Requiem for a Train

[n2doc]

By Will Oremus|
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011, at 8:24 PM ET


If you live in Los Angeles, Orlando, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, Raleigh, or any number of other U.S. cities, chances are you’ve read a news story that started something like this: “Imagine stepping on a train in and stepping off in just two-and-a-half hours later. This dream could become a reality in the next years, thanks to plans for a national network of high-speed rail lines.”

Well, you can stop imagining it now. High-speed rail isn’t happening in America. Not anytime soon. Probably not ever. The questions now are (1) what killed it, and (2) should we mourn its passing?

There was a brief burst of enthusiasm around the future of high-speed rail in January 2010, when President Obama announced $8 billion in federal stimulus spending to start building “America’s first nationwide program of high-speed intercity passenger rail service.” Since then, however, the project’s chances of success have been heading in one direction: downhill. First, Tea Party conservatives in Florida and wealthy liberal suburbanites in the Bay Area began questioning their states’ plans. Then, just as Joe Biden was calling for $53 billion in high-speed-rail spending over the next six years, a crop of freshly elected Republican governors turned down billions in federal money for lines in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida. Finally, Republicans in Congress zeroed out the federal high-speed rail budget last month. (To understand why conservatives hate trains, see my colleague Dave Weigel’s story from earlier this year.)


Though Republicans’ outright rejection of high-speed rail is short-sighted, so were many of the plans themselves. Rather than focus on the few corridors that need high-speed rail lines the most, the Obama administration doled out half a billion here and half a billion there, a strategy better-suited to currying political support than to addressing real infrastructure problems. Spread across 10 corridors, each between 100 and 600 miles long, Obama’s rail system would have been, at best, a disjointed patchwork. The nation’s most gridlocked corridor, along the East Coast between Washington, D.C. and Boston, was left out of the plans entirely. Worse, much of the money was allocated to projects that weren’t high-speed rail at all.

more
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technocracy/2011/12/high_speed_rail_is_dead_in_america_should_we_mourn_it_.html

[phantom power]

1. We no longer solve problems in America, we curry favor with constituencies

[Loge23]

2. We're about 200 light years behind the rest of the world

We're still in the relatively Mesozoic era of transporation where small bands of highway workers stand around idly for years at a time to add one or two more lanes on the interstate, as the world slowly passes by.
The former USA will never see high-speed rail because we never maintained "slow-speed" rail as an infrastructure for future improvement. Why? Beacause the rail industry hasn't been a vaible political force since the days of Jay Gould - not that those days are to be missed. The point is, the oil companies drive political will in the transportaion business in this country.

[Bob Wallace]

3. Wrong.

President Obama made the funds available to get HSR going in several parts of the country. If we had a pro-America Congress we would now be moving forward with the first parts of a nation-wide HSR system.

Republicans, as part of their strategy to make PBO a one term president torpedoed HSR.

Let's put the blame where it belongs. On those who harm America for political gain.

The Republican House of Representatives just passed a bill to kill HSR funding for 2012. That bill is not law yet, it has to get through the Senate and signed by the President.

We've got to get control of the government out of Republican hands or we're going to speed our path to becoming serfs.

[Bob Wallace]

4. California...

Is apparently pushing on with its HSR program in spite of Republican resistance.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., has said money for high-speed rail can be found in other transportation accounts. California expects to begin construction in 2012 on the first leg of its SF->LA HSR system.

http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2011/11/17/house-gop-kills-high-speed-rail-funding/

If we can get one track up and running I expect public sentiment to support further expansion.

---

There was an interesting discussion on Clean Technia a few days ago about 'moving stations'. The idea is that HSR would not stop in smaller stations along the way thus slowing overall travel time. Rather passengers would board a self-propelled transfer car prior to the train reaching the station, the car would then detach and use a siding into the station. At the same time another transfer car would leave the station, catch up with the train and move passengers onto the moving train.

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/12/01/high-speed-trains-can-save-more-energy-with-moving-platforms/#comment-377799663

[bananas]

6. Last month: "Gov. Jerry Brown Makes Strongest Statement Yet In Support of High Speed Rail"

http://www.cahsrblog.com/2011/11/gov-jerry-brown-makes-strongest-statement-yet-in-support-of-high-speed-rail/

Gov. Jerry Brown Makes Strongest Statement Yet In Support of High Speed Rail
Nov 11th, 2011

<snip>

Gov. Jerry Brown said Thursday that he will formally request that the Legislature approve billions of dollars to start construction of the California bullet train next year and will work hard to persuade skeptical lawmakers that the project is critical to the state’s future.

In his first extended remarks on the $98.5-billion project since a controversial business plan was unveiled last week, Brown said that the state will have a broad need for the system in the long term and that it represents a significantly cheaper alternative to additional highway and commercial aviation investments.

“As an idea, if you think of California as growing and expanding, then it fits into it,” Brown said at a meeting with The Times’ editorial board. “It is based on an optimistic assessment of where California is going.”

<snip>

[Kolesar]

5. Oremus does not have the background to assess high speed rail

"If there’s a silver lining to high-speed rail’s spectacular failure, it’s that these trains were outdated years ago. Even if all went according to the Obama administration’s plans, the nation’s rail network would have remained meager and backward by comparison to those in Japan and China. Those countries are already building trains that run via magnetic levitation. Suspended a few inches above a guide...

Poor

It is a fine strategy to transition to high speed rail by improving alignments, adding tracks, and introducing faster diesel electric locomotives. That opens the possibility of full electrification in a few years as the users and the destinations develop in response to the first trains.