Why Texas High-Speed Rail is Stuck
I’ve been asked on social media why the US can’t build a Shinkansen-style network, with a specific emphasis on Texas. There is an ongoing project, called Texas Central, connecting Dallas with Houston, using Shinkansen technology; the planning is fairly advanced but the project is unfunded and predicted to cost $33.6 billion for a little less than 400 km of route in easy terrain. Amtrak is interested, but it doesn’t seem to be a top priority for it. I gave the skeet-length answer centering costs, blaming, “Farm politics, prior commitments, right-wing populism, and Japanese history.” These all help explain why the project is stuck, despite using technology that in its home country was a success.
How Texas Central is to be constructed
The line is planned to run between Dallas and Houston, but the Houston station is not in Downtown Houston, in order to avoid construction in the built-up area. There are rail corridors into city center, but Texas Central does not want to use them; the concept, based on the Shinkansen, does not permit sharing tracks with legacy railways, and as it developed in the 2010s, it did not want to modify the system for that. Sharing the right-of-way without sharing tracks is possible, but requires new construction within the built-up area. To avoid spending this money, the Texas Central plan is for the Houston station to be built at the intersection of I-610 and US 290, 9 km from city center. Between the cities, the line is not going into intermediate urban areas; a Brazos Valley stop is planned as a beet field station 40 km east of College Station.
Despite all this cost cutting, the line is also planned to run on viaducts. This is in line with construction norms on the newer Shinkansen lines as well as in the rest of Asia; in Europe, high-speed rail outside tunnels runs at-grade or on earthworks, and viaducts are only used for river crossings. As a result, on lines with few tunnels, construction is usually more expensive in Asia than in Europe, with some notable exceptions like High Speed 2 or HSL Zuid. Heavily-tunneled lines sometimes exhibit the opposite, since Japanese standards permit narrower tunnels (more precisely, a slightly wider tunnel accommodates two tracks whereas elsewhere the norm is that each track goes in a separate bore); this works because the Shinkansen trainsets are more strongly pressurized than TGVs or ICEs and also have specially designed noses to reduce tunnel boom.
But in an environment like Texas’s, the recent norm of all-elevated construction drives up costs. This is how, in an easy construction environment, costs have blown to around $87 million/km. For one, recently-opened Shinkansen extensions have cost less than this even while being maybe half or even more in tunnel (that said, the Tsuruga extension that opened earlier this year cost much more). But it’s not the only reason; the construction method interacts poorly with the state’s politics and with implicit and explicit promises made too early.
Japanese history and turnkey projects
The Shinkansen is successful within Japan, and has spawned imitators and attempts at importing the technology wholesale. The imitators have often succeeded on their own terms, like the TGV and the KTX. The attempts at importing the technology wholesale, less so.
The issue here is twofold. First, state railways that behave responsibly at home can be unreasonable abroad. SNCF is a great example, running the TGV at a consistent but low profit to keep ticket fares affordable domestically but then extracting maximum surplus as a monopolist charging premium fares on Eurostar and Thalys. Japan National Railways, now the JR group, is much the same. Domestically, it is constrained by not just implicit expectations of providing a social service (albeit profitably) but also local institutions that push back against some of management’s thinking about how things ought to be. With SNCF, it’s most visible in how management wants to run the railway like an airline, but is circumscribed by expectations such as open platforms, whereas on Eurostar it is freer to force passengers to wait until the equivalent of an airline gate opens. With JR, it’s a matter of rigidity: the Shinkansen does run through to classical lines on the Mini-Shinkansen, but it’s considered a compromise, which is not to be tolerated in the idealized export product.
And second, the history of Taiwan High-Speed Rail left everyone feeling a little dirty, and led Japan to react by insisting on total turnkey products. THSR, unlike the contemporary KTX or the later CRH network, was not run on the basis of dirigistic tech transfers but on that of buying imported products. To ensure competition, Taiwan insisted on designing the infrastructure to accommodate both Japanese and European trains; for example, the tunnels were built to the larger European standard. There were two bidders, the Japanese one (JRs do not compete with one another for export orders) and a Franco-German one called the Eurotrain, coupling lighter TGV coaches to the stronger motor of the ICE 2.
The choice between the two bids was mired in the corruption typical of 1990s Taiwan. The Taiwanese government relied on external financing, and Japan offered financing just to get the built-operate-transfer consortium allied with the Eurotrain to switch to the Shinkansen. Meetings with European and Japanese politicians hinged on other scandals, such as the one for the frigate purchase. Taiwan eventually chose the Shinkansen, using a variant of the 700 Series called the 700T, but the Eurotrain consortium sued alleging the choice was improperly made, and was awarded a small amount of damages including covering the development cost of the train.
The upshot is that in the last 20 years, a foreign country buying Shinkansen tech has had to buy the entire package. This includes not just the trainsets, which are genuinely better than their European and Chinese counterparts, but also construction standards (at this point all-elevated) and signaling (DS-ATC rather than the more standard ETCS or its Chinese derivative CTCS). It includes the exact specifications of the train, unmodified for the local loading gauge; in India, this means that the turnkey Shinkansen used on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad line is not only on standard gauge rather than broad gauge, but also uses the dimensions of the Shinkansen, 3.36 m wide trains with five-abreast seating, rather than those of Indian commuter lines, 3.66 m with six-abreast seating. It’s unreasonably rigid and yet Japan finds buyers who think that this lets them have a system as successful as the Shinkansen, rather than one component of it, not making the adjustments for local needs that Japan itself made from French and German technology in the 1950s and 60s when it developed the Shinkansen in the first place.
Prior commitments
Texas Central began as a private consortium; JR Central saw it as a way of selling an internationalized eight-car version of the N700 Series, called the N700-I. It developed over the 2010s, as Republican governors were canceling intercity rail projects that they associated with the Obama administration, including one high-speed one (Florida) and two low-speed ones (Ohio, Wisconsin). As a result, it made commitments to remain a private-sector firm, to entice conservative politicians in Texas.
One of the commitments was to minimize farmland takings. This was never a formal commitment, but one of the selling points of the all-elevated setup is that farmers can drive tractors underneath the viaducts, and only the land directly beneath the structures needs to be purchased. At-grade construction splits plots; in France, this is resolved through land swap agreements and overcompensation of farmers by 30%, but this has not yet been done in the United States or in Japan.
Regular readers of this blog, as well as people familiar with the literature on cost overruns, will recognize the problem as one of early commitment and lock-in. The system was defined early as one with features including very limited land takings and no need for land swaps, no interface with existing railroads to the point that the Houston terminal is not central, and promises of external funding and guidance by JR Central. This circumscribed the project and made it difficult to switch gears as the funding situation changed and Amtrak got more interested, for one.
Farm politics and right-wing populism
Despite the promises of private-sector action and limited takings, not everyone was happy. Texas Central is still a train; in a state with the politics of Texas, enough people are against that on principle. The issue of takings looms large, and features heavily in the communications of Texans Against High-Speed Rail.
The combination of this politics and prior commitments made by Texas Central has been especially toxic to the project. Under American law, private railroads are allowed to expropriate land for construction, and only the federal government, not the states, is allowed to expropriate railroads. Texas Central intended to use this provision to assemble land for its right-of-way, leading to lawsuits about whether it can legally be defined as a railroad, since it doesn’t yet operate as one.
Throughout the 2010s, Governor Greg Abbott supported the project, on the grounds that he’s in favor of private-sector involvement in infrastructure and Texas Central is private-sector. But his ability to support it has always been circumscribed by this political opposition from the right. The judicial system ruled in favor of Texas Central, but state legislative sessions trying to pass laws in support of the project were delayed, and relying on Abbott meant not seeking federal funds.
This also means that there is no chance of redesigning the project to reduce its cost by running at-grade. There is too little political capital to do so, due to the premature commitments made nearly 15 years ago. California has been able to resile from its initial promises to Central Valley farmers to use legacy rail corridors rather than carve a new right-of-way, but even then the last-minute route redesign toward the latter, in order to avoid running at 350 km/h on viaducts through unserved towns, are route compromises. But California has only been able to do so because it’s a one-party state and the Central Valley farmers are Republicans; it has not been able to modify early commitments in case of conflict with Democrats or nonpartisan interest groups. In Texas, the state is likewise run by a single party, but the farmers and the opponents in general are members of the party. Thus, right-wing populism and farmer politics, while claiming opposition to government waste, are forcing the project to be more wasteful with money, in order to marginally reduce the obtrusiveness of the state in managing eminent domain; they would not accept land swaps except in a situation of extreme political weakness.
Abbott is not a popularist (in the sense of European Christian democracy, not the unrelated American term). Popularist leaders like the string of corrupt Democrazia Cristiana leaders of the First Italian Republic, or the more moderate CDU leaders here including Angela Merkel, have sometimes enacted policy that had more support on the center-left than on the right, if they thought it was necessary to maintain their own power and enact the popular will. This way, Angela Merkel, personally opposed to gay marriage, finally permitted a vote on it in 2017, knowing it would pass, because if she didn’t, then SPD would use it in the election campaign and could win on it. Republican governors in the United States do not do that, except in very blue states, like Maryland or Massachusetts. If they moderate too much, they face a risk of losing primary elections, and this is even truer of state legislators; moderation is still not going to get them Democratic support for anything. The result is what’s called majority-of-the-majority: in practice, a majority party will not take action unless it has the support of a majority of the caucus, rather than just a handful of moderate members allying with the other party. This is not the milieu for experimenting with land swaps, which are a far more visible instantiation of state power than populist farmers are ever comfortable with.
Is Texas High-Speed Rail doomed?
I don’t know. I think it’s notable that the funding the project is receiving this year is perfunctory, for planning but not construction. The promised private funding seems dead, and Pete Buttigieg’s promise of funding one project to showcase that there can be high-speed rail in the United States seems focused on funding 25% of Brightline West (which needs 50%), connecting Las Vegas with Rancho Cucamonga, 60 km east of Downtown Los Angeles.
That said, planning is still continuing, as if to keep this project fresh for when more funding materializes. This is not the era of perfunctory $8 billion bills like that of the Obama stimulus; Seth Moulton is proposing $205 billion, and presumably this would include Texas Central, depending on the political environment of 2025 and the spending priorities then.
