Remember what I was saying about the recent Los Angeles Times editorial? I compared it both with the Oakland Tribune in one blog entry, and then compared it with another op-ed column in the same newspaper. The point was that the LA Times came close to understanding the high-speed rail situation, but, no cigar! Their editorial position remains, as it has been from the beginning of HSR concern, that high-speed rail is a great idea for California, just not under the current management. Wrong!
Here is Edward Morrissey's take and he finds the same problem with that editorial. However, like many writers, he hasn't kept up with the changing news. It's no longer a rail corridor merely from Borden to Corcoran, as all the papers continue to insist. It's from just outside of Merced all the way down to just outside of Bakersfield. That's over 100 miles. The rail authority has been receiving additional funds (like from the Florida rejection) to extend their earlier plans.
However, that's only the current plan and it could change dramatically when more reality sets in. This project, as it starts to unfold, has been one improvization after another.
One of the as yet unanswered questions is, how much per mile will this new Central Valley construction actually cost? They can throw all the numbers at us that they make up, but until actual construction bids come in, we won't really know. And even then, there are still too many unknowns.
All of which is to say, they may build a lot less rail corridor than they want us to believe. And, to remind you, they have no intentions in this first go-around to make these tracks functional for any rolling stock other than Amtrak's Diesel passenger operations. This corridor will have no "bells and whistles" necessary for high-speed rail. This is not the "train to nowhere;" it's the tracks that will never be used by high-speed rail.
But, I digress. While Morrissey castigates the LA Times for wanting no more than management replacement for the CHSRA, he does not address the non-functionality and pointlessness of the high-speed rail concept in the US generally.
Analogies help us to understand what we are dealing with. We've mentioned the defunct Concorde previously as an analog. Now, let's look at ocean liners, another transit technology that played a major role in inter-continental travel for 100 years. The Atlantic was crowded with vast, thousand feet long ocean liners going back and forth between New York and England in the first half of the 20th century. (Yes we know about the Titanic.)
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Elizabeth_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_liner#The_20th_century
As Wikipedia says, Ocean liners were the primary mode of intercontinental travel for over a century, from the mid-19th century until they began to be supplanted by airliners in the late 1960s.
The glamorous days of ocean liners are pretty much gone. They cruised around 30/40 knots. Even if it were possible to create new ones that travelled at, say, four times that speed, should they be brought back? And should the US pay for a fleet of them? Ridiculous. Well, the ocean liners were somewhat like high-speed rail; luxurious and elegant, even though they also included "lower class" travel, all the way to "steerage." (Which HSR won't do.) And, I should point out, they were profitable.
The point here is that there are modes of transit that will no longer be used the way we used to. Ocean liners have evolved into recreational cruise ships for vacations, not for business travel. ("The voyage is the reward," as Steve Jobs used to say.)
Likewise, overland, we used to travel across the United States by rail. [Edit. I did so, from Syracuse, New York to San Antonio, Texas in three days when I entered military service in 1952.] We no longer do that, unless it's recreational. Air carriers are the primary mode of transit beyond distances convenient for driving. That's why the rail industry declined in the latter half of the 20th century. Convenience and the market place made that evolution possible.
Please note, I'm talking about the US only.
If such travel by passenger rail has become inconvenient, it is absurd to seek to bring back rail and make it go faster to solve whatever transit problems we now endure. What should be done is fix the air service. Any funding that is now available for re-inventing the rail modality with higher speeds should be used to make major upgrades in air carrier service, long and short haul.
For example, a huge improvement in air travel is called "NextGen" and it sits on the drawing boards at the FAA, waiting for $12 billion to install it nationwide. It would increase air and airport capacity profoundly, with shorter, more fuel efficient trips. New aircraft technologies also are far more fuel efficient. The regulatory FAA is severely underfunded. It's odd that the Department of Transportation has such retrospective perspectives; politics is the only explanation.
In 'System' terms, it is always more effective to make incremental improvements, rather than replace a major component of that system completely with another. It is a grave mistake to view HSR as a replacement for short haul air traffic, as the CHSRA has argued. The commercial air business developed concurrently with passenger rail use throughout the 20th century, driven by market demand. And now, the government wants to reverse that evolutionary trend. That's not a good idea.
So, the surviving useful and viable rail systems for passengers remains urban and regional public mass transit that has a role to play insofar as it is integrated with a larger and more comprehensive multi-modal transit network system.
Therefore, there really is no compelling argument to bring back inter-city, or cross-continental rail, no matter how fast. It still won't do the job as well as what we have now. And, as we've been saying, all those other claims of HSR curing all our various ills are just that, illusory advertising claims, with no substance to them. Which means that Edward Morrissey in his essay doesn't go far enough either.
