It's always interesting to read the reservations held by high-speed rail promoters. Michael Scott Moore is a supporter of high-speed rail, but he does qualify his endorsement with a number of caveats, and those are what we should be paying attention to. Here's his article in which he admonishes us to proceed with high-speed rail but to "go slow."
His first observation is that since real HSR requires adequate rail corridors (straight and level), we in the US are badly prepared for such trains and in most cases (such as California) have to start at ground zero. What Moore doesn't go into is that most rail corridors in the US are freight owned and controlled and HSR on their corridors would be nothing more than a pain in the rear for them.
Then, he raises but doesn't resolve the mantra of "build it and they will come." It's not only in Florida that transportation professionals have said that "no one will ride this train." Moore goes on to suggest that we have an almost mythic/cultural attachment to automobiles and "nobody knows" whether we will abandon them (or flying) to ride fast luxury trains between cities.
All of which is to say that there is a raging debate about "ridership." We already know from history (see Bent Flyvbjerg) that the rail promoters invariably exaggerate ridership projections to almost ridiculous numbers in their desperation to attract funding for a project that might very well be useless.
In the US, our fear is not so much about a completed, operational rail system built from scratch, sitting useless, as he says. But that it will never be completed to become operational and all the billions poured down this rat-hole will be sunk as unrecoverable costs. Only those contractors, politicians, etc. that have been "on the take" will make out like bandits and it will cost the rest of us endless tax-dollars.
It's really getting tiresome to keep seeing "success" stories from the UK or Europe or Asia as justification for a US commitment. Upon close examination,the success stories are nothing of the sort. All those lavish percentage increases still are trivial numbers. Remember, we are talking about taking trains that charge the most expensive fares for any train ride. How will that ever attract a mass population, anywhere? These trains are for the "upper crust" be it in "communist" China, Spain or Japan; the professional suits with their laptops.
One of Moore's central points is what he calls the "spark" effect, based on the presumed success (ridership increases) of rail electrification in the UK in the 20th century.
We are hearing this same mantra from Caltrain on the Bay Area Peninsula. If they can electrify, most of their operational deficit problems will go away. Build it, and they will come. Well, maybe. But, what if they don't? Shouldn't we ask for the most cost-effective way to upgrade? What if there are technologies (DEMUs) that can accomplish nearly the same thing for a lot less funding? I find this another argument that is highly speculative.
Here is a "side bar" point: I'm very uncomfortable with the argument that speed sells. I know speed costs, but if, on the one hand, we are told that whatever the duration of the train ride, people can work (wireless, etc.), then if the train ride is one hour longer, nothing is lost since that hour becomes another productive hour. HSR riders are immersed in the lap of luxury and computer productivity. Since "getting there" is half the fun, as they used to say, what's the damn hurry? This is a trivial debate and a trivial issue, and the increased time saved, especially when counted in minutes, is not a compelling argument. The rail promoters are, of course, making this one of the major selling points.
The problem with the "spark" effect is that we won't know its effect until we have spent all the money and gotten the train rolling. And then, we have to calculate the continuous subsidy costs to keep it running. The Chinese lesson should be clear, now that the Chinese are slowing down all their high-speed trains by 30 miles per hour, and perhaps more than that. Maybe speed is not all it's cracked up to be.
We've said this many times. Transit is not a zero-sum game. There is no fixed travelling population that will, given a choice, transfer from one modality to another unless there are fundamental and permanent advantages for making such changes.
That did happen in the US. Passenger rail use declined as air traffic and highway traffic increased. The problem with HSR is a fixed track that, once installed, can't be changed; it's there forever. Unless you live in the apartment next to the train station and your office is next to the train station in another city (more or less), you will not be riding this train very much, if at all. Actually, in the US, that problem is not that different than with airports. Although rail, if you look at the map, is far less networked across the US than flight routes.
There are many reasons people drive cars; one is that the US developed/evolved to accommodate that transit modality. Rail, fast or slow, is not embedded into our culture; perhaps it once was, but no longer. All of Amtrak, all over the US, during its most dazzling successful year, carries around 25 million annual passengers (one third in the Northeast Corridor). That's in a Nation of over 300 million. How are the rest of us travelling?