But I’m still pessimistic. High-speed rail could work between Dallas and Houston. It’s a reasonably strong corridor, and is growing over time, even if it is not as superlative as Tokyo-Osaka or Boston-New York-Washington. But I’m not sure it’s worth it at $33.6 billion, and I don’t think anyone with the power to fund it thinks it is either. Those costs are not just what high-speed rail is supposed to cost; this is a premium of a factor of at least 2, and likely 3, over what can be done with efficient at-grade construction, of the kind that the project unfortunately ruled out over the 2010s.
Pedestrian Observations 
Paradoxically Trump supported the project as even he, in his travels, could see HSR success around the world. If they couldn’t get it going in those 4 years, when it only cost $12bn, then they aren’t going to succeed now with ridiculous costs and even more toxic politics. Buttigieg is not going to butt heads with Texans (hmm, unless they feel like rewarding Texans if they give them Cruz’s Senate seat!). Perhaps if Trump wins then Elon Musk, now a Texan, will force it thru as a showcase for Hyperloop even if it would cost $100bn plus; which would probably evolve into a standard Maglev. Could they persuade those ranchers?
Perhaps they could re-examine Houston-Austin and Austin-Dallas with a fresh start with their learnings from this debacle. At 539km it is not much more than Paris-Bordeaux (522km) which is down to 2h with one stop in Tours.
But seriously this parrot is dead.
The ranchers don’t care about what tech it is. To them, it’s still a train that’s encroaching on their property. Think of them less in American terms (“Republicans”) and more in French terms (“farmers who are against everything”); their praxis is American lawfare rather than French rioting, but their goals are French rural NIMBY.
Farmers have nothing to gain – this goes right by them without stopping in any sane world (by the time they get to a station they may as well drive the whole trip). They shouldn’t have much to lose either though – a little land on a fence line – and they get paid a fair price for that land. At grade is just fine with them so long as there are crossings every mile or two (that is don’t block the existing roads). Maybe put in some in field crossings for the cattle/tractor (just wide enough for one tractor or truck, if the farmer can show this is where they always cross)
However somehow this blew up in the media and now farmers have been convinced that this is far worse for them than it really will be. A common problem really – you see the same thing where people are convinced that windmills, electric cars, or other such things are the end of the world.
The fact that there are no intermediate stops along the route is undoubtedly the problem. Same mistake as HS2.
Could very easily be some farmers in Texas have spoken to friends/family affected by HS2 and realise that it will be a huge pain during construction and no benefits after.
Could very easily be some farmers in Texas have spoken to friends/family affected by HS2
I’m pretty comfortable claiming that absolutely no farmers in rural Texas have friends or family in the home counties of England affected by HS2 construction. Those two areas are worlds apart (literally and figuratively) and unlikely to have contacts. Not saying it’s impossible there is one or two, but not enough to affect opinion. Alon is correct, this is ideological and the line would have opposition regardless of how it is designed.
Lack of intermediate stops is not a problem. The density of the area is such that they wouldn’t be used and wouldn’t benefit rural residents if they existed.
10% of all Americans are majority British, with 7.5% majority English. And certainly given several hundred thousand people are negatively affected by HS2, the idea a few people in Texas have family negatively affected by HS2 is pretty plausible.
Far more so than people negatively affected by other high speed rail projects who are much less numerous.
College/Bryan and Waco should certainly each have a station on Texas central, and no doubt on the TGV or ICE or Shinkansen that they both would. Both are big places all things considered.
South Dallas and North Houston probably should have a station as well. The French wouldn’t bother but the ICE and Shinkansen would have a stop there.
10% of all Americans are majority British, with 7.5% majority English
No, 10% of Americans have British/English ancestry, a result of long distant relatives who immigrated to the United States (or what would become it) in the 1600s-1800s, leaving many generations of descendants who can claim that more people in their family tree are British/English than something else. It does not mean that 33 million Americans were born in Buckinghamshire or Liverpool before moving to the US or have any sort of ties to anyone living in the UK today, just at Donald Trump knows absolutely no one in that German village his family originate from.
I agreed that there could be a few people who would have this link, but a few people would not affect the attitude of the whole region; after all there are a few people in rural Texas who really support the project and know HSR is beneficial. Once again, the opposition here is a result of local ideology, not anything happening on another project somewhere else.
College/Bryan and Waco should certainly each have a station on Texas central
Go to the TCR website, their ROW goes nowhere near or through College Station or Waco.
@Onux, if they are too out the way fair enough – but adding 10 minutes of journey time to serve them doesn’t seem pointless.
However that doesn’t stop having a stop at the edge of both cities.
Even just a stop in the suburbs helps as it has the advantage that you don’t have to drive into the city which people hate.
Last I checked there was a stop for College station – it was a long distance away from the town, but close enough to get a ride or even regular bus service (I don’t know how the bus situation is in College station, if it is good they will run a bus to the train and get good ridership on it. that is a big if though)
@henry, I think the million dolllar question for the rural areas along the route is whether people who live in them who hate driving in the city would drive to a station and use the train for part/all of their journey if they wanted to go out in the city or to go to the airport or whether they would consider it too much hassle.
Same really for the people in the cities along the way, but there is also the question about whether the public transport is adequate to do it all with public transport or a lift/taxi for part of the way.
Just because there is a dot on the map doesn’t mean there are a lot of people living there. By definintion rural places are places without a lot of people. If there aren’t a lot of people there aren’t going to be a lot of passengers.
It’s not the Tokaido. It’s not the Northeast Corridor and it’s not even the Atlantic Coast of Florida. There are no cities between Dallas and Houston. College Station is an extra wide place along the road and Waco – which will someday perhaps be along the route from Fort Worth to Austin – is a bit wider.
People in rural areas go downtown any city only a few times in their life. There is nothing there that they cannot get closer to home. The suburbs have Home Depot, Walmart, and the strip malls that serve their big city shopping needs (they likely make this trip monthly to get things that are expensive or not available in their local small town – though a city of 50k if one is closer covers all these needs). Downtown might have a sport stadium, the state capital (Which is in Austin and so not on the route in question anyway), or historic sites they might visit on vacation, but nothing a rural person visits often.
Now if you did have a station convenient to rural people, and the downtown station had shopping maybe. However remember this is a monthly trip, so your trains needs to have plenty of room for shopping carts – today they are filling the back of their truck (a large sedan would have enough trunk space but truck it is because of other farm shopping done closer to home that needs a truck)
There is some demand for rural train service, but really it should be thought of as a footnote that you give because they are on the way anyway and so adding a station is cheap and likely serves other operational needs (ie when doing track maintenance you need a place to stop trains). This station isn’t really a rural station, it just serves a small city that nobody has heard of, but the people in that community will just the train because it is there.
Let me be clear, rural stations should be put in, but not for the purpose of getting riders. They are cheap, score political points, and when well placed give other operational flexibility.
No they aren’t. Tens of millions of dollars. For not too many people because there aren’t many of them.
@Henry, the French rural stations on LGV Sud Est get 10 journeys a person a year in ridership. That isn’t awful.
@adirondacker12800, a basic Haddenham and Thame Parkway style station wouldn’t cost $10s of millions of dollars to construct.
And besides the community goodwill you get in exchange is worth a lot too.
What community? It’s rural Texas not the Tokaido. New commuter stations cost tens of millions of dollars.
You can’t build field crossings on HSR by definition. You can build bridges, but that adds up fast.
At grade in this context means on a low berm. HSR tracks are almost never truly at grade due to the tight tolerances for vertical and horizontal curves. Even if you are designing to be “on the ground” when the ground dips a few feet the tracks cannot so in a lot of places the berm is higher still. It is usually practical to build a low clearance underpass (one lane wide, 2.5-3m high) suitable for farm use but not road trucks into the berm. It doesn’t require a full sized bridge.
To add to that, these crossings can flood when it rains – the farmer will just close the gate when not moving cows between pastures, and not use it when it is flooded. You do of course need full bridges that don’t flood, but I assume they were planning on those anyway. This is just the cheapest crossing that 1 (maybe two) farmers use to get cows and/or tractors to the other side of the tracks. If there is a road not too far away than just the cow only crossing is good enough (humans can walk though but may need to duck)
They shouldn’t have much to lose either though – a little land on a fence line
If their house and barn are on one side of the rail line and 80% of their fields on the other they have quite a lot to lose. Same if their house is on one side and the road to their property on the other. These concerns shouldn’t be minimized – it’s no different than Robert Moses ignoring the impact of his highway projects on the neighborhoods they passed through, even if the built environment is very different – the issue is that there are many ways to address them that are not being used in Texas, or more systematically throughout the US.
Seriously? Disturbing one million of the city’s most disadvantaged versus a tiny handful of rich Texan ranchers? No difference at all …
It wasn’t a million and most of them were middle class. Life was much different in the 50s.
Disturbing one million of the city’s most disadvantaged versus a tiny handful of rich Texan ranchers?
Most farmers/ranchers are not rich. Like other small business owners they are usually middle class but struggle with day to day (season to season for farmers) issues of paying the bills to keep going. Your very dismissal of them as not being worthy of concern because they are rich (being rich doesn’t mean you don’t have rights, neither does being poor) together with your comment below that if they are Texan they must be among the “worst” actually proves my point that people disregarding farmer/rancher concerns are acting exactly as Moses did even if the scale and environment are different (“who cares what the poor people think, their neighborhood is a slum” / “who cares what the ranchers think, they’re rich and there are not a lot of them”). The rural Texans in the 2020s and New Yorkers in tenements in the 1950s have one very important thing in common: someone more powerful is telling them they have to give up part of their home/land/livelihood when they don’t want to, and we should be sensitive to that even if you believe that takings are justified either in principle or in this case.
