But mostly trains, right now.
The FRA is talking about high-speed rail, right now. Good. The Federal funds allotted are a drop in the bucket, but California may be able to do a lot of this for itself.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that the most efficient way to construct railroads is often on the sites of old railways from the 1900s, because they are already leveled, though I’m not sure that holds in a case such as on the California Coastline, since to install high-speed rail there we would need to either scrap the existing trains and tracks, or double-track the line—which in turn means building a whole lot of bridges, and revamping the building codes in areas such as Big Sur and Carmel, which are deliberately underdeveloped to keep them pristine.
The main problem in getting from Los Angeles to the Bay Area has always been the time factor, and the train has generally taken as long as has driving “the long way around”—that is, via the Coast (the 101 and Highway 1). That is a 12-hour drive, as opposed to going through the Central/San Joaquin Valleys, which takes eight hours at the speed limit with a meal break, seven hours at a brisker pace, and five and a half hours if you, um . . . really know what you’re doing.
Plus, if you drive there you have a car once you’re there, so that is an intrinsic advantage.
I once went by bus, but I do not recommend it.
Rail doesn’t change any of that, but high-speed rail would. Particularly given that a lot of people who drive along the Interstate 5 these days are driving alone; this means that for a train to compete on price point it would not have to be as cheap as it would for those who are making the journey “student-style,” with four people packed into a car.
The standard model for high-speed trains in this country is the Acela train on the East Coast; one nice thing about the Acela/Marc trains is that they represent a hugh variety in comfort, speed, and price points (my obvious basis of comparison being the journey from D.C. to Baltimore, which I’ve been doing for several years now for my traditional post-CPAC mini-vacation in Maryland: I’ve been on a few different types of trains, and paid at a few different levels).
Nick Gillespie is not happy about the potential for high-speed rail:
If you’re the president of the United States and you’re talking about goddamn traffic jams and you’re proposing high-speed rail as anything other than an unapologetic boondoggle that will a) never get built and b) never get built to the gee-whiz specs it’s supposed and c) be ridden by fewer people than commuted by zeppelin last year, you’ve got real problems, bub. And by extension, so do we all.
It isn’t the traffic issue, but rather the inefficiency. And, of course, the demands that long-term driving can take on one’s body and brain, if one wants to continue living. Not that I don’t love doing it; I do. I’m a driver, and they’ll probably bury me in one of my little putt-putts. But it’s nice to get somewhere now and then without being hopped-up on adrenaline and yet mentally exhausted.
Nick points us to the Reason transportation policy page; the FRA gives us the Feds’ concept of high-speed-rail corridors for this country, which means that those who want to go over the Rockies will need to take good old regular-speed trains.
The trick to that, of course, is to make it into an experience, as they did in the 1920s and 1930s: travelling from Chicago to Los Angeles was an event, and a way to meet people. Dining cars, sleepers, lounges, and all kinds of amenities made it special.
All without anyone having to fly, which is becoming a more and more dehumanizing experience (unless one takes one of the good airlines, such as Southwest or Virgin America). Also, it is very difficult to transform a train into a bomb by flying it into a building. So there is that.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey points out that well-used trains also make attractive terrorist targets. Absolutely. But it’s hard to use a train to get the body count one can achieve with a plane.
This country is absolutely too big for trains to take care of our transportation needs, but trains can certainly perform some of the functions that cars are now handling—and short-hop airlines, for that matter. We need something in between.
; ?>/images/user.png)
; ?>/images/email.png)
; ?>/images/feed.png)
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
*sigh*
This falls into the same category as solar and wind power — people have entirely unrealistic notions. In the very best case, solar gives you an average of about 200 – 250 watts per square meter, and that’s if you have the means to store the power collected over periods as long as a year, which we do not.
High-speed trains need big gradual curves. Big gradual curves take up a lot of space. The reason the Coast Starlight takes so long now is that it can’t even run at “normal” train speeds of 60 – 70 miles per hour over a lot of its route, because the curves are too sharp. It can’t be replaced by a true high speed train without blasting away gigantic chunks of picturesque scenery. That’s not even counting places like Santa Barbara, where the train has to run at 25 MPH(!) for almost twenty miles because it has to coexist with car and foot traffic at grade crossings, and makes so much noise at speed that the NIMBYs that make up 99% of the population of the town go berserk.
Acela sort of works because it isn’t all that high-speed, and because the route it follows is relatively flat and was built up as a rail corridor over a century or more. Steam-powered trains did 100 MPH up that corridor 75 – 100 years ago. It still required reworking a lot of the grade crossings, as well as noise barriers, and the latter were minimal because until the current explosion in real estate development people didn’t live next to the rail lines unless they were too poor to hire lawyers.
European high-speed trains work because European Governments have the power to tell the citizens (and their lawyers) who bitch about the real estate takings and people/train interactions to eff off and die. They also have very high population densities, which translate into more people near enough to the station(s) to get there and back conveniently. The densest American city is San Francisco, which is about two-thirds the density of the least dense European city — that’s if London is considered “European”.
Gillespie is right. High-speed rail either will never be built, or, if built, will be an entirely cosmetic boondoggle. When I lived in the SF Bay Area, I took time to run the numbers on something I heard, and it was true: For the annual operating cost of BART, they could’ve bought everybody who used the system a car and the gas to commute with, plus put up enough parking garages to accommodate the vehicles. That’s about how high-speed rail will work.
Regards,
Ric
Also *sigh*
All one needs to do is actually look at the performance of the Acela to see why high speed will ultimately fail – because it really isn’t high speed. High speed rail advocates are always quick to point out the maximum operating speed but conveniently forget the average speed after factoring in all the stops and negotiating difficult terrain.
It takes the Acela over 7 hours to make the 450+ mile journey between Boston and Washington DC. Much of that time is spent at the 14 intermediate stops. That’s only somewhat better than highway speeds. If each stop could be completing in 10 minutes, a person riding from Boston to DC would have literally spent over two hours parked in train stations waiting for passengers to embark/disembark.
For the 50 to 80 billion that it will ultimately cost, the State of California could completely overhaul the states aviation infrastructure AND purchase several hundred regional aircraft. Every single community on the proposed California High Speed Rail route is already served by airports that can readily accommodate regional aircraft such as the ATR-72.
If a community wished to be added to the route, all they need to do is pave a 7,000 foot runway and build a terminal – they won’t have to wait decades for service.
Oh – and by the way – small regional aircraft fly at about twice the speed of high speed rail.
Commuter rail only achieves collective efficiency when it *entirely* eliminates the need for a car for significant numbers of people. If I have to have a car, then it no longer makes economic sense to use public transport, and given that a privately-owned-vehicle (POV) is much more convenient than public transport, the POV is the clear winner.
We could put a damper on the enamor for public transport by getting the phrase, “If it needs a subsidy, it’s hurting the environment,” to go viral.
Men will be wearing suits again to go to ball games before people will be willing to spend 2 1/2 days travelling from New York to California. They can bring back the
Zephyrettes, though. This time they might want to arm them and give them a few hundred hours of hand-to-hand combat lessons.
As Babs sings, people who need people are the sorriest cocksuckers in the world. My car is a one-seater and I’m sticking to that story.
Why not go whole hog and propose a Maglev train in an air-evacuated tunnel? That
way you can reach speeds of up to 4000 mph. New York to San Fran nonstop in a half hour or so anyone? And it will be a make-work-wet-dream for Democrats for the next 200 years. How many generations of brother-in-laws is that?