Posted on Friday November 6th by Alex Lessard-Pilon | 202
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- Airbus predicts that air travel will outpace HSR as the preferred method of travel between major cities. HSR requires massive public funding that airlines don’t need, and many cities do not have local transit systems to make long-distance HSR travel convenient. (Crikey)
- In Spain, however, rail service is booming: for the first time, more passengers chose the high-speed link between Madrid and Barcelona than chose to fly. British officials may enlist Renfe, the Spanish rail operator, to help build out their own system. (Times)
- A panel of experts weighs in on Buffett’s decision to buy out Burlington Northern. Rail development will become more important for moving freight and increasing exports, so his bet is good; Buffett’s the wisest–on par, apparently, with J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt. (Room For Debate)
- The amount allocated to HSR in the transportation appropriations bill is down to $1.2 billion. An editorial calls on Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has been a powerful advocate of HSR in the past, to use her clout to bring that amount back into the range of $4 billion. (MercNews)
- Buffett makes an environmental case for his acquisition of BNSF, despite the fact that half of its tonnage is coal. The company could become involved in California’s HSR plans, and has recommended a national focus for HSR plans instead of spreading the money “like peanut butter.” (Streetsblog)
- Officials in Connecticut try to decide whether an HSR link from Springfield, MA to New Haven, CT is worthwhile and can be completed quickly. Without progress on a Springfield-Boston link, that line might not be much good. (Courant)
November 6th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Actually airplanes are a from of mass transit just like trains. In that sense it is easier to get passengers from planes into trains. They have already decided to make the trip without a car.
November 6th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I would like Airbus to present a single airport which is not the result of “massive public spending.”
Also, local mass transit systems make travel to the airport more convenient, however people still fly to airports as they are the only option. Surely, the majority of travelers, in a situation without local mass transit systems, would prefer to be let off in a more central location than on the periphery, where most airports are located.
November 6th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
$1.2 billion is a joke. Fund the Oberstar legislation. Pass the Surface Transportation Authorization Act NOW, before health care, before climate change. We need jobs and better transportation options, and Representative Oberstar has the bill to make it happen.
November 6th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
What a bunch of B.S. from Airbus. Who pays for the airports? The security at airports? The air traffic controllers? The roads that service the airports? TAXPAYERS!!!!!!!!!
As for the lack of localized transit- building HSR to city cores is a great way to induce expanded transit demand, just as building the interstate highways forced local communities to spend taxpayer funds to upgrade surface streets.
November 6th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Last time I looked, when you look at the revenue from terminal facility fees added to ticket prices, landing fees, gate rental, and concession fees from the stores and retaurants in the terminal, large airports are money makers. Next lets look at the various taxes added to ticket prices in the U.S. There’s the 7.5% specific excise tax, the security tax ($2.50 per boarding), the segment tax ($3.40 per flight segment), and the interntational tax ($15.10 per international arrival and departure). Subtract these from the costs of ATC, security, and customs/immigration, and let’s talk about subsidies.
And I’m not sure HSR would immediately boost demand for local transit enough to make HSR viable. I live in the Detroit area (northern suburbs), and the prospect of stops in Pontiac, Birmingham, and Royal Oak before departure from Detroit is what makes HSR desirable to me. If Detroit-Chicago is made a purely city center-city center service, and I’m faced with the prospect of driving to downtown Detroit and finding parking (or taking a slow bus or light rail), I’ll just say no thanks and get on the plane at Metro like normal.
I’m as big a fan of HSR as anyone (I’d love to be able to get on a train in Birmingham and get off in Chicago 2-3 hours later), but HSR has to be made convenient for people to take it. And not every dollar spent on air travel by the government is a subsidy.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Don K, security taxes pay for security, balancing the negative externality of plane hijackings.
But the elephant in the room isn’t those taxes, but the air traffic control system, provided by governments for the benefit of air travel. Traffic control has a positive externality, which is why governments provide it, but by the same token, air travel has negative externalities like noise, air pollution, and CO2 emissions.
For Detroit-Chicago service, it may well make sense to electrify the route to Pontiac, and run trains from Detroit to Pontiac at lower speed. It could save storage space in Detroit. On the other hand, an HSR extension is no substitute for good regional rail. Detroit could run regional train service to Pontiac and Windsor, with cross-border rail service taking some of the passenger load off the road crossings. This would allow passengers from Pontiac to connect to services that can’t be through-routed north, such as a future Chicago-Detroit-Toronto service.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Sean, HSR won’t expand local transit if there’s no existing local transit to use. If you think it does, try taking the TGV to one of the beet field stations, like Haute-Picardie or Aix-en-Provence. Since the lines were built those stations have gotten some edge city development and better bus service, but that’s it.
Where HSR does expand local transit is in cases like Shin-Osaka and Shin-Yokohama. Once the Shinkansen was built, it had to serve new stations (shin is Japanese for new) in those cities, since serving Osaka and Yokohama Stations would have required expensive urban construction. So the cities extended their large preexisting rail services to the new stations. But even then, those new stations are connected to fewer lines than the old stations. Shin-Osaka has fewer one-seat connections than many US train stations, including LA, Chicago, Washington, and even the old Five Points station in Atlanta.
November 7th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Riding trains is so much more pleasurable than flying. I don’t feel like a packaged good on trains, and its more seamless travel.
