Category: High-Speed Rail

California HSR: Where Now?

California is going ahead with construction of the Central Valley segment, and has just publicly released an email saying it will solicit bids in 3 months, totaling about $6 billion from Bakersfield to just south of Merced, a distance of about 200-210 kilometers. The alignment bypasses some small towns but not all, avoiding some of the scope creep that happened in the years leading up to the Business Plan, which required more elevated segments; however, some towns will still require many grade separations and viaducts, and so will Fresno and Bakersfield.

The HSR Authority has just released environmental impact reports for the Bakersfield-Fresno and Fresno-Merced that point out to higher costs: the sum of the two cheapest alternatives is $10 billion, in 2010 dollars, for 300 km; although the cost per km is not much higher, the Fresno-Bakersfield segment is much more expensive, whereas the extra bits included in the EIR but not the bid request are the cheapest.

There is some additional room for value engineering, especially in Fresno, where the currently preferred alternative calls for viaducts, but the potential for cost saving is not that great, especially relative to the $6 billion estimate; projects run over budget much more frequently than they come under. The main interest here is not the cost overrun: the current stage, the bidding, is the one most prone to overruns, and no matter what, we will know in three months what the projected cost is. The interest is the breakdown of costs, which, as expected, are primarily infrastructure and tracks, including grading and grade separations. The cost overruns come from scope creep, with more elevated segments than originally expected (but, due to value engineering, less than expected in 2009).

At any case, there is money to proceed, at least from Bakersfield to Fresno – there is $6.3 billion available, half from federal spending (which has been spared in the latest austerity plan) and half from Proposition 1A’s matching funds. There is another almost $6 billion locked in Prop 1A, but it has to be matched 50:50. Matching funds will almost certainly materialize, if not from the federal government then from foreign governments anxious to pay California to buy their products (for example, Japan’s ambassador to the US offered half the money, and Japan expects China and Korea to offer funding as well). It should be enough to build an initial operable segment, though probably not to build from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

The question is then how to prioritize. The gold standard here should be building all the way from Sylmar to San Jose and electrifying the legacy lines at the two ends. At the Bay Area end, the Caltrain FRA waiver ensures this wouldn’t cause regulatory problems, and while it would limit initial capacity, it would not increase travel time by more than a few minutes. At the Los Angeles Basin end, it would require Metrolink or HSR to seek a waiver, along the lines Caltrain has already gotten; the speed reduction, while still not very large, would be larger, because the travel time simulations assume higher operating speed in the LA Basin, and there will be fewer speed limits due to curves.

Unfortunately, while cutting the initial segment to San Jose-Sylmar will save a large number of billions of dollars in urban grade separations, it may not save enough, though it’s fairly close if one believes the 2009 Business Plan numbers. If California has half the money from foreign sources, then matched with Prop 1A and existing federal money, it has a total of $24 billion, which is not enough. The question then boils down to where to go first from the Central Valley – south or north. North would involve going over Pacheco Pass to San Jose (or, better yet, over Altamont Pass to Livermore and thence Redwood City). South would involve going south to Sylmar, either through Palmdale or directly through Tejon Pass, which carries I-5; although Palmdale is the preferred alternative, the HSR Authority is looking at Tejon again. For a slide show using the existing preferred options, see here. Either alone should be doable with the money available under such a circumstance, which is about $18 billion.

I claim that the southern option is the better one – in fact, that LA-Bakersfield is more important than Bakersfield-Fresno. The reason is, first, a pure numbers game: LA is much larger than anything else in California. And second, Tejon is where the existing legacy transit options are the worst: Amtrak can’t go between Palmdale and Bakersfield at all because the Tehachapi Loop is at capacity, ensuring that a mixed legacy-high speed operation in the mold of the initial TGV runs is not possible even under reformed FRA regulations.

Northern options suffer from different problems. The Pacheco option’s problem is that it uses Pacheco, and is therefore inadequate at linking the Bay Area to Sacramento. This means nothing further can be done until enough money materializes to connect to the Los Angeles Basin. The Altamont option’s problem is that the Phase 0 option connects to Livermore and requires a transfer; connecting to Redwood City is possible, but requires all of the most expensive elements of Altamont, especially crossing the Bay in the vicinity of the Dumbarton Bridge.