Unfortunately, your negative comments about Texans, which you make despite having never met or knowing much about them, since you admit to “guessing” they are some of the worst, is at the opposite end of this spectrum. It is exactly the type of othering and stereotyping by ignorance that schoolchildren are taught to avoid lest it lead to hate and fear. The podcast 99% Invisible is doing a year-long series of episodes on the Power Broker, Robert Caro’s famous biography of Robert Moses to mark its 50th anniversary (an ambitious project to match an ambitious book). One of the threads of the series is Caro’s sense of shared humanity for the people he writes about contrasting with Moses’s disregard for the feelings and concerns of others. Sadly, your statements fall into the latter camp.
@Onux
I was saying that when it comes to weighing human cost the effect on a million city dwellers versus a tiny handful of farmers is no contest, especially as we are talking about big public infrastructure that benefits millions or has other big payoffs like ecological. And a freeway takes a lot more land than a railway. I find it faintly ridiculous to believe it is a huge imposition on farmers who are getting compensated. In the rare case of when it happens to divide the major part of the property from the homestead then they would be compensated for moving the house or whatever. And I am a little weary of hearing of whinging farmers who have state and federal subsidies shovelled their way, and I know whose children fill the expensive private schools in the cities (in Australia). Here there is a subset who bitterly fight wind turbines and the transmission lines, but when examined it turns out it is because it was their neighbour who got the windfall and not them. All around the world they are some of the most narrow self-interest oppositionalists one can find. Those of us in settler-societies (US, Australia, Canada) have a lot of respect for farmer’s battles over the centuries but they don’t do themselves many favours and often test that respect with their obstinate oppositionalism (even to things that don’t affect them).
As to the Olgallala aquifer it is silly to make calculations based on the ’50s when development and intensive agriculture, plus a shift to more thirsty crops (because the water was ‘free’) has multiplied several fold. Same thing in the CA Central Valley with their massive shift to almonds. The 600 years replenishment only works if they stop all extraction; currently it will never replenish. The notion that it will simply keep delivering for centuries is already disproven: (Wiki; that WP article you cited is behind a paywall):
In many places it is dropping metres each year, requiring ever deeper wells and more and more energy to power the pumps to extract it, and which then affects the land around it.
The main objection to Texas is their denial of reality and the concept of sustainability or thrifty use. The aquifer is an amazing thing but they are abusing it, robbing future generations and seemingly damaging the environment too.
Farmers the world over are ornery SOBs who fight anything and everything (BANANAs more than NIMBYs) but I’m still guessing Texan ranchers are among the worst. And as you point out, the sweetener of market rate +30% has got thousands of km of HSR built with the occasional extra expense of a tunnel under a heritage vineyard. Of course the legal situations are not comparable. The French have their déclaration d’utilité publique (declaration of public utility) and everyone knows once it is declared resistance is futile; and the state does not arrive at this declaration lightly. AFAIK it hasn’t been abused politically (I was recently reading about the extension of M1 under & thru Bois de Vincennes and how it was proposed as a DUP but did not achieve it, remaining quite contentious due to tree removal and impinging historical sites; of course it is still being built and its effect on the site is minimal. It helps that the French state has a good record in not doing crazy shit.) I suppose the equivalent is “national security” but that has been eroded by endless abuse (it was Eisenhower’s rationale for the IHS.)
My riff was more about exploiting Texan’s farcical braggadocio in that with Musk now being Texan they can claim ‘world beating’ home grown b.s. status for whatever (hyperloop, at the end of the day a version of maglev). I mean the Texas electricity grid is not connected to neighbouring states. They refuse to regulate groundwater extraction and as a consequence have wrecked the Ogallala aquifer (takes 20m years to renew).
As usual the Americans are hog-tied by their state-federal split and mindless obsession with private interests and complete absence of national interest. And endless zombie litigation. Where’s Matt with his explanation of why they can’t get this simple HSR built across empty cow paddocks, and at reasonable cost? How any of this serves the national interest.
The US has plenty of eminent domain abuse, as any search will turn up. Most famous is probably Kelo v. City of New London, but there are plenty of other examples. As such we cannot point to France – their system is different (at least your claim is their system is better, I have no idea if you are right). As such we need to be extra careful – I agree this is a good use of eminent domain, but we still should be careful about using it.
M1 extension works are at the planning stage. The ground will not be broken without a DUP and securing it will take time. The historical argument may carry some weight in the Courts but is not genuine. A modern school was built on Bois’ land much closer to the Château. The problem is that the works will take place and leave some traces in front of some of the very nicest Parisian real estate. It will be a conflict between privileged private interests and those of banlieusards East of Vincennes.
OK, that’s probably why I read about it recently, possibly in The Local (France)? I was vaguely thinking a DUP was only required if the resumptions included private property? But perhaps also if it “impinges”. It is “cut and cover” so is more unsightly while under construction. I was a bit dismayed that they were taking out a bunch of trees but again that is “cut & cover”. In general I have faith that the state and relevant authorities won’t do crazy stuff if unnecessary, unlike in the Anglosphere where any old excuse and often to appease vested private interests, usually property developers. Like the hundreds of century-old Moreton Bay fig trees in Sydney’s Moore Park, commemorating WW1 Anzacs, were removed to make way for a tramway. Done at the last moment, overturning years of public enquiries which had finally approved the initial route. But the initial route took a lane of roadway and was next to the Sydney Cricket Ground which is a public institution but run by a cabal of usual masters-of-universe types who decided they didn’t want it next to them. They forced it to the other side of the road and it had to take a slice of park and this magnificent avenue of trees. In fact they invoked the law about “critical infrastructure” but this was an abuse of such powers, especially as it was done at the last moment and was almost certainly planned from the beginning. Worse it was to ‘safeguard’ a future commercial property development by the SCG which itself should not happen on public green space put in their care. Such an Australian story.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-27/100-yr-old-sydney-trees-to-be-felled-to-commemorate-anzacs/7116608
For the umpteenth time it would be illegal. Because the Constitution calls for “just compensation” which is taken to mean market value plus any associated expenses.
In France it’s structured so that the compensation is at market value but then there’s an additional payment for the pain and suffering involved in being compelled to move. This is because property taxes are based on actual sales prices in the area and if the overcompensation were a single payment then it would raise the neighbors’ property taxes. But in the US it should be legally defensible; payments for pain and suffering do exist in the American legal system, for one.
It’s a goodwill payment. They are pretty standard.
I can imagine the amicus brief the 49 other states will file. Along with the one the Federal Government files.
This statement is absurd. There is nothing in the Constitution that would prevent overpaying for eminent domain, what the just compensation clause prevents is the government taking land and not paying or underpaying. There is no fixed “market value” for real estate, which is why the estimate on Zillow can be so different than Redfin, and why sellers and buyers will each hire their own appraiser when negotiating a sale. People sue all the time claiming an eminent domain offer was too low and often win getting a higher payment. Absolutely nothing would prevent a railroad or a government from telling their appraiser to provide high end estimates and offering higher payments from the start. Or as you note associated expenses are allowed which Alon has explained is how the French offer “30% more”.
The people in prison for buying real estate, for the government, at inflated prices want a better explanation of your theories. So do the people who sold it, at inflated prices and are in prison for it. Telling the appraiser to valuate it at a higher price is called fraud and that’s something people are in prison for. Though I suppose telling the appraiser to fraudulently appraise something higher might be something else like extortion. It would depend on the particulars.
Can you please give some examples of all these people in prison for eminent domain appraisals? I tried multiple variations on a Google search and the only example I could find was from Puerto Rico where government officials were seizing property from their friends via eminent domain, overpaying, and then getting some of the extra money as a kickback. But kickbacks and embezzlement are ordinary fraud, unrelated to eminent domain (or contracting, etc.)
If public officials as a matter of policy decided to make a high offer to property owners to adequately compensate them there would be nothing illegal about it.
In the case of Texas Central it is even less of an issue, because they are a private company. They can pay for land whatever they choose.
Citations work both ways. If there is nothing illegal about it and it’s such a fabulous idea I’m sure you have plenty of examples of where it went swimmingly.
Nice try, but the burden is always on the one making a claim. I don’t have to prove a negative and show examples of it not happening, you must provide examples of people in prison for over appraising otherwise we can disregard what you are saying.
There probably won’t be examples of it happening in the US because most jurisdictions try to minimize their costs and lowball eminent domain offers (and there are lots of citations for eminent domain sandbagging where a government offers one price but in court produces a lower estimate with no evidence of the higher offer to be found). But just because it hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it is illegal and furthermore the non-use in the US is the whole point of Alon’s argument: there are examples of it going swimmingly in France where they overpay slightly for land but by means of a better/shorter route and cheaper at grade construction end up spending much less on the project overall.
We seem to be an impasse. You made a unsupported assertion about my citation of the Constitution and if you want to make one so can I.
My assertion is not unsupported. The Constitution says “without just compensation.” It does not say “no more than just compensation” or “with only minimum market rate compensation” or anything that would support your assertion. There are many cases of eminent domain payments being negotiated with property owners or people suing and being awarded a higher payment then offered, all disproving your claim that there is some fixed max price and people go to jail if more is paid. You claimed there are people in jail for paying too much for eminent domain without any evidence, I identified that the one case in Puerto Rico that might apply was fundamentally about kickbacks not because payments that are too high are intrinsically illegal. The burden of proof here is entirely on you, and of course, you cannot meet it because there is nothing illegal about offering more money to buy a property without hassle.
@Onux is clearly completely right here.
So your super powers came up with this fantabulous plan that no one else has come up with since 1787? All the cases that worked their way up to Supreme Court and no one has come up with it? Really?
Ask Google “just compensation” the answer is “market value”. From reputable sources not some pontificater who has some fantabulous plan no one has come up with since 1787.
Alon has explained that the French have come up with it, and used it. Most municipalities try to minimize what they pay for eminent domain. Alon is explaining how in this case paying slightly more for land leads to overall much lower project cost because you can avoid things like viaducts or underpasses (because you paid more for the land thus getting most landowners to agree to sell or to a land swap). This would not have come up before in the US because 1) until a half a century ago or so people didn’t fight eminent domain like they do now so railroads back when didn’t have to pay as much attention to landowner concerns (if there were landowners, many railroads were built across the west through unsettled areas, and 2) the US has never really built HSR so what railroads existed could more easily be routed around difficult landowners (curves are not as big a deal at 70kph) or they were truly at grade and farmers just walked or drove their herds across the tracks.
can certainly believe that people are in prison for inflating real estate values. That is one form of corruption, just overpay someone.