November 7th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Sandilands is partly right. The distances in Australia are huge, and the amount of economic activity is much smaller than in the parts of Europe served by high-speed rail. As such, it would be impossible, by orders of magnitude, to justify the cost of a high-speed rail line between Sydney and Melbourne.
If Sandilands’ magic carbon-free algal jet fuel comes to fruition, it will be business as usual, and Australia will be tied together by internal combustion for the foreseeable future. (Public transport in Australian cities is generally abysmal, with anyone who can drive doing so.) If not, and oil prices make aviation prohibitively expensive, the cities will drift further apart, as going between Sydney and Melbourne currently takes 11 hours by train.
Then again, if Sydney becomes the next global financial centre (displacing London and Dubai), perhaps the revenues there will justify such huge infrastructure spending.
November 7th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Don,
One of the biggest advantages of HSR is the ease with which it may make a suburban stop or two. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think about it, the option to catch the train at the airport, downtown, or at a suburb at the edge of town adds immensely to the convenience of the service. The real problem is to keep avaricious land developers and their paid politicians from creating too many stops.
HSR is primarily a substitute for short-haul high volume air service. Integrating ground transport should not be a prerequisite for deployment of the service any more or less than integrating ground transport should be part of airport planning.
November 7th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Jim Harper,
HSR is primarily a substitute for driving. It also destroys air traffic, but most of its volume is diverted from driving, or induced demand. You can read the California HSR ridership projections, which break down traffic based on source. The state’s HSR authority states that of the estimated 88-117 million total riders in 2030, 12 million would come from air, and 75 million would come from driving. Excluding commuters, the agency estimates that 17% of the riders would come from air and 74% would come from driving.
In fact, you could argue that the reason Eurostar failed is that it only had air traffic to poach. There was no established ground market before the Channel Tunnel opened, so while Eurostar has reached more than twice the size of the pre-tunnel Paris-London air market, it is still far below the original projections.
November 8th, 2009 at 1:40 am
@ Alon Levy -
“There was no established ground market before the Channel Tunnel opened”
Not so. There were plenty of conventional and hovercraft ferries plying the English Channel. Over 400 trains now run through the Channel Tunnel every day, but even so its modal share is just 42% for freight and 47% for passenger cars.
November 8th, 2009 at 3:10 am
Rafael, the established ground market was about as large as you’d expect a ferry-based market to be. It was nothing like the continuous congestion you see now on I-95 and I-5, or even the busy highways from Paris to Lyon and Marseille.
For HSR, 47% is a high mode share. If I remember correctly the Tokaido Shinkansen’s market share on the Tokyo-Osaka line is about 50%. The KTX’s mode share on Seoul-Busan is 63%, and that’s in a country with a car ownership rate barely higher than New York City’s. The problems with Eurostar are high interest rates and small overall market, not low market share.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:21 am
“Airbus predicts that air travel will outpace HSR as the preferred method of travel between major cities. HSR requires massive public funding that airlines don’t need,”
Are they smoking something? Airlines require massive public funding. More specifically, *expansion* of air travel requires *super* massive public funding, because airports are *very very expensive* to expand, especially in “major cities”. Air travel has reached its economical limits in most of the world. Only by diverting shorter-distance trips to HSR can air travel continue to increase the number of long-distance trips.
Is Airbus looking for public funding, or trying to issue stock or bonds? That would be the only business excuse for its nonsensical puffery.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:33 am
“Sandilands is partly right. The distances in Australia are huge, and the amount of economic activity is much smaller than in the parts of Europe served by high-speed rail. As such, it would be impossible, by orders of magnitude, to justify the cost of a high-speed rail line between Sydney and Melbourne.”
It is true that Australia’s cities are really very small by US or European standards, and are very far apart.
However, I’m not so sure about Sydney-Melbourne. The route is sufficiently important for freight rail that it might be a good candidate for faster passenger rail, though probably not European-standard high-speed rail. Melbourne has first-class public transit and Sydney has pretty good public transit compared to the US. The fact that Canberra is on a branch rather than the mainline is unfortunate, however; were it on the mainline, Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne would be a convincing route.
Adelaide and Brisbane appear to support regular services to Melbourne and Sydney respectively, which would probably benefit from some upgrades as well..
Obviously Perth is right out — rail to Perth or Darwin is simply not for anyone with any sort of time pressure. The routes are impressively good as it is, considering.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:56 am
If memory serves, Airbus is a European-government-backed consortium that was created to compete with the private American company Boeing. If Airbus has not been the beneficiary of huge government subsidies, then I’ll eat my hat. Sure Boeing has gotten a lot of government contracts for aircraft, but their capital came from private sources, un-coerced by governments.
And then there’s the local government subsidies that build and maintain airports and the highways (and occasionally transit) infrastructure to reach them.
For Airbus to make such a claim would indicate that they have been flying at high altitudes for too long without benefit of oxygen. ALL transportation all around the world is subsidized to some degree by government. Deal with it.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
The real subsidy is the government’s massive expenditures (military and otherwise) keeping oil at exceptionally low prices. When oil prices rise we will be glad for some real infrastructure.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:36 am
Boeing is subsidized, too, by defense contracts. Those are far from uncoerced - often, the capital comes from some Congressperson who wants to deliver military pork to his district, or curry favor with an industry lobbyist.