Richard White’s Flawed Attack on HSR
Some days you read something that makes you feel depressed. Someone you respected suddenly writes something that is so lacking in credibility, so wrong on the basic facts, that you wonder what could have possessed them to go so far off the rails.
Today I had that experience reading Stanford professor Richard White’s shocking and misleading attack on the California high speed rail project in today’s New York Times. To call White a respected historian would be to put it mildly. He is one of the leading historians in his field, the study of the American West, and his scholarship is second to none.
I first came to know of him at the University of Washington, when I began my graduate program in history there in 2001. White had just left for Stanford three years earlier, but his legacy was still strong. Several of my colleagues had worked with him and spoke highly of his teaching, his writing, and his attention to detail. I met him briefly at a conference at Stanford in the summer of 2006 when I delivered a paper on neighborhood political organizing in San Francisco in the 1960s. He was friendly and approachable, and very smart.
One of White’s most prominent books is The Organic Machine. Written in the mid-1990s while still at the University of Washington, the book examines the roots of the salmon crisis and in particular the dams along the Columbia River. I wrote about this in 2009 in the context of HSR tracks along the Los Angeles River, in a post titled Building an Organic Machine Along the LA River. Here’s how I put it at the time:
White’s argument was simple: in modern societies, there is no easy separation of the “natural” and the “man-made”. A single key sentence explains White’s thesis: “We might want to look for the natural in the dams and the unnatural in the salmon.” The Columbia River dams became part of nature, and created new ecosystems. The dams brought changes, some of which were positive, some of which were negative. White’s goal isn’t to praise or damn the dams (heh) but to instead show that for humans to think about saving salmon or managing the Columbia River, they have to accept that there can be no such thing as “purely natural” – instead the river is an “organic machine” whose consequences have to be weighed before they are acted upon.
High speed rail will function as an “organic machine” in California. It will change the surrounding environment, whether that environment is a Peninsula city, a Central Valley grassland, or the banks of the Los Angeles River. And it won’t have been the first – compared to the urbanization of California, the agriculturalization of the Central Valley, the building of the first railroads and freeways, high speed rail is really just an upgrade of the existing machine to make it more environmentally friendly and more effective.
And it can serve as an “organic machine” along the Los Angeles River. It can reconnect neighborhoods to the river depending on how the tracks are built. It can help produce a cleaner river, a cleaner sky, and a more sustainable use of the river’s watershed. Lizare and Reyes want to see HSR as some kind of invader. It’s not. It’s instead a way to reconnect human uses of land, just as it is in Palo Alto.
At the time, I didn’t necessarily say that White would have supported HSR, only that he might have understood the nature of the dilemma along the LA River. The history of the American West is one of intensive human uses – and changes – of the land. White’s book was in part a call for historians to focus on the interplay of man-made and natural forces, to see how they came together to shape western history, to reject the easy and often misleading dichotomy between the two.
And I certainly never imagined White, a careful and reputable scholar, would lend his name to an attack on the HSR project that was so deeply rooted in flawed evidence. In White’s NYT op-ed, he compares the HSR project to the 19th century transcontinental railroads, arguing that HSR is merely government subsidy of private enterprise that will cause “dumb growth” and impoverish everyone else. White’s argument is not new – we hear it all the time from Peninsula NIMBYs – but what is shocking and tragic to me is how he roots that analysis in a complete misreading of the project and the evidence. In the end, White is making just another uninformed attack on the project – and has tossed away his credibility by doing so.
Let’s take a look:
IT is hard for liberals like me to find good news in the latest agreement to cut the federal budget, but there is at least one silver lining: subsidies for high-speed rail have been sharply reduced. Why is this good news?
In his State of the Union address, President Obama compared high-speed rail to the 19th-century transcontinental railroads as parallel examples of American innovation. I fear he may be right.
For the country as a whole, the Pacific Railway Act of 1864 and subsequent legislation subsidizing the transcontinental railroads — the lines that crossed the continent from the 98th meridian to the Pacific Coast — were the worst laws money could buy. By encouraging dumb growth, those laws sacrificed public good for private gain, and Americans came to regret it.
Look at what White is doing here. In allying with oil companies and the Koch Brothers, who were behind the defunding of HSR, White tries to inoculate criticism by saying “I’m a liberal.” At the end, he’ll return to this theme of HSR opposition being a liberal position – but keep in mind what is missing. Nowhere in this op-ed will we hear of high gas prices, climate change, or the economic impact of those phenomena. Instead White will place himself squarely with the Peninsula NIMBYs – people who see themselves as “liberals” but who are behaving like conservatives.
Still, White’s point is potentially compelling. He’s absolutely right that the way the transcontinental railroads were built was simply ruinous. By giving away massive amounts of public land and other public subsidies to private corporations that had an unregulated monopoly, American democracy and prosperity were significantly undermined. He is quite right to suggest that we never make that mistake again.
White’s mistake, however, is to make a series of factual errors and from them, conclude that HSR is exactly the same as the Central Pacific that the founder of his current university, Leland Stanford, got rich building. (This irony is nowhere acknowledged in the op-ed, although I don’t think that’s White’s fault.)
The first error is White’s description of the California HSR project:
It is not that either transcontinental railroads or high-speed railroads are always bad ideas. A compelling case can be made for high-speed rail between Boston and Washington, for example, but the administration proposes building high-speed lines in places where there is no demonstrated demand. In California, construction of the new high-speed rail line from San Francisco to San Diego will begin with a line from Borden to Corcoran in California’s Central Valley. It is already being derided as the train to nowhere. The reduction of federal subsidies has not stopped the project, which now threatens to become a forlorn monument to hubris.
White is wrong here, as people familiar with the HSR project know. He is ignoring the enormous benefits of HSR from San Francisco to San Diego and repeating the lie that the project is from “Borden to Corcoran.” That’s merely where the first shovels will dig; and that segment is now being expanded to connect downtown Merced to downtown Bakersfield. Even those endpoints are merely temporary. The California High Speed Rail Authority has made it crystal-clear that the first line is from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The first dirt has to be turned somewhere, and all construction projects have a phase. The fact that the project is starting where construction is the cheapest and easiest doesn’t mean the whole thing has no value.
White then goes on to correctly describe the many ways that the private operators of the transcontinental railroads drew huge subsidies from state and federal governments, most of which the governments never were able to recover. He talks about the Gilded Age reaction against giveaways to large corporations, which was a necessary corrective to these kind of reckless practices.
But then White starts arguing that HSR is the same thing. And as above, he does so on the basis of flawed evidence.
Yet here we are again. The Obama administration proposed a substantial subsidy, $53 billion over six years, to induce investors to take on risk that they are otherwise unwilling to assume. Such subsidies create what the economist Robert Fogel has called “hothouse capitalism”: government assumes much of the risk, while private contractors and financiers take the profit.
The key to White’s argument is “risk” – that government is shouldering a huge risk by building HSR, and that the private sector alone will see the gains. He develops that argument further:
And, as it did in the 1860s, California has sweetened the pot with subsidies of its own: a $9 billion bond issue. State law stipulates that the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which is planning, contracting for, and, eventually operating the system, will not get operational subsidies. It, not taxpayers, will pay its operating costs and its debts.
Correct. And as we know from global experience, the train will cover its own operating costs out of fare revenues. The question of its debts is a bigger one, which we’ll get to in a moment. But on this crucial question of covering its own operating costs, White makes his biggest factual errors:
Those assurances are based on rosy and widely ridiculed ridership projections. Critics, the most trenchant of whom are part of the Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail, say that only two high-speed rail routes run without operating subsidies: Paris to Lyon and Osaka to Tokyo.
White really made a big error here, one that undermines his credibility significantly. By assuming that Peninsula NIMBYs are right when they say only two HSR routes do not have operating subsidies, he makes a big error that most of us historians know to NEVER make – he takes someone else’s statement of fact for granted.
Good historians do not do that. We look at the evidence for ourselves. The evidence is crystal clear that virtually all HSR systems cover their operating costs. The Acela, operated by Amtrak, covers its own operating costs out of fares. So does Spain’s AVE. So too does HSR in Russia and Taiwan. The CC-HSR group is simply lying. And now White has repeated the lie in the pages of the New York Times. That’s devastating to his credibility here.
White’s playing the game of claiming that California HSR is a risk because nobody in California rides trains. We know this is not true. Amtrak California continues to see huge increases in ridership, especially as gas prices rise again. Near Stanford, Caltrain continues to have high ridership, leading to an all-out effort to save Caltrain funding – and yes, that train, which Stanford depends on, is heavily subsidized. But intercity trains like Amtrak California have big ridership and indicate that the market is there.
So too do the ridership studies. CC-HSR, a anti-rail group with the same objectives as the oil companies, is claiming that the ridership studies are “rosy” and unreliable. But there’s no evidence at all to defend that statement. CC-HSR, White, and others are willfully misreading the Berkeley ITS report. That report was deeply flawed, as I pointed out, but even its main conclusion was that their view of proper modeling indicates that the ridership numbers might or might not be right. But Cambridge Systematics, a highly respected firm that did the ridership study, has their own view on this, backed up by other observers and econometrists, who say the numbers are valid. This is not a case of someone disproving something, it’s a case of different views on how modeling should be done.
I don’t see how it helps White’s credibility to come into the middle of this debate, which I doubt he even knows about, and decide that the ridership studies are flawed when even the Berkeley ITS report was careful to stay away from that conclusion.
While there *is* risk that the ridership numbers won’t cover operating costs, all the evidence shows that risk to be very, very small. The Acela is a good example – it pays its own costs. As the New York Times itself explained last year, high ridership materialized quickly on Spain’s new AVE line between Madrid and Barcelona:
Two years ago, nearly 90 percent of the six million people traveling between Madrid and Barcelona went by air. But early this year the number of train travelers on the route surpassed fliers. The trajectory is ever upward.
And we know from the data that Spain and California are very similar. The weight of the global evidence is clear; California HSR will very likely cover its operating costs. The risk it won’t is minimal.
The true risks are the ones White never discusses. The risk to California’s economy and households of ever-rising gas prices. White never once mentions those. Nor does he mention the 12 billion pounds of CO2 that HSR will save, and the risks of unchecked climate change are never discussed at all by White. Finally, White ignores the cost of doing nothing – which isn’t zero, and could actually be in the hundreds of billions just to deal with the transportation needs that HSR would serve at a much cheaper price.
White makes it sound like HSR would be a burden to Californians, rather than an asset:
Without bond guarantees, private investors, which so far seem more prone to due diligence than the California High-Speed Rail Authority, have yet to put up money. The most astonishing thing is that even as financial problems force California to dismantle its social safety net, eviscerate its educational system, and watch its roads crumble, it has agreed on a plan for high-speed rail that demands substantial local subsidies and certainly will involve further concessions by the state to attract private investment.
White is wrong here – California isn’t being “forced” to dismantle those things at all. It’s doing so because its political leaders would rather do it than raise taxes on the rich, which would avoid those problems. And HSR does help solve the underlying problem, which is one of a severe and prolonged recession caused by dependence on oil. As a western historian, White knows very well the role of resources in economies. White’s argument, that HSR “certainly” will require subsidies and concessions, is simply not backed by the evidence, and the evidence he did give is flawed or outright wrong.
It is as if a family, with one spouse out of work, unable to meet mortgage payments or school tuition, eagerly takes out a loan to buy an electric car after an uncle offers to share the cost. The catch is that there is no upper limit on the price, and the neighbors have to chip in. Nineteenth-century Americans would have grasped the analogy.
But it’s a flawed analogy. Private investors haven’t put up the money yet because they haven’t yet been asked. Yet it has been made crystal clear that they will if interested – Richard Branson and Virgin, Siemens, as well as the governments of China and Japan – which said it would put up “half the money” – are just some of the investors who have shown strong interest in helping fund the system. UBS believes the biggest risks to HSR investment are political. Investors know HSR will make money – their concern is instead that Washington DC doesn’t have the political will to get it built.
