https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/05/12/randal-otoole-gets-high-speed-rail-wrong/ Pedestrian Observations For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Boondoggles and Pollution * About * Comment Policy * Construction Costs * Post Queue * Support Me! 2021/05/12 Randal O'Toole Gets High-Speed Rail Wrong Now that there's decent chance of US investment in rail, Randal O'Toole is resurrecting his takes from the early Obama era, warning that high-speed rail is a multi-trillion dollar money sink. It's not a good analysis, and in particular it gets the reality of European and Asian high-speed rail systems wrong. It displays lack of familiarity with rail practice and rail politics, to the point that most nontrivial assertions about rail in Europe and Asia are incorrect. More broadly, the way O'Toole gets rail investment here wrong comes from making unexamined American assumptions and substituting them for a European or Japanese reality regarding rail as well as rail politics. If the US can't do it, he thinks other countries can't. Unfortunately, he's even unfamiliar with recent work done on American costs, when he compares the Interstate system positively with recent high-speed rail lines. High-Speed Rail Profitability: France I'm currently working on building a database similar to our urban rail costs for high-speed rail. Between this and previous iterations of analyzing the TGV, I've been reading a lot of internal French reports about its system. Thankfully, France makes available very good public information about the costs and technical specifications of its system. It helps that I read French, but the gap between what's available for France and Belgium (see for example line schemas ) is vast. This provides crucial background that O'Toole is missing. The most important thing to understand is that the TGV network is profitable. The Spinetta report on the fiscal losses of SNCF makes it clear, starting on p. 60, that the TGV network is profitable, and recommends favoring its development over the money-losing legacy networks, especially the branch lines. The report even calls for closing weak branch lines with only a few trains a day, which I called the Spinetta Axe at the time, in analogy with the Beeching Axe . Due to public outcry the state rejected the cuts and only implemented the organizational changes promoted by the report. Moreover, all lines are very profitable excluding the cost of fixed capital. The Spinetta report's TGV section says that operating costs average EUR0.06/seat-km, which is around 0.085EUR/p-km, despite overstaffing of conductors (8 per conventional 400-car TGV) and extensive travel on legacy track at low speed and higher per-km labor costs. Average TGV fare revenue per an ARAFER report from 2016 is 0.10EUR/p-km - compare p-km on p. 15 and revenue on p. 26. This is typical for Europe - RENFE and DB charge similar fares, and the nominal fares seem to have been flat over the last decade. What's dicier is cost of capital. In all other European countries for which I'm aware of the process, all of which are Northern rather than Southern, this is done with benefit-cost analysis with a fixed behind-the-scenes discount rate. France, in my view wisely, rates lines by their financial and social rates of return instead. A 2014 report about the Bordeaux-Toulouse LGV, recently given the go-ahead for 7.5 billion EUR, warns that the profitability of LGVs decreases as the system is built out: the LGV Sud-Est returned 15% to SNCF's finances and 30% to French society (including rider consumer surplus), but subsequent lines only returned 4-7% to SNCF's finances, and Bordeaux-Toulouse is likely to return less, 6% including social benefits per the study and at this point slightly less since the study assumed it would cost slightly less than the current budget. The general theme in the French discourse on trains is that the TGV network is an obvious success. There absolutely is criticism, which focuses on the following issues: * Regional rail, that is not intercity rail, is underdeveloped in France outside Paris. The ridership of TER networks is pitiful in comparison with German-speaking and Nordic metropolitan areas of comparable size. For example, sourced to a dead link, Wikipedia claims 64,300 TER PACA trips per day, comprising the metropolitan areas of Marseille (1.8 million), Nice (1), Toulon (0.6), and Avignon (0.5); in Helsinki (1.5) alone, there are 200,000 daily commuter rail trips. But this isn't really about high-speed rail, since TER planning and subsidies are devolved to regional governments, and not to SNCF. * SNCF has contentious labor relations. In the early 2010s, the unions went on a wave of strikes and got wage concessions that led to the evaporation of SNCF's 600 million EUR/year primary surplus. The railway unions in France ("cheminots") are unpopular, and Macron has been able to pass reforms to SNCF's governance over their strikes and objections. * Future LGVs are not as strong as past ones. Real costs in France are rising, and the network already links Paris with all major secondary cities in airplane-competitive time save Nice. Interprovincial links on