However that doesn’t mean a project cannot have a policy of we will pay 10% (pick a number) more than just compensation if you take our offer without going through emanate domain, but if you force emanate domain or bring us to court we will insist on the fair market value. The difference is this is an official published policy and so nobody is cheating, and taxpayers know how much extra they are paying. This would likely stand up in court, though of course local laws need to be examined (I suspect some will not allow it)
I think another important point is that we all have a lot more stuff than we used to. My house probably has tens of thousands of pounds worth of stuff that would at best be a huge pain to remove. Now sure some of it will explicitly add value, but not necessarily all of it.
I have fitted carpets, tiling, storage, bathrooms and kitchen etc.
Plus there is a fair amount of flat pack furniture that would be tough to move. You can’t get my IKEA master bed out of the bedroom for example.
And in terms of moving no way are you sticking all my stuff in the back of a friends van – so that’s another cost.
If the bed got in, it can get out. If you have extra special super duper whatever attached to the house it increases the market value of the house. You get reasonable expenses which includes having someone else, professionals, with insurance, to move your stuff. You don’t even have to watch.
Flat pack furniture can only get out by destroying it and putting it in the trash. I’ve had professionals move my stuff: they looked at the flat pack stuff and made me sign a waver before they would touch it – they did get it to the new house but it is clearly worse for that one move.
Re: flat pak tangent, it’s very possible to disassemble if made of good quality wood or plywood. Particle board on the other hand, yeah that has a very limited lifespan in many ways.
As for the additional payment — I believe some US states have business value eminent domain damages, so that’s probably the tried and tested way to handle these farms. May depend on the exact state constitution.
To put it in the trash it has to leave the room.
FYI,
from the Fifth Amendment: … “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
from the 14th Amendment: … nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Before it was Silicon Valley, it was prune and apricot orchards, and cinnabar mines (hence, the newspaper is the San Jose Mercury News). In 1886, California said the word “persons” means corporations don’t qualify for equal protection. The US Supreme Court made one of its most consequential decisions in Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railway (yes, a railroad lawsuit) that California had to give railroad property the same treatment as citizens. One spinoff is the well-worn legal phrase “corporations are people”.
I would say in LDC the more expensive alignment either elevated or on an embankment is preffered due the density of the non motorized rural population that make “simple” ROW protections like fences insufficient against illegal level crossings. The new SGR in Ethiopia built at-grade to save money fell victim to it as there’s now countless level crossings and the federal government (both TPLF then and Abiy now) is to afraid to stirr any kind of anymosity with the (armed) rural population that can single handedly threaten the life line for the Ethiopian state (the Djibouti corridor). So the max speed has been reduced to 50 kph and the railway is forced by the government to compensate people for their livestock they are driving onto the tracks.
Interestingly the Ethiopian state (under TPLF) had much higher say into the design of the railway than the Kenyan admin in theirs. The Chinese wanted just to deliver the same turnkey project as they did in Kenya but the Ethiopian beauracracy came up with design changes to cut costs (building at grade) and the ruling class then was very insistent on the involvment of METEC (former military owned industrial complex inherited from the Derg that produces anything from Ammunition to public transport buses to Howitzers) as well as having a western consultant as supervisor.
In the end the Kenyans fared better with their turnkey project even though the Ethiopian railway had massive advantages as the whole import logistical sector is owned by the government anyway through ESLE, any imports have to go through the Modjo dryport anyway (meaning a single point of origin and destination ideal for rail transport), there’s no petroleum product pipeline like in Kenya to supply the big cities and railway in Kenya doesn’t benefit from a border choke point for trucks.
You can totally imagine the rural Indians building illegal level crossings.
I would like to know more about Ethiopian railway.
Do you have some source about the speed ? It is hard for me to understand, that trains go 50 km/h on a track build for 120 km/h.
Also I would be interested, how much the railway is used I read some reports, that utilisation of Adis Abeba – Djibouti railway is low, because of poorly located stations. How much is railway used?
The Ethiopia-Djibouti Railway currently catches about 2 million tons off the 17 million ton market for imports through Djibouti. On top of that there’s about 200,000 passengers per year for a single train pair per day.
The station location are not very optimal but anybody that had to travel on long distance buses in a country like Ethiopia will understand that any alternative that is safe, reliable and affordable will see people flock to it.
For comparison the biggest success for SGR in Kenya was that road fatalities dropped by 50 people per year on the Mombasa-Nairobi Highway after its inauguration (about 50%).
The main two reasons for the underperformance of the EDR are these:
For further readings there’s some strategic documents by the railway/the government.
https://edr.gov.et/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/EDR-2024-Revised-Annual-Plan-Stamped.pdf
https://www.motl.gov.et/sites/default/files/resource/Reform%20Prospects%20for%20Ethiopia%27s%20Rail%20and%20Surface%20Transport.pdf
Interesting !
Thanks.
I was looking at the UK tourism figures by mode and the UK Belgium split is 40% car, 42% train and 18% flying. The train share really isn’t bad.
The bigger barrier for Belgium is probably very high peak shares into London from the north (e.g. Manchester to London peak is £370 return).
For France where the share is much lower the biggest issue is undoubtably the weakness of onward connections once you get off the Eurostar.
If Alstom or Siemens would do the link for half the price of Shinkansen, they would get the job. Money talks. The rest is noise. P.S. I think a main reason BART is popular is that it always goes with zero/nada/zip grade crossings. Caltrain is electrified now, but I expect collisions to continue at grade crossings, and traffic will still be stopped when a train passes.
Easiest solution in countryside with sparse population is to have rail at grade and build road owerpasses. Highways do the same, they are not elevated on countryside.
All the issues Alon outlined are related to the tracks, not the rolling stock. Even if the rolling stock is half of the total price, getting it at half price would give you a 25% saving, irrelevant when the base cost is 300 or 400% of the norm…
BART is popular?
Are you one of those who howl at the moon (for perfect)? (Sounds like a Joni line; she gave a headlining concert last weekend at the Hollywood Bowl.)
It’s referring to usage. It is the third after LIRR and Washington, ie. considering regional rail. And compares surprisingly well with Paris RER-C; here’s something from the PO archives:
By contrast Caltrain’s ridership is about one fifth of BARTs, so indeed maybe ‘popular’.
This is the first time I’ve explicitly seen BART compared to regional rail systems like the RER (people wanting more infill stations in San Francisco implicitly make the comparison negatively when they complain about far suburban extensions) – but given the typology of BART (all lines serving a single downtown tunnel like RER/S-Bahn) and the scale (lines stretching 40-80 km from center city) it is actually very accurate. It also makes one look at BART very differently, from a poor performing metro to a very high quality (100% grade separated, fully electrified and level boarding, with approximately 1/5 of route underground) regional rail system.
I’m not sure I would include the DC Metro as a regional rail system though. With the exception of the ends of one red line branch and the silver line it’s distances more closely match its urban area and its layout is clearly that of a metro system.
Onux:
Hallelujah!
If you go to that link I provided earlier (a PO article) there was a long exchange over this very thing (in fact I recall you were in it). On one side are people who hate BART and think it is a terrible Metro and the money should have been spent on SF Metro, and on the other (ok, mostly me) is the incomprehension at why some want to think of its SF Metro and insist it is a failure because of that. It was conceived of, and is, a regional rail for the whole sprawling Bay Area (doh, it’s in its title!) and actually performs adequately. Given the immense opposition it faced at the beginning and then every step of its development, I think it is quite remarkable. That is proven by even being able to compare it to a single RER line in Paris. People, including railfans who should know better are deflecting their criticism of SF Metro onto BART which has a different raison d’être entirely.
I think DC Metro is much closer to BART and RER than it is to classic Metro. It serves far-flung subsidiary cities like Bethesda, Silver Spring, Tyson’s Corner and now the 45km (from memory) to Dulles. In fact any such thing built for big sprawling American cities is going to look the same.
I disagree that the DC metro serves “far flung” cities. From Metro Center, Silver Spring is 10.5km, Bethesda is 11km, Tysons is 17km.
For comparision, Times Square to either Coney Island in Brooklyn or 241st St in the Bronx is 20km, to Far Rockaway is 26km.
In Paris, from Chatelet to La Defense is 8.5km, to Orly on M14 is 15km (or 13km to Pont de Rungis), to St Denis Universite on M13 is 9.5km, to Rosney on the new M11 extension is 10km.
For London, Barking is 14.5km from Charing Cross, and the District line continues to Upminster at 25.5km, with Uxbridge and Heathrow in the opposite direction also at 25km. There are regional-rail-like-outliers such as Epping and Chesam, but the end of most Underground lines (Cockfosters, High Barnet, Stanmore, Harrow) are 16-17km away.
Excepting the long tail on the Red Line past Bethesda and the Silver Line past Tysons (Ashburn is closer to West Virginia than downtown DC) the termini of DC Metro lines is 12.5-21.5km from downtown DC, averaging 16.5km. This is entirely reasonable for a metro system.
I’m not sure there’s much point to such semantics. I reckon your examples more or less support what I wrote. From memory I mentioned places in the Washington area that are outside DC (and all of which I have used the Metro to reach) and none of them are the end of the line. When you use W Metro to those places the experience is very much like an RER journey with long distances between stops that feel like the boondocks. As I recall WMATA and BART trains are similar and more resemble RER than, say, London or NYC Metro trains; indeed wasn’t their comfort for longer journeys a PR point? All those places in “Paris” are in fact in the banlieu and those are all modern extensions of the Metro and again those sectors feel more like RER, especially M14. Could include M7 southern extension to Villejuif where I worked. All with widely spaced stations and the few places in the network where the trains get up to any speed (very noticeable coming downhill from Villejuif, almost thrilling like a roller-coaster).
