beaulieu I think Mr. O'Toole bases his points on assumptions that are no longer valid, the most important of which is cheap oil that will allow us to go on like we have been.
I think Mr. O'Toole bases his points on assumptions that are no longer valid, the most important of which is cheap oil that will allow us to go on like we have been.
And how are we in the advocacy community any different in our thinking about cheap oil, when we support high rates of subsidy to save maybe 20 percent on oil usage per passenger mile? How are we any different than Mr. O'Toole when our most ambitious plans would replace auto travel at the single-digit level and result in net oil savings that are a fraction of a percent of total usage?
For intstance, why aren't rail-passsenger locomotives going to become clearner and thriftier with fuel -- he says that won't happen but it will happen to the private car.
Since the initial 1970's oil shocks, cars have increased in fuel economy although perhaps not as much when oil got cheap in the 1990's. Airlines have had steady increase in fuel economy -- partly through improved airplane designed, improved engines, largely because of packing passengers into the airplane. Trains have had hardly any change worth noting -- fuel usage has moved up and down, but there is no discernable improvement over time.
I suppose people are going to turn around and say that we "underinvested in trains." But Amtrak has been around since the 1970's and has received billions in subsidies over the years, but little has changed in their fuel economy when it had been a priority for everyone else.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Sam1beaulieu I am not going to quote in order to keep my reply down in size. I do agree with some of what you quote Sam, however, I also disagree with some of the premises that Mr. O'Toole appears to base his points on, and by inference you appear to concur. I think Mr. O'Toole bases his points on assumptions that are no longer valid, the most important of which is cheap oil that will allow us to go on like we have been. I read through your response quickly and then went to another site. When I returned to read it again, most of it had been deleted. Did you delete it or has some else deleted most of it?
beaulieu I am not going to quote in order to keep my reply down in size. I do agree with some of what you quote Sam, however, I also disagree with some of the premises that Mr. O'Toole appears to base his points on, and by inference you appear to concur. I think Mr. O'Toole bases his points on assumptions that are no longer valid, the most important of which is cheap oil that will allow us to go on like we have been.
I am not going to quote in order to keep my reply down in size. I do agree with some of what you quote Sam, however, I also disagree with some of the premises that Mr. O'Toole appears to base his points on, and by inference you appear to concur.
I read through your response quickly and then went to another site. When I returned to read it again, most of it had been deleted. Did you delete it or has some else deleted most of it?
Sam, sorry I took so long to post it and then I read Paul's post, and I was not satisfied with what I written.
Paul, SNCF's TGV Dayse with 186 mph. capability weighs 0.7 tonnes per seat. If you would be satisfied with 110 mph. max speed I would think that you could either get down to 0.6 tonnes per seat or expand the seat pitch (leg room).
The car of the future that will meet the announced CAFE standards will be much smaller, more expensive, and have less power.
If we are going to have a viable rail PASSENGER transportation system in this country, it cannot share tracks with the freight railroads because it will be unviable if it has to meet collision standards that make no sense except for the fact you might hit a freight train head-on.
Wait until cars that meet the new CAFE standards begin to hit fully loaded semi-trucks. At least on the rails a collision avoidance system is practical, we are nowhere near to a similar system for the highways, especially where the individual is responsible for the maintenance .
The CATO Institute is a consisently, some would say relentlessly, libertarian think tank. "Let the market take care of it" is practically a home creed If the government is wasting money to build or improve passenger rail, how on earth are private enterpreneurs to try in this cash-poor era? Perhaps that's the point: the USA is such an exceptional society with its rugged individualism that we citizens have "chosen" to have a RR system most of whose technology is not beyond the mid-1950s. Hah!
The Interstate Highway program was a great idea for its time. Back when it was being debated (actually the bill passed in several sections but roughly 1960), the primary aim was to make driving safer, and that it has done. The secondary reason was to speed up truck travel, and that it has done. What finally got the thing passed, though, was a putative military use: hauling tactical atomic cannons quickly between cities. As far as I know, that never happened, but the military aspect helped "sell" the program to a reluctant public. Some people condemned the gas tax as intrusive and inflationary, and resented the fact that under the program, the Federal gov't bankrolled about 90 percent of construction costs. After all, the Northeast and Midwest had already evolved a system of toll roads; why should the other states get off with ten percent of the building bill?
