Here are some segments of a lengthy written discussion about various critical subject, including high-speed rail. The comment that opens the discussion, by Steve Steckler, is worth paying attention to.
There were many answers from different people to the questions posed by the moderator, David Mark. Many of those were supportive of HSR, with all the usual sweeping promises and forecasts that we have learned to ignore.
The key question hinged on Florida's Governor Scott's decision to turn down $2.4 billion for HSR. If you read a lot of HSR articles, it becomes apparent that Governor Scott committed a sinful break-through almost like Martin Luther initiating the Reformation, when he nailed his '95 Theses' on the Wittenburg Church door. Scott said NO THANK YOU to the HSR establishment and the Democratic Party.
Scott's rejection was viewed as heresy (and still is in many venues), and at the same time brought out the greed of all those states and districts lusting for federal dollars. Those dollars, labelled "High-Speed Rail," are being dispersed mostly for Amtrak upgrades; thereby a way of funding capital development improvements for a highly subsidized passenger rail program that lives on the Government's generosity. The Administration has been saying, let's improve Amtrak but call it "High-Speed Rail" because that "sells" better.
Anyhow, Steckler deconstructs the problems with high-speed rail in the context of national culture and politics. That's an important way to look at all this. He also offers some alternative perspectives with which I conditionally agree and would have to give far greater thought to.
What's been missing in all the pro- and con-HSR discussions has been these kind of thoughtful considerations from different perspectives. It's not as simple as a for or against answer. But is it clear that what's going on now, what the intentions and the costs are, is stunningly bad.
For example, I concur that making airports inter-city mulit-modal hubs, with high-speed connectors, sounds quite plausible.
There are very fast trains into Paris, Shanghai, Stockholm, and London from their respective airports, among many other cities. Where can we find that in the US? One is under construction from Dulles into Washington, but it's in constant funding turmoil.
The oft-claimed virtue of HSR is that it can travel from inner-city to inner-city. That, in the US, is a questionable benefit. Most of us no longer live or work in the inner city, except perhaps the very well to do in Manhattan. At least, Steckler' position, valid or not, does not pit one modality -- high-speed rail -- against all the others as all our HSR promoters are so fond of doing. He seeks to integrate them, and I am a believer in integrated multi-modal transit systems.
Let's just say, for the sake of discussion, that it is worth investigating the merits of building a true high-speed rail system from Washington D.C. to Boston, by way of Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, as well as several other major population centers along the way. As it happens, that's the Amtrak-Acela route and Amtrak has just received a lot of federal funding to upgrade parts of that route. However, that's still not true HSR.
If, as Amtrak suggests, such a HSR system will cost $117 billion over 20 or 30 years to construct, it might be appropriate for us to lower our sights, even for this most heavily used route in the US, for the time being. (You can bet that the costs will be twice that!) Incremental upgrades might be just the ticket in order to sell more tickets and increase already popular Acela service.
I have said this before; the cost-benefits of speed can be graphed on an asymptotic curve. If the costs of construction and operation of a train system going 150 mph is X, building one that goes 200 mph will cost at least 2X. And so on, as the cost increase becomes ever greater and the performance gains diminish.
The point here is that while it sounds so AMERICAN to shoot for the sky (Man on the Moon) with high-speed rail -- costs no obstacle, the more pedestrian and far lower cost improvements to Amtrak may have greater cost-efficiencies and benefits. And, as you know, the Department of Transportation has never conducted cost-benefit analyses of high-speed rail. Why not? Perhaps because they don't want to know the answers.
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The Arena - Daily debate about the big issue of the moment
POLITICO Home
May. 21, 2011
Driving the Conversation:
Arena Ref: David Mark
David Mark Moderator :
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) has tussled recently with the federal government over funding for high speed rail. Scott, citing concerns over potential cost overruns, rejected $2.4 billion in federal dollars to pay for construction of a high speed rail line connecting Tampa and Orlando.
Did Gov. Scott make the right call on high speed rail? And have high speed rail costs been justified elsewhere by strong enough ridership?
Steve Steckler Chairman and founder, Infrastructure Management Group (IMG) :
Hard Lessons From Four American High-Speed Rail Initiatives
Being a financial adviser to American high-speed-rail projects is like being an oncological acupuncturist: You really hope it works, but you have to be realistic even if it costs you a wishful client or two. The experiences (and my own work) in Florida, Texas, Illinois and California have enough in common to draw a few painful lessons.
1. America Just Isn’t Europe
Center-left politicians will never succeed in making Americans into urban-living train lovers as long as they lack the courage to impose the European-level energy taxes necessary to drive the middle and working classes out of their cars and into trains. Moreover, those high energy taxes are also necessary to force the higher-density residential patterns that make European-level mass-transit systems such a great complement to HSR.
Finally, the administration’s ham-fisted automotive fuel-efficiency regulations worsen the situation by burying what could be useful consumer price signals into the higher price of new cars. Once you own a car — and everyone will — why take a train when you can drive at an incremental cost of 15 cents a mile or less, especially when you know you’d probably have to rent a car at the other end of a train ride?
2. Highways and Airports Are Largely Self-Financing, but Trains Aren’t Even Close
Transportation modes have two kinds of costs: construction and operations/maintenance. For highways, both are covered largely with gas taxes and, increasingly, tolls. Airports are paid for by a combination of fuel taxes, fees and airport-specific rents and passenger charges. California is hoping to cover its HSR system’s operating costs from fares (leaving aside the billions in construction costs), but such operating cost coverage is rare even when there is no competition from airlines. While proponents correctly plead that highway and air travel impose hidden environmental costs (“externalities”), they have so far shied away from imposing those costs on users via behavior-changing gas taxes.