Eric2 wrote:
Somewhat odd take as RER/S-bahns everywhere are competing with cars. I’d bet my house that the mode share on cross-bay journeys being in favour of roads. Due to property prices, lots of people working in tech (and in fact all the support workers, cleaners etc) live in the East Bay and mostly commute by car. They hate it as it creates a nightmare “lifestyle”. The tech industry has a whole flexi-work thing (dating to at least the 90s if not earlier) whereby they can start work very early and leave early–usually by 3pm to avoid the road congestion. The creators of BART could see all this but were foiled in building the system to serve the area in the most effective way (let’s not get into how awful their implementation was).
The comparison between BART and RER is a bit unfair (to RER). BART has a virtual monopoly on rail travel, anyone who wants to get from the entire east bay to SF without driving across the bay bridge has to take it. In contrast there are many rail alternatives to RER C not far from its stations – many of them higher quality than RER C (which has an unusually bad routing). Similarly for RER D, it is not a whole line but only half a line which shares tracks with RER B.
I think the comparison is especially unfair when you compare the efforts made to build those two systems. RER C gets pretty good results considering how low-effort its construction was: a short tunnel, some station reconstructions, maybe some grade separations. The southern part of RER C was instantly completed iirc.
Compare this to the huge expense and timescale to get BART to where it is today, and it already looks way less impressive.
Petitoiseau wrote:
That is a completely weird way to look at it. Birdbrained even (sorry, I apologise but couldn’t resist the pun). BART was a vastly more challenging project both geographically and politically because of the obstruction from all those who owned existing regional rail (Caltrain etc) and often their counties. Sprawled over long distances, across a major waterway and with low-density suburbia. And in the 60s when car culture and freeway building was at its peak even if its limits were becoming more obvious. RATP/SNCF may get brownie points for merging those two railways into one thru-line serving vast areas of Ile-de-France but it can’t compare to getting any city transit built in America at that time. It may have all kinds of imperfections (allegedly) yet it still carries 90% of the pax/km as a hundred year old railway (with modern mods) in a much larger mega-city (about 10m versus about 2-3m at the time) where transit has been a way of life for those hundred plus years. (In the 1890s Marie Curie commuted from her home in suburban Sceaux into her lab near the Pantheon on what later became RER-B.) And BART was created before any RER was created from existing rail so its creators even earn points for vision: thru running the city centre via massive cut-and-cover tunnels, a massive cross-harbour tunnel and fast running to connect far-flung suburbs and secondary cities. (OK Alon will tell me the Germans were ahead of the game …).
I’m not disputing that BART was technically/politically challenging to build! But what usually makes RER/S-Bahn style systems so powerful is precisely that they aren’t that complicated 🙂
The real achievement would have been getting through-running on the existing lines! If that had happened, there would never have been the need for extravagances like the San Jose extension being built right now. Rather BART could easily have run to San Jose in the 60s. I honestly don’t think it is much of an achievement that they wasted so much on suburban tunnels instead of through running onto existing lines. Building new suburban alignments can make sense (after all, the new lines are what made RER A so successful!), but to be worth it it needs to be coupled to new development. I think you really see how absurd the BART logic is in the San Jose extension, imagine how trivially easy it would be in comparison to just retool the Capitol Corridor!
Also, where are you getting the 90% pax/km figure from? From the pre-COVID figures I get about 60% (BART: 408k on 211km, RER: 540k on 165km). But then again I might have made a mistake.
You’ve completely changed the argument and are ignoring why BART was built like it is. None of the owners of existing track and ROW would agree to their tracks being used for the scheme. So it is a pointless argument. Truly, it is howling at the moon for perfect. Plus, they would not simply keep the Peninsular Caltrain track which has innumerable level crossings. So of course it all looks f’d up, especially today as costs escalate into sheer madness, nevertheless in that context it is quite an achievement to have a quite successful regional rail serving American sprawl town. Even with the crazy SJ segment, if it gets built with time the sunk costs are forgotten and the main thing is to have a functional rail service that people use. Look at RER-A and -B which Alon says were the most expensive tunnels in the world evah, and the cost and overall project were hugely controversial at the time. Yet who would even question it today? (Well, Alon, who is angry they didn’t double that Gare du Nord to Chatelet tunnel!)
Ridership in FY2019 was 119 million hence 674,000 per km pa.
Petitoiseau needs to drink some Red Bull (grow some wings, geddit?).
The central section of the RER A and B was the most expensive in France at the time, not in the world (on the corrected number Alain Dumas pointed out in comments) – New York was already building for maybe twice that per-km cost, in a much easier environment, namely, East Harlem under Second Avenue.
BART did not have the hard construction environment of the RER, ever. The Transbay Tube was a complex underwater project, but the Market Street Subway was built as a single two-level project comprising Muni and BART, and the tunnels in Oakland never had to go under older subway lines. The only American projects of comparable complexity are things like East Side Access and now the Downtown Extension, both of which are managing to cost about an order of magnitude more than the RER did per km.
Alon,
I was really talking about political obstructionism not engineering difficulty. However, because the existing tracks were not available to them they had to create their ROW (sometimes using bits of line that had fallen into disuse which is the only reason it was available). We can see how difficult that is almost anywhere today. Also I’d think the TransBay tunnel is one of the longest underwater crossings within a city/urban zone in the world? They did it without fuss using, to me, the improbable submerged segment approach.
On this subject I admit to trending to Adirondacker’s POV: I mean railfans get all agitated that it was bloody obvious how it should have been built, you know to perfection, by subsuming CalTrain and Empire line or whatever, and blah, blah. But it.was.not.possible (well it was only possible if the relevant political institutions agreed and they didn’t and they still don’t today 60 years later as the Peninsula line finally gets electrified yet most of the level crossings remain).
[Incidentally, that last post I made a rare error in typing my email address–a single letter–that made WordPress treat me as a new poster.]
Helpful hints to improve (ie “make tolerable”) your experience of pedestrianoservations.com:
You’re welcome.
Yeah, cos everyone wants a world, online or IRL, ruled by Kim Jung Mlynarik. Where anything that is a shade deviated from the opinion of one person triggers a tirade of toxic invective. If Trump gets in maybe you’ll be able to call out the goon squad. Well, no, nothing so crude or physical. Musk will be in charge and pay people like you to write code to keep the digital world pure. Praise be.
Get over yourself.
Alstom and Siemens don’t build tracks; states do.
“With SNCF, it’s most visible in how management wants to run the railway like an airline, but is circumscribed by expectations such as open platforms, whereas on Eurostar it is freer to force passengers to wait until the equivalent of an airline gate opens.”
I believe that a large amount of the security etc. on Eurostar is mandated by law.
1. The law mandates the ability to do security checks, but not full security theater; in fact the Euroshuttles don’t have security theater, so you can bring a bomb on a car and take the car on a train and nobody will know.
2. The airport gate-style boarding is independent of the security theater. Once passengers have cleared security, they can’t just walk onto the platform and board; they are required to wait in an area with nowhere near enough seats for a full train, and then only board through one access point when the train begins boarding, which process takes 20 minutes where an ICE can do it in three. This also means it’s impossible to recover delays during busy times, leading to cascading delays during peak periods, so add 20-30 minutes (or an hour) to the trip if you’re traveling during the summer peak.
Is this at Gare du Nord and Lille (and Brussels)? Or is it just a St Pancras British thing? When was this nutty protocol brought in? Was it after the 2015 terror in Paris and Brussels? Hard to see how it improves security since it is more secure for pax when they are seated on the train. When I was using Eurostar it was always simple access to the platforms and trains with almost no one on the platforms because everyone just directly boarded. Even with the passport and security stuff it was remarkably quick and frictionless, maybe ten minutes from walking into the station, even in the UK. It was part of the experience that had you thinking you’re never going to fly this route again …
I think there is an issue with the Eurostar trains not being reliable.
There are two trains today they have had to swap out due to a technical issue.
There’s the same stupid circumstance for the security controls in the high speed section of the main stations in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia…). The controls are quite useless because they are not thorough at all, but then in Atocha most of the people is left waiting standing or sitting in the floor, while at the other side of the control there’s a beautiful and underused station building. Plus the boarding queue, which is a mess because an AVE train has the capacity of one and a half Boeing 787. In Barcelona there’s more seats per waiting passenger at least, and in Valencia you have to go through the security check but at least you can wait for your train at the platform.
The whole thing is apparently justified as a legacy from the 11-M 2004 bombings (which happened in the completely separated commuter trains in which it would be completely impractical to set up this controls). I suspect this is done to get rent from the commercial spaces inside the waiting area, plus some bureaucrats not wanting to get blamed if somebody decides to jump on the track, but I cannot say for sure.
Having those controls in the Eurostar, it could just be that France is being obstructive of foreign companies. For example: Four of the 11 country pairs with the most available seats are Spain with other European countries ( https://www.oag.com/airline-frequency-and-capacity-statistics#pairs 1 UK, 3 Germany, 9 Italy, 11 France, this goes up and down depending on the month), yet almost no train connections exist from Barcelona to the rest of Europe because of Some Naughty Company Fooling around.
country pairs with the most available **plane*** seats <- I notice I missed a word quite important for the context
RENFE are part of the problem too. The last train from Barcelona to Valencia in 2025 will go 45 minutes after the morning TGV arrives from Paris. That is pretty tight for a last train.
There is a strong argument that the German situation is better as even though there are always delays at least there is usually another train.
I am pretty sure the Eurostar border controls are the fault of the UK government. That said I really don’t view them as a major problem.
Through services to other UK cities would add a tonne of complexity even ignoring the passport controls and would be at the sort of 1tpd stuff that is really bad in the real world.
And in an emergency if you are running late I am sure you can clear security pretty quickly. I went from Lille Flanders to Lille Europe and boarded a Eurostar within 15 minutes including security checks.
With Barcelona 1000km/4hr from Paris, 1100km/5 hr from Milan, 1350km/5.5hr from Frankfurt, and 1500km/6hr from London/Munich, there will not be a huge market for HSR travel from Spain to UK/Italy/Germany, especially since starting in Madrid would increase all these times by 2.5hr and many of these times are optimistic because they assume infrastructure that does not exist yet (Lyon-Turin high speed rail link and parts of TGV Rhin-Rhone). Paris-Barcelona should actually be possible in 3.75 hr given current best case travel time Paris-Montpellier, so there will certainly be benefit to completing to Perpignan, but even that puts Madrid to Paris at 6.25 hr.