Once the southern option is selected, the question is how far to go. Bakersfield-Sylmar is expensive, and although it’s easily doable given 50% foreign funding, lower levels of funding may not suffice. Bakersfield-Palmdale is much easier, and could be done on existing Prop 1A money if it were not required a 50:50 match; however, Palmdale is not in the LA Basin, and the legacy rail line to LA is curvy and steep. Express Metrolink trains do Palmdale-LA in 1:28, versus 0:27 projected for HSR. Higher cant deficiency and acceleration with electrification could cut the travel time somewhat, but not enough to make HSR competitive for travel from LA to the Central Valley. Travel from LA to the Bay Area is another issue, but a situation in which it’s possible to build all the way to San Jose is one in which there’s money to build to Sylmar.

The alternative is to use Tejon and connect to the legacy line in Santa Clarita. It’s more expensive because Tejon is one big crossing whereas the Palmdale route involves two smaller crossings, one to Bakersfield and one to the LA Basin. It should still be affordable, though I have no detailed segment-by-segment breakdown of the Tejon route’s cost. The advantage is that Santa Clarita is much closer to Los Angeles than Palmdale, and the legacy Metrolink route to Palmdale is fairly straight south of Santa Clarita; even now, express trains travel to LA in 42 minutes, half an hour slower than full HSR buildout rather than an hour as with Palmdale, and there’s more potential for an increase in speed.

That said, the debate is most likely academic – Tejon vs. Palmdale is most likely going to be decided primarily on a revisited look at the costs, with other issues (LA County power brokers prefer Palmdale, Tejon is shorter) not much more than tiebreakers. In addition, a situation in which Prop 1A money could be released for the crossing is one in which matching funds have materialized, making the full Bakersfield-LA route realistic with the available money. The primary lesson is that there should be enough money to build a realistic initial operable segment, not going all the way from LA to San Francisco but still serving a fair number of intercity travelers.

Racism and Accidents

As has been widely reported in the news, China had a major rail accident three days ago, killing 43 people. A positive train control system that was supposed to prevent accidents didn’t; it was reportedly shut down due to severe weather, and as a result, when one train stalled on a bridge, another train rear-ended it and derailed, and two of its cars fell from the bridge. The Chinese government’s response was secretive and authoritarian, as can only be expected of a regime that treats breathing exercises as an act of subversion, and a leaked set of propaganda instructions to reporters contains such gems as “From now on, the Wenzhou train accident should be reported along the theme of ‘major love in the face of major disaster.'”

However, more interesting is the reaction of Western media to the disaster. Bloomberg quotes several financial analysts who raise doubts about China’s ability to export technology. A Financial Times blog analogizes high-speed rail to China’s fast-growing economy and warns of overheating. The general mood is one of treating accidents in China as evidence of a defective culture, which does not care about safety. More abstractly, it’s evidence that Asians don’t care about the individual, only about nationality and prestige. It comes from the same place as the San Francisco transit planner who, Richard Mlynarik reports, answered a question about Japan’s short turnaround times with, “Asians don’t value life the same way we do.”

The biggest HSR accident in history is still Eschede. The cause of the accident turned out to be a series of errors in maintenance and design. And yet, nobody doubts the safety record of Germany. They know that German industry turns out high-quality products. Siemens successfully distanced itself from the accident, claiming that it was only partially responsible to the manufacturing and that it was really DB’s train, and has sold its Velaro train in multiple foreign markets. An accident on its maglev test track that killed 23 hasn’t prevented it from marketing its maglev technology, and Germany’s continued rejection of maglev is on grounds of cost rather than safety. DB too was unfazed, made cosmetic changes, and was more recently hit with a less deadly egg on its face in Berlin; it too gets contracts abroad.

Eschede is emblematic of reactions to accidents in the West; Wenzhou is emblematic of reactions to accidents in Asia. (Amagasaki was as far as I can tell somewhere in the middle.) Individual incidents merely confirm what everyone knows.

The reality, buried at the bottom of few articles and unmentioned elsewhere, is that China’s overall safety record is not that bad. If one believes that Wikipedia’s list of accidents is exhaustive, then China’s record is very good. Even if not, on any reasonable estimate of Chinese HSR traffic (including traveling at lower speed, as the trains in question were), its safety is better than in many of the scoffing Western countries. Assume 150 billion passenger-km a year; this compares with an actual figure of 300 million HSR passengers per year as of 2010 and an average trip length of a little more than 500 km on all lines, not just high-speed (computed from data here). To beat the last twenty years’ American railway safety, China’s HSR division will need to have no additional fatal accidents for a year. To beat Germany, make that three years.

