General Discussion

Railway Man:

dehusman:

Railway Man:

Starting at Square 1 is not a bad thing -- it enables not being stuck with sunk cost in a not-so-good infrastructure such as Britain's small loading gauge.

But they aren't starting at square one.  Virtually every "high speed rail" proposal that is out there starts with overlaying a high speed passenger operation on top of an existing freight line, for example the territory between Chicago and St. Louis.  Its not starting at square one, its just upgrading the existing facility to handle higher speed trains.

 

True, and for 90 mph that may be acceptable.  But for 110 mph or greater, my opinion is that those plans will come to naught.  When it's all done, my opinion is it will be at least 90% new infrastructure and 10% shared.  Because:  The costs for shared infrastructure for compliant vehicles, extra energy to shove it down the track, train-control systems, electrification, track geometry, rail profile, maintenance costs for 286K and high-speed, will prove higher than just building new infrastructure. 

RWM

I'd say 90-110 mph is a gray area.  On one hand, you have roads like NS that have made 90 mph max part of stated policy.  On the other hand, you have the CSX Hudson line with mixed traffic and passenger speeds >90 mph, although freight presence is minimal. 

Good thing that new ROW and starting out with 90mph upgrades aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

This should be fun to watch.

Railway Man:

erikem:

Railway Man:

 It isn't rocket surgery though there is a lot of work involved, and it's defensible.

 

 Mixed metaphors here???

Only on purpose!

[snip]

erikem - He (RWM) probably picked it up from working with those young whippersnappers ("Generation X") in his firm.  My daughter (age 30) uses terms like that often in casual technical conversation.  (When she was doing her M.S. Geology work at Cape Canaveral from 2000 - 2002, popular T-shirts said, "Why yes, I am a rocket scientist !".)  To be perhaps stupefying obvious here: "Rocket surgery" = intentional contraction of "rocket science" + "brain surgery", both being emblematic and icons of professions and businesses that require high levels of technical training and knowledge, skill, expertise, and sometimes imagination (the former) and/ or judgment (the latter).  Interestingly, the math, physics, and equations that are the stuff of such studies are more part of the rocket scientist's knowledge base than the brain surgeon's.  More importantly, the brain surgeon is presumably paid well; the rocket scientist, not so much.  So those who worry about compensation maybe should want to say that, "Yes, it is brain surgery, not rocket science." 

Railway Man:

Difficulty in not fully understanding economic and scientific issues is supposed to be part of the risk analysis in the feasibility study.  If it's naked of that level of analysis, it's shelf art. 

RWM 

[emphasis added - PDN.]

Interesting insight, disclosure, and back-handed critique - I'm not sure that it is stated or appreciated by those involved as often as it should be (outside of financial proxy statement and report kind of things). 

Reminds me of a couple of aphorisms: "Behold the turtle - he makes progress only when he sticks his neck out."  More to the point: "Ships are safe in port.  But that's not where ships belong." - Adm. Grace Hopper, USN (dec'd.).  Also reminds me of something I once read about the U.S. Presidency - "The easy decisions are made elsewhere; the hard ones come here.  And if it's not a hard decision, then it's not much of a decision."  Very little in life is risk-free - but some people have a problem accepting that.  To me, the key is to understand the subject, find out about and minimize the risk as much as reasonably possible, and then make the decisions.  The decision shouldn't always be to go ahead - not all projects are worthwhile - and one sign of a pro is the ability to walk away from a deal (quote from John Kneiling again). 

- Paul North.

Railway Man:

...it's shelf art.

 I gotta remember this one!

 Me, too - that was part of the "charm" of that post ! - PDN.

I tend to agree that thinking small on this route---conventional equipment and no dedicated ROW will gather some new riders and make the trip more time and energy efficient. But more traffic goes Chicago-St. Louis than could ever hope to go to the Quad Cities. The bulk of the truly slow ride is still in Chicagoland where at least 30 minutes is wasted on every trip going slowly or waiting for the hand-moved gate on the SW side to be moved. Equally antiquated is the hand-moved switches all along the ex-GM&O route. Without extensive upgrades to ROW, closure or overpasses for the 422 crossings (Amtrak study pdf), there is only so much to gain. However, money spent improving rail is never a waste when compared to military waste or unwanted pork projects. Spending billions on O'Hare expansion (or even the Peotone option) could be better spent moving people onto true high-speed lines to major cities throughout the Midwest and eliminate these hundreds of small regional flights tha clog O'Hare.