White would have been on much stronger ground had he been raising questions, not making conclusions. He is absolutely right that the private sector role in major infrastructure projects can be a bad deal for the public if the details aren’t gotten right, if that role is too large. In fact, one of the very first posts on this blog made the same point. And this blog has been consistent in its warning that using too much private debt can be a problem. This post from a year ago made the point clearly. Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic and DoDo at the European Tribune have made the point too.
But their points are very specific. They both showed that HSR has high ridership. They both showed HSR covers its operating costs. What they also showed is that too much private funding can cause problems if you expect fare revenues to cover both operating costs AND pay back high-interest loans immediately. If the capital loans are to be paid back over a long period of time at a low rate, then it could be workable. Still, HSR advocates, myself included, have been consistent in saying that to be safe, we should fund HSR construction out of tax revenues as much as possible, to limit any private involvement to a small and manageable level.
What White is praising – the federal government’s elimination of HSR funding – actually makes his nightmare scenario more and not less likely. He should lead the charge for public funding, not lead the charge against it.
And of course, nowhere is White offering a balance sheet that shows the benefits from HSR – jobs created, companies founded, tax revenues from economic activity generated, money saved from not having to buy oil, carbon emissions reduced from not having to burn oil.
Had he merely said “let’s hope HSR doesn’t follow that path and fund this with general taxes like we did the Interstate Highway System” I’d be praising his op-ed. He’d have offered a fair and reasonable warning about how we build HSR. Instead he seems to be saying we should not build HSR at all – that HSR is following the flawed path and therefore it sucks. White’s conclusion does not match the evidence, and he himself repeats flawed and false claims instead of having done the diligence and research himself, as he has in his own excellent historical scholarship. And that’s a big problem.
And that’s why I’m so depressed today. It really sucks when people use their name and their reputation like this.
Mr. White was born in 1947; that makes him 64, a bit over my current threshold of 61 or so to be part of the “auto generation” we have discussed in the past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_White_(historian)
Even historians can miss recent history if they have been looking at things that are older. How old (or how recent) is the history of younger people delaying driving? Is it considerably younger than what Mr. White has been looking at?
What would Mr. White say if we brought this up to him? Would he just deny it, or would he check it out? What else might he say after he took a look?
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 4:39 pm
I have no idea what he’d do. I came to my support of HSR by looking at the evidence. I’d hope he’d do so too.
Wad Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 9:39 pm
What difference does logic make?
The vote on HSR was decided by extra-rational factors. Most of the people who voted for HSR did so because they didn’t bother weighing the pros and cons and just followed the direction their family, friends and community was going in. Most of the people who voted against it did so for the same reason: following the direction of family, friends, community … and talk radio/Fox News.
Nathanael Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:28 pm
Mr. Cruickshank, Professor White is a professor. Unlike the elected officials we are so used to dealing with, he most likely *reads his own mail*.
You need to send a copy of something approximating your article here directly to him and tell him that he needs to write the New York Times to correct his piece. Focus specifically on the facts which he got wrong by listening to other people who lied.
At that point, he will have the choice of restoring his reputation and credibility or further trashing it.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:12 pm
I think what Nathanael said is right. Just make sure not to come off as a crank. I don’t know about history professors, but math people occasionally get really weird emails from people purporting to prove P = NP in two pages and such.
John Burrows Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:02 pm
Speaking of younger people—A few months ago the student newspaper at Stanford, (the Stanford Daily) came out strongly in support of HSR in California. What if the editorial staff of the Stanford Daily were to write the New York Times with a rebuttal to White’s article? The opinion of a newspaper representing the Stanford student body might carry some weight should it be published in the Times—Perhaps as much weight as the opinion of a single misguided professor.
Robert, I wouldn’t look too deeply into this particular attack.
The attacks were always going to come for CA HSR after Koch Industries successfully killed off FL HSR.
It would be surprising and disappointing to see the attack coming from a supposedly intellectual liberal source such as NY Times, but the Times has been quite open in their desire to see HSR funds directed to the NE corridor. Just as an intellectual liberal news source can have an agenda, so too can an intellectual liberal, such as the author.
The argument is brief, weak, and obscure. There really isn’t much else to say about it. Nobody knows or cares about the 1864 Pacific Railroad Act, nor does the author ever make the case for how it applies today.
I wouldn’t waste your time on a WATB circumlocution. In a few weeks, we should know how ray LaHood is going to disburse the $2B in funds, and hopefully, CA will receive close to all.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 6:41 pm
I missed something here. First you were talking about the NYT, then you mentioned a intellectual liberal news source. Since that would not describe the NYT for over a decade, I’m wondering which intellectual liberal news source you are referring to?
No Fortunate Son Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 8:21 pm
Your point is well taken — I did add the word ‘supposedly’
BruceMcF Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Ah, yes, I did not read carefully enough. “one-time” also works in that sentence.
I’d be willing to bet that White is one of those PAMPA phonies who’s liberal only as long as it doesn’t interfere with his personal space, and that his home is somewhere close to the Caltrain ROW.
Academic freedom is one thing, but abusing their academic credentials as Einthoven and now White are doing, is quite another. About time for the Stanford administration to exercise a little authority.
I also disagree with the premise that the Western transcons, and the way they were financed, was somehow ruinous to the nation. Was there corruption in the building of the UP/CP? Sure there was. It’s unfortunate, but it happened. The fact is, the government gained far more than it spent on the land grants. The transcons would have been built, and the development would have happened with or without the land grants.
It’s ironic that White decries the original UP/SP transcon, because without it his employer, Stanford U., wouldn’t exist. ISTR that some guy named Stanford made a bundle building that line…
The bottom line is simple: White is standing on a soapbox, yelling “LISTEN TO ME! I’M A STANFORD PROFESSOR WHO KNOWS WHAT HE’S TALKING ABOUT. YOU DON’T.” Just to protect his precious quiet space and/or property value. It’s sickening how self-centered these people are. And he found a willing forum in the floundering NY Times, who will pander to anyone who will throw some crumbs there way.
Alan Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 1:41 pm
“…their way.” Stupid spell-checker…
D. P. Lubic Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 2:57 pm
I don’t blame the professor for being concerned about corruption, although that seems to be an inevitability in anything today.
What I would like to know is how would we get private businesses to jump in on this without government involvement of some sort, at the very least as a sort of loan guarantee. The rail business very nearly died in this country under the twin onslaughts of rate regulation in an otherwise unregulated environment and subsidized competition, part of which was sponsored and backed by rival interests. Those rival interests are still around and kicking pretty good, too.
Truth is, private enterprise or capitalism is always (justifiably) cautious, and in my opinion, with few exceptions, is not really a social, economic, or technical leader. Leadership is too risky; one rail tycoon is reported to have commented that “Pioneering doesn’t pay.”
The fans of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” have liked to compare one its characters to that of the late James J. Hill, who built his railroad without land grants or other government support. I will also admit to being a great admirer of Hill. But Hill built his Great Northern partially by acquiring the assets of the Minneapolis & St. Cloud Railway, which did have land grant rights, and the Great Northern itself as a corporate entity only dated to 1889, and as a through route was not completed until 1893. Hill didn’t even officially get started in railroading until 1878, when he and his investment group acquired the bankrupt St. Paul & Pacific. That was 9 years after the completion of the original transcontinental route, which was proving its value by then, even as it was rocked by scandal.
Great Hill may have been, but he was not some fearless, reckless pioneer as some would like to believe.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 3:54 pm
Hill did get land grants – he just did not get government support. And his squabbles with Union Pacific over the Burlington (via the Northern Pacific) created a stock market crash.
The railroad in the area that got neither subsidies nor land grants is the Milwaukee, but we all know how well that turned out.
Richard Mlynarik Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 4:19 pm
My goodness.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 4:53 pm
Why not? Harvard “exercised a little authority” when Cornel West pissed off Larry Summers, and Columbia has been trying to “exercise a little authority” on the entire Middle Eastern Studies department… it’s not like this has no precedent.
Of course, Berkeley will absolutely not exercise any authority on law professor John Yoo, no matter how much Brad DeLong begs it to.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Sending him to the Hague for a war crimes trial is bit beyond their scope of influence. Why they have someone of the staff who should be sent to a war crimes trial is a different question.
Nathanael Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:34 pm
Having a law professor on their staff who openly violated the law and wrote indefensible memos claiming to provide legal cover for violating the law — well, it’s just bad practice. The only thing Yoo can teach students is how to omit relevant precedent in order to mislead the people you’re trying to argue in front of, and that’s unethical in law.
It’s not just that he’s a war criminal, it’s that he’s violated the ethical and intellectual standards of his *profession*, and as such should not be a professor — he brings discredit upon his entire department, and the entire university which purports to use him as a “teacher”. Both misfeasance and malfeasance hearings would be appropriate for John Yoo.
thatbruce Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:05 am
The US has a little bit of an issue with US Citizens being tried by the ICC, in the Hague or otherwise.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:20 am
That too but once a US citizen is in another jurisdiction, there’s little the US government can do about it, other than protest. It’s not like we’d nuke Belgium over it.
thatbruce Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 2:44 pm
Nuking Belgium? That’s a bit off even for a dummy targeting shot.
The ASMPA is what I was referring to.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Well we invaded Iraq because Saudis who attacked us were hiding out in Afghanistan. Invading Belgium has always been popular. Why not? Even with the minor detail that it’s the wrong country and a NATO ally. … and that Germany France and the UK, depending on the weather, are downwind.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
The old Soviet Union used to invade their allies all the time, but never resorted to nukes. Tanks always sufficed. Seems like they’d suffice for an invasion of Belgium.
joe Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:26 pm
No, not a good idea to have the Admin get involved.
morris brown Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 8:01 pm
My goodness indeed. And are you going to shut down the NYT for allowing such an OP ED to be printed?
Walter Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 10:09 am
Saying that only two HSR lines in the world cover their costs is not an opinion. It’s a lie.
VBobier Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 10:38 am
It’s also a lie to say that Amtrak can’t make a profit, But then Amtrak outside of the NEC where Amtrak owns their own tracks, can’t as the Freight RR’s make Amtrak trains wait as Big Oil, the Freight RR’s & the airlines don’t want Amtrak to expand their rails beyond the NEC, Amtrak actually makes a profit in the NEC, If It weren’t for the rails that Amtrak doesn’t control, Amtrak would make a profit. But then now You know why Amtrak asks for money from the US Government, It has to, as Amtrak is operating with one hand tied behind Its back. It can’t put money from profitable lines into new construction as It has to support operations first, then any money left over could go for expansion, But of course there usually isn’t the money to do so with, Freeways got construction money and with no regard to profit, Yet rail is held to a higher standard and some say go get private money like Taiwan did, that wasn’t good, Private companies go bankrupt & do often, Governments aren’t allowed to do that and by virtue of the size of the taxable base of citizenry have the needed wherewithal to do construction and not have construction costs drive them into bankruptcy. But then Government isn’t in the business of making a profit, Government is there for people, Profits be damned.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:15 am
Makes money now and then other places too. Chicago-St. Louis. The route in Virginia that DP uses.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:14 pm
I was under the impression he used the MARC Brunswick Line, not the Lynchburg line. D. P., can you help us?
Beta Magellan Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Chicago-Milwaukee’s also covering its costs now.
D. P. Lubic Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 3:58 pm
Of course, it’s the MARC Brunswick line–scenic route, if a bit on the slow side.