But, that's OK. He certainly is on target with what he does say.
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EDWARD MORRISSEY
A high-speed derailment in California
Why the state's proposed new rail system is little more than a foolish boondoggle
POSTED ON MAY 17, 2011, AT 3:30 PM
The Los Angeles Times editorial board almost got the big picture on the state's high-speed rail plan this week. The editors decried the sadly predictable results of sinking vast amounts of money into government boondoggles, with consequences including political decisions on routing and location, spiraling costs, and bad management.
The conclusion reached by the editors? Let's have a different government agency try running it instead.
So close — and yet so far.
California's high-speed rail project has lots of problems, but its most basic is purpose. The project proposes to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco with an express train that will take two hours and 40 minutes from beginning to end. That sounds good in comparison to the drive, which is approximately six-and-a-half hours, when there is no traffic, or by existing Amtrak service, which takes almost 10 hours to go from Union Station to Moscone Center — and uses two buses.
In contrast, passengers have plenty of choices for direct transportation between the two major metropolitan areas via commercial airlines. Not only does the airline ticket price on Travelocity come in at only a little more than subsidized Amtrak fares for a round trip ($138 as compared to $112), it takes less than half of the time to travel than the proposed "high-speed" rail project does — 75 minutes as opposed to 160 minutes. Consumers can save an average of $20 on fares by booking a flight from less-used Long Beach Airport (adding only 5 minutes to the length of the flight), and still have a choice between three different airlines for non-stop service.
With these choices and convenience, why bother going ground at all?
Purpose isn't the only problem with high-speed rail. Thanks to rules attached to federal subsidies in President Obama's stimulus package, California had to break ground on the project by next year. That forced the state to focus much of its $3.5 billion on an effort to connect the bustling metropolises of… Borden and Corcoran. The latter is a town of less than 25,000 people located 174 miles north of Los Angeles, while Borden, 167 miles south of San Francisco, is an unincorporated area that doesn’t even have a population listing. Its county, Madera, boasts a population of 148,000, making it 33rd out of 58 counties in California in population.
Taxpayers throughout the country therefore paid more than $3 billion to connect fewer than 175,000 people by rail. That may not be a "train to nowhere," as the Times' editors put it, but it's pretty darned close. Moreover, thanks to California's own budget meltdowns, the state won’t allow any bond issues for rail projects that don't generate enough revenue to pay for themselves — and with the fabulous destinations of Borden and Corcoran as end points, the state won’t sell enough tickets to have the engines pulling out of the station.
We could talk about some of the other strange decisions by the state on the rail line, such as diverting from its express path to wander around Bakersfield and Lancaster, which added $1 billion dollars to the cost of the project, but the picture is clear.
High-speed rail, run by government as it must be, spends a lot of money to go where almost no one wants to go. Decisions get made on the basis of political expediency rather than efficient use of capital, as no one gets rewarded for the latter and everyone is afraid to buck the former. All of this takes place in the service of a train system that takes more than twice as long to transport passengers by the most optimistic calculations, along a line that roughly follows the San Andreas Fault.
Does the L.A. Times conclude that California should dump its high-speed rail project in the face of all this failure? Not at all. The paper's editorial states that the only logical solution is to start over from scratch and take the project away from the High Speed Rail Authority, presumably by creating another agency with a different name but the same mission, and with the exact same political pressures.
Why? Because the editors insist that the federal and state governments need to provide "cleaner, safer and cheaper competition to airlines and reducing reliance on gas-guzzling automobiles." First, "cheaper" assumes that the ticket cost represents the total cost. It doesn't. A recent study at the Heritage Foundation shows that the federal subsidies for Amtrak now are over $237 per every 1,000 passenger miles, while commercial airline fares get $4.23 of subsidies for the same measure. A ticket may be cheaper at the window for high-speed rail, but it's going to cost taxpayers a bundle.
Besides, why should we want the federal government to compete with airlines and force them out of business? Airlines provide real competition and deliver superior service. It's also hard to make an argument for environmentalism when the state is about to chew up hundreds of miles of land in order to install high-speed rail, and then power the trains with electricity that California already has to buy from out-of-state producers that rely on fossil fuels. It wasn't that long ago that Californians had to endure rolling blackouts because of electricity shortages, and the state will have to scrounge for every kilowatt-hour to push the trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
There are no good reasons to build this high-speed rail system, except for pork-barrel politics that benefit the politicians while soaking the taxpayers. The real lesson from California’s derailment is that government should stay out of the transportation business. One could even see that clearly from Borden… if one could find it.
