Posted on Friday May 22nd by The Infrastructurist | 1,290
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- Ray LaHood says it will take “two decades” to build out America’s high speed rail network. (LaSalle News Tribune)
- As Michael Dukakis told us earlier this week, the northeast is lagging miserably in the planning for high speed rail. Until late last year it didn’t even have a regionwide hsr organization. (Boston Globe)
- California and Washington state officials have had a meeting about the possibility of a high speed west coast line that would run from Vancouver to San Diego. (McClatchy)
- The Christian Science Monitor weighs in with a survey about “high hopes for high speed rail” — and doesn’t really draw any conclusions. Executive summary: Could work! But there are detractors! Hmm! (CSM)
- This LaHood chap is *everywhere*. In Chicago, he was calling for a midwest “rail czar.” Had we been in the audience would have asked: How about a national infrastructure czar? And then he/she could just assign midwest rail czarlet. (Chicagoist)
- Half of the total $8 billion in stimulus funds dedicated to HSR could go to California. (KLIV)
- Officials in North Carolina met to discuss the Charlotte and Raleigh portion of a proposed southeastern high speed rail line. (News 14)
- Fox News wonders, “Are trains better than planes and automobiles?” The answer: blah blah blah blah blah maybe. What does Geraldo think?
Photo: Artyit.co.uk
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Czarevich?
I don’t really understand how all of these czars will coordinate activities better than a restructured USDOT official. Does LaHood mean to put him in the upcoming DOT reorganization, or would this official simply be a top-level appointee with a generally advisory role, like the Drug Czar?
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Interstate rail please–the rights of way already exist; laying track on existing freway lanes should be relatively cheap and fast.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:52 pm
“Czar” talk is dangerous. It usually means: “I’m tired of dealing with all these people and thinking about this.”
Its a national program so it should be led from DOT. Federal money with federal planning, expedited federal siting, condemnation and environmental review.
Have state coordination and input, but feds take a primary roll. If the NIMBY stuff and even teaparty rhetoric becomes too heavy, bail to the next project and don’t look back.
May 26th, 2009 at 2:25 am
As a quasi-expat who lives the bulk of the year in Fukuoka, Japan and the bulk of the remainder in Chicago, I feel compelled to weigh in on the rail issue.
Allow me to use my personal experinces as examples. While in the US, besides using local transit in Chicago, I make occasional trips from there to both coasts plus occasional forays to Madison, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor and Columbus, (OH, not Georgia).
In Japan, I frequently use both local transit systems and intercity rail. I almost never need to use a plane for domestic travel in Japan. In fact, I would say the Japanese rail system is one of the key factors in promoting high quality of life in Japan. Allow me some personal examples.
While in Fukuoka, I have a weekly appointment in Kitakyuushu, a city 42 miles from the train station nearest my house. The 42 mile ride takes 17 minutes on the Shinkansen– aka the Bullet Train in English. Do the math. That’s 148 MPH.
On time? Yes, and this is critical to a successful rail system. If I’m 17 seconds (that’s seconds, not minutes) late, I’ve got less than a 50% chance of catching that train, if I’m 30 seconds late the chance I’ll catch the train drops to less than 10%– probaly less than 5%.
To get to the train station in Fukuoka, I have a pleasant 7 minute bicycle ride to a nearby subway station, then a punctual 10 minute ride in a spotless, smooth-riding subway to the train station. Should I need to avail myself of sanitary facilities en route, I know that every subway station has a restroom cleaner and better maintained than any airport restroom I can think of in the US.
Were this trustworthy, convenient comfortable system to be dismantled, to say there would be general consternation would be an understatement.
The US makes quite a contrast.
Chicago has one of the best local and suburban transit systems in the US. It is also a rail hub. Despite this, I’m frankly embarrassed by our transit when Japanese friends come to visit me there. While agog at the quality of the city’s wonderful cultural and recreational infrastructure– parks, beaches, museums, libraries– they are (despite doing their well-mannered best not to show it) appalled by the Chicago’s transit system, with its slow, screechy, weaving trains running on ancient tracks, subject to numerous slow-downs and delays.
And the inter-city system is even more pathetic. Permit me an example.
Thinking it would be relaxing, 3 years ago I took a Japanese friend along on the Amtrak from Chicago to Minneapolis. This service was called the 400 back in the 1930s because it took 400 minutes to go the roughly 400 miles back then. Now the service is scheduled to take 480 minutes and, on the occasion we rode it, it took about 550 minutes (over 9 hours). In other words, 2 and a half hours longer than the service took over 70 years ago!!
And to make matters worse, instead of stopping in the convenient downtown Minneapolis station, (which seems to no longer exist)), it stopped in a god-forsaken no man’s land somewhere in St. Paul. The sation had no facilites worth mentioning, the only refreshment being offered in the form of a few vending machines offering junk food and beverages.
Contrast this with the experience of going from Fukuoka to Kobe, which I occasionally do.
The distance is almost the same. 350 vs the 380 mile Chicago Minneapolis run.
The standard Bullet Train covers the distance in 150 minutes (as little as 135 minutes on the faster Nozomi train), probaly to within 5 to 30 seconds. (that’s right, seconds, not minutes) Compare this with 480 to 600 minutes, allowing for up to 120 minutes of “error” which our pathetic system seems to tolerate on the Chi-Minnie run. And to add insult to injury, Madison, Wisconsin’s state capital and the seat of one of the largest and best state universities in the country, isn’t even on the line!
While the overall population density of the Great Lakes region may not rival Japan’s, Chicago has a metropolitan population of close to 10 million. In Japan only Tokyo/Yokohama and Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto outclass Chicago in population. And Minneapolis/St. Paul is certainly a respectable size with a metro population pushing 4 million. This is far more people than these two metro areas had more than 70 years ago when there was faster, more frequent service than today. From both a historical and an international perspective, this is a disgrace.
Please, let’s end this counterproductive, humiliating situation.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
I would love the opportunity to ride a high speed train to destinations all over the US. I live in El Paso Texas which if you don’t know where that is, just look on the big brown spot in the USA and you’ll see us squished up against the Mexican border in the lonely dessert.
I love living here, and I love the city but if you must travel to another city it takes many many hours. ABQ in New Mexico is 4 hours, Phoenix is about 6 hours, and San Antonio (my nearest hope of in state tuition for grad school) is 11 hours!!
Texas wants to connect its “major cities” but leaves us out of the loop. Instead we are fighting to get money for an ABQ, Las Cruces, Denver route. This would be great, but I would love to have access to the rest of Texas as well. Maybe someday
When we visited family in Munich Germany they were surprised to hear that in El Paso, a city of 740,000+ (predicted to top 1 million in the near future) and Juarez Mexico (so close I can see it from my window) a city of 1.5+ million there is no subway, or light rail. We have Amtrak, but it goes to Los Angeles, a whopping 11+ hour ride that costs an arm and a leg.