Railway Man:

 

Most important question is: Would a sufficiently large number of people  actually use HSR if available? I suspect the answer is highly dependent on the implementation.

 

As usual, the devil is in the details. 

Implementation studies have to have a general outline, and a site-specific analysis.  It's not necessary to reinvent the general methodology every time (and undesirable because it makes comparisons difficult), but it is necessary to develop site-specific independent variables.  I think we could agree without even thinking about it that a HSR corridor between Tonopah and Fallon, Nevada, would probably not have very many riders, and an HSR corridor between San Diego and Los Angeles probably would.  But in between is where the answers are not yet known.

RWM 

No argument from me about "the devil is in the details".

My intent when referring to "implementation" was in the very broad sense. In addition to location I would add stations (location, parking, etc), scheduling, reliability, interior design and fares. As an example, I would imagine the Acela would be a lot less appealing to you if it was equipped with 3-2 seating. HSR could lose a lot of appeal if no one bothers to maintain the equipment.

Pretty obvious that the LOSSAN corridor would get a lot more traffic than a Tonopah Fallon corridor (haven't been to either Tonopah or Fallon but did get to Dayton, NV), though it might be easier and cheaper to make a truly high speed corridor between Tonopah and Fallon. I'd also wonder what the optimum speed would be on the LOSSAN corridor, especially considering trade-offs between speed and number of stops - a train that takes two hours to get from San Diego to LA would be more appealing to me if I could get on at Solana Beach than a train that took one and a half hours between LA and SD where I'd have to get on at Oceanslide - though someone living near downtown San Diego might think differently.

Come to think of it, just getting the LA-SD to be consistently under two hours would be a much better investment than trying to get HSR between LA and the Bay Area. 

UChicagoMatt:

However, money spent improving rail is never a waste when compared to military waste or unwanted pork projects.

Never? 

I hope this isn't what you really meant, after all the RWM has written!

Is the military really any more "wasteful" than any other branch of gov't?

"Unwanted port project" is oxymoronic.  SOMEBODY wanted it or it wouldn't have made it into a bill.  Remeber, one person's pork is another's "other white meat".

You can make a case that Amtrak's LD trains should make the "Top  Ten" list of gov't waste if you go strictly on a cost benefit analysis - even if you throw in all the "soft" benefits. 

That Quad Cities - Chicago service sure sets my "pork alert" antenna buzzing.  The best use of our money is to provide service through corn country to the 132nd largest metro area in the US? 

Two important points from the above posts are worth emphasizing [emphasis added - PDN]:

By UChicagoMatt on 03-23-09 at 10:48 PM:  "The bulk of the truly slow ride is still in Chicagoland where at least 30 minutes is wasted on every trip going slowly or waiting for the hand-moved gate on the SW side to be moved. Equally antiquated is the hand-moved switches all along the ex-GM&O route."

Hey Matt - Welcome to the Forum !    Good comment, too.

By erikem on 03-24-09 at 12:57 AM:  "I'd also wonder what the optimum speed would be on the LOSSAN corridor, especially considering trade-offs between speed and number of stops - a train that takes two hours to get from San Diego to LA would be more appealing to me if I could get on at Solana Beach than a train that took one and a half hours between LA and SD where I'd have to get on at Oceanslide - though someone living near downtown San Diego might think differently."

- PDN.

oltmannd:

 

That Quad Cities - Chicago service sure sets my "pork alert" antenna buzzing.  The best use of our money is to provide service through corn country to the 132nd largest metro area in the US? 

On the other hand, who knows for sure?  Someone living in the 132nd largest might want to get out of town-a lot!

Just wait, folks.

Granted that it's a long shot, but if we taxpayers out west get stuck with the cost of a Disneyland-to-Las Vegas mag-lev train, it'll make these other proposals look cheap!  And, (sarcasm added here) it's exactly what we need. 

Still, the worst government spending is not pork-barrel or excesses in the military, it's rewarding people for bad behavior (e.g., breeding fatherless children--the kind of gift that keeps on giving).  Subsidize anything and you get more of it.

garyla - Gee, what makes you think it'll be you taxpayers out west (only) that get stuck with the cost of a Disneyland-to-Las Vegas mag-lev train ?  The way it looks to me, we'll all get stuck with its cost, if it is ever built.  And likewise, the rest of us need it exactly just as much as you do !

- PDN. 