@Onux the travel data says there are 41000 trips (so 82000 train journeys) by UK residents to Spain by train as it stands.
If there were a couple of through trains a day from Lille to Madrid – which is doable with the current infrastructure – it’s difficult to imagine you wouldn’t fill them sufficiently to cover their costs. Especially if you started them in Brussels or even Amsterdam.
If there are hundreds of people starting out in the U.K. why do they have to change trains. Which then sends empty seats onto Paris. Or Brussels or wherever your cockamamie plan has the empty seats traveling to?
@adiron – why change? Because then you don’t have to setup security for 1 train a day.
And you also get passengers from Belgium and the Netherlands which isn’t pointless.
Do they sit on the U.K. passengers’ laps or in the aisles?
That’s only 224 journeys per day, not enough to fill half a train, let alone multiple trips per day. I’m guessing virtually all of these travelers are students doing the Europass thing (does that still exist?) or people on a slow vacation where “the journey is the destination”. If there was a train going from London to Barcelona in 6hr would it get some traffic, sure, but not much. Effectively everyone going from the UK to Madrid/Valencia/Seville/etc. would fly.
@Onux, currently there are an average of 112 journeys a day per direction. That alone is frankly enough to cover the marginal costs of a daily train.
That said serving Madrid as well as Barcelona would presumably double that figure as currently it is only really plausible to get to Barcelona in a day from the UK, and then there is the significant convenience improvement from a connection at Lille over Paris. Perhaps between those advantages conservatively you would get 300 journeys a day per direction.
Additionally you would be in a position to start this daily service in Amsterdam and that would probably net you conservatively another 300 journeys a day per direction as Belgium and the Netherlands are a similar size to London and it’s surrounds and they would get direct service.
Plus there are going to be some number of people who want to go from the UK and the Low Countries and Lille to the South of France where there will be at least some stops. So overall you are probably looking at the better part of a thousand passengers a day.
currently there are an average of 112 journeys a day per direction. That alone is frankly enough to cover the marginal costs of a daily train.
A Eurostar seats 404. The new TGV M seats 634. I’m not sure a load factor of 18-28% would be enough to cover the cost of an added train, I could be wrong.
That said serving Madrid as well as Barcelona would presumably double that figure
No, your figure was for total train travel UK to Spain. Due to how long it currently takes that will include all people travelling anywhere in Spain, because the extra time to Madrid is irrelevant if you are already spending a full day in travel (because you are a rail fan taking a vacation where the train trip is part of the fun, because you are a broke student, etc.). As I noted, 6-8 hr to Spain from London (farther if you are part of the 75% of the UK living in Britain that does not live in Greater London). At those times HSR gets extremely low ridership compared to air (it will be worse for UK-Spain because the planes can take a more direct route across the Bay of Biscay to reach places other than Barcelona). If there is a justification for a Spain-France link it is for travel between Spain and France.
I am pretty sure there are vast sections of the this Dallas to Houston train that are still on embankment and not viaduct. In Harris County, which is the county Houston is in, the project is on viaduct due to flooding concerns. However, the viaducts have fenced access roads running alongside them, so it is not open or easy to cross the viaducts as shown in the promo materials. Given that much of the route is actually on embankment in rural areas, the cost is even that much more insane. See the FEIS to see how much of the route is still on embankment. It is a lot. Since the original backers basically poor-boyed the route, you have a ridiculous alignment that veers west of Houston to avoid Houston Oaks Country Club, but damages minority areas, and ends up at Northwest Mall, which is impossible to access due to extreme road congestion in the area. It is also the armpit of Houston with NO amenities around itself. Plus METRO just announced it will not be doing the inner-Katy bus rapid transit that would have eventually linked to the Northwest Mall. So, the Houston terminus makes even less sense now.
the concept, based on the Shinkansen, does not permit sharing tracks with legacy railways, and as it developed in the 2010s, it did not want to modify the system for that
Shinkansen could not share legacy track in Japan because they are narrow gauge while Shinkansen is standard gauge. What would have to be modified in the Shinkansen “system” to allow a TCR standard gauge train to run on legacy standard gauge tracks? (Obviously the legacy route would need catenary power, signal upgrades, etc.)
this works because the Shinkansen trainsets are more strongly pressurized than TGVs or ICEs and also have specially designed noses to reduce tunnel boom
Not familiar with the pressurization issue, but shouldn’t tunnel boom work the opposite; shouldn’t a larger tunnel result in less boom than a train in a smaller single track tunnel? My understanding was the Japanese just accept the risk of a derailment in a tunnel affecting two trains (plus the lack of evacuation via the other bore) because they so rarely have accidents at all.
this is a premium of a factor of at least 2, and likely 3
Is there anyone out there building HSR for $28M per km right now, given inflation over the past few years?
Accidents in rail tunnels in Europe are pretty rare too to be fair. Aside from lorry fires in the channel tunnel I am not aware of any where there would be a plausible risk of someone getting run over by a train going the other way.
Yes, but the regulations in Europe still require separate bores so that a train derailing in one direction can’t hit a train passing it in the other, and so in the event of a fire people can cross to the other bore and await rescue. Whether or not these are reasonable risks, the Japanese accept them and Europeans do not.
This is pretty much what happened in the Gotthard Tunnel, a freight train derailed, and because of Murphy’s law, it managed to do so at the connection track between both tubes.
The first wagon to derail did so ~8 kilometers before that (~10 km after entering the southern portal), but the rest of the train kept it bouncing along — until they reached the crossover’s points (switches), which directed the derailed wagon into headbutting the firedoors.
No regulations only demand this if tracks are shared with freight trains
EU regulations don’t prohibit single bore tunnels. There are plenty of old and recent ones. Rules vary with tunnel lengths with thresholds at 1 and 5 km. Rules mandate fire proof refuges or exits, as well as robust telecom means. In a double bore tunnel, the second bore is an acceptable exit way as long as there are passages between the tunnels every 500 meters. Otherwise, a separate gallery would be needed.
A few days ago, an empty RENFE HST runaway backwards, downhill from Chamartin towards the Iryo following it. Thankfully, the 2 year old tunnel was single bore and a quick thinking regulator could direct the runaway train towards the downhill, Atocha bound, tracks. The needles have a 50 km/h speed limit and the runaway train which may have been going above 100 km/h, derailed.
There was just one in Madrid the other day with a runaway train.
have wrecked the Ogallala aquifer (takes 20m years to renew)
From 1950 to 1962 about 9% of the Ogallala was drawn via irrigation, implying 600 more years until depletion. It would take 6000 years to replenish via rainwater. The whole geologic structure containing the aquifer was only created in the past 3-10 million years.
Does no one know how to use Google or read Wikipedia?
Guilty. Assemble the scaffold.
It was laziness, and irrelevance. Not sure why you cited extraction rates from the ’50s. Today replenishment is 10% of extraction so there is really no meaningful difference to today’s people–ranchers or urbanites in Texas–whether it is 20 million years or 6000 years or indeed 60 years. But yes, as a scientist, I should get it right … Incidentally I thought in tens of millions of years because the Great Artesian Basin does operate like that; an outback town in Queensland has made a successful business of bottling it and selling it as Jurassic water because apparently it is that old (well within one or two order of magnitude I imagine; I’m doing it again: too lazy to check).
Oh, and with global warming reducing the snowfall in the Rockies that replenishment is reducing all the time too. The same reason why Lake Mead is at its all-time lowest level.
From 1950 to 1962 about 9% of the Ogallala was drawn via irrigation, implying 600 more years until depletion
Correction: 9% of the Ogallala was used between 1950 and 2012, thus 1% every 6.88 years or 688 years to deplete.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/08/10/where-the-worlds-running-out-of-water-in-one-map/
My reply to Onux seems to have disappeared. Back in mod? I’m quite sure I saw it appear at the time I posted it … ? OTOH WordPress refuses to recognise me and forces a login for every single post, and then still says I am not logged in … Last week when I made a comment to a new WP blog site I thought it had finally conceded but nope …
Again, Brightline is showing us how to do it. Grand visions won’t work unless private capital is involved in every step of the process. Governments’ role is the planning and regulation that give greater confidence to investors about what they are investing in. It’s the delicate balance of public and private that are necessary for anything to work in the US. Nothing led and/or owned entirely by Amtrak alone will ever work well. At the same time, no entirely private project will succeed without the planning and regulatory powers of government creating a framework investors can understand. Unless private capital can participate in all stages of planning, building, and operating passenger rail, it will always be the transportation of last choice in the US.
High speed rail was a grand vision in 1962. It isn’t anymore because people all over the world keep doing it. Sucessfully in most cases.
I’m describing the US. Nations create rail. Rail doesn’t create nations. Grand visions implemented top down do work in France, China, and some other nations. The US is very different from those nations. Until private capital in involved in some substantial and sustained way, high speed rail won’t exist in the US.
Unlike Tokyo-Osaka or Boston-New York-Washington, HSR is not truly essential to a large portion of the population so you don’t have a lot of very enthusiastic advocates pushing for it. Each CBD only has around 100,000 workers, and a lot of employment centers around chemical plants, airlines, or other industries that aren’t well-suited to business districts. It’s also has relatively few tourists. You also have the problem that because those 2 cities have high COL-adjusted incomes, a very large portion of the population owns cars. And those who don’t are typically too poor to afford HSR tickets and would likely continue to use the bus or share a ride with a car-owner.
My impression of Texans is that most think it’s a “nice to have” rather than something essential. Even left-wing enthusiasm is limited because it’s a private corporation. So there isn’t strong pro-train advocacy. Waymo/Tesla self-driving car optimism due to the AI boom also doesn’t help.
There’s also the issue that land values, construction costs, and interest rates have dramatically increased in the past several years and don’t really show signs of stopping. That means any construction project is much more expensive including housing, commercial buildings, and transport infrastructure. It’s not clear that costs won’t increase even further as labor and land become even more expensive in the future.
The airports aren’t in the central business district yet people fly between them. and manage to get around even though they left the automobile at the origin airport…. odd how they manage it and railfans think they are incompable of figuring it out when it’s a train.