Some unfortunate and unforeseen consequences of the "Interstating" of America include the inevitable cheesy "strip" that streches from the town center to its Interstate interchange, and the ruination of hitherto viable urban neighborhoods by the encroachment of urban Interstates in the 1960's. (Robert Caro's THE POWER BROKER has a whole chapter about Robert Moses' ruination of a neighborhood in the Bronx.). Even worse, as I think most of us would acknowledge, other unforeseen consequences include these superhighways' being so successful they've become victims of that success with constant overcrowding and rush-hour "parking lots"
It was known at the time of planning that the new superhighways would not physically endure super-long-term; in fact, their subsurface is only about half of what Hitler had his planners use for the German autobahns starting in the 1930's. Highway engineers argued -- unsuccessfully -- that we should have no less but politically there was basically one reason -- money -- that the things were in some ways deliberately underdesigned and now the busiest routes have to be stripped down and re-blacktopped every few years.
Saddest of all for people on these sites, but true: apparently no one estimated accurately how the public's growing fondness for driving medium- to long-distances in private cars over the new highways would decimate rail passenger traffic that was already hurting by the desertion of the business traveler to airplanes. No one would have guessed how much the public would take to Interstate driving, but as we know after the businessmen deserted the rails, so did most of hte public. (Notice that enhanced speed for the privately owned car wasn't stressed among the most important reasons to go Interstate. The irony now is, of course, that the roads have become so durn overcrowded that it almost impossible to set a reasonable driving schedule between major cities or with a big city in between. (Should we allow one hour for Metro Nashville? Or two, like last year. And Atlanta has become unspeakable.) I've you've driven on an Interstate Highway route ending in a zero or a five, you know that even in the country the road can be so crowded as to resemble an urban rush hour of 20 - 30 years ago. But often with hills.
The libertarian think-tanker's analysis had some merit, but it can hardly be called even-handed. For intstance, why aren't rail-passsenger locomotives going to become clearner and thriftier with fuel -- he says that won't happen but it will happen to the private car. And government planning is always wrong -- obviously, I think it's a mixed bag. But we have to try, don't we? His carping is Unfair!
Never mind that, but as happened with the Interstates these new passenger-rail projects will probably turn out a mix of failed planning, woefully pessimtic planning, overly optimistic planning , home runs, and completely unforeseen consequences. Why do we need them?
Because.All.Other.Means.of.DomesticTravel.Are.Too.Crowded.To.Add.Capacity.
Can Atlanta add more ring roads? (No.) Can Houston and SoCal alleviate their crowded Interstates with more privately-build toll roads? For a while, but even they will fill up. Rail is about all that's left, and I for one think that the standard of living in this country has not yet declined to a point where we should put up with a warmed-over, Fifties technology and extremely skeletal service that is Amtrak anywhere west of the Appalachians. In this sense, if we're planning to do nothing, we're planning for failure.
Randal O'Toole indeed. Dontcha know he works for Cato, which is a RIGHT WING think tank and they and he HATE TRAINS. OK, I have gone on record with that, so the usual suspects around here don't have to repeat it.
Metra carries something like 300,000 passenger daily, which means that 150,000 people use it to access jobs in the Chicago Downtown. Their rush hour peak lasts about 2 hours, so say they carry 75,000 people/hour. A freeway lane may be good for 2000 cars/hr, so lets say on average 2500 people/hr. So the Metra network replaces 30 freeway lanes in each direction. I know the Kennedy Expressway has reversible lanes, but they are not duplicated elsewhere, so the Metra network is replacing 60 freeway lanes or perhaps 8-10 major freeways into the Chicago Downtown.
I ran this analysis by Randal O'Toole because he claims that many transit lines barely replace a single freeway lane with their ridership, but his analysis conflates 24-hour freeway capacity with peak-hour freeway capacity. Mr. O'Toole was gracious enough to respond to my e-mail.
His response was that it might be good that Metra supports 150,000 people in the suburbs having jobs in the Downtown, but during some time period around the 1990's, the Chicago Metropolitan area added 600,000 jobs in the suburbs not served by Metra. There are several notions in those statistics. One is that if Metra suddenly went POOF! that those 150,000 people could probably find work closer to where they lived. Another is that a city downtown require commuter rail or a transit system may be an anachronism. Yet another is that automobiles and roads, over a distibuted network of mainly arterial streets and highways and to a lesser extent limited-access tollways and freeways, are handling the growth in employment that is multiples of the total number of people served by the commuter rail network required for density in the city core.
