High Speed Rail in the US – can Obama make it happen?
Firstly, my apologies for my absence over the last couple of months – I’ve started working full time as a graduate economist and haven’t had very much time on my hands. I’ve been meaning to post again for ages, but somehow I always put it off another day. But I’ve come down with a damned cold and have the day off from work, so I thought it might be a good time to get back into the swing of things – hopefully I’ll be able to get back to commenting as well as a post or two every week and a cleanup/update of the site now that I’ve settled into work.
I’ve been meaning to write this post since Barack Obama and ‘Amtrak’ Joe Biden released plans to develop a large High Speed Rail network in the US. It involves spending $8bn over the next 2 years from the stimulus package and an additional $1bn annually for 5 years – $13bn all up. The Federal Railroad Administration has the strategic plan available, as well as a map of proposed lines.
Whilst it’s clear the plan is only a first step towards HSR in the US – $13bn is a lot of money, and it will be interesting to see how it is spent.
Good aspects of the plan
Even though the strategic plan lacks detail, I was impressed by its ability to clearly set out how HSR was defined, and where it would work under that definition. The table below – taken from the first page of the report – clearly sets out where HSR can hope to have a comparative advantage against road and air. In targeting the 150-1000km medium to high density market, hopefully the US will avoid foolish transcontinental ideas and focus on where road and air can be beaten.
Furthermore, clearly setting out how the US government plans to define HSR is a positive step. The report separates HSR into express, regional and emerging categories, with express roughly on par with continental European and Japanese practice, regional with much of the UK system, and emerging with Victoria’s RFR. Acually setting where and how HSR would work in the US from the outset is a welcome step and detracts from the temptation to build silly projects for political gain.
Potential problems
Even at this early stage of planning, I can foresee three potential problems.
Firstly, $13bn is nowhere enough money to build a high quality network of the size drawn on the map. Whilst the report notes that this funding is only a down-payment, severe structural problems in the US federal budget are going to mean that the US government is not going to have a lot of money in years to come (especially if they keep throwing it into the banking sector for no return – Paul Krugman has an interesting article on this.) So whilst $13bn is only a down-payment, there’s no guarantee that the rest will ever arrive.
Exactly how much HSR $13bn will buy is hard to say. But let’s consider a couple of recent examples from France and Australia. The French, who have got HSR down to a fine art, have just finished building their most recent line, the LGV Est. It cost around €4bn for 406km (including rolling stock) – around €10m per km. Converting this to a figure for the US is tricky, in large part because the French have a great deal of technical and economic experience with HSR, while the Americans have very little. But on the back of an envelope, with US$1 = €0.77, the LGV Est cost about US$12.1m per km. If the US has $13bn to spend on HSR, they could get 1074km of HSR.
If the US went the other way, and spent it on “emerging HSR” (which, in my view, would be a terrible waste), then the recent Victorian experience is perhaps more instructive. With around AUD$1bn spent on upgrading about 500km of track (and rolling stock), it works out to about AUD$2m per km. With my envelope filling up, thats about US$1.4m per km for RFR standard rail. For their $13bn, the Americans could get some 9285km of emerging HSR.
Secondly, if the US chose to build more emerging HSR instead of express HSR to maximise political gain, it would be unlikely to substantially change the mode share of rail. Using emerging HSR would get closer to the amounts of HSR on the map for $13bn , but it wouldn’t be much chop against air. Sharing the tracks with freight operators (who own the tracks) would be very difficult to organise and could see more freight go to road. Sending more freight on roads would create a much larger greenhouse problem.
Thirdly, outside the Northeast, few US cities have urban transport systems well developed enough to feed the HSR. Across Western Europe, even smallish towns have well developed public transport and public transport friendly land use – that simply isn’t the case in most of the US.
Some suggestions
Ultimately, the US can build about 1000km of decent HSR – about enough for one corridor. If choosing a corridor for HSR in the US, I’d give it to the Northeast hands down. Whilst they already have Acela along the Northeast Corridor – HSR of sorts – it’s not very fast, managing an average speed of only 138km/h. Despite serving a linear corridor home to some 55 million people and calling cities with some of the best urban public transport in the US, it only manages 3.2 million passengers per year – that’s about the same patronage as the Geelong line (which carries 3.08 million passengers per year). If it were up to me, I’d spend the $13bn there.
cheers,
Phin
good to see you back Phin.
I’ve done some reading on this recently after I heard about it and I think I would probably avoid spending the bulk of the money on the north east corridor. why? Well the Acela service already has the capability of running at 150mp/h it simply can’t do that for much fo the trip due to sub standard curves, shared track, poor catenary wires.
A targeted program of spending (similar in style to Sydneys’ clearways (?) program could deliver significant benefits to the existing ‘HSR’ for a lot less money. Lets say $3 billion which at your cost estimates would build 250km of track. But realistically it might be 100km of new alignment, some road/rail grade separations, 100km of track and overhead upgrades and some station works. that might be enough to raise average speeds from about 80mp/h to over 100mp/h.