The sort of racism that would lead commentators and investors to think less of China’s safety over Wenzhou but not of Germany’s over Eschede is subtle; it’s nothing like overt discrimination in jobs or immigration or housing. As a result, it’s more or less self-solving in the long run: in the 1960s, Westerners thought Japan made shoddy products, in the 1990s they thought the same of South Korea, and in the last decade they’ve shifted the target to China. In twenty years, when China’s GDP starts approaching that of developed countries, they’ll find another target. They’ll of course not stop thinking that Asians are an undifferentiated mass of insects with no thought or creativity (or that Muslims are terrorists), but they’ll appreciate that they can make and even design manufactured products.

The significance is that it’s a telltale sign of the Not Invented Here syndrome. Convincing Americans to adopt European practices and vice versa is hard enough; but convincing them to adopt practices from Japan, let alone China, is anathema. You might as well try to convince an Orthodox Jew to switch from beef to pork. Attacking the assumption that other countries’ experiences are always part of a grand cultural essence is not just good humanity and antiracism; it’s also good technical planning.

In contrast to both the cultural approach and China’s apparatchik guidelines, I’d propose the following way to report accidents, terrorist attacks, and other major disasters:

1. Put individual events into broader statistical context. An aircraft or train crash should be accompanied by a reminder that those modes are still safer than all others.

2. Report on the causes of the accident, both immediate (as described in the first paragraph of this post) and fundamental, including any political or economic pressure to skimp on safety.

3. Avoid overinterpreting high-impact, low-probability events. Thus, avoid questions such as which train design standard is safer unless either directly relevant to the disaster (the wheel broke, the car crumpled, etc.) or backed up by extensive multi-year evidence.

4. If the official story or the source is not credible, pursue a separate investigation, using your own knowledge, or that of outside expert sources; pressure the institutions involved to be more candid about their own failures.

5. Follow up on the lessons learned, and whether they are helpful or not. As an example, consider the various measures taken to improve air safety since 9/11, and think which have been effective and which have not.

6. Avoid fluff at all costs.

For the most part, this list of items boils down to “Report on disasters involving non-Westerners as if they involved Westerners.” People are people, and societies are societies.

Uncompetitive Transit

In general, government at all level should be encouraging a mode shift away from cars and toward trains, using legacy lines for regional service outside urban areas. Here is a canonical example of such a proposal, unfortunately completely unofficial, in Medford, Oregon. A key point is that transit needs to provide a competitive trip time, and connect people to where they want to go, or else there’s no point in running it.

Sometimes, it’s impossible given present infrastructure. One example of this, routinely mooted on California High-Speed Rail Blog, is a system connecting to Gilroy and feeding high-speed rail. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that the current FRA regulations and US rail practices have been completely gutted and replaced with Swiss or Japanese practice, and, more speculatively, that the legacy line can be made passenger-primary, despite Union Pacific ownership. The system would connect Gilroy, Santa Cruz, Salinas, and Monterey, using a now-abandoned right-of-way to get to downtown Monterey and legacy lines elsewhere.

The result can be seen on this map. There would be timed transfers at Castroville and Watsonville (running one-seat rides everywhere at acceptable frequency would require too many trains), and several additional intermediate stops, such as Marina, Seaside, Capitola, and Aromas. In terms of pure railroad operations, it could be a well-run system. Unfortunately, it could not be a successful one: the largest and densest city on the line, Salinas, is connected to the others in a very roundabout way. Salinas-Gilroy is 60 kilometers by rail and only 45 by road. Frequent curves would make it impossible to maintain a high average speed. Even a 55-minute trip time, allowing two trainsets to provide hourly service, would be ambitious, though possible with a wide stop spacing and good rolling stock; in contrast, driving takes 37 minutes according to Google Maps.

Monterey-Gilroy and Santa Cruz-Gilroy would be a little more competitive – they’re 50 and 54 minutes by car respectively. However, the markets are much smaller, especially in the case of Santa Cruz, where to get to any regional destination other than Gilroy, it’s faster to drive to San Jose. In addition, Santa Cruz-Gilroy is the hardest pair to get on a reliable clockface schedule: it’s 65 km, and the segment west of Watsonville is 34 with many curves, some of radius going down to about 220 meters, restricting speed even under optimistic performance assumptions to 75 km/h.

Since the congestion level in this part of California is not very high, cars could always beat the train, and for many trips so could buses. Therefore normal origin-and-destination travel would not produce much ridership on such a system. The worse trip time would be tolerable to some high-speed rail travelers if the transfer to high-speed rail were well-configured; however, high-speed travel alone does not generate enough ridership to justify an entirely new rail system, especially at an outlying station such as Gilroy. It would be the high-speed rail equivalent of an airport express.