Railway Man:

[snip]  The sweet spot for high-speed rail for the business traveler is the 100-500 mile corridor with frequent service.  Doesn't matter where the station is, as long as it's either center-city with subway or taxis or both, or suburban with a rental car lot next to a beltway.  That will 100% nail my business everytime.  Hopefully TSA won't ruin it too.  At the bottom end of that range it beats driving.  At the top end it beats flying.  There's some significant market for the business traveler in the 1,000-mile corridor, too, because often the airline schedules are so poor that the "time savings" doesn't exist. [snip; emphasis added - PDN.]]

RWM

Sadly, don't bet on TSA not ruining it.  See what the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, its Transportation Security Administration, and the U.S. Coast Guard have done here to the "mule skinners" who walk alongside the 2 mules that pull a faux-replica canal boat on about a 1-mile ride in a land-locked segment of the former Lehigh Canal in Hugh Moore Park in Easton, PA, at:

"Mule Guides Must Get ID Cards" - The Morning Call, Allentown, PA, March 24, 2009, page B-1:

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_5mules.6828782mar24,0,1129022.story

and, "National Canal Museum Mule Drivers Subjected to Increased Anti-Terrorism Screening" - The Express-Times, Easton, PA, March 24, 2009, at:

http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/easton/index.ssf/2009/03/national_canal_museum_mule_dri.html

"The organization will pay $105 for each of four workers to get biometric identification cards, which include their photos and fingerprint information, by next month. The cards are good for five years."

I couldn't make this stuff up.  Whatever happened to common sense ?

"We have met the enemy, and he is us !" - Pogo [apologies to whoever here's signature line that is]

- Paul North.

Paul_D_North_Jr:

Railway Man:

[snip]  The sweet spot for high-speed rail for the business traveler is the 100-500 mile corridor with frequent service.  Doesn't matter where the station is, as long as it's either center-city with subway or taxis or both, or suburban with a rental car lot next to a beltway.  That will 100% nail my business everytime.  Hopefully TSA won't ruin it too.  At the bottom end of that range it beats driving.  At the top end it beats flying.  There's some significant market for the business traveler in the 1,000-mile corridor, too, because often the airline schedules are so poor that the "time savings" doesn't exist. [snip; emphasis added - PDN.]]

RWM

Sadly, don't bet on TSA not ruining it.  See what the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, its Transportation Security Administration, and the U.S. Coast Guard have done here to the "mule skinners" who walk alongside the 2 mules that pull a faux-replica canal boat on about a 1-mile ride in a land-locked segment of the former Lehigh Canal in Hugh Moore Park in Easton, PA, at:

"Mule Guides Must Get ID Cards" - The Morning Call, Allentown, PA, March 24, 2009, page B-1:

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_5mules.6828782mar24,0,1129022.story

and, "National Canal Museum Mule Drivers Subjected to Increased Anti-Terrorism Screening" - The Express-Times, Easton, PA, March 24, 2009, at:

http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/easton/index.ssf/2009/03/national_canal_museum_mule_dri.html

"The organization will pay $105 for each of four workers to get biometric identification cards, which include their photos and fingerprint information, by next month. The cards are good for five years."

I couldn't make this stuff up.  Whatever happened to common sense ?

"We have met the enemy, and he is us !" - Pogo [apologies to whoever here's signature line that is]

- Paul North.

 

 

Bringing this up again because of Bob Johnston's news article in the May Trains.  He goes over the various choke points on Amtrak's Chicago-St Louis service.  Not that elimination of these would put the service over the top, but their elimination-at what would be a low cost compared to even 110MPH service-could pull as much as an hour out of the current schedule.

I would pose this.  If we don't want to pay the price for high speed or "mid-speed" (110MPH max), why not consider 79MPH top speed service with enough money put into fixing the slow spots so that the service matches what might be typical auto drive time.  No doubt finding the price for all the fixes would put a number of good railroad civil engineers to work, but I could see the realization of some goals.  For example, I think there can be a bigger bang for the public buck to get people out of cars rather than planes and into trains.  If we are not putting trillions into rail infrastructure, maybe there is enough to improve service frequency.  That could address the convenience factor of personal vehicle leaving at any time vs. the fixed schedule of a train.

Clearly, this is not a very glamouous proposal, and I don't expect that this would get a massive shift out of cars and planes.  On the other hand, I can't see that the $8 billion that is now on the table will get us very far down the high speed line.  At something on the order of $50,000,000 a mile for high speed we would need $50 billion for just 2 or 3 regional projects.  Depending on who is counting, there are anywhere from 11 to 20 such routes.  That means anywhere between one half and one whole trillion bucks.  It doesn't bother me so much, but that many zeros put a lot of people into a cataconic state.