You’d then have another $10 billion to spend on other places that don’t even have a basis to start from. I’d be looking at:
1. California which has large population and a receptive State Government (that is already trying to get HSR off the ground by itself).
2. The Texas triangle. linking Dallas, San Antonio, Houston which are within about about 200 miles from each other and all have populations of over 1 million. Also about half way between Dallas and San An is Austin with a population of 600,000 and Fort Worth is next to Dallas and has about 600,000 too (and is state capital I think so government traffic) these cities are often seen as the worst of the ‘car cities USA’ phenomena but in the last 10 years they (like Los Angeles) have all started to look at building light rail/metro/heavy rail systems. Although I note that the map doesn’t even link Houston to Dallas or San Antonio
3. The Chicago Hub wouldn’t be a bad location either as I would suggest it would then be a logical point to connect from say Chicago to Detroit/Cleveland to New York.
4. The Pacific North West linking Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. its an area that is known for its ’sustainable practices’, and support for public transport but probably has too low a population to compete with the others IMO.
Also a key component of the first three point is that all of those locations have key Domestic or International Hub airports. LAX, Dallas-Fort Worth and Chicago O’Hare. People are flying to these locations and could then use the fast train for their connection to nearby cities.
But in the end like with the Australian Governments stimulus you’d have preferred to see a genuine investment in this sort of infastructure rather than $13 billion for all fast rail in the USA and $900 stimulus cheques for us. Should have been $100 billino fast rail and the $13 billino in stimulus cheques going to infrastructure eg. Melbourne and Sydney Metros.
Thanks Lachie. I think you’re absolutely right that there are plenty of easy gains to be made on the Northeast corridor that could really upgrade the quality of service for a lot less than $13bn. Thinks like constant tension overhead, straightening out the alignment, segregating services etc. should be done and would leave quite a bit of change in the bank. Whether or not they would be enough to get the corridor up to an acceptable standard I admittedly don’t know. For example, I don’t know how much extra capacity would be required to go from the existing hourly headways to half hourly.
I agree that California is a good prospect – there’s certainly a lot of political will to get things happening and even cities like LA are moving back towards public transport. I think the big question there (and also in the Texas area) is how to get HSR working for the exurbs which have been built largely along the interstate and are planned for basically 100% car use. I don’t see this as being such a problem in the Northeast, but I’m not an expert on this. In places like California and Texas, I think the success of HSR is highly contingent on the extent to which the middle and upper classes in the exurbs are prepared to embrace public transport. In the Northeast, the advantage is that several cities (eg Boston, NY) already have wealthy people living in inner city areas well served by PT.
Chicago seems like an interesting idea too – the primary problem is that a lot of the natural destinations for a Chicago service – like Detroit – are simply dying on the vine. The extent to which a Chicago hub would work will really depend on if/how the US can revitalise those rustbelt areas. I also agree the population densities being probably too low across the Pacific Northwest.
I couldn’t agree more that our stimulus money should have been focussed on more infrastructure spending rather than cash handouts. I mean, if they wanted to give cash handouts then give them to the poor who will have a higher marginal propensity to consume. People on $80000 a year don’t really care about an extra $900 – but it could have gone a long way towards high quality public transport infrastructure in Australian cities. It would be interesting to see what proportion of the stimulus has gone toward infrastructure here vs the US. I might have a look at that in more detail over the weekend and hopefully write a post on it.
cheers
Good to have you back Phin! Congrats on your new job
While I think the lack of feeder services into any HSR service is apparent – I don’t think it is as bad as made out.
Considering the proposed LAX -SFO high speed, SFO has a fairly substantial suburban and interurban network of rail, and LAX has an ‘emerging’ one. San Jose and Sacramento (on a future branch of the line) have light rail services. On the NY to Washington route I can use a range of suburban, interurban and underground rail services in NY, Philadelphia and Washington en route.
Even a Chicago-St Louis journey would have an established suburban and interurban service at one end and an emerging one at the other end, including the line to St Louis airport, more than many Australian or for that matter, European cities can manage.
I suspect the greater problem is the disjointed operation of the systems and timetabling and ticketing.
For example, if I board a Marseille to Paris TGV but am actually am going to Chartres, 1 hour west, and not on a TGV route, I can still buy a through ticket, and can find out the combined timetable on sncf.fr (or use sbb.ch which is better and easier to use!)
OTOH, I can’t buy a through ticket onto the Paris Metro, it is assumed I just know where I want to go and how much it costs.
So I suspect it is a mixture of actual network layout, but also softer issues such as navigability and legibility that will affect the end user.
Any great topic and look forward to more posts from you and others.