There occasionally arise such cases, of lines that look good in principle but can’t be made competitive in practice. That is one example. A few more, not all seriously proposed by transit proponents: many international high-speed rail links in general, and some in particular, for example Minneapolis-Winnipeg (it would dominate the market, but the market is so small it’s not worth it). The only thing that can be done is spend scarce transit funding elsewhere. There are enough regional and intercity lines that could work well and no shortage of local transit supporters, some with political clout, who want them. Urban lines, which routinely get the short end of the stick in California in favor of low-performing outward extensions, would clamor for some of the money required to get a Santa Cruz-Monterey-Salinas-Gilroy system up to acceptable performance standards.

Rumors of the Death of HSR Greatly Exaggerated

Aaron Renn has a post on New Geography pronouncing American high-speed rail dead. His reasoning: the stimulus spread the money around too much, Republican Governors rejected the HSR stimulus money, rail advocates have called 110 mph legacy lines high-speed rail, the FRA hobbles good passenger rail. All of those factors are true – though some cancel out, e.g. the 110 mph pretend-HSR lines in Wisconsin and Ohio were the first on the chopping block – but California HSR marches on.

Reading California HSR Blog gives an impression that the project is controversial, but in no real risk of disappearing. While some of the money from the canceled lines went to chaff, a lot went to California, which already has enough money to build a demonstration line in the Central Valley and is already looking at leveraging other money it will get to reach either Los Angeles or the Bay Area. Moreover, although the authority still carries over a lot of past incompetence, the current administration of Roelof van Ark is looking at alternatives to reduce costs, such as reducing the number and length of viaducts and even revisiting past alignment decisions. The adults are more firmly in charge today than a year and a half ago.

There’s still NIMBYism, particularly from Central Valley farmers and from suburbs on the San Francisco Peninsula, but the former is no big deal by the standards of what TGV construction has to go through, and the latter has simply led the authority to focus on connecting HSR track to Los Angeles first and use legacy track at slightly lower speed with much less local impact to get to San Francisco. Whether the project will ultimately have a useful starter line or remain a Bakersfield-Fresno-Merced shuttle depends on how much private funding it can attract, but Japan promised to fund 50% of the line, and the authority has had meetings with Spain and China. It’d be enough to do at least LA-Fresno, which is quite useful, if not as good as LA-Fresno-San Francisco.

Moreover, calling HSR dead on New Geography and saying it’s because Republican Governors rejected the money is ironic, in light of who owns the site. Aaron is interested in reform and efficiency; the same can’t be said of New Geography executive editor Joel Kotkin, an anti-urbanist so uninformed and desperate he blamed megacities for AIDS.

Kotkin may be just uninformed, but contributing editor Wendell Cox goes further: he and fellow Reason transportation hack Robert Poole wrote a report claiming, on flimsy evidence, that Florida’s high-speed rail line would have huge cost overruns and ridership shortfalls (a later report released by professional consultants said in fact the line would have been more profitable than expected). The report is a lie, and Rick Scott’s cancellation of the Florida HSR line, based on the report, involved additional lying to the court.

My explanation, hoisted from a comment I wrote on the subject on the Infrastructurist, responding to commenter Colin Prime:

1. The executive summary – i.e. what most people would read – says, “This report estimates that the cost to Florida taxpayers could be $3 billion more than currently projected.” As it turns out, in the body of the report in the section on Flyvbjerg the report says $0.54-2.7 billion, with $1.2 billion as the likeliest. None of these lower figures appears in the executive summary. That alone suggests massive deception.

2. In fact, Flyvbjerg either talks about megaprojects in general or focuses on urban rail. HSR projects don’t run over budget frequently, and when they do, it’s not by 100%. In Norway, a 50% cost overrun on the HSR line to the airport (coming from geological problems) was considered so unusual it triggered a government investigation.

3. Here’s the report on California [the projected per-km cost of the Central Valley segment is much higher than that of the Florida line]: “The California segment is not being built to full high-speed rail standards, because of a legal requirement that the line be usable by conventional Amtrak services if the Los Angeles to San Francisco project is not completed. The line would be upgraded to full high-speed rail standards when and if the much longer route is completed.”

