Why Do Conservatives oppose High Speed Rail?

The point would be, and I'd think it rather obvious, that we have far greater distances to cover and far too low a population density to make it practical. average populaiton density in the US is 25 people per square mile. The parts of Europe with Highspeed rail are more akin to 300 to 500 people per square mile. Out side of the Boston to Atlanta corridor and the LA to Frisco corridor we simply don't have sufficient population density to make any sort of mass transit profitable.

 

Becuase it may decrease our dependence on the fossil fuel sector.

 

Wrong daniel as per usual.

 

Conservatives are not against high speed rail, conservatives are against waste, abuse, fraud, and government cronyism.

A small group of businessmen in Florida have been trying to push high speed rail since at least the 1990's. They could not get any private sector support and finally put it on the Nov 2000 ballot as a Florida Constitutional Amendment. To get votes and political support they expanded the rail from basically an Orlando-Tampa-Miami system to a statewide system running from Miammi to Pensacola. It was a joke, it was obvious some of the routes were never going to be built and were included as a means to route "study money" to politicians throughout the state.

The ballot measure passed. Costs skyrocketed beyond predictions, and surveys of ridership showed the statewide program could not be supported and the program would always be in deficit.

In Nov 2004, Florida voters removed the high speed rail amendment from the Florida Constitution and the measure was dead. Sort of. The big corps still had their fangs in the govt and still pushed for the rail to be built. The corps worked the state legislature (both Republican and Democrat) and got it to fund the high speed rail using state tax money, state bonds, and federal stimulus money.

It was still a scam. Gov Scott finally canceled it in 2011 - and that was the right decision.

 

I voted against Scott last time. Won't make that mistake again. He has done a good job managing the budget downturn.

 

still nothing but fallacy for your Cause?

 

Read my last post prior to my response to your fear mongering conspircy claptrap.

 

Re: Post # 35

Railroads are infrastructure. Electrifying railroads reduces oil consumption. Electrified railroad will pull even more long-haul trucks off the road as electric locomotives are very powerful (read fast).

 

Amtrak was started in 1971, they estimated that Amtrak would be off public funds by 1974. 41 years later Amtrak is still subsidised by tax payers. Ya, but high speed rail will totally be different this time.

 

Not really. the trucks in the main are now hauling to places that have no rail head access or are hauling Perishables that are time/date sensitive. Trans are great for hauling freight in bulk from one large town to another. Not so great if you plan on stopping at every wide spot in the road in between.

 

What is your problem? Except for the high density areas in the north and east rail services simply can not compete. Sure we could spend billions to build a high speed system, but is it competitive? I seriously doubt it. As it is our system of rails is incapable of handling high speed trains. That is a fact. Do we need such a system if it is not fully utilized? At the prices train travel is today it is less expensive to take a plane.

Trucking is a very profitable business. Trains do carry large cargo over long distances IF you want a cross country big shipment. I thoroughly enjoyed using the train system in Germany and France, but the last train trip I took in the US was miserable, New Orleans to Chicago and on to Denver, because it was 2,000 miles and took 2 days and cost more than a plane.

Not being a conservative I can't relate to your comment.

The caveat is competitive. I doubt it will be competitive because of the long distances, even if we had trains as fast as Germany or Japan. They are small countries, about the size of some of our states. Now if we service 60 million people in a space the size of Georgia, it would be great. I am not trying to be contrary, I just wonder if you understand the differences between our sparsely populated country outside of the north east or southern California. I do agree that automobiles may kill more people, and they may be more dangerous, but air travel is the safest way to go.

 

Experiments in rail travel have been tried, and before the independence auto and air travel gave us they did a good job. The biggest problem with rail travel in the US is the distance one must travel through unoccupied country side.

 

Only in terms of energy, not total cost, and neither is more efficient than cross-country bus service\ which is going through a resurgence right now, and, can pay for itself.

Now don't get me wrong, Roads can also be wasteful, just look over at Detroit. On the other hand though, roads are more universal, they can accept different kinds of travelers of differing sizes and purpose.

High Speed Rail is not nearly so nimble, only high speed locomotives can travel on it, and you don't have control over your final destination.

If you (a railway planner) decide later on that your better off making "stop B" somewhere a couple miles from where it is now, you have to spend money and lots of time re-working the rails in that direction, while with bus service, all you have to do is change the route.

You're going to pick and choose your examples. Some countries it only works because their population is dense, other countries, like Greece's Hellenic Railways, had the experience of more employees than customers.

Here in the U.S., Amtrak does not pay for itself, it is losing money, and is kept afloat only by the Government owning all of its stock, paying for all of its fixed costs, and subsidizing its operating costs.

What you are suggesting is Amtrak on steroids, when what Amtrak needs right now is a right-sizing, not an expansion. Amtrak needs to first prove it can be sustainable, or in other words, pay for itself.

But not the most cost-efficient. It's not simply MPG or MPG equivalent, it's also how you deliver that energy that matters.

Freight Railways, which do pay for themselves, have not been able to electrify because electrifying would cost far more in fixed infrastructure than the more robust, self-contained diesel engines they currently use. The best they can do right now is hybrids, while full electric locomotives for cross-country journeys won't be practical until batteries have caught up with fossil fuels.

 

There is a lot of BS in that post of yours.

According to a 2009 study by the Federal Railroad Administration, rail fuel efficiency varies from 66 to 218 ton-kilometers per liter, whereas truck fuel efficiency ranges from 29 to 57 ton-kilometers per liter.

Moreover, the fuel efficiency of rail has been ramping up at a far faster rate than trucks. Between 1990 and 2006 rail efficiency improved by about 20 percent, or 1.1 percent annually.