Earlier on in this thread, there was some argument over the issue of where a rational transportation policy should start.  I am in the group that says government transportation planners, which would be a mix of government bureaucrats and contracted private entities should be laying the ground work.  Others argue that the market place, that is the collective result of the individual decisions should drive the result.

When it comes to transportation, I see problems with the latter.  To illustrate.  In May, my wife are traveling to Maryland to visit family.  We are taking public transportation-she will fly from Milwaukee to Baltimore and I will take trains from Fox Lake, IL to DC.  Renting a car at our destination will put our total transportation cost for the trip at about $650.

I have a nice car, gets about 20 MPG and I could use it for the trip.  At $3.00 per gallon, I estimate the 2000 miles I would drive would would run me about $300.00.  We could stay with family half way, so I wouldn't have to consider lodging enroute, and since we are both retired on pension, we don't have to factor any lost income.

Are we making a rational decision to spend twice as much money to use public transportation rather than drive?  Maybe.  When I figure up my total cost for the vehicle-ownership, fuel, maintenance and repairs and insurance-I find that the driving the trip would cost me about 50 cents a mile or $1,000. 

Of course, our decision to use public transportation rest more on personal preference than any kind of cash constraint, but I would submit that the largest proportition of the traveling public would decide on a mode of travel based on the direct cost. i.e., fuel expense and ignore the rest of the expense as a sunken cost. 

So I again raise the point, if the market place for travel chooses to ignore a significan part of the cost, is the result rational?

By the way, even if our government decided to spend mega bucks on high speed rail service, I do not foresee any mandates for the auto driving public to abandon their cars.  For as long as I can see we will probably always be in a situation where we are in a multi-modal environment.  Automobiles will be needed and justified for myself and millions like me who live in the rural areas of our nation.  I don't ever expect to be able to walk to a public transportation system starting in my small town that will connect me with the world.  (On the other hand, in the unlikely event I were to move back to Chicago, I would, as I did many years ago, probably live without owning a car.  In that place, cabs and the occasional rent-a-car along with public mass transport can do the job nicely at some considerably lower cost.)

jeaton:

[emphasis added - PDN] Earlier on in this thread, there was some argument over the issue of where a rational transportation policy should start.  I am in the group that says government transportation planners, which would be a mix of government bureaucrats and contracted private entities should be laying the ground work.  Others argue that the market place, that is the collective result of the individual decisions should drive the result.

[snip]

So I again raise the point, if the market place for travel chooses to ignore a significant part of the cost, is the result rational?

By the way, even if our government decided to spend mega bucks on high speed rail service, I do not foresee any mandates for the auto driving public to abandon their cars.  For as long as I can see we will probably always be in a situation where we are in a multi-modal environment.  Automobiles will be needed and justified for myself and millions like me who live in the rural areas of our nation.  I don't ever expect to be able to walk to a public transportation system starting in my small town that will connect me with the world.  (On the other hand, in the unlikely event I were to move back to Chicago, I would, as I did many years ago, probably live without owning a car.  In that place, cabs and the occasional rent-a-car along with public mass transport can do the job nicely at some considerably lower cost.)

Excellent point (the 1st one emphasized above).  This may be where the pure private sector marketplace and Adam Smith's proverbial "invisible hand" of responses and decisions appear to be dysfunctional for the particular circumstances.  As such, we need an economist-type to explain such things as "external dis-economies or costs" and the "Tragedy of the Commons", and why they may justify - or actually mandate - that the government step in to provide the missing inputs to complete the system for analysis, and so on. 

As to the 2nd point emphasized above:  Yes, but this morning (and the past couple mornings as well) I heard an ad on the 5:00 AM "America in the Morning" AM radio show for IBM that talks about how a "congestion management fee" as implemented in Stockholm (?) reduced traffic delays by 20 %.  [I know that has been done in London a couple of years ago as well.]  But this morning I thought - "Huh ?  That kind of thing used to be reserved for policy wonks and think tanks.  Now it's the basis for an ad on (almost) prime-time drive-time radio ?"  If it's come to that, then we may well be seeing a sea-change in public policy and perception towards compelling - excuse me, incentivising - people to leave their cars behind, at least in those limited kinds of special conditions.

Liked your example and the details, too.  Someplace I was told that a "real person example" makes it easier to understand a technical discussion such as this one.

- Paul North.