This is technically known as “a lie.” Making the line Amtrak-usable is actually a cost raiser rather than a cost saver, because Amtrak trains are heavier and therefore elevated structures would have to be beefed up. Otherwise the line is built to HSR standards in terms of the expensive bits, i.e. track geometry and physical infrastructure; the only component that may not be included in California in this round is electrification, which is a fraction of the total cost of HSR ($3 million per mile kilometer at Acela costs).

4. In general, of the 11 factors cited for California-Florida differences, the ones on which Florida would be more expensive than California are all small things like stations and electricity; the big items involve physical infrastructure, and there Florida would be cheaper.

5. To support the assertion that HSR can suffer from a ridership shortfall, the report mentions Eurostar and THSR. Unmentioned are the many TGV lines that exceeded projections. The report also makes a spurious comparison to the Acela; it even doubles-down on the Acela comparison, and uses a false comparison to make the Florida line look slow. Florida’s travel time is compared not with end-to-end travel time on the average fast train (an average of 80 mph on the Acela NY-DC, and 140 mph on the Sanyo Shinkansen) but with the fastest intermediate segment on the fastest train of the day, connecting two small cities (100 and 170, respectively). On top of it, the Acela is priced for premium travel, with coach travel provided by the 66 mph Regional.

6. To add insult to injury, Cox and Poole dismiss Florida’s tourism as such: “The metropolitan areas in both markets [NEC and Florida] have substantial tourist volumes.” In reality, the tourist volumes in Florida relative to the metro area size are much larger than in the Northeast, and the Florida line directly serves tourist attractions (airport to Disneyland) whereas the Acela does not (minimal airport service, premium brand).

Given the above issues the study, I’d say calling it a lie is fair.

High-speed rail has challenges, many correctly identified by Aaron. The FRA is an obstacle (though the people most interested in changing it tend to be good transit activists); spreading the money around was a problem. But right-wing populists who can’t govern soon become unpopular, and are thus an ephemeral phenomenon. Rick Scott’s approval rate is 27%, John Kasich‘s is 35%, Scott Walker‘s is 37%. And it’s deeply troubling to go on a website and say that high-speed rail is dead when one of the reasons it’s dead is shoddy or dishonest work done by another contributor to the same website.

Fortunately, in California, the real obstacle is so far not a huge deal (California is planning to run on dedicated tracks, or at least on tracks shared only with commuter trains), and the ephemeral obstacle lost the gubernatorial election. Money is a problem and so is incompetence, but the incompetence seems to be waning, albeit slowly, and the money is likely to materialize. Don’t count HSR out yet.

Quick Note: Are HSR Transfers Acceptable?

When SNCF built the first TGV line, it did not have funding to complete the full line from Paris to Lyon. Instead, it built two thirds of the line’s length, with the remaining third done on legacy track at reduced speed. The travel time was 4 hours; when the full line was completed a few years later, it was reduced to 2. The one-seat ride remains the TGV’s current operating model, to the point that one unelectrified branch got direct service with a diesel locomotive attached to the trains at the end, and was only electrified recently.

In Japan, transfers are more common, because of the different track gauges. At the outer ends of the Shinkansen, it is common for people to transfer to a legacy express train at the northern end of the line, though on two branches JR East built two Mini-Shinkansen lines, regauging or dual-gauging legacy track to make TGV-style through-running possible. In Germany, the entire system is built on transfers, typically timed between two high-speed trains.

I mention this because the California HSR activists are talking about the possibility of transfers as an initial phase. Some politicians occasionally hint about forced transfers at San Jose, even though it is relatively easy (in fact, planned) to electrify Caltrain and run trains through to San Francisco, but more intriguing is Clem Tillier and Richard Mlynarik’s proposal about running to Livermore first:

This is predicated on prioritizing the San Francisco to Los Angeles connection. It has nothing to do with Sacramento or the East Bay… those are just the cherry on top. Focus on the cake, not the cherry.

LA – Livermore HSR 2:06
Transfer in Livermore 0:10
Livermore – SF Embarcadero BART 0:57
TOTAL SF-LA via Altamont/Livermore BART 3:13

LA – Gilroy HSR 1:57
Transfer in Gilroy 0:10
Gilroy – SF 4th & King by Caltrain 2:00
TOTAL SF-LA via Pacheco/Gilroy Caltrain 4:07

It’s simply not a contest. Even for San Jose, LA – SJ downtown times would be approximately equivalent via Livermore BART once BART to SJ is built. So let me reiterate: No other alternative, least of all Pacheco, provides such a “Phase Zero” access to SF.