Dallas to Houston is almost all driving, only a tiny fraction of travel between is flying. It’s just a lot cheaper to drive (especially with group/family travel) and almost the same amount of time for point to point travel. I think most people flying between are just having connecting flights. Another issue is that the DFW airport is actually better connected to transit than the CBD. TexRail, TRE, Orange Line, and Silver Line all serve it.
Texas HSR should highly consider having south dallas and north houston stations with TOD to serve people who live or are travelling to suburban areas. It would also help people commute to the CBD. The number of stations should be more similar to the Shinkansen and Brightline.
It doesn’t matter what their destination airport is. Except for oil sheiks and world leaders most people leave the automobile at the origin airport and manage to get around at the destination airport. I don’t know why railfans think the same people will suddenly lose those skills if they are on a train. Why does there have to be TOD at the station if people are going to suburbs far away from the station? Dedicated ramps to and from the limited access highway and enormous parking garages might be more useful.
Most trips are people traveling alone, they leave the brats home. Especially if it’s a business trip to the ……….CBD…… The seven year old would be very bored at an HR conference. Or a sales meeting. Or..
There is a whole lot of nothing between Houston and Dallas unlike Japan or even Florida. Tell us where these stops should be where dozens and dozens perhaps even scores of people might get on and off the train everyday. Which is it? everybody is going to drive between Dallas and Houston but they should spend 50, 100 million dollars building a station for Huntsville which is in Walker County with a population of 76,000?
There is a good argument that a train should stop every half hour or hour no matter what is there just to allow for some rural service and allow people to “stretch their legs”. I’m not sure if it is true, but if the stops are fast enough it doesn’t matter much. You don’t want too many, but adding a few extra minutes to the total trip time for a city of 70k isn’t the worst thing.
No there isn’t. This is not a patch of asphalt with a bus shelter by the side of the tracks. It’s 1000 feet of high level platforms for tens of millions of dollars. And they won’t be able to stretch their legs because if the doors are open for 30 seconds that’s a long time.
Texas central isn’t going to run 14tph or anywhere close.
No reason you cannot have 2tph express and 2tph with a few stops.
If you want to finance 100 million dollars worth of station so a dozen people an hour can get on the train, feel free.
There are a large number of people who live in the northern suburbs of houston and need to work in the cbd or in an area on the red line (Texas Medical Center). Many would use park and ride or would be willing to live in a TOD development. I’m a little hesitant to recommend an enormous parking garage infrastructure because of self-driving expansion in Texas. But having TOD and some parking is not mutually exclusive. It wouldn’t be any different from brightline commuter passes, or the use of HSR for commuting in China/Japan. It’s not that different from the stops at Shin-Yokohama, Shinagawa, Ueno, etc. in tokyo or the Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, or Boca Raton stops in South Florida.
“Most trips are people traveling alone, they leave the brats home.” “HR conference. Or a sales meeting”
I think these are statements that don’t have any evidence or experience behind it. It ignores the extend to which remote work has reduced business travel in Texas. HR conferences and sales meetings don’t require HSR. A huge portion of these trips are group trips from living in these areas. I feel like you’re creating a fake world that doesn’t match what Texan’s lives are actually like.
For example, there are only 416,000 passengers between Love Field and Hobby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Love_Field#Top_destinations
A huge portion of these passengers are connecting flights. There isn’t that much demand for airport-like travel.
I also think you’re ignoring the typical pattern in Texas where most businesses are in suburbs…
There is a good argument that a train should stop every half hour or hour no matter what is there just to allow for some rural service and allow people to “stretch their legs”.
Absolutely not. First a train normally stops for ~1 min for people to get on or off, so not enough time to let people get out to stretch their legs.
Second, on a train you don’t need a stop to stretch your legs, you can get up and walk around at any time.
Third doing this every half hour wouldn’t just cost a few extra minutes for total trip time, it would cost several minutes each stop. The penalty for slowing down, stopping, then getting back up to speed is about 4 min per stop, before accounting for extra waiting time so people can “stretch their legs.” Adding 4-5 min every half hour is absolutely something that matter’s much, its adding 13-17% to travel time.
The some rural service is a false hope. There population density is way too low, you will get very few riders, so few that either you will have trains stop so infrequently that you are not providing real service, or if you stop trains regularly you will be delaying hundreds of passengers for one or no rural passengers to get on and off.
@Onux, Le Creseut and Macon TGV get a train slightly worse than every 2 hours and still get the people living nearby to do 10 rides a year each.
And certainly in the suburbs and other urban centres if you get 10 rides a year each it adds up to big numbers.
Commuting from Denton County to downtown Dallas doesn’t involve high speed rail trips to Houston, flying to Denver, driving to Austin or saddling up the horse and riding it to Tulsa.
If 416,000 people fly from the secondary airport to a secondary airport how does that support your claim that they drive.
You were the one who brought up the CBD. People don’t travel long distances with their family members to go to the company’s other office.
Because the “primary airport” of DFW doesn’t even have Houston in it’s top 10 domestic destinations… The flights between the metro areas are often by secondary airport. The primary airport flights are around 613,151.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Fort_Worth_International_Airport#Top_destinations
416,000+613,151 passengers a year isn’t anywhere near enough to support a 33 billion dollar project. This would be something like $33k per yearly rider. Even over 33 years that’s $1000 per ride… I think it’s obvious how this project isn’t the most cost-effective HSR project to ever exist if it were to just displace airline passengers. It’s only even remotely cost-effective if it gets a large number of people out of their cars.
CBDs are relevant for places like Tokyo and NYC because millions of jobs are there unlike in Texas. I brought it up to illustrate how CBD travel was more minimal in Texas. However, using the line as a commuting option (similar to South Florida) will increase the utilization of the HSR line. I’m not sure why you’re so focused on business travel.
Business travel is only 16% of long-distance travel, and the vast majority is done by car.
https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/america_on_the_go/us_business_travel/entire
And you would be surprised, a lot of people including myself have accompanied family members on their business trips. I have done that. It’s more common than you think.
There are lots of secondary employment clusters like texas medical center etc.
@Matthew Hutton
Saone-et-Loire (the department containing Le Creusot TGV station) has a population of 549k with a density of 170p/km. Leon County (one of the places TCRs route goes through) has a population of 15k at 5.6p/km. Adjacent counties like Madison and Freestone are not much different.
Also, stopping one train every 2 hrs as part of a Local/Regional/Express service pattern is far different than Henry Miller’s argument that every train should stop every 30 min.
My argument that every train stops assumes that the total stopped time is less than 1 minute, which is only possible if you have a train designed for that – plenty of doors and enough space for people to queue up before the train stops. (or put the seats for the disabled by the door) This is commonly seen in metro service, but less common on HSR. Thus your stop every 30 minutes costs someone riding through less than 5 minutes. I’m assuming frequent enough trains with enough free seats that you can reasonably make a spontaneous decision to get off the train and explore some small town.
Stopping a train along the way is of course a trade off, it costs time for those riding through, but it adds options for people who want to be someplace along the way. Along the way is a key part here – towns that are not along the route need to lose, but once you have a route decided a few stops are a good thing.
@Onux Waco and College Station are both denser than 170 people per kilometre I am sure.
If the Texas Central line is going through places less dense than that perhaps it would actually be better to go closer to the cities where a stop would be more viable.
College Station is an extra wide place along obscure roads off the route between Dallas and Houston. Waco is a bit wider along the route that doesn’t go to Houston. It’s along the route from Dallas to Austin and San Antonio.
You don’t have to guess at the density. The Census Bureau publishes them. Actual from the Census and estimates between Censuses. It doesn’t really matter because along with density numbers they publish totals. There aren’t may people in either of them. If there aren’t many people there aren’t going to be many passengers. It’s a passenger railroad not an exercise in connecting dots on a map. Though I doubt you looked a map because a map would reveal that College Station and Waco are not along a route between Houston and Dallas.
@adirondacker12800 the metropolitan areas have a population of 250k and 300k respectively. They are big places.
No they aren’t
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_statistical_areas
Arithmetic is a cruel cruel mistress. 365,000 people decide to each take a round trip on high speed rail every year that is 1,000 people getting on a train and 1,000 people getting off a train each week. 1,000 divided by 7 is 143-ish. over a 16 hour service day that’s perhaps a dozen people. In busy hours. The ones in Waco, someday, perhaps, maybe, when there is high speed rail between Fort Worth and Austin, can drive out to the enormous parking lot at the station and go to either. The people in College Station can get in the 9 passenger van that meets the train. 9 passenger might be excessive because people in metropolitan College Station own cars and will just drive to the station.
@Henry, I believe that the deceleration and acceleration penalties are fairly significant as well. It seems to take a TGV about 4min for both, though of course you are traveling during that time, just more slowly. Maybe 5-8min time loss per stop minimum? A metro travels more slowly, and is designed as you say so pax are ready to board/debark quickly. Also, I suspect that passengers with mobility disabilities would need longer than a minute to debark from a distance train.
SNCF used to say a stop on the LGV cost 8 minutes. When the TGV was running on conventional tracks, the penalty was only 5 minutes.
@adirondacker12800 Stamford has a population of 300,000 in its metro area and its station gets 5m rides a year.
@Szurke, I haven’t sat there with a stopwatch but even with a ramp a disabled person can disembark pretty quickly. I also assume that a new trainline would have fully level boarding these days.
I don’t know what nether regions you are pulling these numbers out of.
Wikipedia says the population of the city of Stamford is 135,470. It’s part of the Western Connecticut Planning Region, part of what was Fairfield County, with a population of 620,549, which is part of the Stamford-Bridgeport-Norwalk Metropolitan Statistical Area, which was formerly Fairfield County, with a population of 951,558. The whole state of Connecticut had 1.8 million Amtrak passengers last year.
Arithmetic rears it’s ugly ugly head again. Everybody in Stamford-Bridgeport-Norwalk takes two high speed rail round trips a year, which would be extraordinary, it would be a bit less than 4 million.