MARC in action at Point of Rocks and Dickerson, Md. Point of Rocks is notable for a wonderful Victorian brick pile of a station which is in the middle of a wye. Approaching from the east are the original main line from Baltimore (pre-Civil War era) and the relatively newer line (1880s) from Washington. They join here to proceed west to Brunwick, Harpers Ferry, Martinsburg, Cumberland, Pittsburgh and Chicago (Capitol Limited route). Passenger service is mostly on the line from Martinsburg and Brunswick to Washington, but the third side of the wye gets some exercise, too, as some trains turn off to go up the original mainline (actually going back the way they came briefly) to go to Frederick, Md., which is on a branch about 15 miles back toward Baltimore.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtHpE73e104
MARC on the map (freight only lines not shown):
http://mta.maryland.gov/services/marc/schedulesSystemMaps/marcTrainSystemMap.cfm
Timetable, Brunswick line:
http://mta.maryland.gov/services/marc/schedulesSystemMaps/Brunswick_Jan10.pdf
Camden line, originally the Washington Branch of the B&O (built 1835); Abraham Lincoln rode this route on the way to his inauguration in 1861.
http://mta.maryland.gov/services/marc/schedulesSystemMaps/Camden_Jan10.pdf
Penn line, former PRR service:
http://www.mta.maryland.gov/services/marc/schedulesSystemMaps/pennMar2011F.pdf
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 4:38 pm
I doubt that White is doing this for the same self-interested reason as Enthoven. I am guessing that he hasn’t paid close attention to the HSR project, heard colleagues attack it, and made a quick comparison and conclusion based on flimsy evidence. He should have known better.
There is nothing extreme about this article to get depressed about. His primary sticking point is the obvious need for subsidies, both to repay “private” capital and to defray maintenance costs and operating deficits. You are not going to convince the general populace otherwise because we have the daily reality of BART, Amtrak, etc. in our face. The author is polite enough not to go into the politically unpleasant reasons for this inevitablilty, but they center for the most part on excessive payroll. There is currently no substantive movement towards controlling this problem – witness Jerry Brown’s capitulation to the prison guards union. The politically connected unions will demand and secure rich compensation packages and featherbedded work rules. Profitability will be impossible under these circumstances and so too private operation.. These are the dire fiscal penalties of the hsr that the author is lamenting.
And he does not even mention the shoddy planning. The CHSRA chose the secondary routes instead of the best and obvious ones. In a corollary of the “nothing succeeds like success” principle always go with the flow and follow the most used access routes. That would be Altamont in the north and Tejon in the south. Instead they allowed San Jose to pick Pacheco and LA-Palmdale to insist on Tehachapi. Terrible dumbdown from the outset.
And then the CHSRA goes out of its way to pick fights with putative sympathizers. Yes liberal PAMPA is an erstwhile supporter of the hsr concept but not when its intelligence is being insulted. What is responsible for this stupidity – could be Kopp and Diridon were pursuing some private long-time vendettas and definitely we know PB-BART-MTC have always had their own agenda for the SP ROW. In any event the obvious approach to PAMPA is a four track scheme, useable by both hsr and Caltrain, sometimes at grade with road underpasses, sometimes in trench and maybe aerial or berm where localities ok it. Then you present Greater PAMPA with the bill and sit down to figure out where to locate all that money. If that process gets nowhere then you bring out your worst case blight-belt berm scenarios. Only then.
Risenmessiah Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 3:08 pm
Shorter version of White’s opinion: Transcontinental railroad allowed for the immense corporatism and greed of the Gilded Age. It was built on the backs of the poor rotting in slums. America is in the throes of another Gilded Age, and Progressives need to fight for something else other than what enfranchises the landed gentry.
Some fine revisionist history there. Sure, the transcontinental railroad strengthened the hand of many robber barons, but so did the Civil War, and a resumption of international trade. The mistake White makes is to assume that infrastructure was cause of bad policy, when it was merely the conduit.
Plenty of great technology has had its origins in hideous objectives. And plenty of great technology has been used for macabre designs.
The future will be what we make of it. That’s the only thing that depresses me about White’s piece. He doesn’t seem to acknowledge that point.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 6:44 pm
If he’d wanted to draw a useful lesson, it would be the benefit of retaining public ownership of the infrastructure. Since the business model has not been decided yet, and since the majority would involves the state of California retaining ownership of the infrastructure, it would be useful to warn of the need to be sure to pick one of those business models.
But if he wanted to get his column in the NYT, he needed to attack CA-HSR.
Risenmessiah Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 10:00 pm
I think White has genuinely convinced himself that big public works projects are in fact, non-Progressive. So he would probably take issue that even with public ownership of the infrastructure that there would be no way to transfer benefits properly.
Robert also said, “they haven’t been asked” to pay for HSR (meaning foreign investors). I don’t think that’s true. I think the problem is that Schwarzenegger said to them “hey you with all those T-Bills, how about you redeem those here in California”.) And the Chinese, Japanese, etc. are like, “Um, we can build 100 dams in Africa for the same amount of money…what else can you offer us?”
Schwarzenegger: “pistachoes…my buddy owns like 90 percent of the us crop”
And there you go…foreign investors left to shake their heads at Americans who act like this is the 80s……
BruceMcF Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 3:28 pm
CA HSR is a smaller public works project than the roadworks that would otherwise be required to provide the same intercity capacity. Its one thing to have a preference against big public works projects, but to pretend that not building the CA HSR will not lead to big public works projects is blinkered thinking.
Risenmessiah Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
The opposition to HSR don’t want any capacity growth at all. And given that population growth is slowing down in California the better question is how does HSR compare with upgrading existing roadworks to serve the population that is already here?
Nathanael Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:36 pm
What Bruce said:
Perhaps if the facts are pointed out to Professor White he will revise his views. Most professors, war criminals like John Yoo excepted, actually do follow the intellectual, scientific rule of “revise your views when you get new evidence”.
Wad Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 10:38 pm
Risenmessiah wrote:
Shorter version of White’s opinion: Transcontinental railroad allowed for the immense corporatism and greed of the Gilded Age. It was built on the backs of the poor rotting in slums. America is in the throes of another Gilded Age, and Progressives need to fight for something else other than what enfranchises the landed gentry.
The problem with White’s thesis is that he’s writing history according to a high concept.
Each of the sentences above fails the “If Only” test.
If Only the railroads had not been built, the corporatism and greed of the Gilded Age would have never happened. False, because any other booming industry would have also produced the same behaviors (oil, gold, homesteading, etc.), they did independent of railroads, and the Gilded Age was bound to happen anyway.
If Only the railroads had not been built, the poor would not have been rotting in slums. False, because the poor would have been in the same station in life and by their desperation and destitution would have also subject themselves to exploitation.
If Only the Progressives had a common enemy to fight. They are fighting, but as a historian, White better than anyone else ought to know that we’ve moved beyond the late 19th-early 20th century playbook.
The U.S. has moved civilizational epochs beyond feudalism. Land is not the dividing line between wealth and immiseration; our economy offers other avenues of advancements outside of land-holdings. Also, property ownership is more democratic in the U.S., and our present economic crisis is a deflation of the real estate markets (a glut of property after the bubble).
The modern Progressive movement does have an identified enemy: the axis of Wall Street-Washington-Pentagon. They are losing badly and fighting a lost cause. Most Americans gain a better standard of living by acquiescing to the axis; they wouldn’t stand to gain anything they couldn’t easily acquire by other less confrontational means; plus, the Progressive movement itself is a collection of tribal concerns that can’t, won’t or shouldn’t subordinate their tribal position in favor of a greater class movement.
If Only doesn’t change broader movements in history that would have played out exactly as they do now or did even if the other option occurred.
Risenmessiah Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:20 pm
Well no, railroads allowed for robber barons to get richer and for more slums to be built…without them a lot of industrial growth would have been stymied. That said though, railroads had lots of other influences that were great for Progressives (it helped blacks mobilize through the Pullman Porters, and helped organize labor in general.) National Parks too.
What White should have said is something like this: HSR cannot be a case where we privatize profits and socialize losses. That would have resonated with conservatives and liberals. Instead he said, burn the mother f-er down. I don’t think it was as Bruce suggested, because he wanted the attention of the NY Times. I think it was because like Synonmouse…he’s become cynical of any “pure” motive that the project’s backers might have.
VBobier Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:05 am
agreed.
Wad Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
Risenmessiah, we don’t need to speak for White. As a scholar, he knows what he said and why he said it. He showed everybody where he stands on high-speed rail.
Trying to turn him into a supporter is pointless.
Risenmessiah Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:11 pm
I’m not trying to turn him into a supporter. I’m trying to say that his own arguments can be used to support the project against criticisms by other “Progressive” critics.
D. P. Lubic Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 6:52 pm
One of the problems I see is that not enough people can appreciate what travel was like before powered transport, which of course started with railroads.
(The following is adapted from another post on the Infrastructurist, in a thread on this same subject.)
A decent road in the horse-and-coach era would have allowed you to travel perhaps 20 miles in one day. Horses don’t have headlights, and like us, they get tired. Most of the travel with a coach would have been with the horses walking; there would be little if any of that full-gallop business you see in Hollywood Westerns. Like us, a horse can not sustain a full-speed run for any length of time.
I don’t have the cost data for wheat shipments via the Baltimore & Ohio, but my memory seems to recall that a shipment went from something like $40 per ton to maybe 20 cents–perhaps someone can offer confirmation or correction on this. I do have, however, a story about horse and wagon travel that illustrates the speed of this mode–or lack of it. . .
I had the chance to talk with an older gentleman, a state senator in West Virginia, some years ago. Among the things that came up was his childhood in Capon Bridge, W.Va., and the trips he and his family made very rarely to Winchester, Va., which is about that 20 miles. This was with a team and a wagon over what is now US 50, and would have included several long climbs and descents.
He said such a trip started very early in the day, that there was at least one break, possibly two (I’m trying to remember this from years ago) to rest and eat, and that it would be dark by the time they reached Winchester.
At Winchester, the horses would go to a stable, and the wagons would be placed in a wagon yard. His family would stay in a hotel under cover, but he mentioned that some farmers were tighter than his father was with money, and would choose to sleep in their wagons in the wagon yard.
The next day was the one on which they sold their crops at auction, and as a treat went shopping in fancy stores (at least compared with what was in Capon Bridge). He also recalled the first time he saw a train, and recounted how the big, snorting steam engine made him press himself the wall of the station, attempting to fit himself into the spaces between the stones! I smile and think a bit of him now and then when I see this station today.
All this was followed by the trip home, and again, arrival would be well after dark. Quite an adventure for a boy who was then about six–but it took two whole days, dawn to dark, to cover those 20 miles out and back!
The late West Virginia Federal Senator Robert Byrd (1917-2010) was in musician in his younger days, playing at weddings and other gatherings. He continued to play old-time fiddle music for much of his life (and this was greatly entertaining during his campaigns), and in 1978 he got to make an album with a variety of blue grass musicians. Among the songs was a piece that takes a humorous look at such a trip as that of the state senator. Let not the fuss over liberal or conservative politics, nor over Mr. Byrd’s former membership in the KKK (which he later greatly regretted). Just enjoy some old-time music. . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1UD9B9E-6s
Alon Levy Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:21 pm
No, White actually is right about the Progressives, as well as about their modern equivalents. In New York, patrician reformers convinced themselves that what the city really needed to be less slummy was not unionization, workplace safety, higher wages, or a shorter workweek, but a subway, suburbanization, and home ownership.
And the same attitude is prevalent today, in Bloomberg, Tom Friedman, and most of the Democratic Party. The only difference is that instead of building suburbs that try and fail to approximate rural life, they’re building gentrified cities that try and fail to approximate organic urbanism. To those people, HSR is just a convenient way to get from one gentrified city to another. HSR also has separate progressive benefits and therefore gets support from actual leftists like Robert and me, but it’s important to make sure it doesn’t become a massive public-to-private wealth transfer and to make sure that it doesn’t detract from other, equally or more important efforts to fight climate change and urban sprawl.
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 4:32 pm
You give yourself away here:
That’s a totally misleading comparison, and you know it. HSR lines should be compared to each other. HSR lines are not money losers. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) You’re hoping to mislead the public and take advantage of ignorance.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Actually… one person who appears to know what he’s talking about claims that people aren’t opposed to HSR by comparison with Amtrak, but by comparison with trains from classic movies. (He says much more than that, and is worth listening to.)