The one possible problem: Livermore’s quality of service will be low after BART goes there. From their 1982 opening until 1985, the Tohoku and Joetsu Shinkansen only served Omiya, located 30 km north of central Tokyo; however, Omiya was already connected to Tokyo by multiple high-capacity rapid transit lines, and an additional line was built at the same time as mitigation for the line’s construction impacts.

International Links Underperform

Eurostar, the high-speed rail system connecting London and Paris, underperforms. Its ridership, 9.5 million in 2010, is very low relative to both ridership projections and the populations of the cities it connects. This is used by opponents of high-speed rail as a worst-case scenario, as evidence that high-speed rail is a lemon. In addition, Drunk Engineer has argued in comments that it comes from unique design problems such as security theater, not present on any other high-speed rail network.

I claim that it’s not Eurostar specifically that underperforms, but rather the entire London-Paris travel market, and that it’s probably due to its being an international link. Specifically, there should be fewer business ties between London and Paris than between two similarly-sized cities in the same country, or even in different countries speaking the same language. In addition, because London and Paris were traditionally separated by sea, there was never a large ground market between them for rail transportation to poach.

Exhibit #1: Eurostar’s mode share is quite normal by the standards of other HSR lines of comparable travel time. See for example figure 1 in this report on air/rail competition in Europe, with data a few years out of date, and figure 2-4 2-3 in this report on Brazilian HSR, which is more up to date.

Exhibit #2: before the Channel Tunnel opened, the total size of the London-Paris air market was 4 million per year. This is smaller than intranational links connecting smaller cities: for example, according to an EU report on the busiest single-airport pairs in Europe, Madrid-Barcelona was 4.6 million (largest in Europe) on the eve of the AVE’s opening, Paris-Toulouse and Paris-Nice were a total of 4.6 million between them, and Rome-Milan with 2.5 million. In Australia, Sydney-Melbourne has 6.8 million annual passengers, and is the fourth busiest air market in the world, after Tokyo-Sapporo (not served by HSR), Tokyo-Fukuoka (where HSR takes 5 hours), and Seoul-Jeju (Jeju is an island off of mainland South Korea).

Exhibit #3: international air links other than London-Paris underperform as well. The EU report cited above, a study by the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation ranking all airport pairs in the world by seats flown, and a Brookings ranking of the top 100 city pairs (not airport pairs) in or into the US are all missing or underranking international city pairs with huge combined populations. Tokyo-Seoul has 21% the seats flown of Tokyo-Sapporo; Paris-Milan is three-fifths the size of Paris-Nice; the only air market from Zurich to the EU that makes the top 20 EU-to-not-EU pairs is Zurich-London, with 900,000; and New York-Toronto is not on Brookings’ list, and has only 1 million passengers per year, compared with 2.3 million for New York-Washington, which has to compete with rail, buses, and cars.

Note that this effect applies both to international pairs speaking the same language and international pairs not speaking the same language. However, language does have an effect: there are far fewer air travelers from the US to Montreal than to Toronto or Vancouver. London-Dublin is a large market (4 million) when one looks at all airport combinations. Paris-Brussels rail traffic (6 million) is  lower than Paris-Lyon (18 million in 1988, the last year the LGV Sud-Est was the only LGV) but almost as high as Paris-London despite a huge city size difference. And London-New York is the largest long-haul market, more than 4 million, though much of it must be connecting traffic – perhaps the finance links between the two cities contribute.

Indeed, while Eurostar flounders with its 9.5 million passengers, domestic HSR networks thrive – follow some of the links in the above paragraph to see numbers for the TGV, the KTX, and the premium-priced AVE.

Note that this pattern applies only to intercity passenger travel. Regional travel crosses borders frequently: the S-Bahn networks of Zurich and Basel both cross borders every day, with integrated tickets and fares, and the border crossings between San Diego and Tijuana and between Detroit and Windsor are infamous for their congestion. That the travel market between New York and Toronto is small says nothing about the travel market between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, Ontario.

There are two upshots to this pattern. First, proposals for high-speed rail within the US should be compared with higher-performing lines, such as the TGV network; they should avoid comparisons to the Eurostar flop. Second, US HSR plans should give much lower priority to international links, especially to Montreal; links to Toronto, Vancouver, and Tijuana may be justifiable on grounds of regional cross-border travel.