My argument that every train stops assumes that the total stopped time is less than 1 minute, which is only possible if you have a train designed for that
@Szurke and @dralaindumas have explained the problem with this thinking. The loss of time isn’t just (or primarily) the time spent stopped with the doors open. The loss includes the time spent decelerating to the stop and then accelerating after it. If you are going 330kph and start slowing down to eventually stop, you will reach the station much later than if you kept going 330kph. I believe Alon has said the penalty is 4 min per stop with a short (30sec?) door open time. Others have quoted 5-8 min. I am not sure about the longer times, although the penalty is greater the higher your cruising speed, and TGVs have increased their speed over time. Any of these values are far to high to introduce stops every 30 min.
@Henry Miller
You can have stops along the way, but you cannot stop every train at all stops, it would kill ridership on the big city-big city travel, which will always be much much larger than big city-small/medium city travel. The Japanese way is best, with an express that only stops in big city centers, a limited that stops in most major cities, and a local that makes all stops – but the local runs much less frequently.
@Matthew Hutton.
I agree that TCR should go through College Station, Temple, and Waco on the way to Dallas, because there are more people that way, and because Dall-Temple is about half the distance of Dall-San Antonio. That would means for a total of ~600km of HSR you could connect all major Texas cities. This is the ’T-Bone’ layout. If you go with You-Dall direct, to make the other connections requires a total of ~1150km – the ‘Texas Triangle design. Saving 550km of construction is a big deal. You should still be able to do Hou-Dall in 2hr (over ~480km).
@Adirondacker
Arithmetic is indeed cruel. If 365k are taking a trip each year, then with 52 weeks in the year the weekly travel is just over 7,000. 365k trips per year would be 1k trips per day, or at 16tpd 63 getting on an off each train, close to a full car load.
College Station is home to Texas A&M, with about 73k students at the main campus. There is a railroad track running right through campus on an ~30m ROW (this is not figurative, the tracks literally split the campus in two). I think they will get more ridership than you can fit in a 9 passenger van.
@Matthew Hutton
Approx 3.7M of the riders at Stamford each year are commuters riding Metro North to Midtown Manhattan, not riders on Amtrak. Although Adirondacker is underestimating future ridership, I do not think it is accurate to use commuter ridership to estimate intercity ridership.
Each of them taking a round trip each year would be Japanese levels of usage. Texas isn’t Japan and Interstate 45 isn’t the Tokaido. It’s also Texas where Real Americans ™ think trains are a Communist plot to sap and impurify their precious bodily fluids. Texas Central took into account Real Americans ™ driving everywhere and come up with a round trip every few years. Which Real Americans ™ deride as impossibly optimistic. They may have a point because Real Americans ™ out in the wide open spaces of Texas think places like Dallas and Houston are cesspits of sin, crime, depravity and lawlessness. And it’s difficult to park. ….. you have to keep in mind that when some people say “driving is more convenient” they are saying that because they realize it is impolite to say “Are you nutzzzz? Get on a bus? With ThOsE pEoplE?”
Quite clever of the railroad calling the place the land grant school was going to be, “College Station”, wasn’t it? I don’t know or care when or if a municipality was incorporated. Or why they didn’t call it something more creative.
Are they going to plop the parking garage in the middle of campus? Or since it’s the Texan version of Real America ™ where everyone drives pickup trucks could it be out on Interstate 45? Where there aren’t any NIMBYs or BANANAs to object to a cheaper parking lot. Where, as Matt points out, the stalwart yeomanry of righteous private enterprise is proposing to build tracks. Since there is no bus system, for the general public, to speak of, in extra wide places along the road, almost all of the prospective passengers are going to drive to the station. Which leaves Super Shuttle like service picking people up in a 9 passenger van. Would work that way in other wide places in the road like…. wait for it…. State College Pennsylvania where there is a land grant school? I lean towards putting the high speed rail station in Syracuse out at the airport because then the 12 passenger van could drop people off at either. Though a 6 passenger stretch SUV would mean more frequency. And in Rochester. I’m digressing.
No I’m not. It’s surprisingly small, even if they take a round trip a year. Japanese levels of ridership would mean a round trip a year.
11 million people in Southern New England each take a round trip is 22,000,000 trips. 22,000,000 divided by 365 is 60,273. Nice and tidy isn’t it. 60 divided by 15 is 4. Which means 60,000 divided by 15 is 4,000, 2,000 in each direction. though it is the Northeast corridor where the sidewalks don’t roll up at sundown. 15 hour service day may be too short. I digress again.
Stamford isn’t Yokohama, the Northeast Corridor is not the Tokaido and the U.S. is not Japan. Amtrak is suggesting that three hours between Boston and Washington D.C. would result in a round trip every two years. I leave it to you to divide 2,000 by 2.
Things like Providence to Syracuse or Pittsburgh to Boston are outside of the scope of the studies and make railfans crayons melt. New Haven to Montreal. Hartford to Toronto. …Someone from the Newport set taking the waters during racing season at Saratoga Springs….
None of those involve
Stamford.
Even though there is commuter style service between Springfield and New Haven is that intercity? Hmmm. And when masochists change trains to get to work in, insert a long sigh here, Stamford, that is across multiple MSAs. Hmm. Frugal Yalie boinking a Princetonian and getting there on commuter trains. Hmm.
@Matthew Yes, a disabled person can debark quickly but there’s also luggage and switching to a wheelchair if applicable, and they may not have the capability to stand at the door if they have mobility issues not rising to the level of needing a wheelchair. I’m sure it’s possible to reduce this time by having staff help, but it’s still going to need planning for. Not sure what best practices are.
@Adirondacker, Onux clearly the students need to start a new TRADITION around train use, isn’t that the Texas A&M catchphrase?
No matter how hard railfans click their ruby walking shoes while chanting “There’s no place like TOD” it’s not going to magically change McMansions into the 11th arrondissement or Nanako-Ku. Even if you clap really loud while clicking.
I believe the choice of spec in Taiwan had less to do with corruption, more have to do with the military technology import and diplomacy that was tied in with them in the background.
As for the spec, I believe a big reason why they choose to do so was because, the special circumstances in Taiwan have resulted in the requirement of them needing to build a dedicated factory to complete the very small lot of less than a dozen Shinkansen trains demanded by the slight expansion of the Taiwan system, that resulted in an average cost an order of magnitude more expensive than what it would otherwise be costing per each individual train set, therefore they wish to bring down the cost for each trains by creating a common standard based on Shinkansen across the world. But that probably doesn’t make much sense in India given Indian planned to ultimately build their own trains instead of importing from outside.
As for use of viaduct vs earthwork, my understanding is that Tokaido Shinkansen which is mostly earthwork have led to various disruption due to rain and snow that could have been avoidable were it be constructed on viaduct, hence that is the direction most line plannings are moving toward in Japan. Although with lines with marginal benefits like Uetsu/Ou Shinkansen there are now proposal of building the lines with lower standard matching Tokaido Shinkansen to reduce the cost.
As for the use of right of way, my understanding is currently Tokaido Shinkansen trainset do not match US requirement of surviving collision which Japanese companies explain it is because of the design principle of avoiding collision, and thus US government allowed the import of Shinkansen train on the ground that it is treated as a separate thing not interacting with conventional train/track, therefore it would be legally impossible for Shinkansen trains to run on conventional lines inside the US.
And for the alignment of track, I guess Texas Central/JR Central probably designed it based on principle similar to how they design location of stations for Chuo Shinkansen, aka focus on intercity transportation of passengers between big urban area, and make stations intermediate existing only for the purpose of social service instead of actually being useful, based on data like the percentage of traffic currently exists on Tokaido Shinkansen that are Nozomi/Hikari passengers vs Kodama.
Only the Japanese would consider 1.5 million rides a year to be a “social service”
1.5 million ride is 4100 a day. That’s barely above JNR era’s line of what a line can be abandoned (and that requirement was ridership density not ridership, so it would be below that line)
Sounds like the Japanese would shut lines that are cash profitable here 🤪
In fact it happens even nowadays, like the section between Hakodate station to Shin Hakodate Hokuto with about 4000 passengers a day (the section with most ridership is over 8000 a day) is now undergoing discussion for shut down and convert to bus service by Hokkaido government despite local government want to upgrade the line to provide Shinkansen through service, and JR Hokkaido the operator’s position on the section is the line must be spin off from the network and any local proposals including through running cannot cause any extra financial or operational burden on them.
I think you’re talking past each other. Japanese operators use passenger density (daily riders/route length), 4000 on a 90km line in difficult terrain using DMUs isn’t that profitable. Especially if you don’t have UK fares. And then remember Japan’s underlying demographic trajectory.
JR Hokkaido is just a different issue, where they managed to keep some of the problems of JNR while pushing the privatisation model into an area with a deeply problematic network (not entirely JR Hokkaido has a financial fund from the government). To be honest Hokkaido and the national government should have just eaten closing a lot of the lines now being closed a long time ago, and focused the money wasted on them towards Sapporo-Asahikawa plus the Hokkaido Shinkansen. If they want to keep the lines into the East and North of Hokkaido for strategic reasons they should pay JR Hokkaido. Though Hakodate-Shin-Hakodate is weird since its much more viable. Part of the problem is that Hokkaido needs to just replace all its mini-municipalities with something more like counties.
4000 passenger density is definitely more than 4000 riders a day due to the way passenger density is calculated.
Back when the figure of 4000 was first posted, I think Japan have not entered declining population yet?
As for Hokkaido, part of the problem is the current Hokkaido prefecture government see railway as technology of the past and a mere liability and they probably want to keep as much passenger railway service as South Dakota. Which is the biggest reason why it is left to municipalities with little budget instead of the prefecture government taking up the role as potential subsidizer of operation.
As for line closure, the entire JR Hokkaido network now including Sapporo urban network and also the Hokkaido Shinkansen currently opened section until Shin Hakodate Hokuto, are all losing money, so if let say Japanese central government which is currently providing central relief subsidy to JR Hokkaido and JR Shikoku find it not sustainable to continue providing such subsidy and if Hokkaido prefectural government still hate railway as much as they are now, I think it is might be not impossible to see the entire network get abandoned.
A line costs a lot more than a station, though.
Correct see: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-II/part-299