• More rumblings of trouble in Florida: Even the state’s Congressmen are questioning whether it was a good idea to make the Orlando-Tampa line the first major HSR project to be undertaken in the U.S. (NYT)
• Meanwhile, FL business and civic leaders are being told, rightfully, that the only way to have any chance of success with HSR in the state is to “get all the details right.” Like this one. (Ledger.com)
• More on Florida’s various and numerous problems from Liam Julian at Stanford’s Policy Review. (PR)
• Another day, another round of drama in California HSR. Now it’s Orange County Assemblywoman Diane Harkey, who has introduced Assembly Bill 2121, which would pull the plug on funding the whole HSR project. (Examiner.com)
• Oh and all critics of California’s plan to run HSR from L.A. all the way to San Francisco, your job just got harder. While critics want the line to stop in San Jose, Caltrain officials announced that the idea would require the same levels of track expansion, but would also harm local commuter service and strip the agency of funding. (MercuryNews)
• A study has calculated the total cost of building HSR service along Colorado’s Interstate 25 and Interstate 70 corridors. So what’s the damage? Twenty-two billion dollars. (CoIndy)
• And China’s HSR continues its steady path to domination, with the announcement that all flights from Zhengzhou to Xian have been suspended due to the near-total exodus of passengers to the new HSR line. (Reuters)
Finally, meet the U.K.’s Secretary of State for Transport. His HSR vision is large, his figure slight, and his name priceless: Lord Adonis. (Telegraph)
March 27th, 2010 at 6:20 am
You hit on it in the Amtrak/HSR post, but can we revisit and have a full write up of all the reasons why Acela isn’t a badass HSR line..
…some track needs smoothing out, bad regulations about car weight and tilting, needs coordination between multiple states (eminent domain, state regs, constituency resistance, etc.), speed/noise/safety issues, freight resistance, etc.
What else am I missing…?
It seems like such a no brainer. Have real HSR between D.C. & NYC and the power brokers on the line will use it so much that HSR will sell itself to Congress.
March 27th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
When will my home-state of Colorado stop looking at this ludicrous Ski-line idea? Build out front-range transport. If in 30 years there’s money left for the shrinking ski industry (as global warming is predicted to reduce snow levels in Colorado), then we can think about it. But lets get large communities hooked up first.
March 28th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Why link to articles based on Cato Institute cult-member Randall the Tool? The whole article is one distortion after the next. Disney alone brings in 14 million by air, and Disney has agreed to include the HSR ticket in its package. That alone guarantees millions of tickets, and is enough to pay for operations. And, of course, this is just Phase One. It will later go onto Miami, providing much needed relief on I95. This is a no-brainer, and a great first step to HSR in the USA.
March 28th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Randall Toole is truly a major problem—I see him linked and posted everywhere, often by people and places I wouldn’t expect. He’s gaining traction or something; there needs to be a real effort to systematically debunk and refute him
March 29th, 2010 at 2:05 am
I just sent an email to Diane Harkey and explained why she should not kill CA-High Speed Rail. Please join me:
http://arc.asm.ca.gov/member/73/?p=email
March 29th, 2010 at 5:00 pm
It will not work in US. It will cost too much and will cost us a lot to maintain it. Will never get the return we want unless you believe in fairy tales. US is not densely populated as in China and the labor cost to put down the rail is very high (unless we force the welfare recipients to work like slaves), not even counting the politics…
March 29th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Amtrak is losing money on the HSR. It is not HSR but HS train. You need new rail to attain the speed.
March 29th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Amtrak is making large operating profits on the Acela. Check its monthly performance reports.
The labor cost in the US isn’t much higher than in Spain, where they routinely build subway tunnels for one twentieth the cost of New York subway tunnels. The issue isn’t labor; it’s how well the projects are managed.
March 30th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Managed or embezzled?
Is it possible that conditions in NYC, ranging from bedrock extraction to old layers of infrastructure to just the large amounts of congestion in the city, could make the costs higher?
Not doubting you, but I would be interested in seeing some data on how you come up with the figure of 1/20th the cost if you could post some links.
March 31st, 2010 at 12:33 am
For some of the data, you can see a compendium of NYC costs here. SAS costs $1.7 billion/km, the 7 extension $1.3 billion/km. Between them, they only cross under one old layer of infrastructure, namely the shallow 8th Avenue Subway.
For costs elsewhere, see here for Paris Métro Line 14 (including a river crossing and multiple old infrastructure to deal with, including catacombs that force excavation to be extra-careful) and here for Berlin’s U55, both of which cost about $250 million/km in inflation-adjusted money. The Jubilee line extension, complete with multiple crossings under older lines and four river crossings, cost $450 million/km and got called a boondoggle.
Spain’s construction costs are unusually low: about $70 million/km, inflation-adjusted, for Madrid’s MetroSur. That’s one twentieth the cost of New York projects. I’ve also heard that the latest commuter rail tunnel in Spain is going to have a comparable per-km cost, despite crossing under an entire subway network, but I don’t have a link.
I don’t know whether embezzling actually takes place. The comment thread on the first link in this comment has some suggestions for why New York costs are so high.
March 31st, 2010 at 3:33 am
Thanks for the responsiveness, really great. Find it very interesting to see the comps. But in the Big East conference you cannot help but wonder about slush funds, or quartermaster errors in the way of buying way too much concrete and rebar, or other such shenanigans when it comes to big construction projects. I’m sure its not the sole cause of higher costs, and these sorts of things are endemic to construction industries worldwide, but I wouldn’t be as naive as to think them implausible or insignificant.
March 31st, 2010 at 5:46 pm
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/weather/03/31/northeast.flood.fears/?hpt=T2&imw=Y
Acela suspends service due to high water levels caused by torrential flooding in CT. Maybe we should just tunnel the whole thing or go for a raised maglev (joking).
May 14th, 2010 at 7:52 pm
Just building even more freeways isn’t exactly cheap either. See e.g. http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/infra.shtml for a comparison between the costs of building freeways and railways in Australia. Now I realize that the cost of high-speed rail is much higher than conventional rail, though the distances on the Tampa-Orlando line are so short that high-speed rail is probably overkill (conventional rail running at 150-200km/h would be more than adequate).