Mica Introduces NEC Privatization Bill

Yesterday, House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica and Railroads Subcommittee Chairman Bill Shuster proposed a bill to privatize Northeast Corridor operations. This will be done more like European rather than Japanese privatization: Amtrak will not be privatized directly, but instead the Amtrak-owned trackage and rolling stock in the Northeast will be transferred to a separate government-owned company, which will award a design-build-operate-maintain contract based on competitive bidding and lease the infrastructure to the winning bidder for 99 years.

Amtrak President Joseph Boardman replied, “This is broader than the northeast at this point. This is the Privatize Passenger Rail for America Act. The overall impact is this takes Amtrak apart, from an infrastructure standpoint, and replaces it with a government entity.”

The bill can be read here, with summary in plain English here. It does not include any regulatory component, and at this stage appears to leave the FRA in place. It also explicitly states that only the Amtrak-owned portions of the NEC will be transferred to the new government authority; if the private bidder wishes to use any infrastructure owned by Metro-North or the MBTA, the federal government will not help. With both of these hurdles still in place, the bill demands that private bidders meet the following requirements:

1. All current commuter rail services on NEC continued at current levels
2. All current freight rail services on NEC continued at current levels
3. 2 hours or less express high-speed rail service between Washington, DC and New York, and 2.5 hours or less between New York and Boston
4. Double the number of intercity trains on the NEC (both high-speed and Northeast Regional)
5. Complete the entire proposed project within 10 years

It is not clarified what the first two points mean. For example, one way to permit higher speeds in MBTA and Metro-North’s territories is to speed up the commuter trains, buying higher-performance trains and running them with more schedule discipline. Although by passenger standards this means the commuter rail service will have higher levels, from the perspective of the agencies this involves conceding turf and changing operating practices. In addition, increasing superelevation requires setting a minimum speed or running vehicles at cant excess (negative cant deficiency); while this is not a technical problem for commuter trains, traditional regulations are against it even outside the US, and it is a problem for freight trains. Speeding up freight trains is a solution, but could increase their operating costs, especially if they remain diesel-powered; this may or may not satisfy the second point in the bill.

In the absence of FRA reform, it would be difficult and expensive to achieve significant improvements; together with commuter rail agency turf, it bears some responsibility to the $117 billion cost of Amtrak’s Next-Generation High-Speed Rail plan, which has drawn criticism from many good transit activists.

In the presence of FRA reform and a rule requiring the commuter railroads to give access if required, the standards set in the bill are not very ambitious. The advertised timetable calls for an average speed of 180 km/h between New York and Washington, at the lower end of high-speed rail, and 145 km/h between New York and Boston, at the upper end of upgraded legacy rail. Existing high-acceleration or high-cant deficiency trains could achieve this on legacy tracks, with some upgrades. With small curve modifications (including an increase in superelevation, which could complicate matters for freight trains) an off-the-shelf Pendolino could run at 160-200 km/h even on the curvy Shore Line in Connecticut; south of New York, few curves would limit speeds to less than 200 km/h, and those are either relatively easy to fix or located near urban stations where speed would be low anyway.

Another issue with the bill is that it seems to want to maximize private spending in addition to minimizing public spending. It directs the Secretary of Transportation (who currently opposes privatization) to choose the expression of interest that,

(A) indicates that the project will successfully meet or exceed the performance standards.
(B) incorporates the greatest amount of private sector financing.
(C) incorporates the least amount of Federal support.
(D) is based on a public-private partnership structure that closely aligns with the structure selected by the Secretary.

In other words, there are no points awarded for exceeding the standards; however, there are points awarded for spending more money than necessary, as long as it’s all in the private sector. This despite the fact that at the speeds of the express trains running on the Sanyo Shinkansen (currently the fastest in Japan) and the TGV from Paris to Marseille, average speed would be about 220-230 km/h, for a total travel time of about 1:35-1:40 on both the New York-Boston and New York-Washington segments.

The glossy PDF that Mica and Shuster use to argue for the importance of privatization, noting increases in ridership in Britain and Japan, leaves out similar increases that came in Europe after the introduction of better regulations or more modern rolling stock. For example, the German rail reforms in the 1990s and the introduction of high-speed ICE trains helped raise ICE ridership from 6 million in 1991 to 36 million in 1999. France has seen large increases in TGV ridership and intercity ridership in general from the 1980s onward.

Despite this, good transit activists should not dismiss Mica’s effort the way they should dismiss openly dishonest anti-transit politicians, such as Governor Rick Scott. Achieving improvements in ten years is much better than Amtrak’s competing unambitious Master Plan. I believe the bill is reformable, and have already called Rep. Mica’s office and urge everyone else to do the same, demanding regulatory reform in addition to or instead of privatization.