3. HSR Plans Typically Shave Costs by Building Where It’s Easiest, Not Best
Environmentalists tend to view high-speed-rail lines the way they view windmills off Cape Cod: with a mixture of pride and nausea. Great idea unless it runs through the backyard of Sierra Club donors or the habitat of anything with more cellular complexity than mold.
Moreover, the last few miles of an HSR route into a city center is like the last few months of Medicare: It can cost more than the rest of the service combined. This often forces planners to put rail alignments where they can be built cheaply, not where the passengers are. For this reason, California’s first-phase HSR segment is being criticized — fairly or unfairly — as a “train from nowhere, to nowhere,” but it will still require billions in federal subsidies.
4. The Stimulus Argument Is Fading
The rail components of the administration’s latest legislative proposal for surface transportation reauthorization (euphemistically entitled the Transportation Opportunities Act) have already been dismissed by congressional Democrats and Republicans as no better than Obama’s 2010 burst of Europhile rail indulgence. In the draft bill, the administration proposes to spend $53 billion over six years for HSR or nearly a quarter of the total proceeds from all transportation-related tax revenues over the same period. This is clearly not a plan by which the government will “learn to live within its means.” The proposal is even more puzzling now that Congress has rescinded the FY 2011 funding for HSR and the House leadership plans to kill it permanently.
So is high-speed rail hopelessly out of reach for America and are its proponents out of touch with reality?
Well, not entirely. Here’s why:
1. The One Bipartisan Corridor
There is solid bipartisan support — including from Florida Republican John Mica, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee — for sinking serious money into improving the Northeast Corridor rail lines between Washington, New York and Boston. It’s a unique strip of American trainscape where lots of people live and travel in a ground and air space already too crowded to rely solely on cars and planes. Although even incremental improvements to travel times will be enormously expensive, in part because of the very density that yields so many prospective passengers, there will be a day in this half-century when rail will be the corridor’s dominant intercity mode.
2. Semi-Fast, Mega-Cheaper
Three hundred-mph trains serving Detroit-Chicago-St. Louis or Indianapolis-Cleveland-Pittsburgh might have to wait for later in the century, but improving the service levels and speeds of existing Amtrak service in those and other regions is not out of the question, especially if gas prices rise above $7 a gallon and stay there for 20 years. Illinois has a very cost-effective plan on its shelf for semi-high-speed (120 mph-150 mph) service between the fast-growing southern Chicago suburbs and metropolitan St. Louis. Estimated capital outlays are a fraction of the cost estimates for true high-speed (200 mph-plus) service on the same route, but service levels will be virtually the same.
3. Airports as Multi-Modal Inter-city Hubs
If there is one good lesson for America from the European HSR experience, it is the value of linking major airports in a region with rail, thus making them into intercity multi-modal hubs. This odd coupling has some demonstrable benefits. First, it eliminates the most wasteful (from an energy standpoint) and relatively time-consuming (from a passenger standpoint) elements of the U.S. transportation system: short-haul flights. In nearly every European city-pair in which high-speed rail has been introduced, air travel between the pair has dropped by roughly half, and many of those remaining air trips are merely connections to longer-distance flights.
Second, U.S. airports tend to be located in lower-density suburban areas where HSR can be built much more cheaply than ramming it into downtown. And more and more suburban U.S. airports are being linked directly to their city’s central mass-transit systems (e.g., Washington’s Dulles Airport).
Sure, it’s not as nifty as zipping underground into central Paris on the TGV, but it makes a lot of sense for cities in California, Florida and Texas, especially since their major airports have lots of space around them for parking, car rentals, highway access and commercial development.
The Obama administration’s inappropriate Eurostyle vision for American high-speed rail is now fading to fiscal irrelevance, but its comparatively intelligent recycling of Florida’s forgone HSR allocation — basically, diverting it to improvements in the Northeast corridor and to more conventional rail improvements in other cost-effective locations — indicates that it may yet learn the lessons of past failures and the glossed-over financial weaknesses of some recent state initiatives.
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[And here are some additional comments from a member of the conservative Hudson Institute.]
Diana Furchtgott-Roth Senior fellow, Hudson Institute :
Gov. Scott made a wise decision. Building high-speed lines — capable of speeds of 150 to 200 miles per hour — on newly laid track, as well as incremental improvements in existing rail infrastructure, would cost $250 billion to $500 billion, perhaps more. President Barack Obama’s $53 billion would be just the start.
High-speed-rail proponents have overstated its benefits. Transportation jobs can be created through expansion of highways, using private funding from tolls rather than taxpayer dollars. High-speed rail won’t relieve traffic jams, because they occur within cities, rather than outside them. High-speed rail is expensive, it reaches only small segments of the country, and it cannot substitute for most highways.
Surprisingly, the U.S. Department of Transportation has performed no cost-benefit analyses — routine comparisons of costs of infrastructure projects versus their benefits — of constructing a high-speed-rail system, either of the entire system or of individual components, such as California’s Corcoran-Borden or Florida’s Orlando-Tampa high-speed-rail lines.
In response to a FOIA request, Federal Railroad Administration chief counsel William Fashouer wrote, “The agency’s files do not contain any records related to cost-benefit analyses created by or on behalf of the Federal Railroad Administration related to the construction of a national high-speed and intercity passenger rail network.”
High-speed rail is not faster, cheaper or easier than building more freeways or expanding the overburdened air traffic control system, services that users are generally prepared to pay for. Few transportation experts believe that passengers will be prepared to pay for high-speed rail, leaving states with expensive white elephants.