the network are weak, despite the construction of the LGV Rhin-Rhone, and nothing like the Deutschlandtakt is on the horizon enabling everywhere-to-everywhere travel. * SNCF thinks like an airline and not like a railroad. It separates passengers into different buckets as airlines do, has many executives with airline background (and Spinetta is ex-Air France), thinks passengers do not ride trains for longer than 3 hours even though at 4 hours the modal split with air is still better than 50-50, and has poor integration between the TGV and legacy rail. * SNCF still has a lot of accumulated debt from past operating losses, some predating the TGV and the start of regional subsidies for regional rail. It was hoped that TGV profits could cover them, but they can't. This mirrors the controversy in Japan in the 1980s, where, in the breakup of JNR into the JRs and their privatization, debt from past operating losses was wiped but not debt from Shinkansen construction (see Privatization Best Practices, PDF-p. 106). However, saying that the existing network is a failure is the domain of cranks and populists. It is unrecognizable from the discussion of transportation investments in France. What O'Toole says about high-speed rail O'Toole's understanding of internal French (or Spanish, or Japanese) issues is weak. This isn't surprising - Americans to a good approximation never have good insights on the internal issues of any other country, even when it speaks English. The American political sphere, which includes political thinktanks like Cato, is remarkably ignorant globally, and rather incurious. As a result, what he says about the TGV is based on an Americanized understanding. To wit: Bus-rail competition The Northeastern United States has a weak rail network: Amtrak averages vintage 1960s speeds and charges 2-4 times the per-km fare of the TGV. As a result, an ecosystem of private intercity buses has developed, starting with unregulated ones like Fung Wah and, as they were shut down, corporate systems like Megabus and Bolt. O'Toole is fond of these buses, with their lower fares and road-like lack of integration between infrastructure and operations. And thus, he claims, falsely, that European high-speed rail cannibalized profitable buses. This is unrecognizable from within Europe, where intercity buses were underdeveloped until recently. In France, US-style intercity buses are called Macron buses, because the deregulation that brought them into existence passed in the mid-2010s, when Macron was the economy minister. They complement high-speed rail but do not replace it, because trains get me from Paris to the German border in 1:45 and buses don't. To be fair, TGV ridership has been stagnant in the last few years. But this stagnation goes back to the financial crisis, and if anything ridership picked up starting 2017 with the opening of the LGV Sud-Europe-Atlantique. So the buses are not even outcompeting the trains - they thrive in the gaps between them, just as historically they did on international routes, where rail fares are considerably higher and ridership lower. High-speed rail construction costs O'Toole looks at the most expensive few lines possible: Britain's 345- mile London-Scotland HS2 high- speed rail line was originally projected to cost PS32.7 billion (about $123 million per mile) and is currently expected to cost PS106 billion ($400 million per mile). International comparisons of high-speed rail costs exist, and Britain's costs are by far the worst. For example, a 2013 Australian comparison looking at the prospects for such a system in Australia finds that High-Speed 1/CTRL, the line linking the Channel Tunnel with London, cost A$134 million/km, and the second costliest line in the dataset was thee 94% tunneled Bologna-Florence line, at A$95 million/km. French costs up until the LGV Bordeaux-Toulouse stood around $25-30 million per km in 2021 dollars, net of tunnels. German costs are similar, but German lines have far heavier tunneling than France, a range of 26-51% in tunnel compared with 0-6% in France. One reason is topography. But another is that Germany prefers mixed-use passenger-freight lines, which forces higher construction costs as freight requires gentler grades and, since superelevation must be lower, wider curves; France, like Japan and China, builds dedicated passenger lines, and, unlike Japan or China, keeps them largely at-grade to reduce costs. O'Toole says, without more references, that it would cost $3-4 trillion to build a US-wide high-speed rail network. But the official Obama-era crayon, at 20,000 km, would be $500 billion at tunnel-free European costs, or maybe $600 billion with 5% tunneling, mostly in difficult places like California and across the Appalachians. Freeway costs O'Toole proposes more freeways, and says that to build the Interstate system today would cost $530 billion so it's better than high-speed rail. Here is where his lack of knowledge of the most recent literature on infrastructure costs is a serious drag on his analysis: Brooks-Liscow establish that there was a large real increase in Interstate cost throughout the life of the program, so a budget that's really