Thanks Ricc. I agree that places like California have had their public transport underrated (often by Australians – perhaps we just want to feel that our public transport is better than theirs because we can’t really say that about anywhere else) but that there’s actually quite a bit to work with.
The other side of the coin is that areas which have little or no public transport are ripe for application of modern best practice systems without having to worry about inefficiencies built into legacy networks. I can imagine that dealing with something like the Upfield line with its 4000 or whatever level crossings, single track sections and loop constraints is actually a lot harder to fix than when you have nothing and can go from scratch and integrate with land use and a new HSR system.
I don’t know enough about the US, but I wonder if there’s a perception problem with public transport there, that public transport is for losers. In areas where public transport is just emerging, running new high quality services may serve to solve the perception problem more so than where PT is already entrenched, because people haven’t had any experience with it – good or bad.
Service marketing and integration is certainly something that needs to be looked at very seriously – especially with the state based commuter systems like NJ transit etc. I’m not sure how to solve that one, but if the Americans can manage the political will to build decent quality HSR, hopefully they will be able to come up with something.
Good to see you back Phin, and like the new image above ‘recent comments’. Can you stick around please this time?
On the lack of feeders issue, shouldn’t HSR be compared to aviation? Air isn’t losing out on many of these routes because of it. Look at how they manage it.
The stereotype pushed around here (in Oz) is that PT in the USA is hopeless and that LA has barely any PT. I’d like to go there and see it for myself – although I know the stereotypes issue is much bigger than here.
Just look at terms like “Moving Aficans Rapidly Through Atlanta”, a racist way to explain MARTA! There are some good online articles about this.
Thanks Somebody – now that I’ve settled into full time work (as opposed to my former 12 hours of uni per week
) I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get back to regularly commenting every day or two and getting a new post written once a week or so.
For HSR competing with air, that makes a lot of sense – if people can get taxis/conventional PT/a lift to the airport now, who’s to say they won’t just do the same to the station if the HSR offers a better service. In the end, air travel is as much public transport as the 546 bus – it just serves a different market.
For competing with cars, I think there’s probably more need for higher quality feeder PT, but those sort of car trips are often going to be holiday traffic that’s on the road because of luggage etc. For the rest, it’s not HSR’s job to compete the daily car commuter market.
With international airfares so insanely cheap at the moment, I’m seriously considering heading over to New York for a couple of weeks around midyear. Would be really interesting riding around the subway (especially if these planned service cuts go ahead).
Oh and I found the picture on the State Library website – the link is
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/pictoria/b/1/7/doc/b17525.shtml
I was thinking it might be good to change it around now and again. Somebody, if you’re interested, perhaps we could put some of your photos up?
I didn’t know that there were service cuts on the NY Subway but from looking it up there isn’t many specific details of what’s happening. If you’ve got the money then definitely go – wish I could afford to do so.
Going a little OT here but I’m happy for you to use my photos. Drop me an email about it if you wish (you should know my address!)
Just looking at Lachie’s post, some more thoughts that might help
The car dependency is obviously a problem, but on those routes sub 500km where the train can probably compete with air simply on frequency and absence of check-in (and not counting home/business transport) the train might be the way to go. The comments about Texas would be pertinent here. There would be several city pairs in other states like those in Texas, eg Memphis-Nashville, the three big cities of Ohio, Florida and so on.
Factor in the other matters:
-ice/snow in the northern USA affects air but not rail
-said to be millions of Americans have a fear of flying
-better on-board comfort and potentially better service
-more reliabilty
It is only on the up.
When we look back at what killed the great American trains, we see 3 things – good air services killing the long distance trains, interstate highways killing the short range ones, and of course, the railroads were freight focussed and had their own networks that didn’t always connect.
All through Europe’s sorry period post WWII, there was always a belief that the railways were there for passengers. And the interchanges between railways were at national borders – meaning that the only people affected were the relatively smaller market of people not travelling within one country, or not travelling on the pan-European expresses like the TEEs. So Europe had an advantage in the passenger market which, combined with heavily regulated aviation and bad weather, kept air in check outside the charter holiday destinations.
Somebody, regarding the MTA cuts in New York, the only information I’ve found refers to a general cutback in offpeak frequencies (of an undisclosed size), the closure of the W and Z lines (which I don’t think will actually see any trackage closed) and the axing of lots of bus routes. A map of buses to go is at http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/03/26/nyregion/0326-met-web-BUSmap.html
I’ll drop you an email about using some pics soon
Ricc, the US HSR strategic report is interesting in that it notes that the US govt. have spent $1.8 trillion in current dollars on the interstate system and air transport, but nothing like that on rail. The graph on page 4 is really interesting – it shows that WW2 aside, that rail had already been losing market share and absolute passenger numbers even pre Eisenhower starting on the interstate system.
[...] have been some recent posts such as Phin’s on high speed rail in the USA on the different blogs, stemming from recent announcements from the [...]