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:12 pm
They don’t oppose trains on any rational basis. They’ll dredge out vague recollections from old movies if you press them. They oppose trains because Real Americans(tm) don’t ride trains. Real Americans don’t live in places that could use trains anyway. And those places are entirely too filled with people who don’t have enough vowels in their last name or too many vowels in their last name or have skin color other than pasty or a combination of above. They eat bagels, sip wine, gulp espresso and don’t recoil in horror at food that has garlic in it. There’s even ones who could be called rich who don’t own cars and have no plans to buy one.
Miles Bader Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:40 pm
Yup. In other words, the opposition is mostly cultural: trains are “the other guy’s thing”, and they hate “the other guy.” Opposing any kind of rail development is just another way of bonding with their group while not having to think too hard.
It’s depressing that American society has degenerated into such non-thinking tribalism.
joe Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:51 pm
Most top tier faculty travel in O’Yurp and ride trains. They know better.
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 6:53 pm
Most Americans support trains, of all kinds, and the polling proves this.
There’s no need for a debate about “why do Americans hate trains?” They don’t. We won that debate long ago. If we had a functioning democracy we’d be on a train-building spree.
But we don’t have a functioning democracy. We have an oligarchy, with oil companies at the top, and rich “liberals” playing along for their own benefit. (Not saying White falls into that category, but Gary Patton, Alain Enthoven, and other Peninsula NIMBYs absolutely do.) So the desire of the people to build trains gets thwarted.
Mad Park Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 8:46 pm
“It’s depressing that American society has degenerated into such non-thinking tribalism.”
Degenerted? It has always been this way save for a handful of the Founders in the Age of Enlightment
and a few other bright spots. As an historian of note, one would think Professor White would
have read sufficient US History to realize this.
VBobier Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:08 am
Maybe He needs to study this longer and see what most see instead of what just a few jaded cynics see, As His eyes are shut and His mind is closed to new ideas.
Wad Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:28 pm
So do the people in the “us” camp. It’s a natural human bias to assume that our beliefs are the result of rationality while the other side is based on emotion.
The sad fact is, most of the populations in both pro- and anti- camps stake their positions for nonrational reasons. The human brain’s default setting is ignorance. Information must be processed and discerned in order to gain knowledge. Few do this; those who do end up serving as leaders. Most people will agree with them because they want the approval of family, friends or other kinship groups. It’s also known as “going along to get along” or “logic of the stampede.”
Alon Levy Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 8:37 am
Yes… but that should be the subject of a very different article – if only because it’s not just about HSR for that camp, but really about a return to mythologized cities. (Much as the suburbs were about the return to the mythologized countryside.) I doubt it can be argued in as much depth as necessary in less than a book.
D. P. Lubic Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:37 pm
What?! What red-blooded American male wouldn’t want to ride on the 20th Century, and get a shot at Eva Marie Saint? In a sleeper compartment?
Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho!
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:50 pm
PRR foamers?
jim Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Railroad sleeper berths are narrow and uncomfortable. Two things are worse in a sleeper. One of them is sleep.
Meh. The first three paragraphs of the article are right on the mark. The transcontinental railroads were a massive public-to-private transfer. No, it doesn’t justify stupid zingers like Borden to Corcoran and the “critics say” weaseling, but parts of the article are true and you should admit that.
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 4:34 pm
Huh? Did you read the entire post? I said he’s right in his history, right that PPP for infrastructure can be bad deals, and is wrong that the CA project is one of them, because he is arguing from bad evidence.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 4:51 pm
I did. Here’s what you said in response to that section of the article:
White is not allying with oil companies and the Koch Brothers any more than Richard M. is. He opposes HSR on completely unrelated grounds. Nor does he even mention community impacts, as a NIMBY would. By the same token, it’s almost certain that if Jane Jacobs were alive today, she’d be equally opposed as part of her general opposition to megaprojects. Such people are very far from allies of David Koch or the Atherton NIMBYs; they’re allies of a completely different movement, one that helped end freeway construction in many urban areas.
Beta Magellan Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 10:36 pm
The quoted text left a bad taste in my mouth too. A bit too “if you’re not with us you’re against us.” Also, you seem to have framed CAHSR as a “liberal” project—it may well be, but that doesn’t seem strike me as an effective message for someone who’s involved in HSR advocacy.
Nathanael Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:40 pm
The serious problem is that White opposes HSR on grounds based on lies and false analogies. This isn’t appropriate for any professor to do. It is perfectly possible that given the real numbers, he will revise his views, support HSR, and demand that it be fully government owned and government run. Give him a chance by writing him such a letter.
VBobier Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:11 am
He needs to come down from His Ivory Tower and do a real study with an open mind, Not this baby dribble(pablum for the right).
“And that’s why I’m so depressed today. It really sucks when people use their name and their reputation like this.”
Never heard of him.
I am familiar with Stanford and other CA professors in Earth, Hydrological and Biological Sciences – people deeply concerned with mitigating climate change, causes of global warming and sustainability.
HSR isn’t going to be swayed by a history lesson in rail roads.
We’re with our backs against the wall and about to see unprecedented change, peak oil and a decreasing standard of living.
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 4:35 pm
And White acknowledged none of those things in his op-ed.
He’s only a household name among US historians and not the general public. Still, it’s sad to see him attack the project like this, especially when his evidence is so flawed.
joe Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:01 pm
How do we mitigate this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png
Rail is one of the few ways to preserve our standard of living while reducing CO2 emissions
Alon Levy Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:19 pm
Yep. And HSR is about priority #15 for that. Intercity transportation just isn’t important enough as a component of global carbon emissions; air travel is about 2% of the worldwide total. Much more important are lower car ownership (which HSR has nearly zero impact on), smaller distances driven per car (which HSR has very little impact on), more fuel-efficient cars, greener electricity, lower industrial emissions, better-insulated buildings, larger buildings (which HSR has nearly zero impact on, since condo towers in a park are not much of an improvement over sprawlburgs), reduced red meat consumption, and probably other things that I’m missing.
joe Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:46 pm
Sorry, do you want to change the topic?
Rail *is* one of the few ways to preserve our standard of living. If you want to compare rail to vegetarianism, well that’s silly.
Come-up with a better transportation alternative.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Yes, urban rail is one of the ways, coupled with walkability, mixed use zoning, etc. Intercity rail is a nice-to-have.
Nathanael Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:43 pm
Intercity rail is pretty crucial in the bigger picture, though your rough guess of #15 is probably about right. #15 is still pretty high on the list.
Intercity rail has a meaningful impact on lower car ownership when layered on top of urban rail; essentially, there are people and particularly businesses who ONLY have cars for the purpose of intercity travel. It doesn’t really do anything to affect car ownership until the urban system is present, though.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:28 pm
Is there a significant number of such people? People can rent cars, or fly. I don’t know about businesses, but the only person in New York I’ve heard of who owns a car just for intercity travel keeps it with friends in Stamford (ride-and-drive). And at least for a while, he used it to shuttle back and forth from Boston because he got reimbursed and the actual cost to operate was vastly lower than 55 cents per mile. So as far as intercity driving goes, I’d say making the IRS take a more realistic view of driving costs is also important. (Say, priority #20.)
Jon Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:57 pm
“the only person in New York I’ve heard of who owns a car just for intercity travel…”
Seriously, only one? I can count a bunch of people in San Francisco who do precisely that.
Here’s the priority order. Firstly, you make transit inside an urban area sufficiently fast that people take transit into the center for work rather than drive. This is commuter rail or commuter bus.
Then you make transit frequent and fast enough outside of commute hours so that people leave their cars at home for non-work urban trips as well. This is rapid transit. (People in cities with decent rapid transit are the ones who may well own a car just for intercity trips, and this type of car ownership is also gradually being replaced by Zipcar and similar schemes.)
Then you make transit between urban areas fast enough that people will get rid of their cars completely, and just rent cars for trips to areas not served by rail (e.g. national parks.) This is intercity rail, and encompasses both medium trips within the same region and longer trips to different regions.
A great enabler to the last stage is having excellent connecting transit in both the origin and destination cities. So I agree with you that the US needs better rapid transit in it’s cities, but given that there are US cities which already have decent rapid transit, intercity rail is surely higher than #15 on the priority list.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:17 pm
“but the only person in New York I’ve heard of who owns a car just for intercity travel” …
So, living in the city with the best provision of intercity rail transport in the country, you find it rare to encounter someone who owns a car just for intercity travel.
Umh, yeah? That would be the hope ~ to make it equally rare in other parts of the country.
Auto oriented transport depends upon a “One size fits all” system. HSR systems site right in the heart of demand for cars for intercity transport ~ more motorists have occasion to drive one to five hundred miles multiple times a year than have occasion to drive over five hundred miles multiple times a year.
The number of households for which HSR is sufficient to go car free is likely to be fairly small. On the other hand, the number of households for which HSR is necessary to go car free is substantially greater.
And we are, of course, not building HSR for the 2011 transport environment, but for the 2015~2021 transport environment. Where a suburban HSR station might serve as a transport anchor for marginal local transport routes on its the urban side in today’s environment, those routes might be in a virtuous cycle and its routes that were not viable in any event in 2011 that are the marginal routes relying on the HSR station as a patronage anchor.
jim Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:54 pm
Having lived in New York both with and without a car:
If you do have a car in New York, you don’t just use it for intercity travel. At the very least, you drive to Jones Beach before the parking lots open and sit on the beach eating breakfast and watching the Atlantic.
Oh and it’s much easier to get to the Botanical Gardens with a car. Just saying.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 8:46 am
Bruce, New York does not have good intercity transportation. It’s not as bad as Ohio, but to put things in perspective for you, the average Acela speed from New York to Washington is less than the average TGV speed from Nice to Paris, including the 2.5 hours spent meandering on the curvy PACA legacy track. And if you tell people that they don’t need a car in the Riviera because there’s great transportation to Paris, they’ll laugh at you.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 9:20 am
I was referring to the absolute effectiveness of intercity rail transport, not the effectiveness “relative to what it might be”. In that context, you are seriously making an analogy between NYC and Nice in the Paris/Nice intercity corridor?
One key index of transport effectiveness is how many places one can visit within a three hour trip. How many cities lie within a three hour rail trip of NYC, and what is the combined population of those cities? Leaving aside the Acela, I get Wilmington, Trenton, Newark, New Haven and Hartford, adding the Acela adds Baltimore, DC, New London and Providence.
And that is setting aside that the New York subway system connects a broader diversity of destinations together than are available in some geographically large states ~ what many people across the US would be engaged in intercity transport for (by whatever mode) is instead an intra-urban transport task in NYC.
Once again, you throw the facts you have at hand at an issue, rather than starting from what evidence is relevant to the question at hand. Its better than evidence free argument, but the result is going to be very hit or miss, depending on how well the facts you have at hand really do work as evidence with respect to the question at hand.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 11:25 am
How many cities lie within a three hour rail trip of NYC, and what is the combined population of those cities? Leaving aside the Acela, I get Wilmington, Trenton, Newark, New Haven and Hartford, adding the Acela adds Baltimore, DC, New London and Providence.
Don’t forget the branches. Harrisburg, Albany, Hartford. I suspect a few people have business in the the state capital. Maybe not from New York City, except in the case of New York City and Albany but the Springfield line connects New Haven and Fairfield counties to Hartford and the Keystone corridor connects Philadelphia to Harrisburg.
Interesting little tidbit I ran across recently. Albany-NYC has almost as much ridership as Boston-NYC. Wandered around a bit. Metro Springfield MA is almost as big as metro Albany.
…Springfield-New Haven would go through Hartford, metro area just over a million….