a mixture of cheaper early-1960s construction and more expensive construction in the 1970s is not applicable today. The same issue affects rail costs: the LGV Sud-Est cost, in today's money, around $8 million/km, which cost would never recur. Brooks-Liscow explain this by greater surplus extraction from citizen voice groups, which demanded detours and route compromises raising costs. This appears true not just diachronically within the US but also synchronically across countries: so far, the low-cost subways we have investigated are all in states with bureaucratic rather than adversarial legalism, while medium-cost Germany is more mixed. Politicized demands leading to more tunneling are well-documented within Germany - the Berlin-Munich line was built through a topographically harder alignment in order to serve Erfurt, at Thuringia's behest. So no, today costs from the 1960s are not relevant. Today, urban motorway extensions cost double-digit millions of dollars per lane-km, sometimes more. The I-5 improvement project in Los Angeles is $1.9 billion for I-5 South, a distance of 11 km, adding two lanes (one HOV, one mixed traffic) in each direction. It's possible to go lower than this - in Madrid this budget would buy a longer 6-lane tunnel - but then in Madrid the construction costs of rail are even lower, for both metros and high-speed lines. The discourse on profits In contrast with the basic picture I outlined for the TGV, French media and researchers often point out threats to rail profitability. This can easily be taken to mean that the TGV is unprofitable, and if one has an American mindset, then it's especially easy to think this. If SNCF officials say that 20% of TGVs lose money, then surely they must be hiding something and the figure is much higher, right? Likewise, if Spinetta says that the TGV network is profitable but not all trains are, then surely the situation is even worse, right? But no. This is an Americanized interpretation of the debate. In the US, Amtrak is under constant pressure to show book profits, and its very existence is threatened, often by people who cite O'Toole and other libertarians. Thus, as a survival strategy, Amtrak pretends it is more profitable than it really is. This has no bearing on the behavior of railroads elsewhere, though. SNCF is not so threatened. The biggest threat from the perspective of SNCF management is union demands for higher wages, and therefore, its incentive is to cry poverty. Nobody in France takes out yardsticks of farebox recovery ratios, and therefore, nobody needs to orient their communications around what would satisfy American libertarians. Energy Within the European high-speed rail research community, the energy efficiency of high-speed rail is well-understood, and many studies look at real-world examples, for example the metastudy of Hasegawa-Nicholson-Roberts-Schmid. In fact, it's understood that high-speed rail has lower energy consumption than conventional rail. For example, here is Garcia Alvarez's paper on the subject. This is counterintuitive, because higher speeds should surely lead to higher energy consumption, as Hasegawa et al demonstrate - but high-speed lines run at a uniform speed of 200 or 250 or 300 or 350 km/h, whereas legacy rail has many cycles of acceleration and deceleration. At speeds of up to about 200 km/h, nearly all electricity consumption is in acceleration and not maintaining constant speed, and even at 300 km/h, a late-model high-speed train consumes only above one third of its maximum power maintaining speed. Instead of this literature, O'Toole picks out the fact that all else being equal energy consumption rises in speed, which it is not equal. Garcia in fact points out that higher speeds are better for the environment due to better competition with air, in line with environmental consensus that trains are far superior on well-to-wheels emissions to cars and planes. Worse, O'Toole is citing Chester-Horvath's lifecycle analysis, which is not favorable to California High-Speed Rail's energy efficiency. The only problem is that this paper's analysis relies on a unit conversion error between BTUs and kWh, pointed out by Clem Tillier. The paper was eventually corrected, and with the correct figures, high-speed rail looks healthy. Competition with cars and planes Where high-speed rail exists, and the distance is within a well-understood range of around 300-800 km, it dominates travel. A 2004 report by Steer Davies Gleave has some profiles of what were then the world's main networks. For Japan, it includes a graphic from 1998 on PDF-p. 120 of modal splits by distance. In the 500-700 km bucket, a slight majority of trips all over Japan are made by rail; this is because Tokyo-Osaka is within that range, and due to those cities' size this city pair dominates pairs where rail is weaker, especially inter-island ones. In the 300-500 km bucket more people drive, but the Shinkansen is stronger than this on the Tokyo-Nagoya pair, it's just that 300-500 includes many more peripheral links with no high-speed rail service. It goes without saying that high-speed rail does not get any ridership where it does not exist. In France, this