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The Ohio High Speed Passenger Rail Project
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[quote]QUOTE: <i>Originally posted by WetumkaFats</i> <br /><br />Be careful about getting your hopes too high. When high speed rail was proposed as a way of connecting Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, and San Antonio (or Austin), Southwest Airlines went ballistic and put all of their clout into killing the idea. They get a lot of revenue from their flights between those cities and wouldn't stand for the competition. <br /> <br />From where I stand, especially with oil prices skyrocketing, high speed rail is looking better and better, especially for trips of 500 miles or less. Let the airlines have the NYC to LA business. That sort of long-distance travel is what they do best. But, let rail have the 500 mile routes. If we could get high speed rail that would do 150 MPH or greater, it would be a lot more efficient. Also, as oil supplies run short, rail may become the only viable option. You can run a train with electric locomotives, and you don't need petroleum to generate electricity. But that jet has to have petroleum-based jet fuel. Yes, I know that I am preaching to the choir. <br /> <br />[C):-)] <br />[/quote] <br /> <br />The TX HSR proposal would have been dead BEFORE arrival even if SWA had not become involved. Here are just a few of the reasons why: <br /> <br />1. The system was effectively entirely endpoint oriented - DAL/FTW, HOU, AUS/SAT. This is the issue that really ticked Kelleher off. It exactly replicated their major in-state route structure and virtually nothing else, and clearly was conceived by SWA as just another way to put them out of business. But there was also a significant exception in the route structure - a stop at DFW, where it got to serve all of the competition that had endorsed the Wright Amendment, opposed any expansion of SWA or operations at Love Field (for the latest wrinkle on this one, see www.setlovefree.com) and had tried to put SWA and other competitors out of business in various markets for years (remember, AA got caught re antitrust in other markets running off even other majors, and Braniff, TI and Continental were nailed for conspiracy in the very early SWA days). If government tried to do this to your business, you'd be howling too! <br /> <br />2. See Item 1. The system was virtually entirely endpoint oriented. It missed a lot of intermediate population and cities who would have had little or no access, even though it was essentially a captive market. And those folks can set up a huge opposition, which they did (see below). <br /> <br />3. The promoters routed the system right across the middle of lots of individual farms, with little or no consideration or provision for access, redress, or compromise, and when confronted with this problem, their attitude was most charitably referred to as "cavalier". Not very smart--Texas was and largely still is a rural state. You tell that bunch of farmers you're going to build a 30' high berm right across their pastures at fire-sale comdemnation prices, with no provision for their moving stock and equipment between fields and pastures, and then have the audacity to expect them to support you? <br /> <br />4. Because of the way the HSR system was conceived and promoted, it was correctly perceived by large segments of the general public as being an ultra-premium service serving only a small segment of the population and benefit financially an even smaller group, but with a massive tax bill to be paid mostly by people outside the target market who couldn't use it readily, if at all. Mix that group with the farmers, and who needs SWA's help to kill it? <br /> <br />5. The market projections were correctly perceived to have been grossly overinflated and skewed to achieve a preconceived political target. The promoters and consultants crowed that the target market was airline passengers (wanna make Herb even madder??) and that all their projections were based on diversion of 100% of the airline pax to HSR in the triangle. Nice thinking! <br /> <br />6. They also underestimated the analytical skills of people, some of whom might have supported a program that was perceived as having a reasonable, defensible, and, most importantly, honestly conceived basis. But the basis was transparently in a different universe from these conditions. Bear with the technical explanation--I'll try and simplify it. From a computational standpoint, what the promoters and their consultants actually did was a terrible back-of-the-envelope SWAG that they tried to package as being scientific. To "calculate" patronage, they computed the number of airline seats on all flights by all airlines with route segments between the endpoints in the triangle (e.g., SAT-IAH/HOU), applied the then-industry standard 60% load factor, and diverted every airline passenger to HSR so that all the planes ran empty in the triangle. The methodology was so disingenuous and flawed that Ray Charles could have seen through it, even without Stevie Wonder's help, and needless to say, they tried to spin it and keep it under wraps through the use of technical sounding verbiage. When confronted with this fact at one of their public meetings, they admitted that was the methodology, although they again tried to put a spin on it. ONE of the fatal flaws was that the data base they used included a huge number (in fact the majority of flights were in this category) of THRU flights originating and terminating outside the triangle, making intermediate stops at the fortress hubs of DFW and IAH. Anybody who has spent 30 seconds in the major airline business or even at SWA, who claims they don't have hubs but they do, could have told them that you don't get anywhere near 100% endpoint origination/termination between a triangle city and one or more intermediate hub(s) in a fortress hub route structure like we have in TX (i.e., that IAH-MCO AA pax flying from IAH to DFW is really only changing planes at DFW, not getting off, and IS NOT getting on that train!). So not only did they assume wrong, the calculations based on their assumptions were also wrong. And despite some popular misconceptions in some parts of the country, we Texans CAN add. <br /> <br />6. Many Texans looked at this as just a step removed from Amtrak, whose record in the state has been less than stellar, and they didn't want more of the same (tri-weekly bullet trains, anyone??). <br /> <br />7. The fact that this construction project could net them lots of bucks was never properly sold to the AGC heavy highway division and the Texas Good Roads and Transportation Association, although the taxpayers lining up against HSR figured that out real fast. <br /> <br />8. It happened during one of the state's perennial education "crises". There was nothing in it for the teachers. <br /> <br />9. The momentum from a successful rail program that could be built upon incrementally did not exist and was never even considered. <br /> <br />Put it and a bunch of other issues all together and it spells DOA, with or without the help of SWA. <br /> <br />Probably the best description is that it was a monument to arrogance and poor planning, along with flawed reasoning, that was conceived in such a poor fashion that failure was predictable and inevitable. <br /> <br />If it's any consolation to you guys, the statewide Trans-Texas Corridor toll road folks are currently getting almost the same opposition, for most of the same reasons (excepting airline ridership estimates, of course).
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