It’s too bad this leaves out Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton… population almost a million.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 1:54 am
Bruce, most of the cities you’re mentioning are of no interest to people in New York. Washingtonians visit New York to beg for money; the reverse doesn’t happen very often. The places people I know have any interest in going to are Ithaca, various points in New England not all of which have any rail service, the Poconos, suburban cul-de-sac hell hotels in Central Jersey, and the Hudson Highlands. The commuter services offered in the area are useful; the intercity rail is not, as a result of which I’m the only person in my social group who ever takes Amtrak instead of suffering through Megabus or Bolt. (Yes, I know the actual mode shares. Spare me. I’m talking about people with lower middle-class incomes, i.e. people who can’t generally afford Amtrak.)
If you measure where you can get to with any speed or regularity, then yes, the Riviera has better intercity transit than New York. That the region around the Riviera is less dense than the Northeast is not relevant – at long range, you’d fly instead of take surface transportation anyway. But even with the low quality of the Riviera’s main line, and the even lower quality of the line to Genoa (to say nothing of the trains that run on the Italian low-speed network), it’s better than anything in the US. And, again despite general awfulness by European standards, the PACA TER is better than any commuter rail that exists in the US.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 9:47 am
“(Yes, I know the actual mode shares. Spare me. I’m talking about people with lower middle-class incomes, i.e. people who can’t generally afford Amtrak.)”
Where in your original argument was it specified that people with lower middle class incomes will be the ones that will be the least likely to be squeezed out of driving by rising gas prices, so that the strategic benefit of HSR in accelerating the reduction of car ownership is to be determined by focusing exclusively on its impact on ridership among people with lower middle class incomes?
Alon Levy Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Look, if you want to restrict the car ownership reduction to one social class, one set of destinations (Boston and Washington but not, say, Storrs and Ithaca), etc., you’re not going to get nontrivial change in car ownership, or car use.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 12:33 pm
Most people along the NEC have different priorities than you. They aren’t interested in boinking someone attending Cornell or Uconn. Which is why college students find traveling between college campuses so fascinating. For most people in New York City the information that Ithaca is someaht west of Ninth Avenue is more than enough and that Storrs is somewhat north of 96th more than adequate. They find that the fastest way to Philadelphia, Baltimore or DC is on Amtrak much nore fascinating, which is why Amtrak has a bigger share of the market.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Amtrak is about even on those markets with Bolt plus Megabus. And bear in mind, I’m talking about people many of whom have never set foot on Amtrak due to high prices; one took Fung Wah between New York and Boston back when it was authentic and sketchy and dirt cheap.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Nice round numbers. A bus holds 50 passengers. An Acela holds 400 and then 5 minutes later a Regional follows it. Keystones pick up the slack between Philadelphia and New York. I doubt even when you add in the bus from Flushing to Philadelphia that runs twice a day they match Amtrak’s capacity. The people on the bus are out to save money. There’s always going to be frugal people in the world.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 9:51 am
Intercity transport among the various cities in a region is a necessity. Its not a necessity for every person every day, but its a necessity for our economy nonetheless ~ our central place system does not function without it.
Where intercity rail is the most energy and cost efficient means of maintaining that transport access, it is the most effective means of providing a necessity.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Our standard of living includes going to Fresno to visit Grandma. Or going to Fresno to call on clients. Using HSR to do that does reduce CO2 emissions.
Spokker Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 6:02 pm
How do we stop volcanos?
VBobier Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:13 am
Stop a volcano, Good question, No one has that level of technology on this planet, At least not yet.
ks Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 8:03 pm
Electric vehicles will be very common by 2020, but I don’t see electric airplane coming to market any time soon.
Lower car ownership is not practical. We can only hope that car owners drive less.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Lower car ownership not practical? Really? Tell that to all the not particularly dense or urbanized European countries with two thirds the per capita car ownership of the US.
Electric vehicles are expensive and, outside bus fleets, slow to adopt. Ten years after introduction, hybrids’ share of new car sales in the US is on the order of 7% (vs. 20% for buses); why do you think electric vehicles are going to be any different?
Nathanael Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:44 pm
How do those European countries do it?
Not just non-motorized urban transportation, better land use, and urban rail: but also extensive intercity rail.
Andre Peretti Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 9:24 am
They don’t do much better than the US. Here are 2007 statistics for France (billion riders x km):
Car: 728 (82.6%)
Bus: 47 (5.3%)
Rail: 93 (10.5%) * including subways, light rail, etc.
Air: 13 (1.5%).
Half of rail ridership is in greater Paris.
France remains car-dependent and extending HSR coverage won’t do much about it.
Beta Magellan Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 3:35 pm
One of the big issues with infrastructure investment in America is that the idea of different modes having different niches seems to confuse people, sometimes including people who boost intercity passenger rail, wanting it to serve all markets and be all things to all people. The TGV is a success because SNCF founds its niche for new rail services (~3 hours or less intercity travel) and ran with it. Here, it seems like the idea of intermediate capacity corridors baffles a lot of people—the finest we can split passenger transportation is highway versus airport. And the French experience should also show us that you can have successful intercity rail even with high car ownership—you don’t have to take an urban train to the intercity train station.
Alai Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 2:41 am
One thing which is hidden by this is the extent to which people don’t travel– IE, even if people don’t use the trains for a large portion of total passenger-km, their presence allows for things like dense cities and pedestrian lifestyles which reduce the total number of passenger-km dramatically.
Consider a city where everyone drives, averaging a total of 50 km/day: the statistics would show 100% auto. Now consider a different city with a dense core, where 30% of the people use transit exclusively an average of 10 km/day. The statistic would show a meager 8% passenger-km for transit and 92% passenger-km for cars. But it’s a dramatically different city. I think this applies to your statistics for France.
Alon Levy Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:36 pm
Cities that are more compact and more walkable, and encourage people to just take one car trip and then walk around the city, instead of drive to each destination in the same downtown. Fewer motorways, even fewer that are toll-free, and practically none that enter urban cores.
The region of France I’m most familiar with has no useful intercity rail; only railfans and plane-haters like me take the TGV from Nice to Paris. It is also filled with suburban sprawl – look up Sophia-Antipolis. And it is very rich, despite which its TER network is only barely passable. My recollection is that it has 600 or 650 cars per 1,000 people (driven much less than American cars, since evidently the highways are not completely clogged and the capacity isn’t very high); Andre, am I remembering right?
Andre Peretti Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
Yes, you are remembering right. You’ve really got to hate planes to take the TGV to Nice. The airport is only 4.5 miles from the city center and buses are cheap and frequent. Landing there is also very interesting: part of the runway has been reclaimed from the sea and the approach is really breathtaking (or scary for some).
Due to geography the line has many curves and tunnels and trains are very slow, by French standards. The double track is shared by all types of trains, including freight. Upgrading it would cost a fortune and nobody wants to pay for it.
That’s why, on the Cote d’Azur, “nobody rides trains”. People either drive or fly. I don’t know anyone who takes the TGV from Nice to Paris. Easyjet is cheaper and much faster.
joe Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 9:27 pm
Car ownership is already less valued by the current generation coming of age. They proportionally favor bus/train and would rather use smart phones.
Economically, SF was more affordable because it wasn’t car centric. We had one old car which was parked all weekend and during the week, used to carpool to the train station. Mileage and costs were low, a monthly MUNI Pass was our expense – oh a shoes. You wear out shoes quickly walking on cement.
Andre Peretti Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:47 am
When they get married and have children they will have to own a car (or two), whether they value it or not. When you have to get the family’s groceries, you don’t take the train or the bus.
GoGregorio Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:59 pm
I think this is a silly, suburb-centric way of thinking. I take the bus to get my groceries every week. If I were shopping for a family, rather than just me, I would make two trips a week.
Getting groceries for a family doesn’t need a car, the mentality does. There are plenty of available solutions: go to the store more often. Bring one of those little carts with you. Live within walking distance to a grocery store.
No, it’s not easy in super-suburban Vacaville, where I’m from, but then, we all know that’s not sustainable. Even in suburban San Jose, I’ve done just fine grocery shopping without a car, and I have no doubt that with a little adjustment, I could do the same if I were shopping for a family.
Stop coddling drivers.
VBobier Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 1:32 pm
1. Lets see drive more often, Nope, Won’t work, Gas costs money and I have very little in the first place.
2. Walk to shopping, Nope, Won’t work, As I already live where I can afford to live, Moving costs money that I don’t have and I may not have for a good long time, I get $845 a month from SSI until June, From July until further notice It will be $830 a month, So I have to stay here. Plus I live with a cat that I will not abandon, She’d been abandoned once before and was a stray for a bit before the shelter where I picked Her up for $10 and She’s My only company as I live alone. She’d run away and die as feral cats don’t always know how to hunt, It’s not instinctive, Hunting & Killing for food/water is a learned activity. She knows none of this and I know no way of teaching Her.
3. Out here Buses here have a 4 bag limit per person & per trip and being dial a ride the bus has no fixed route, Nor anywhere to sit and wait for a bus at, Plus one needs exact change(coin of the realm only, Cash or Plastic not accepted). I live in the desert and It gets hot out here and frozen food spoils rapidly in the heat and being disabled I can’t walk or stand for very long and getting up off the ground would mean I’d need help.
4. I live in Yermo CA, Google It, It isn’t rocket science, The nearest shopping to Me is in the nearest big city.
5. To visit relatives during the holidays I have to drive 45 miles each way, No bus goes there and I can’t afford Amtrak, I’d still need to drive to Barstow and I doubt Amtrak stops in Barstow or Victorville. Mind You I do like trains, It doesn’t mean I can ride on one.
GoGregorio Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Congratulations, this checklist confirms that you live in an unsustainable community! Yermo is precisely the community that we should NOT be planning our future around. I don’t mean to be cold-hearted, but if you think the future is full of Yermos, you’re living in a sad nightmare in which everyone MUST continue to drive despite its continuously-increasing cost, and local, state and federal governments are even more in the red.
The things I’m saying are difficult in Yermo, I know. With all due respect, that’s because Yermo appears to be an unsustainable community, that needs to wither. It’s harsh, but it’s the way of it in a world of ever-rising gas prices and looming global warming.
(Also, I never advocated driving more, per your answer 1. I never advocated driving at all, so when I said go more often, I meant taking more bus/rail trips. It’s kind of sad that, in our society, “go” automatically equates to “drive.”
BruceMcF Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Yermo has, what, 1,500 to 2,000 people? At one time, a town of 1,500 to 2,000 people used to have a grocers and a general store. In such a town, a neighborhood electric vehicle and a complete grid of streets with appropriate speed limits for them would get anyone in town to the grocers and general store. Today, a local gas station franchising the holding of orders placed online with the supermarket a few towns over might be what takes over for that.
Once we abandon the notion of a one size fits all solution, we can also stop pointing out that one particular solution that will work well in one type of setting will not solve every problem in that setting and will not work in every setting, and focus on what solutions are available for what settings and what holes there are still to fill.
Spokker Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 3:09 am
GoGregorio, I wonder who is going to move the VBobiers of the country out of these unsustainable places and into more walkable, transit friendly, albeit poorer neighborhoods. I mean, good God, even Orange County, CA would be a better place for him to live. We do have low income housing here. I think I live in it (yet paying full rent!).
In any case, he clearly cannot move himself. It reminds me of my partner’s aunt that lives in Turlock, CA. Another one on a fixed income and no vehicle. She relies on the kindness of neighbors who know her. She would also be better off in a place with some transit.
As an aside, make sure your husband has life insurance. Because when he drops dead and you’ve been a homemaker all your life, you are screwed.
VBobier Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 10:35 am
Yermo may not be sustainable as some say, It used to be bigger before the I15 opened up and bypassed It, there were gas stations, real estate offices, a truck stop, more than 1 store, motels, etc, It was almost the size of present day Barstow. Today It does have a general store, a fast food restaurant(Formerly the first Del Taco ever built, It’s where the Del Taco chain got It’s start), an antique dealer, A water district, a liquor store and a US Post Office, It’s largely now a bedroom community tied to Barstow CA, Like It or not, One person here works at Ft Irwin and another works in Barstow, Others I have no idea. There are those Who work at the local Marine base annex, there are 2 gas stations(one’s a truck stop too), a real Restaurant(Peggy Sue’s 50′S Diner), a New Motel with Its own diner and a Jack in the Box beyond the township of Yermo proper near the freeway now, Oh and Yermo also has It’s own tourist attraction: the Ghost Town of Calico and CALICO is spelled out in big letters on the local mountains and can be seen & read for miles.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 1:54 pm
Millions of families, even ones in the US, live without a car. They don’t starve. There’s other solutions, some that GoGregario mentioned. There’s also the concept of “delivery”. Either one like FreshDirect where you place an order online and the food gets delivered all the way to you go to the store and select everything yourself and then it gets delivered.
http://www.freshdirect.com
Hmmm … what’s wrong with good ol’ regular speed rail?