was also studied for the LGV PACA. On p. 14, the presentation lists modal splits as of 2009. Paris-Toulon, a city pair where the TGV takes around 4 hours, has an outright majority for the TGV, with 54% of the market, compared with 12% for air and 34% for driving. Paris-Cannes is 34% and Paris-Nice is 30%, both figures on the high side for their 5:00-5:30 train trips. Lyon-Nice, a 3:30 trip with awful frequency thanks to SNCF's poor interprovincial service, still has a 25% market share for the TGV. In general, competition with cars is understudied. Competition with planes is much more prominent in the literature, with plenty of reports on air-rail modal splits by train trip length. JR East, Central (PDF-p. 4), and West all report such market shares, omitting road transport. Many European analyses appeared in the 2000s, for example by Steer Davies Gleave again in 2006, but the links have rotted and Eurostat's link is corrupt. O'Toole misunderstands this literature. He lumps all air and road links, even on markets where rail is weak, sometimes for geographical factors such as mountains or islands, sometimes for fixable institutional ones like European borders. In fact, at least measured in greenhouse gas emission and not ridership, all air travel growth in Europe since 1990 has been international. International high-speed rail exists in Europe but charges higher fares and the infrastructure for it is often not built, with slowdowns in border zones. This is a good argument for completing the international network in Europe and a terrible one against building any network at all. Topography Even at the level of basic topography, O'Toole makes elementary errors. He discusses the Tokaido Shinkansen, pointing out its factor-of-2 cost overrun. But its absolute costs were not high, which he characterizes as, The Tokyo-Osaka high- speed rail line supposedly made money, but it was built across fairly flat territory So, first of all, the "supposedly" bit is painful given how much JR Central prints money. But "fairly flat territory" is equally bad. Japan's mountainous topography is not an obscure fact. It's visible from satellite image. Per Japanese Wikipedia, 13% of the route is in tunnel, more than California High-Speed Rail. The United States can and should do better The report is on stronger grounds when criticizing specifics of Amtrak and California High-Speed Rail. American rail construction is just bad. However, this is not because rail is bad; it's because the United States is bad. And there's the rub. Americans in politics can't tell themselves that another country does something better than the US does. If it's in other countries and the US can't do it, it must be, as O'Toole calls rail, obsolete. This is especially endemic to libertarians, who are intellectually detached from their European right-liberal counterparts (Dutch VVD, German FDP, etc.) even more than the American center-left is from social democrats here and the right is from the mainline and extreme right here. So here, faced with not too hard to find evidence that high-speed rail is profitable in Europe and Asia, and in fact intercity rail is profitable here in general (direct subsidies are forbidden by EU law unless the line is classified as regional), unlike in the United States, O'Toole makes up reasons why trains here are unprofitable or unsuccessful. He says things that are not so much wrong as unrecognizable, regarding topography, buses, construction costs, debt, the state of the TGV debate, or greenhouse gas emissions. O'Toole is aware of our transit costs comparison. I imagine he's also aware of high-speed rail cost comparisons, which exist in the literature - if he's not, it's because he doesn't want to be so aware. And yet, no matter how loudly the evidence screams "the United States needs to become more like France, Germany, Japan, Spain, etc.," American libertarians always find excuses why this is bad or unnecessary. And then, when it comes to expanding freeways, suddenly the cost concerns go out the door and they use unrealistically low cost figures. But figuring out why the US is bad requires way deeper dives. It requires delving into the field and understanding how procurement is done differently, what is wrong with Amtrak, what is wrong with the California High-Speed Rail Authority, how engineering is done in low- and medium-cost countries, various tradeoffs for planning lead time, and so on. It requires turning into the kind of expert that libertarians have spent the last 60 years theorizing why they need not listen to ("public choice"). And it requires a lot of knowledge of internal affairs of successful examples, none of which is in an English-speaking country. So it's easier to call this obsolete just because incurious Americans can't do it. Share this: * Twitter * Facebook * Like this: Like Loading... Related Written by Alon Levy Posted in Environmental Issues, Germany, High-Speed Rail, Shoddy Studies, Studies, Transportation 48 comments 1. [7c0a] 2021/05/12 - 11:51 Henry Miller I don't get why so many libertarians in the US say "who will build the roads is a dumb question because toll roads will make money for whoever builds