Update: as Bruce McF notes in comments both here and on CAHSR Blog, 99 years is normal for a land concession but extraordinarily long for a transport concession. Under European-style privatization there’s a new auction once every few years, I think 10 at most.

High-Speed Rail Operator Profit

I intended to write a post debunking the myth that high-speed lines do not pay for themselves, but Paulus Magnus has written one instead. He posts the revenue and net income figures for the mainland JRs, SNCF, DB, and RENFE. All but RENFE have positive net income, and even RENFE has positive EBIT.

The only thing I want to add is that there’s a myth going around that the Shinkansen isn’t really profitable because the government wiped its construction debt. While it’s true that the government wiped JNR’s debt, that debt was predominantly operating losses before restructuring; since JNR got few subsidies, it had to keep borrowing to cover its losses: see pages 46 and 88 on this PDF. Construction was only one eighth of the debt burden, and that part the JRs did have to pay. In other words, the government really just subsidize JNR’s operating losses from its inefficient pre-restructuring days.

Quick Note: Midwest HSR Study

I’m usually skeptical of industry-funded studies about the value of megaprojects, but despite the involvement of Siemens I recommend reading the 2011 Economic Study for Midwest high-speed rail.

Building up on previous ideas for the 110 mph Midwest high-speed rail and on SNCF’s proposal, the study goes through all the nitty-gritty details that are often missing from publications geared toward investors and urban boosters. The technical report addresses questions about alignment, transfer convenience, integration with commuter rail, and FRA regulations. It discusses such issues as how to build a tunnel for Metra providing useful regional rail service, why the FRA is likely to let lightweight high-speed trains operate in the US, or whether to route trains through Eau Claire along I-94 or through La Crosse and Rochester on a greenfield alignment.

The proposed cost of the project is $83.6 billion, in 2010 dollars (compare $69 billion in SNCF’s proposal, or $117 billion in year of construction in Amtrak’s one third as long Northeast Corridor proposal). It works out to $35 million per kilometer, which isn’t outrageous but still a little higher than normal for flat terrain; the total contingency in the proposal’s budget is 35% of the base, which is higher than the norm, which is 25%. Construction costs on the French LGV Est‘s second phase are $24 million per km, and those on Belgium’s HSL 3 were $29 million per km.

Quick Note on High-Speed Rail and Flying

I have just come back home from my conference in Athens, GA. Total door-to-door travel time, from the hotel to my apartment: just under 8 hours. The road distance from Athens to New York is about 1,300 km, so the average speed is barely higher than that of the East Coast Main Line between London and York, and lower than that of modern high-speed rail even including connections at both ends.

The main factor raising travel time so much was getting to the airport in Atlanta. Athens-Atlanta is served by arterial roads with some grade separation, but not Interstates; the total travel time is about an hour and a half, and another 15 minutes to the airport. Add shuttle van schedule padding, much uncertainty about security, and very long legacy airline boarding times, and door-to-departure was 4 hours.

This lack of Interstate connection is part of what makes this a realistic option for rail. I do not know specifics about the freight railroad connecting Atlanta and Athens except that it’s owned by CSX and only moderately curvy, but if it were reactivated as modern intercity rail, it would be successful. It’s 111 km from Athens to Downtown Atlanta; 1:22 city-to-city (3 trains provide hourly service) making multiple stops along the way would be unambitious, and 1:22 Athens-to-Atlanta-to-the-airport would be feasible. UGA students traveling home or to Atlanta would flock to it.

Every time I fly domestically even somewhat beyond the optimal range for high-speed rail, I temporarily stop caring about cost-effectiveness and want fast trains, now. With this caveat, let me note that New York-Atlanta in 5 hours is ambitious, but possible. For me, it would mean the Atlanta-Athens line could get me home in about 7 hours door-to-door, by either train or plane. And if the preferred route from Charlotte to Atlanta detoured to the south to serve Athens, it would cut away the connection time and make the entire run take about 5.5 hours.

Of course, it requires either overcoming a lot of agency inertia or spending huge sums of money to build high-speed rail just down to Washington; building to Atlanta requires both. Even if the US could bring costs down to French or Belgian levels, Washington-Atlanta would cost nearly $30 billion. But once built, the line would be competitive even for trips that do not make use of Atlanta’s meager existing connecting transit. The value may end up higher than the cost of construction. And connecting transit on modernized legacy track should not be technically difficult to add.