It’s cheap, easy to assemble — a few thousand unemployed men/women with rails, spikes, cross- ties and some rolling stock made in Your Town can install a good rail line of several hundred miles in less than a year — a bit longer with grade separation. People know already how to make regular- speed railroads. They’ve been building them around the world for at least a hundred and fifty years.
Talk about an established, mature technology! The best part about well- designed regular speed rail is that it is almost as usefully fast as the ‘Brand X’ kind. American railroads in the early 1920′s had plus 100 mph speed limits — for freight trains.
High speed rail is yet another toy for the kiddies who never seem to grow up, who want everything when they want it. The idea is to ‘compete with the carz’ which are — even as I write — obsolete.
The USA is broke, period. When the accounting for US waste is made (six months from now or six years, not much difference) there will be nothing in the cash drawer for toys. All will go into the trash heap of history: carz, airplanes, air conditioners, McDonalds, credit cards, Internet, etc. If we want to get somewhere it will be walking, bicycles or good ol’ regular speed rail.
Good for another 150 years, something that cannot necessarily can be said about the human race itself.
High Speed rail is something for the comic books, it costs too much to build and uses too much energy. In the real world more rail is needed now, skip the high speed variety.
joe Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 9:32 pm
HSR is only for advance nations – like Spain.
Wad Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 9:33 pm
Steve, I respond to your questions with a couple of questions:
1. Why haven’t you done anything to bring the kind of mature regular-speed rail that we “need” but didn’t know it until you showed up? You’ve had 40 years.
2. Why does the alleged broke-ness of the U.S. government have to foreclose on the future of high-speed rail in the U.S.? Since World War II, the U.S. has:
*Maintained an ever-growing war-making apparatus along with an economically dependent private constituency;
*Burned through the treasury in the false notion of tax cuts paying for themselves and then cutting deeper in correspondence to their futility;
*And allowed health care costs to rocket out of control while the highest-cost populations (the poor and the elderly) are put on the public ledger
Yet, the economy still expanded while tolerating these three burdens.
Yet it’s high-speed rail — at a fraction of the costs and far better direct revenue projections and economic multipliers (transactions that aren’t captured directly but enabled through availability of HSR) than the imposing three — that’s the bridge too far.
Really, Steve? Really?
Beta Magellan Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 10:28 pm
Steve, you’ve managed to combine the nostalgic American railfan, tea party economist, apocalyptic green, and toys-for-boys objections to HSR in one concise post. Well done.
Snark aside, the sort of “less than a year” construction you’re describing typically takes several years to get done, still costs a lot of money and would, as Wad notes, ultimately fail to attract enough riders to make a good return on investment.
Nathanael Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:50 pm
What you call regular speed rail, and what Western Europe would call regular speed rail, is most of the high speed rail projects in the country. I’m all for it. However, unlike 220mph California-style high speed rail, it doesn’t pay for its own operations out of ticket revenue, so that’s a rather important point. In contrast, 59mph and 79mph rail, which is “regular speed” in the US, is just too slow for all practical purposes.
Also, you’re repeating outright lies. The US is not “broke”. That’s just right-wing bullshit. The US has lots of excess labor and lots of physical capital (equipment, etc.) and lots of intellectual capital — also lots of land and lots of natural resources. Still rich in real terms!
Money? The US *PRINTS* money. It’s impossible for it to “go broke” in terms of printed money — look up Modern Monetary Theory for the technical treatment. Hell, the US still has the power to tax and can enforce it, if you don’t like money-printing, and the Forbes 400 have enough money to pay for everything we’ve ever talked about.
VBobier Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:22 am
Yep, I couldn’t agree more, We aren’t broke, Some just don’t want to pay for this or pay for that as they don’t like their tax money going for this or that as some said a few years back, some even went as far as Tax Evasion by refusing to pay their taxes, Federal Prison is a long stretch, Where 20 years, means 20 years behind bars…
jim Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 1:01 pm
Conventional trains are perfectly capable of covering their operating costs. The Regionals on the NEC do, even though Acela skims off the bulk of the premium-paying customers. NEC Regional extensions to the south either lose small amounts or run small surpluses. When the Connecticut spur is double-tracked and upgraded, it’s expected to run a small surplus. Several of the Midwest corridors essentially break even (small losses some years, small surpluses others) and will run consistent surpluses once their tracks are upgraded. Amtrak does lose bucketloads of cash on the long distance trains.
It’s not speed that matters on those losses. One could rebuild the route of the California Zephyr to California HSR standards and run it across the Plains at 250 mph and it’d still lose money. The route is uneconomic. California HSR will run surpluses, fairly large surpluses, too, probably, not because it will run at 250 mph, but because it will connect LA and SF. The high speed makes connecting LA and SF practical, but it’s the connection which creates the ridership.
European conventional trains lose money, not because they run slowly, but because their governments insist they serve uneconomic routes, for social and policy reasons. In that sense, Amtrak’s long distance trains are the most European of its features.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Indeed, transport provides benefits over and above the direct benefit to the passenger, so that services that generate a surplus overall are being underprovided ~ the non-passenger beneficiaries are getting a free ride, and charging the passengers to cover that free ride depresses demand for the transport.
It is, indeed, a misnomer to say a route is “uneconomic” merely because it cannot generate either an operational surplus or a full capital and operating profit … since economic benefits include third party benefits that its hard or impossible to charge directly for, just as economic costs include third party costs that its hard or impossible to charge directly for.
An “uneconomic” route would be one where the full economic benefits do not justify the full cost. A 200mph California Zephyr would clearly be uneconomic in the technical sense, but if market conditions would allow capturing a sufficient share of current long haul truck freight, a 100mph (max, not avg) Rapid Electric Freight corridor might be economic. It would, however, have to address the bias in letting trucks use heavily cross subsidized and property tax free transport infrastructure while rail freight uses unsubsidized and property taxed transport infrastructure.
The question is not whether to subsidize transport, but what transport to subsidize and how to subsidize it for the best results. Providing federal capital subsidies to intercity passenger rail on corridors that can generate an operating surplus is is a perfectly reasonable way to proceed for intercity transport, in particular in the large number of corridors where the cost of the project is less than the cost of providing equivalent road and air transport transport capacity.
jim Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Bruce,
We’re not disagreeing. Running money losing trains for broader benefits is not necessarily bad.
What I’m objecting to is the meme that HSR always covers its costs and conventional rail never does.
joe Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 6:53 pm
There are parallels to regional bus service that was once regulated to preserve routes to smaller towns. Once deregulated, bus service consolidated to the most profitable, leaving some communities with no alternative to the automobile.
I’m sure there are also routes in cities that don’t bring in cash but exist to service communities, like the old MUNI 26 in SF which was finally discontinued.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 9:36 am
HSR rarely covers its costs, and where capital-efficient use of existing rail infrastructure can be made, it would not be surprising for conventional rail to
However, we have established institutions for the Federal government to provide capital but not operating subsidies to intercity transport, so its an entrenched habit of thought in the state and local transport operating and planning community to view running an operating surplus as if it was covering costs, because those are the costs that have to be covered at the state and local level.
What matters most to operating surplus is effective population density ~ population density of the catchments of the stations within a two and three hour trip. Enough per square mile population density, and the effective population density of 50mph transit speeds may be sufficient. Fewer, and you need 70mph transit speeds, or 100mph transit speeds, or 150mph transit speeds.
There are lots of intercity tasks where even 150mph transit speeds won’t generate enough effective population density to run a service at an operating surplus ~ its just that nobody makes the very capital intensive investments in those kinds of corridors unless there are big populations that get pulled into an effective corridor as a result.
And given how badly US public policy has put the thumb on the scale on favor of roadbuilding and against passenger rail over the past three quarters of a century, its obvious that there will be plenty of corridors that will do the same at 70mph and 100mph effective transit speeds. Its a matter of identifying the best, providing the service, and studying the result to work out how far down the list of potential corridors it makes sense to go.
I’d rather focus the search for ways to provide needed operating subsidies for sustainable transport on local transport, which is why with respect to intercity transport, I focus on the issue of how to establish more sustainable intercity transport that is able to cover its operating costs.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 9:37 am
… not be surprising for conventional rail {to come closer to covering full economic costs.}
egk Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 12:27 pm
>European conventional trains lose money, not because they run slowly, but because their governments insist they serve uneconomic routes, for social and policy reasons.
Which do you mean? The only segments of the European rail market that need heavy operating subsidies are commuter rail. Intercity rail tends to make profits, high frequency city rail (subway) services about break even.
In 2009, for example German Rail got
– 4 billion Euros in subsidies for regional rail (like Metrolink, Caltrain, etc.), serving about 1.2 billion (!) annual passengers;
– 350 million Euros in subsidies for city rail (like BART, DC Metrorail, etc.), serving about 600 million annual passengers;
– no subsidies at all for the 120 million annual intercity passengers (many high speed, many not)
Alex M. Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Hmmm … what’s wrong with good ol’ regular speed rail?
It’s not fast. You aren’t going to get the general public to take the train from SF to LA if it takes 6 hours.
People know already how to make regular- speed railroads. They’ve been building them around the world for at least a hundred and fifty years.
People already know how to make high-speed railroads. They’ve been building them around the world for almost fifty years. Talk about an established, mature technology indeed.
High speed rail is yet another toy for the kiddies who never seem to grow up, who want everything when they want it.
It is not a toy. And how could we want to have it right now? We here all know full well that it will take at least 8 years to get Phase I built.
The idea is to ‘compete with the carz’ which are — even as I write — obsolete.
I think you’re contradicting yourself.
High Speed rail is something for the comic books, it costs too much to build and uses too much energy. In the real world more rail is needed now, skip the high speed variety.
You’re talking like HSR doesn’t exist. As for costing too much, I hope you realize that expanding airports and freeways costs a lot more than building HSR, and those forms of transit use a lot more energy. Where did you hear that HSR uses too much energy?
Jon Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 1:10 pm
Rail has to be significantly faster than driving to be competitive in a country with such high car ownership as the US. If by ‘regular’ speed you mean 100mph+, then I’m all for building such lines; but given that the existing FRA mess means that everything is going to be have to be built from scratch anyway, you may as well make the relatively small extra expenditure and build the track for 220mph+, with the added bonus that the system becomes profitable and will pay for it’s own operating costs, thus somewhat appeasing fiscal conservatives.
Nothing is wrong with regular speed rail, but it won’t get built in the current political climate. Hopefully HSR will be a game changer that proves the value of rail and spurs the construction of 100mph+ feeder lines from mid-sized cities to cities with HSR stations.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Where there is available room in existing rail corridor and sufficient population in a 100 mile to 300 mile radius, the incremental cost of a 200mph corridor is far more than a “small extra expenditure”.
There is, of course, not sufficient space in most existing rail corridors leading out of the LA Basin, and heading north, you don’t hit any of the 1m+ urban areas of the state within a 300mile radius. For California’s particular population distribution and geography, the cost of whichever new egress is built out of the Bay and the LA Basin and the distance between the two mean that the baseline cost is substantially higher than most parts of the country, while the incremental benefit of cranking up from 110mph max to 220mph max is several multiples of the baseline benefit.