So in one sense, Mr. O'Toole would not graciously own up to the somewhat misleading comparisons he makes between the ridership of transit systems and the 24-hour capacity of certain roads. On the other hand, I don't see transit or train advocates owning up to the fact that even the most optimistic projects for train networks and train ridership would barely put a dent in the enormous number of passenger miles that are handled in one form or another by cars.
I guess my question for many of the people around here, are there a variety of problems out there, oil dependence, global warming, paving over land, social isolation, etc to which trains are a particularly good solution, or are trains intrinsically meritorious and that if trains make even minor contributions to solving these social problems, we need to have them.
There are two factors that have moved me from foamer enthusiasm for passenger trains to a kind of guarded skepticism. One is that the energy efficiency just isn't there -- the best discussion of that is on David Lawyer's Web site, and David Lawyer does not work for the Cato Institute. David Lawyer is a self-described environmentalist who set out to evaluate trains as a solution to the energy crisis instead of a passenger train advocate who set out to show people that trains are energy efficient.
The second factor, believe it or not, is the airline travel experience. Yes, trains may not have the same weather delays, and trains may not ever get the level of social regimentation as the airline travel experience, and yes, trains may have increased leg room offset by having to occupy the seats for longer periods of time for the same distance. But if trains become a mass market, someone has to convince me that train travel operated on an economic basis won't be yet another kind of bus as air travel has become.
The one question to which I have not seen a proper response from anyone around here disagreeing with my perspective on this is the fuel economy one. That present-day Amtrak offers a minor fuel economy improvement, on average, over driving just doesn't cut it. Where is the large fuel savings from trains going to come from? What are fuel-efficient trains going to look like, from the standpoint of weight per seat, aerodynamics, propulsion? What is the seating density and situation with regard to non-revenue seating (dining, lounge, crew dorms) going to look like on fuel-efficient trains? What kind of load factors are required to make trains fuel efficient, and would those load factors impose inconvenience on travellers (always full trains with long boarding times, short space for luggage, required to take a train at a less convenient time or to book reservations weeks in advance).
Last week USA Today carried an op-ed piece by Randal O'Toole on President Obama's high and moderate speed rail plans. O'Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute. Outlined below are some of the points that he made.
The administration's high and moderate speed rail plans would cost billions of dollars but would do little to improve traffic congestion or the environment.
Studies in Japan and France have shown that high speed rail is not about serving the common citizen. Instead it is used largely by foreign tourists and in-country elites.
Many if not most of the folks who patronize the Acela (business and first class accommodations only) appear to have better than median incomes or are traveling on expense accounts. Most of the common folks are on the regional trains, buses, airplanes or in their cars.
To date the administration has committed approximately $13 billion for moderate and high speed rail. This represents somewhere between 2.5 and 25 per cent of the estimated cost of these plans, although no one really knows how much the proposed systems would cost.
Investments in passenger rail will not cover the capital costs and in most instances will only cover a portion of the operating costs. California wants half of the committed funds to build a high speed line from scratch, as opposed to most other states where the plans are to upgrade existing rail lines for moderate speeds. If California is successful in getting significant federal funding for its high speed system, the other states will clamor for similar funding. And that could drive the cost of the proposed rail improvement plans above $500 billion. By comparison, according to O'Toole, the inflation adjusted cost to build the Interstate Highway System was approximately $425 billion. Interstate highways cover all 50 states; the rail plans will only provide service to 33 states.
Whether the proposals to improve passenger rail will reduce congestion is debatable. California estimates that its high speed rail line would remove approximately 3.5 per cent of the cars from its highways. Moderate speed rail systems would probably remove a smaller percentage.
As to the environmental arguments for faster rail service, Amtrak's diesel powered trains are only a little more energy efficient than cars. Moreover, cars will become more energy efficient, especially in light of the new CAFÉ standards and the introduction of alternative fuel systems. Also, significantly higher rail speeds will mean greater inputs of energy and pollution outputs.
O'Toole makes several points worthy of a rational response. Most telling, in my view, is no where in the discussions for high and moderate speed rail have I read or heard a detailed, realistic proposal on how to pay for it. Or a realistic estimate of the total cost of the build out or a completion date.
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