Today, from Megan McArdle at the Daily Beast:
Without that kind of passenger traffic, it would never make sense to lay the tracks (new tracks are required because for high speed rail to be truly high speed, it needs very, very straight tracks.) The Chinese government has a variety of strongarm measures to simply take the land it wants (not to mention a lot of low-productivity farmland). The US government has to tediously assemble plots one by one, compensating the folks whose land it has seized, and then jumping through various obstacle courses comprised of local and environmental review processes.
So we aren’t getting a national high speed rail network. Your wallet should be glad. But those of you who would really like to hurtle across the American landscape at 300 mph from Chicago to Las Vegas are permitted a small sigh.
Me, responding to Megan’s choo-choo dreams in June 2008:
To make train travel competitive, you’d need to raise airline ticket prices about 15 times, say with an excise tax or a tariff. Raising the airline ticket prices 15 times would, of course, pretty well end the airline industry as we know it; rock stars and CEOs would be about all that was left. Although I suppose they’d give their occasional traveler a second bag of peanuts if asked.
New technology won’t help all that much for a nationwide system, either. The French TGV train — I love French: train à grande vitesse just sounds so much inherently cooler than “really fast train” — really only travels about 200 miles an hour; even maglev trains are not a lot faster. That would cut the travel time in half, making the total travel time to New York only, hoo-hah, 45 hours.
It’s not a matter of the government not supporting Amtrak. It’s not a matter of the U.S. not having the “will” to have the best passenger trains in the world. It’s that passenger trains, using any current technology or any technology we see coming in the foreseeable future, simply can’t compete with airlines.
It’s just arithmetic.
But government and government-philes love trains. It’s something they can make run on time.
No, they can’t!
They love trains because trains have limited stops. With a car, you can drive anywhere you want. With a train, you go where the central planners say you can go.
There there are these things called mountains…
What all these trainees miss is that the US is much, much larger than most countries that have high-speed trains. France is about the size of Texas. Japan, whose awesome shinkansen I’ve ridden, is about the size of California. They want high-speed trains, fine. We’re bigger than those countries, we’re not China, and trains are things of the past. Even the really really fast ones, that can’t keep up with airplanes.
– Jerry Brown forces California to build will be a fart (like him) in the wind of commerce.
Trains are useful for moving large amounts of cargo but, of course, there is no reason we need cargo to go six hundred miles an hour, or even two hundred miles an hour. Going sixty or seventy miles an hour is perfectly fine.
As the article says, for passenger service, airplanes are just CHEAPER!
We don’t need high speed passenger train service because planes are already cheaper and faster.
We don’t need high speed cargo train service because our cargo need to go that fast.
Is it REALLY that hard to understand?
That’s Supposed to read…
“We don’t need high speed cargo train service because our cargo DOESN’T need to go that fast.”
Sorry about that.
Don’t these people have a f*&king clue? Someone ought to invite this idiot dreamer to write a guest column on PJM and let us educate her. And I don’t mean being rude (if I can contain myself) but just to have her confront realities. Yeah, I think trains could be fun. I’m thinking about taking one to the west coast this spring. But I’m accepting the trade offs including the time involved and the expense.
Please Charlie, invite her to appear.
Guys, read Megan’s recent column: she’s seen the things you’re mentioning. I’m just enjoying saying “I told you so!”
That’s because Ms. McArdle has never actually driven or even ridden across the country. She has no idea of the intricacies of running a railroad, planning a railroad.
One of the reasons totalitarian countries like railroads is when necessary they can turn them off.
Good point on the perception of distance. I have a good friend who has traveled the world by plane but has spent almost her entire life within a 50 mile radius of Frederick, Maryland. She has this idea the United States is a terrible overcrowed place that can’t absorb anymore people. If my wife would let me I would take her on a cross country road trip so she could see that most of North America is empty space. My guess is that whe would go crazy by the time we hit Western Ohio and demand that we reutrn home. She has the classic flyover country mentality
Well to be honest, the Germans made rather efficient use of mass rail transit during WWII. It had something to do with a “final solution” to a vexing problem they had with certain government officially designated “undesirables” …
Fortunately there is no need for concern about a subculture in our society developing any sort of cult that is given to worshiping an individual personality so much that such a thing could ever happen here./s
The Germans were really good at using their rail networks for very large, efficient troop movements during the world wars. That’s one place where central planning shines – top town manipulation of lotsa humans at the command of one guy on top.
President Eisenhower’s support of the Interstate Highway system, in case of need for massive defensive movements, was sort of a reflection of that.
Hmmmm…I think you’re only partially correct.
My understanding is that the interstate Highway system was inspired by the autobahn.
Rail, on the other hand,was efficient – but came at the price of creating nice juicy targets for allied fighter bombers as the trains could not avoid or dodge during attacks which in turn made them prime targets. Lot of grainy black and white video out there of trains blowing up.
But yes, the Germans were big fans of the railroad.
The interstate highway system Was inspired by the german autobahn. Our army used it to full advantage during the waning days of WWII and Eisenhower believed in its usefulness. However, since at the time there was no constitutionally proper way to use federal public funds for what was heretofore a state function (i.e. highways), he sold it as a national defense measure and it was funded for that “purpose”.
There was an interesting interview with Ray LaHood on the Diane Rehm show yesterday (Yes, I am a National Proletarian Radio fan. So there!). On the subject of Amtrak he was absolutely exstatic that the GSE was operating profitably “especially in the Northeast corridor”. Translation, the BOS-WSH Acela operations are subsidising the rest of Amtrak’s money-losing operations. High-speed passenger rail works best in areas with high population densities. Downtown Boston to Midtown Manhattan train trips can take just as long as a similar trip by air. They are much less complicated logistically and similarly priced. Hence the service along the northeast megalopolis makes money. This cannot to be duplicated cross-country no matter how hard we try.
If Amtrak’s initial mandate was to reorganize passenger railroads and eventually go independent of government then perhaps it is time for the BOS-WSH corridor line to be taken up by the investment community and wean itself off of the goverment.