Luckily, the Obama administration was not suckered by the line of argument favoring putting all the HSR funds into one or two high profile projects, but instead spread the funding around among two Express HSR projects and five Regional HSR projects, which turned out to be one too many Express HSR project and three too many Regional HSR projects for the ideological (and self-interested) opponents of HSR to succeed in killing all HSR projects of any type.
Robert, you say you met him briefly some time back; you have referenced his work in some of your own. You say he is approachable, or at least was when you got to see him. Have you considered contacting him, and laying out the case (with a link to here, of course)?
Of equal importance, do you think it worthwhile?
Robert Cruickshank Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 6:55 pm
I have considered that. It can be done. It depends on whether I have the time.
What would be worthwhile – and is in fact badly needed – is a short fact sheet as to why the California HSR project in particular is worthwhile, something that quickly debunks the commonplace misstatements being made about the project. This has been discussed from time to time but it’s no small amount of work. If there’s a group of people willing to help, however, it can and should be done.
I link through to this piece in tonight’s Sunday Train.
Is this something new Robert?
A bill by Assemblyman Brian Jones, R-Santee, would put the brakes on high-speed rail in California by withholding money until environmental studies are complete. Jones wants a UC Berkeley institute to conduct a ridership study before nearly $10 billion could be spent on the train system. The ridership findings would contribute to a later environmental analysis. The bill, AB953, will be heard Monday in the Assembly Transportation Committee.
More BS
political_incorrectness Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:15 pm
Hopefully this gets shot down fast.
VBobier Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
I predict It will not go anywhere, Except to defeat.
Nathanael Reply:
April 24th, 2011 at 11:51 pm
Obvious Republican delay attempt — he’s trying to get studies redone which were already done perfectly competently.
Yeah – let’s lose billions in ARRA money and conduct a study.
I live in Menlo Park (across the parking lot from Caltrain), and I totally support the high speed rail, elevated even. I think there is one area where it could cause bad growth though, in the Mojave, because there is so little water there. Because the cities there apparently do want the railroad very much anyway, there doesn’t seem to be a practical way to oppose or prevent that growth. Hopefully the cities will manage to solve the water problems in a way that doesn’t hurt Northern California too much.
Wad Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 4:15 am
You don’t have much to fear about Mojave sprawl, Nick.
For one thing, for that area to sprawl you would have to have a) a station and b) high enough land values to make the Mojave area attractive in comparison to the Antelope Valley or metropolitan Kern County. Neither of those conditions exist.
Second, much of the train is running through some of the most distressed housing communities in the U.S. If developers can even find the money for new subdivisions, that would only exacerbate the underlying problem. The bursting of the real estate bubble has solved the sprawl problem, albeit cruelly, for at least a generation.
Risenmessiah Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 11:08 am
Actually, no it hasn’t. The reason is that there is plenty of commercial property available, and companies aren’t shy about moving their operations where it is cheaper to do so. It’s true that we won’t see the scale of sprawl that we did in the last few years, but sprawl isn’t dead until gas becomes prohibitively expensive.
Nick makes a great point though, and I would answer him this way. The chance of huge boomtowns in the Mojave desert isn’t likely because Desert Xpress has no real desire to put that many stops in. However, I do think that the HSR route through the Inland Empire is problematic because it will encourage more development there and strain on water supplies that are probably untenable. Luckily, that portion is Phase 2, so there’s a while yet before that comes to a head.
Wad Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 12:26 am
Risenmessiah wrote:
The reason is that there is plenty of commercial property available, and companies aren’t shy about moving their operations where it is cheaper to do so.
Real estate is distressed entirely, but the distressed parties are different for residential and commercial transactions. In residential transactions, it’s the tenants (mortgage payers) that are bearing the brunt of a poor job climate and underwater mortgages.
Commercial and industrial real estate, though, is practically a golden age for business tenants. It’s the property owners that are over a barrel. Their problems are a debt hangover from burning through bubble-era capital, an oversupply of square footage, and losing leverage over tenants.
Also, relocations are not a factor that can drive markets. Richard Longworth, an author and scholar with a Midwest think tank, had a recent blog post about recruiting of transplant businesses. He says in a year there are about 300 major corporate relocations involving hundreds of employees or more. He also says that in the U.S., there are about 15,000 various economic development entities that are angling for these relocations. That means each entity has 50-to-1 odds of landing a relocation based on equal probability.
These events don’t move markets enough to affect the present real estate climate. Also, this appears to be a variation on the economic concept of the lump of labor fallacy: In this case, there’s only a fixed quantity of corporate activity that can only be distributed through relocation. (Newly established and expanding businesses will also need real estate, so it is evident that there’s a variable level of tenant demand.)
Anyhow, commercial real estate’s problem stems from the post-bubble hangover (many landowners can’t meet their payment obligations) and an oversupply of product. Neither of these will resolve themselves in the short-term, and the only remedy is destructive. Real estate also has another problem: Land does not go bad.
In an agricultural glut, crop spoilage can solve the oversupply imbalance. Buildings, though, don’t have expiration dates. Vacant space produces no money yet it still imposes costs. Yet it’s not always possible to shed costs. If a mid-rise office building has a 20% vacancy rate, it’s not practical to lop off the top 20% of floors from the building.
Plus, the reality of high vacancies is casting a pall over the market. It’s much harder to obtain working capital for anything real estate-related, be it new space or converting existing space.
Shedding the space, and the capital crunch, come as the trend in commercial real estate is to “downspace.” Tenants are cutting their demand for square footage. Digitization means less space is used for filing and storage, and productivity and outsourcing means there is less of a demand for people-space.
Sprawl isn’t dead until gas becomes prohibitively expensive.
Don’t assume that high gas prices mean the pendulum will swing in the favor of urban areas.
When you’re on the downside of scarcity, low economic values will be sacrificed to preserve higher economic values much like the mythical snake that eats its own tail. If the key decision makers need their BMWs and their commute to the edge city in order to function in their jobs, they’ll sooner cannibalize other jobs to pay for their gas money.
Pareto, he of the “law of the vital few”, says most of us will be screwed.
Wad Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 12:27 am
The parts I quoted from Risenmessiah are:
The reason is that there is plenty of commercial property available, and companies aren’t shy about moving their operations where it is cheaper to do so.
and
Sprawl isn’t dead until gas becomes prohibitively expensive.
“And HSR does help solve the underlying problem, which is one of a severe and prolonged recession caused by dependence on oil.”
All of the evidence I am aware of indicates that the recession was caused by fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the financial industry (coupled with deregulation), not oil. Do you have evidence to back the claim that it was caused by dependence on oil instead?
BruceMcF Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 9:44 am
Either/or is silly. The recession started with the collapse of the housing bubble. It accelerated with the oil price shock. One impact of the oil price shock was to worsen the impact of the collapse of the housing bubble, since so much housing bubble housing stock was outer suburban. Another impact of the oil price shock was pressure on household budgets. Both contributed to the weakness of cash flows in the second half of 2008 that made is impossible to continue masking the underlying insolvency of the financial institutions.
Either an asset bubble collapse of that magnitude, an oil price shock of that magnitude, or a financial panic of that magnitude would have caused a recession, and so combining all three together gave us the worst recession since the two recessions of the Great Depression (the Hoover recession of 1929~1933 and the Roosevelt recession after the effort to balance the budget of 1937~1938).
The underlying cause of the financial panic was we allowed Wall Street to behave in ways that always lead to financial panic, but the proximate causes were the collapse of the housing bubble and the oil price shock.
Risenmessiah Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 11:11 am
The underlying cause of the financial panic is that we have a country which focuses way too much of selling debt as a primary economic growth driver. Wall Street was too big for its own good and that’s what is lost in the debate. We have had serious financial crises before, but because of the number of people and dollars involved, this one has been exceptionally painful.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 9:37 am
Same underlying cause in different words ~ when you allow financial intermediaries free reign, one thing they always do over the longer term is to increase total leverage, as they find that they can take on greater and greater systemic risk without any noticeable impact on the bottom line.
Then, because systemic risks are the ones where all the pigeons come home to roost at one time, they realize the systemic risk, which means that nobody has the reserves to cope, because everyone abandoned prudence in order to “stay competitive” with everyone else, and the system is insolvent.
We’ve got a 2.5x GDP private debt overhang, all of which is subject to insolvency risk, and Wall Street has convinced people to focus instead of a less than 1x GDP public debt overhang, the majority of which is subject to no insolvency risk, and the biggest slice of which is the government owing money to itself.
Off topic, but sometimes it’s productive to reflect on the predictions of high speed rail’s past.
http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2008/05/anaheim-sf-by-2014-and-more-altamont.html
Beware of politicians bearing lofty promises.
Well as comments cool down on Robert’s 3000 word tirade against White’s OP ED in the NY Times, he can open up his word spigot to condemn this new OP ED that appears i the LA Times.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-moore-rail-20110425,0,7651714.story
D. P. Lubic Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:25 am
Check out the source:
http://reason.org/authors/show/james-e-moore-ii
http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/experts/739.html
http://www.usc.edu/schools/sppd/faculty/detail.php?id=23
Amazing, simply amazing, that such educated and smart people can somehow miss things like our oil dependency, production rates, and so on. . .
Wad Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Ah yes, the Reason Foundation School of Public Policy at USC.
James Moore is one of the L.A. Times’ “token hater” columnists who gets published because he’s a proven commodity of opposition, not because his predictions has come through.
His clique opined ex cathedra that first mass transit and now high-speed rail will be a failure because the numbers decreed it so. Remember the pronouncement that the Los Angeles Blue Line was going to be a “ghost train”; that there is no conceivable reason why anyone should even attempt to use it?
Before the Blue Line opened, light rail ridership was 0, obviously. In the first months of operation, the Blue Line was a bleak 19,000 boardings. After 20 years? In the neighborhood of 75,000 to 80,000 boardings.
If these guys were in charge of making investment decisions, and they made such a bad miscalculation, they’d be in prison.
YESonHSR Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 6:48 pm
Most of the commments are against his “opinion” A yes the Reason foundation..so unbiased and YES he is on the staff..and cashing a check!!
joe Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 7:01 pm
….in prison or stuck in a subsidized conservative think-tank churning out chum.
Some of the WA DC based HSR opposition comes form think tanks located conveniently near a DC METRO stop.
thatbruce Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 10:23 am
I read that this morning over my morning gruel, and was slightly surprised that the LA Times would print such a thing given some of their previous pieces. Apart from the usual issue over large scary sums of money not being cited along with their original year of expenditure figure, it reads like a direct encouragement for the airline and highway industries.
morris brown Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 10:44 am
The LA Times as certainly for the most part been favorable to HSR. There have been a few exceptions.
The LA Times is really responsible for Prop 1A passing in 2008. Their very late endorsement of Prop 1A seems to have pushed enough voters to vote yes, in what was a very close vote and a vote which was decidedly headed towards the no column towards the end.
That endorsement was not without reservations. It said vote yes, because it thought risking around $2 billion was worth seeing what would develop as the process moved forward.
We are now seeing more and more opposition from large circulation media, to this and other HSR projects as reality sets in and much more transparency has become available.
When one realizes that today on the Federal level, 42% of all dollars being spent, are being borrowed, one must face the reality that embarking on long term, hugely expensive initiatives, like HSR, cannot be accommodated in the near or medium term.
The LA OP ED clearly sets forth the reality.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:18 am
The Federal government borrows money during a recession. The other alternative is allocating a family to you and having you house, feed and clothe them until the economy picks up. We can reduce spending to close or eliminate the deficit or we can raise taxes. Reduced spending gets back to having homeless people coming to live with you.
synonymouse Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
I wonder how long it going to take for the hsr foamers to recognize that if they want to build some semblance of improved passenger rail in California they will have to acquire flexibility and amend the scheme. Before it is too late. Both the CHSRA and PB have lost credibility and alienated potential supporters with a string of ill-advised political compromises and bullying tactics.
Maybe firing PB is the only way to regroup.