The California project, for its 500 miles, from a city of 800 thousand to another city of 3 million, projects 40 million annual passengers. Huh? Mr. Moore and I agree; start slow with "bullet trains."
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PEAN DISPATCH
May 2, 2011
Start Slow With Bullet Trains
Will investing in speed and electrification create the “sparks effect” needed to convince Americans to ride high-speed rail?
By Michael Scott Moore
The prospect of building new rail corridors in the U.S. must seem expensive and daunting, as it did to Europeans 20 or 30 years ago. Old American track, in many cases, is too rickety or crowded for modern electric trains to vault between major cities at speeds that compete with short-haul passenger flights. To upgrade the U.S. rail system in any significant way, there will have to be at least a few dedicated high-speed lines, on whole new rights-of-way. The cost will be staggering.
And what if the people don’t come? “No one will ride this train,” was a refrain on message boards in Florida early this year from people who backed Gov. Rick Scott’s eyebrow-raising decision to reject federal funding for a high-speed link between Orlando and Tampa.
Americans don’t ride trains; they like their cars. Right? The fact is, nobody knows. In California, where an L.A.-to-San Francisco project is further ahead than most others in the U.S., a group of Palo Alto homeowners has pressed for (probably nonexistent) details on just how many people will use this train. “Ultimately,” Governing magazine reported last year, “Palo Altans worry that their homes will be razed to build capacity the system won’t end up needing.”
The sight of expensive rail systems gathering dust like abandoned theme parks around the American countryside would, of course, be a waking nightmare. But the history of steadily speedier trains in Europe suggests something different. When Britain started to shift its rail service in the 1950s and ’60s from steam to (much faster, if not “bullet”-speed) electrified trains, researchers noticed what came to be known as the sparks effect: Electrify the line, and people will ride.
“A 26 percent reduction in the London-Manchester journey time produced a 27 percent increase in demand,” writes Dr. Terry Gourvish, at the London School of Economics, in a recent report called, “The High-Speed Rail Revolution: Its History and Prospects.”
“Sparks effect” is an antiquated term, but Gourvish uses it in a report on the feasibility of a second British high-speed line called HS2. “The effect is there, whatever you want to call it,” he told me, “that if you invest in speed, and invest in electrification, you get extra revenue.” It was consistent in Britain regardless of the decade.
British bullet trains lag behind the continent’s. The U.K.’s single modern high-speed line, the EuroStar, rushes off the island and over to Paris as quickly as possible. But even the most sophisticated European systems, like France’s TGV or Spain’s AVE, had modest, experimental beginnings. The German ICE or Inter-City trains linked a number of West German hubs in the 1980s but came into their own in the ’90s after reunification opened more logical routes between east and west.
“It does matter, the distance between your major centers of industry and commerce,” Gourvish said.
“In Spain, Barcelona is far enough from Madrid to make high-speed rail work because it can kill off air competition, and it’s too far for motor vehicles to pose a threat. This is why high-speed rail is not really going to be successful in the Netherlands, though they’ve built lines between Amsterdam and Rotterdam and so on. The distances between these places [are] just too small.”
Germany’s system works because it’s fully mixed — ICE trains run on the same track as slower, more regional trains. Germany isn’t linear enough to benefit from a single dedicated trunk line like Japan’s (between Tokyo and Kyoto). American planners have to face the same considerations. Except on the two most obvious routes — in California and the Northeast Corridor — dedicated lines might be too expensive. And in Germany, a mixed system has required years of route and schedule adjustments.
So the main lesson from Europe might be: Start slow. “The example of the Spanish case should not serve precisely to animate U.S. politicians” but warn them off, wrote El Mundo soberly after Gov. Scott’s decision in Florida. “The governments [here in Spain] spent a fortune on the AVE while the economy flourished thanks to the real estate bubble.” And the era of Spanish rail enthusiasm in the early 2000s contributed to Spanish debt — which has made at least as many headlines over the past year as American high-speed trains.