them", and then won't make the connection that rail roads will make money for someone who builds them too - unless of course they have to compete with free roads. As a libertarian leaning American I'm always confused. Then again, the only reason I even consider supporting government rail is after what NYC did to the private subways systems no sane entrepreneur will ever invest in private rail anywhere near there. Reply + [05af] 2021/05/12 - 12:19 Alon Levy Yeah, part of the issue is that it's harder to guarantee security of property to a private investor in rail than in roads. In either case there are nasty non-compete clauses, but rail needs to be so integrated that the same clause would cover more stuff. For example, it's straightforward for a city to extract surplus through levying impact fees on new development, and because rail encourages more intense development in a narrower radius, it's harder to flee to the next suburb over, so you have to engage in top-down discipline to prevent this kind of behavior (ideally, through elimination of subnational or subprovincial government). Reply + [3f3b] 2021/05/13 - 11:39 Karl "I don't get why so many libertarians in the US say "who will build the roads is a dumb question because toll roads will make money for whoever builds them", and then won't make the connection that rail roads will make money for someone who builds them too - unless of course they have to compete with free roads. " I don't get why so many foamers claim that road subsidies are the ONLY reason why people don't take rail. a) rail technology is incredibly expensive. It requires ginormous resources up front + enormous resource to operate. With any short of beyond ginormous volumes, it ain't sustainable. b) Autos area a direct, point to point service. Rail is indirect. That makes a huge difference for how a trip _feels_ to people. And how it feels largely determines if they'll do it again. Reply o [3f15] 2021/05/13 - 13:58 adirondacker12800 Driving is work. I don't want to work for hours to get someplace. Then have to find someplace to park. Especially if my door-to-door trip is shorter doing it some other way. Reply # [c93f] 2021/05/13 - 17:47 Lee Ratner This is a distinctly minority way of looking at this in the United States. The way most people see this is that cars solve the last mile problem and allow you to carry a lot more stuff with you than a train would. Let's say that you live in Brooklyn and were invited to spend the weekend in the Hamptons or the Jersey Shore. You would be limited to what you could carry in a suit case or back pack, trek up to Penn Station, go to your station on the LIRR or NJ Transit and then to where ever you were staying. A car would allow you to carry more and could get you direct from Brooklyn to your destination. If you wanted to travel around at your destination, a car could allow you to do that. Even for ordinary stuff, many people would see a car as more important. Like if you had to go to the dentist before work and they weren't in the same place or on the same transit line, a car is much more convenient. Go from your home to the dentist and then to wherever work is. Or if you had chores to do and kids to take places, etc. Reply 2. [868c] 2021/05/12 - 11:51 Phake Nick - If TGV is profitable then why they have made comments in the past to some US HSR projects with private operators and investors saying it is impossible? - In Japan there are pretty big intercity bus network, although market share is still insignificant outside specific markets compares to the overall market size - For tunneling, I don't think the 80%+ tunneling ratio of Hokkaido Shinkansen Sapporo extension or Chuo Shinkansen Tokyo Nagoya section are result of politics (Could it be cheaper via Muroran?), although the Hokuriku Shinkansen upcoming Tsuruga to Shin Osaka extension can probably be said as such with detour via Obama City Reply + [05af] 2021/05/12 - 12:17 Alon Levy SNCF wants government subsidies if it can get them, hence crying poverty. It doesn't help that in the US it was bidding on weaker lines and not the NEC and tie-ins. And I don't think in general tunneling is evidence of politics. I only claim this in the specific case of France vs. Germany and the Netherlands, and even then it's not the only reason. Reply + [3fbc] 2021/05/13 - 04:23 Herbert A government can usually borrow at the lowest rates available in the country. Even in countries where one deems investment very risky due to instability, most people are willing to lend to the government at lower rates than to private corporations. Part of the reason is simple: governments can always raise taxes to cover revenue shortfalls. If something is profitable at 2% interest, that doesn't mean it'll be profitable at 4% interest Reply 3. [94a5] 2021/05/12 - 12:36 Benjamin Turon Ha! I actually got into a online fight with Mister Randal O'Toole when I responded in a letter-to-the-editor to a review of his book "Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need" by the Wall Street Journal -- he actually personally responded back at my published letter in a blog post on the Cato Institute website... No, Passenger Trains Don't Work in Europe & Asia Either https://www.cato.org/blog/ no-passenger-trains-dont-work-europe-asia-either I also gave a lovely review of his book on Amazon.com that I'm sure he appreciated... My favorite Randal O'Toole "fact" was when he was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor in 2012 stating that... ................ "The problem with Obama's high-speed rail is that it's an obsolete technology that doesn't make sense today," says Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that, along with the Heritage Foundation and the Reason Foundation, led the fight to nix the rail plan. And just because it works in other countries does not mean the United States should automatically climb on board. High-speed rail was successful in Japan because at the time it was developed only 12 percent of Japanese were driving," he says. "It makes no sense today when cars go where you want to go when you want to go. Just because other countries built this and are driving themselves into bankruptcy doesn't mean we should." .............. Of course a quite Google search shows that by the time the Tokaido Shinkansen open in 1964 Japan had already built its first expressway and was not just exporting cars, but building (in Australia) its first overseas auto plants -- so the Japanese certainly had the tech to build cars and highways, but did and continue to invest in passenger rail too. Like many conservative critics of passenger rail, O'Toole goes beyond slight-of-hand of statistics (like that most French people don't use the TGV on a daily basis) to stating outright canards. Reply + [94a5] 2021/05/12 - 13:23 Benjamin Turon Alon Levy, I found the hyperlinks very useful, especially on the modal split for travel time and distance, which is very useful for making the argument that if New York State is going to invest billions in the Empire Corridor, it should go with electrified 186-220-mph high-speed rail NYC-Niagara Falls. I no longer support adding a dedicated 90-mph passenger track within the existing ROW of the CSX mainline which only cuts an hour off the existing 8-hour travel time by Amtrak, I feel even with electrifying and upgrading the existing Metro-North ad Amtrak Hudson Line to Hoffmans west of Schenectady, that a new line on new right-of-way Amsterdam-Buffalo could bring NYC and Buffalo to within 4 to 5 hours, which would be very competitive and create the desired economic, social, and environmental effects that is attributed to modern passenger rail in the United States. The Empire Corridor is actual at 460 miles the longest multi-frequency corridor in the Amtrak system (beats the BosWash NEC by a few miles) and "higher speed" is not good enough (unlike the Boston-Portland Downeaster for example), you need the very high speeds to get the travel times that will make passenger rail the mode of choice along the NYC-Niagara corridor. The Empire Corridor HSR DEIS rejected "very high speed rail" for being "too expensive", but they idiotically proposed a new rail line NYC-Albany that was 39 miles longer than the existing Hudson Line and crossed the Hudson River twice! If you make use of the existing passenger railroad owned track and start your new HSR line where it ends west of Schenectady, then costs would be in the $15 billion range of ALT 125 which in the EIS included a new Albay-Buffalo dedicated passenger railway instead of improving the existing CSX mainline. The mistake in ALT 125, was failure to electrify the Hudson Line so you could run at 160, 186, or 220-mph on the new tracks, instead they proposed 125-mph NJTransit dual-mode locomotives. The consultants for the EIS also work for the California High Speed Rail Authority... Thank you! Reply o [3f15] 2021/05/13 - 17:38 adirondacker12800 There are long stretches west of Little Falls that could bring the freight along for the grade separation ride, cheaply. New York City airports aren't infinitely expandable either. Less trucks beating the Thruway back into gravel and less airplanes clogging airports are worth something. Which is outside of the scope of the studies they do. Reply + [3f15] 2021/05/12 - 14:09 adirondacker12800 It makes no sense today when cars go where you want to go when you want to go. He lives in a Futurama fantasy world where there is no traffic and it's always easy to park or he doesn't want to go places where there is traffic. Vaguely in the same place of the other one who recently said, this is a paraphrase, no one wants to use Penn Station New York, it's too crowded. If the conclusion is that Real Americans(tm) drive everywhere they are going to contort umpteen different ways to support that conclusion. Reply o [7c0a] 2021/05/12 - 15:37 Henry Miller A large fraction of the people don't live or work in downtown whatever city they live closest to. They have adjusted their schedule and route to work so that traffic isn't big problem for them. They sometimes hit a traffic jam, but typically they only see a small part of the whole because they have already figured out how to route around it. It might take a couple hours to get across the city, but they are not doing that so they don't care. In short, traffic is only annoying, and