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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 →

Chicago-St. Louis HSR Is a Dud

By | | Transportation
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When President Obama announced that high-speed rail would be a part of the 2009 economic stimulus program, Illinois immediately applied for federal funding for a high- (really moderate-) speed rail route from Chicago to St. Louis. According to the application (54 megabytes), the state would double track the existing line, owned mostly by Union Pacific, and run trains at up to 110 miles per hour. It would also increase the frequency of those trains from five to eight per day.

The state predicted that ridership would more than double from 521,000 trips year in 2008 to 1,210,000 trips in 2014, the first full year of operation. By 2018, the fifth full year, ridership would further increase to 1,339,000. (The application is actually inconsistent about how many riders were carried in 2008; page 33 says 521,000 while page 59 says 881,000. According to Amtrak, it was 476,000.)

So how well has that worked out? According to Amtrak’s FY 2018 performance report, ridership on the Chicago-St. Louis trains had grown to 586,200 trips in 2018. That’s 23 percent more than Amtrak’s number for 2008, but 56 percent short of the projected ridership. Continue reading →

Can High-Speed Rail Make Housing Affordable?

By | | Housing, Transportation
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UCLA management professor Jerry Nickerson thinks he has found a solution to California’s housing affordability problems: high-speed rail. Based on years of data, he has concluded that some Japanese who work in Tokyo and other expensive cities make long commutes on high-speed trains to more affordable cities elsewhere in the country.

What a fantastically dumb idea. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of undeveloped private land right next to the Los Angeles and San Francisco-Oakland urban areas. Most of these acres have little agricultural value and those around San Francisco are currently being used as pasture or range land, meaning they support a few head of cattle, while many of the undeveloped acres around Los Angeles probably don’t even support livestock.

So, to protect these lands from development, California should spend $77 billion to $100 billion or more building a high-speed rail line to the Central Valley, which has some of the most productive farm land in the nation, so that houses can be built on that farm land rather than on the range lands around Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Continue reading →