtrak station is 4 hours and 41 minutes, just eleven minutes longer than the train will be if and when it ever reaches its planned top speeds. Since most people have origins and destinations that differ from train stations, and since cars can leave at anytime of the day instead of the eight times a day a train happens to operate, the trains won’t pose much competition for highway travel. Continue reading →

Stopping Transportation Megafollies

By | | Transportation
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A commentary in Governing magazine argues that the Trump administration erred in demanding that California return the federal grants used to build its incomplete high-speed rail project. After all, the alternative to not building it is to build it, and that would require at least another $35 billion in federal funds, which Trump does not want to provide.

The other problem is that demanding a refund for incomplete projects creates a perverse incentive for states and cities to finish projects even after they have realized they are a waste of money. “Sometimes common sense wins out only after construction of a megafolly has begun,” says the commentary. “States and cities shouldn’t have to complete projects that they never should have started just to avoid returning federal money they’ve already spent.”

The commentary specifically cites the Honolulu rail line, whose costs have grown from $5 billion when it received federal funding to nearly $10 billion today. The project has been so mismanaged that the Federal Transit Administration has filed three subpoenas for thousands of pages of records. The city probably has enough money to finish 16 miles of the planned 20-mile line, but if the federal government demands a refund if the entire line isn’t finished, it will have to impose another $3 billion or more in taxes on local taxpayers to finish a white elephant. Continue reading →

Sanity Reaches Sacramento

By | | Transportation
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California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that he is cancelling the state’s high-speed rail project. The project “as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long,” he argued, and he doesn’t see “a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A.” (a phrase he got backwards).

Originally projected to cost $20 billion, then $33 billion, then $68 billion, and most recently $77 billion (but it would undoubtedly be even more), the state has never found the resources to fully fund even the lowest, much less the latest, cost estimate.

Newsom said the state will complete the 164 miles it is building between Merced and Bakerfield, allowing Amtrak to run its trains a little faster in that corridor. Amtrak’s San Joaquin, which goes from San Francisco to Los Angeles on that route, carries about a million trips per year and runs two-thirds empty. Amtrak claims the train lost only $11 million last year, but it doesn’t count depreciation and it counts state subsidies to the train as “revenues,” so the real loss is much larger. Continue reading →

The New Transportation Intelligence Test

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has called streetcars an intelligence test: anyone who thinks they are a good idea is not smart enough to make decisions about urban transportation. Now Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed a new intelligence test, this one dealing with high-speed rail.

Obama’s high-speed rail plan might have replaces 5 percent of American air travel and was projected to cost at least half a trillion dollars. Replacing all air travel would cost much more.

In a description of her Green New Deal released yesterday, Ocasio-Cortez advocates that we “build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” This is far more ambitious than Obama’s high-speed rail plan, which was only about 12,000 route miles in five separate, disconnected systems. Continue reading →

Northwest High-Speed Rail Cluelessness

By | | Transportation
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A couple of days ago, the Antiplanner noted that cities fail to learn from each other’s experience with rail transit disasters. It turns out that states don’t learn either, as the state of Washington is considering creating a high-speed rail authority and giving it millions of dollars to study a high-speed rail line from Eugene to Vancouver, BC.

Of course, such an authority worked so well in California, where costs have more than doubled, the project has been delayed for years verging on decades, and proponents’ claims that fares would cover operating costs are so unlikely as to be laughable. If it doesn’t work in California, which has the densest urban areas in the United States, how can it possibly make sense in the Pacific Northwest, where populations and densities are much lower?

The article is accompanied by a photo of a Siemens prototype high-speed rail car. My 66-year-old eyes can’t read all of the writing on the side, but if Siemens were honest it would read, “Connecting cities at half the speed and ten times the cost of flying.” Continue reading →