Borden to Corcoran is a pr disaster that inevitably results from political pandering. Forget peddling the hsr as a welfare project for the San Joaquin Valley – it is a dead giveaway that this project is a intentional money pit from the beginning. Go back to Congress and de-link any federal monies from any specific requirements. Concentrate on filling the gap in existing passenger rail – Bakersfield to Palmdale-Sylmar. Even throwing money at the Tehachapi freight route is better than a train from nowhere to nowhere, a gift to the Reason crowd.
Risenmessiah Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 4:31 pm
For as much mileage as “Stilt a rail” and “Borden to Corcoran” have gotten, I would bet that California is going to get enough federal dollars to do Fresno-Bakersfield. Fresno County is going to kick in some of its local transportation tax to help the ROW stay at ground level. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Amtrak uses the track to launch an Express San Joaquin service.
Firing PB isn’t necessary. There is no guarantee they will get the contract to build the system and this is what they are starting to realize.
joe Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 6:56 pm
Morris wants Stanford to build that 3 Billion dollar hospital extension in **without** any traffic mitigation spending. We are after all in deep debt (42% you know) but need those jobs.
The voters of CA approved Prop 1A on the basis that this project be self-sustaining. Every credible analysis based on realistic ridership numbers has shown that it cannot be so – not even close. The cost will balloon dramatically – just look at the eventual costs of the “Big Dig”, “The New Bay Bridge”, and every other major project. There is NO WAY this project can be in compliance with Prop 1A. This project must be shelved.
If people want to build HSR, the state legislature should prioritize it along with other state projects such as education, infrastructure, roads, bridges, freeways, welfare programs, etc. Prop 1A was an attempt to short circuit this process and bring it to the top of the priority list by fooling people into thinking it “will be self-sustaining.” I am ashamed to say that I voted FOR Prop 1A. If I were to vote today, I would DEFINITELY vote AGAiNST.
synonymouse Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 10:50 pm
I also voted for Prop 1A thinking the proponents could be trusted because they obviously liked trains and therefore just could not be corrupt. And the hsr would keep diabolical BART out of the Peninsula. yeah sure.
Of course that vote has become for me the scarlet letter of naivete perhaps just downright stupidity. I should have known that Bechtel-PB-Balfour-Beatty and all other dba’s past and present was the spider lurking at the center of the web encompassing both BART and CHSRA.
Yes, for these guys building an electric railway might as well be cold fusion. If you want a perpetual and profoundly noisome incarnation of their incompetence take a ride on BART. The worthies who are responsible for the overwhelming noise-the wall of sound- of that piece of dreck should be renditioned to Guantanamo. It is no wonder PB opposes Tejon – it is outside of their job description. They can only do routes on the wrong side of the mountain.
The reality is that Bell is just the tip of the iceberg. Our politicos make Huey and Earl Long look like angels. If you don’t believe how far off track our State has gone read the details of the new prison guards contract Jerry Brown concocted. This editorial appeared today in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat – an inveterate supporter of SMART and presumably the CHSRA. The perks are downright unbelievable
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110425/OPINION/110429789/1042?Title=PD-Editorial-A-sweetheart-deal-for-prison-guards.
adirondacker12800 Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 9:50 am
profoundly noisome incarnation of their incompetence take a ride on BART.
The people who designed BART retired a long time ago. Most of them are probably dead. They won’t have much to say about how anything is designed.
Peter Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 10:51 am
“Yes, for these guys building an electric railway might as well be cold fusion. If you want a perpetual and profoundly noisome incarnation of their incompetence take a ride on BART. The worthies who are responsible for the overwhelming noise-the wall of sound- of that piece of dreck should be renditioned to Guantanamo.”
Right, because the people who designed it are responsible for the fact that the fleet has never been replaced.
synonymouse Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 10:57 am
Yes, newer cars than the Rohrs have been bought, and new lines constructed. No improvement, maybe worse than ever.
PB & Brutalism forever!
Peter Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 11:07 am
Did you read the word “replaced”? That would imply that something old got taken out of service, and something new came in its place. Which did not happen.
Wad Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:50 pm
You know, there’s a funny thing about overruns. The bark of an overrun is far worse than the actual bite. It’s a great way to rouse a response from a credulous public.
This isn’t a defense of cost overruns. There are explainable reasons why they happen, and most of the time they are not due to decision-makers knowingly and willfully lying to the public or the public authorities keeping “two sets of books”.
Remember, these are criminal accusations, not opinions. There needs to be evidence of wrongdoing. Knowing and willful deception involves a person knowing the higher true cost and the lower politically palatable cost and suppressing the knowledge of the latter. The “two sets of books,” in effect doing the same thing, requires finding the paper trail to both.
Every project carries a risk of a cost overrun. This risk is countered by the opportunity of completion. The problem with mega infrastructure projects of any kind is the fact that they require highly specialized knowledge and goods, plus there’s a lack of an identical substitute good. So the decision comes down to “Go or No Go?”
Go opens up the risk of a project costing more than it’s expected price. The utility of the project remains the same. Or, the final output can be cut to match the price input. The alternatives are: Eat the cost increase and get the same product, or cut some inputs to stay within budget.
How do you reduce the risk of overrun? You can pay a lot more out of your total construction budget on pre-construction analysis. Is it worth it? The only thing top-of-the-line analysis will get you is an almost certain expectation that your final construction price comes close to the estimated analysis price. The trade-off is that now you have to underdesign the utility of the system just to pay for the knowledge that you won’t pay more for it.
These analyses will reveal the “known unknowns,” such as project-specific challenges you might come across (such as problematic soil, a protected habitat or running in a flood plain). This at least avoids coming into a problem and going back to square one during construction.
Then there are the “unknown unknowns,” which cannot be forecast with certainty. These are contingencies such as volatility in the prices of supplies (a shortage of steel, or a collapse in steel prices but a lock-in of higher prices) or lawsuits. This means setting aside more money for contingency funds, which raises the total cost.
There’s a really good explanation of the process on Publictransit.us. It’s by Michael Setty and Leroy Demery, who posts on this blog.
http://www.publictransit.us/ptlibrary/specialreports/sr5.Flyvbjerg_Deja_Vue.htm
“that Caltrain train, on which Stanford depends…”
Talk about making a statement that’s devastating to one’s credibility!
Do you read what you emanate?
T Heller Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:41 am
Sorry, I should have used “exude”. Same notion; more terse.
T Heller Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 11:43 am
“emit” would work, too.
Spokker Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 12:49 am
Yeah, I have a thesaurus too.
Can’t we just round up all the nay-sayers and ship them off to Alaska or something? I’m getting sick and tired of this.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 5:09 pm
Getting you sick and tired of it is part of their strategy in nay-saying. When you get too sick and tired, take a break for a spell and recharge.
Why do opponents look at high speed rail as something akin to “cold fusion”? The United States is twenty to thirty years behind the times on this technology and yet we’re supposed to believe tha this is some horrific leap into the unknown? It’s rail. Straighter and with better materials than previously available but essentially a technology more than a hundred years old. Yes, the signalling is more sophisticated and the rolling stock modern but that’s it. Constructing a new rail line across California doesn’t present any difficulties not seen before.
I can’t believe I’m living in an America that is afraid of technology and wants to keep us living in a “horse and buggy” world where the street urchins are supposed to stare in awe at the elite riding past in their private automobiles while waiting for the omnibus that our lord and masters have deemed sufficient for us “liberals” to get around!
Beta Magellan Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 3:45 pm
While I agree there’s definitely skepticism that comes from technological ignorance, I think much of the opposition to HSR comes from capital costs and the assumption that successful HSR needs Japan-levels of urban rail transit and density to support it. I think the latter is something of an unintended byproduct of the fact that HSR generally gets packaged rhetorically with arguments for increased density and supporting urban transit; it’s also thanks to sloppy thinking about density—see DE’s McArdle takedown:
http://systemicfailure.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/china-us-and-europe/
Richard A Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 6:58 pm
The point is that with known technology the capital expense should yield very predictable results – x miles of track per billion. It’s not like building the 787 Dreamliner or an aircraft carrier where the project can become very expensive when you’re trying to incorporate new technology. We’re not building a rocket to the moon. Yes, steel rail could cost more – who knows but its not the same dimension of complexity as trying something new. I think Republicans want to stop HSR because it might work.
joe Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 7:07 pm
Exactly!
HSR is NOT a MEGA project. It is rail with decades old technology, HSR, running on tracks we have been laying and maintaining longer than highways.
The Bay Area’s unmet transportation needs for roads and bridges total 24B and there are 19B in projects slated during the near term let alone over HSR’s horizon to 2035.
So HSR costs all of CA 43B to build – opponents whimsically say 65B.
egk Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 11:26 am
yes, HSR is essentially freeways for trains. In fact, it is exactly that: limited access, grade separated, minimal curvature.
synonymouse Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 12:14 pm
If “HSR is essentially freeways for trains” how come such a hissy fit over paralleling I-5 over Tejon?
thatbruce Reply:
April 26th, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Tolmach is not Stalin, to be able to dribble some coffee across a map and pronounce it part of the plans to be built.
BruceMcF Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 9:31 am
Different gradient requirements, different minimal curvature.
VBobier Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 11:12 am
Syno has a one track mind on HSR over the Tehachapi mountains as He loves Tejon, I’m surprised He doesn’t move to Gorman.
synonymouse Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 12:03 pm
I’d just like to be able to glide on thru Gorman, Lebec, etc. on a passenger train – I’d even settle for diesel at this point. The freeway analogy does not work for PB; they want to build a water-level aqueduct mit copious stilts.
Meantime the “Giuliani” effect of blight is becoming better known and more studied:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110426111417.htm
The toll of blighting infrastructure needs to be included in project cost estimates. Cities and towns are entirely on their own when it comes to paying the “tax” of neighborhood decay. In the Bay Area two burgs in particular come to mind as having experienced very marked deterioration in a relatively short time – Vallejo and Antioch. It is no wonder that toney venues like PAMPA worry about mitigating future blight – it is very expensive, difficult and no guarantee blight can be reversed in a reasonable time frame.
They ought to include aesthetics in engineering school. But it still applies that if the consultant doesn’t give the client what they want – aesthetics and ethics notwithstanding – they “will never work in this town again”, as the expression goes.
Still I say Bell is the bellwether of California decline. Where is our fabled fourth estate? They need to investigate just how the Palmdale deviation came to be “chiseled” in stone.
Winston Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
The blight in Vallejo and Antioch has nothing to do with ugly infrastructure. Both cities were never very nice and only appeared so briefly due to the real estate bubble. If anything Antioch in particular is characterized by a LACK of infrastructure, only this year is Highway 4 being widened to reach the border of Antioch.
Wad Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 8:42 pm
Synonymouse, what do you hope will happen with your endless repetition of routing HSR through the Grapevine? You think that if you ask enough, you’ll badger enough people to get on your side? I don’t have to answer this for you.
Robert can probably analyze how much bandwidth has been wasted on your harangues on this very one subject and just about everyone else on this blog expending their own time and energy repeating the answer that will not change even though you don’t like to hear it.
Do you have any better use of your time than to disrupt the discussion of people who have legitimate questions and interests in high-speed rail?
I forgot to pass on this link to an article that is a thousand percent worse than the NYT Oped piece. First he refers to the Florida HSR as “light rail” – it goes downhill from there!
http://nsbnews.net/content/406082-light-rail-bad-idea-florida
Beta Magellan Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 3:54 pm
I’ve heard the light rail/HSR conflation before—it works well for conservative populists because they have several decades of fighting light rail. Should we be charitable and assume he was talking about SunRail?
In any event, I’d hardly call it a thousand times worse—it’s a phoned-in, detail-free opinion piece from nsbnews.net (.net!), not something which could change the minds of people on the fence about or not really paying attention to HSR, like White’s piece.
Alex M. Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
What’s wrong with .net?
Alex M. Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 6:35 pm
The stupid… it hurts.
joe Reply:
April 25th, 2011 at 6:57 pm
…it burns
VBobier Reply:
April 27th, 2011 at 11:13 am
Their like zombies looking for brains… Brains, Brains…