The benefit is obvious: One double-stacked train can replace 300 trucks and save 285,000 liters of fuel on the 3,200-kilometer journey between Chicago and Los Angeles.



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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=freight-rail-back-to-the-future

 

Uh, no, your source underestimated how much development costs were:

~ £1.1 Billion pounds, £5 or £6 billion pounds today. £900 million in 1987, or £2.1 billion today is not paying that back, nor the other under-reported costs.

And considering that this paid only for 16 under-utilized aircraft (5 of which were not even sold outright, they were simply transferred to British Airways for a few thousand pounds after no other buyers emerged), the entire line can be cited as a commercial failure. That's simply far too few airframes, and my source tells both why it never grew, and why it was retired. It amounts to the same thing: an overestimated, shrinking 1st class market which wasn't willing to carry its exorbitant price tag. The Dornier Do X failed in its time for the same reason.

 

You're making the same mistake Erik did, you're assuming that fuel is the only cost, but the other Elephant in the room is the infrastructure you're building, that unlike roads, can only be used for this train.

Building both the rails and the electrification network to power the train is expensive, maintaining it will be expensive, extending routes or changing pre-existing ones will be expensive.

If there was a marketable case to be made for how this could foreseeably pay for itself, the market would have already attempted it. That they haven't, even with Government subsidies likely to be offered if they tried, should tells us volumes of how it's not.

You're making the case for freight, not passenger travel, which is a different animal. There's a very good reason why one is a Government operation, and the other wholly within the private sector. It's notable that, with the exception of airlines, in all transportation mediums its freight which eventually becomes the dominant business model.

With freight, it's easy to expect something in bulk to want get to one place to another at a scheduled time, while people are more difficult to work around. They peak at certain hours of day, drop at others. They're less inclined to travel at night, or during bad weather. Freight will rarely cancel on you, people will do so constantly.

 

Cable trolleys????

You should change your tag to Go McKinley!

 

America's zoning arrangements just aren't organized in the way Japan or most of Europe is. Population centers aren't located near commercial centers which aren't located near industrial centers. Without having a single nexus of activity, the benefits of building new railways tend not to outweigh the costs.

I had this conservation with a guy the other day, he said that if we had high speed rail in California, he could take it from LA to San Fran for work. I asked him, then what will you do, rent a car for the rest of the way, and rent a car or take a cab to the rail station? And he was like, well, I guess? I never thought about it.

 

You make some good points, but they still don't constitute an argument against high speed rail.

Railroads never made money carrying passengers, even in the Guilded Age. Freight never needed special terminals, wasn't subject to schedule variations, didn't require a sleeper or a club car, and seldom complains. That was as true in 1883 as it is now.

Were it not for existing subsidies, passenger rail service in the US would have completely disappeared.

Alas, many Americans, who have never even seen a modern passenger train, are stuck in that view.

Anyone who travels on business by air routinely can see a growing case for high speed rail.

As I pointed out earlier, at current European speeds, a high speed rail service could reduce the travel time from New York to Atlanta to 3 1/2 hours. Anyone who has been marooned at LaGuardia or Hartsfield will instantly see the value of that, espcecially given that the net travel time by high speed rail is the same or less.

Travel times like that make regional airports viable as alternatives for increasingly crowded hubs as well. If you could get from Philadelphia to Harrisburg in 20 minutes by rail, Harrisburg International Airport instantly becomes a viable alternative to crowded, confusing and generally unpleasant Philadephia International Airport. Choices like that also provide the travelling public with choices too!

Now that Useless Airlines has merged with American, we are going to see a lot fewer choices, more crowded flights (as if they aren't crowded enough already), more creaky old planes, and much higher prices.

But apparantly the knee jerk opponants of high speed rail like it that way.

Already, the US is viewed as a fairly unpleasant and inconvenient place to travel in, with its 1960's vintage transportation matrix, and its severely underfunded infrastructure.

I used to feel the same way you do. But I've seen the alternative, and it works.

 

It clearly never occurred to you, that that's exactly what he has to do now, anyway.

Only now, he has to battle his way out to an airport, park a car, clear security, get on a crowded dirty old airliner (the US has the oldest fleet in the first world now) and reverse the process on the other end.

He could take the train from LA to SF and still rent a car. Services like ZipCar are growing very rapidly, and would be ideal for that transportation matrix! So would electrics!

I doubt that he changed his mind after your conversation if he thought about it a little more.

 

Or he could not work in SF while living in LA to begin with because that's ridiculous

 

What a lot of these people don't see is that there is not much room for expansion in suburban cores either. Beltways and exurban highway rights of way can't easily be grown, and cost as much or more than high speed rail to build (and take up a lot more space).

Our basic transporation matrix hasn't changed in 50 years, and it takes more time to get from New York to Chicago or Washington now, than it did 50 years ago, mainly due to more crowded and less convenient treminals groaning at capacity.

People who don't travel regularly don't see this. When they do see it, they take it for granted because they don't know any better.

 

Ridiculous?

How about SF to San Jose in 30 minutes.

or LA to San Diego in 45?

I guess you'd rather be on the 5.

I live in a waterfront community on the East Coast about halfway between DC and New York. We have quite a few people who commute to both cities, even without high speed rail, and the travel time is much the same. We'd have a lot more of those people (and the higher real estate values and better demographics) if they could make those trips faster.

 

Actually, all the growth in rail freight traffic is in intermodal, not in bulk freight. The main lines of CSX,BNSF, and Conrail are being rebuilt to accomodate double stacked freight cars, not to haul coal, but to haul containers.

 

You are missing the point. Why are we wanting to enable people to live in LA and work in SF when they're hundreds of miles away from each other? No amount of high speed rail can make that more efficient than him working in LA or living in SF.