parking is everywhere - because they don't go anywhere that it isn't. What he doesn't see is HSR, unlike standard public transit is fast. Sure you can drive there, but HSR is 3x faster than driving. This makes it more compelling for drivers. Though I still contend we need to do something about the bad local transit - enough drivers are actually doing things that good local transit would do cheaper and just as well as driving as to get 20-30% mode share in any city. Incompetent local transport administration (bad routes, and poor frequency) means driving is better than it should be. Reply # [3f15] 2021/05/12 - 16:20 adirondacker12800 They don't commute far yet there are still transcontinental flights and intercontinental flights. One of the things the studies that resulted in the High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 noted was that people didn't want to drive to Manhattan and airports sucked. Even back then when you could arrive moments before your flight and still get on it. Traffic hasn't gotten any better in places along the NEC or in places between them. Or in other places like California or Texas. Reply # [60ce] 2021/05/12 - 18:36 michaelrjames @Henry Miller: "They have adjusted their schedule and route to work so that traffic isn't big problem for them." Not a problem? It's literally killing them. That is, causing chronic health problems and premature death. Not to mention shockingly awful quality of life. I don't have experience of commuting in the US but I have met plenty of my peer group in the SF Bay area and it sounds grim. Many who work in Silicon Valley choose to live in the east bay, partly due to cost and availability of housing (="drive until you qualify"), partly due to partner job opportunity and partly due to children issues (schools, childcare ....). The "adjustment" you speak of can mean starting their day at 4am to beat the traffic and getting very nervous as 3pm approaches because there can be a very tight 15 minute window before the roads start jamming up in the mid-afternoon. And these are the ones who are permitted to flexi-work, which itself only exists because the road congestion is so bad. Most people can only do this for a limited period before something gives. After about 3 years there wasn't a single person left in the UCSF lab I guest-worked in, and not a single one left in the Bay Area. Americans only do, or "tolerate", this shit because-like Randal O'Toole-they close their minds to alternatives. Reply @ [3f15] 2021/05/12 - 19:21 adirondacker12800 Most people don't live in places like that. @ [60ce] 2021/05/12 - 20:28 michaelrjames @adirondacker: "Most people don't live in places like that." While I am a bit distrustful of these league tables, apparently it's not true. SF (and I assume they mean the Bay Area) is only number 7, and in fact almost exactly the US cities' average: Rank City Hrs lost to congestion p.a. 1 Boston, MS 149 2 Chicago, IL 145 3 Philadelphia, PA 142 4 New York City, NY 140 5 Washington, D.C. 124 6 Los Angeles, CA 103 7 San Francisco, CA 97 8 Portland, Oregon 89 9 Baltimore, MD 84 10 Atlanta, GA 82 This is an IRIX study using 2019 data, in which they say: "In the U.S. specifically, drivers lost an average of 99 hours in traffic, equivalent to $1,377, in 2019. On a national level, drivers lost more than $88 billion in time due to traffic congestion." @ [3f15] 2021/05/12 - 21:10 adirondacker12800 99 hours a year includes non-work trips. Keep the arithmetic simple 100 hours over a 250 day work-year is 24 minutes a day or 12 minutes on the way to work and 12 minutes on the way home. @ [3fbc] 2021/05/13 - 04:26 Herbert The time people spend commuting is remarkably constant. All a new faster mode of commuting does is allow them to move farther away from work @ [8d6e] 2021/05/13 - 04:36 Eric2 But this is more due to zoning policy than transportation policy. @ [04ed] 2021/05/13 - 07:19 tompw "hours lost to congestion" means "extra travel time on road compared with free-flow (zero traffic) travel times".... but a road network that operates at free flow in its busiest time is substantially below capacity. So any road network that operates near capacity (or "efficiently" will have congestion delays. o [94a5] 2021/05/12 - 15:52 Benjamin Turon Futurama actually had High Speed Rail in it! Um... looks like Albany...lol [Dx4DHVdVAA] Reply o [87f0] 2021/05/12 - 22:34 Bobson Dugnutt Futurama also had pneumatic tubes as public transportation, suicide booths, vending machines serving crack, and your pets could be brought back to life through reverse fossilization. It's not all good, though. Richard Nixon's head in a jar is elected president again. Oh, wrong Futurama. Sorry. Reply # [3fbc] 2021/05/13 - 04:31 Herbert Welcome to the world of tomorrow! Reply # [94a5] 2021/05/13 - 06:46 Benjamin Turon lol Reply o [c93f] 2021/05/13 - 17:50 Lee Ratner I use my car and transit to get around the Bay Area. Big and slow moving traffic jams are much less frequent in the Bay Area than they were back in New York City, where I had always encounter them if I was going back to my apartment from either LGA or JFK. Without fail. In the bay area, nearly every big long traffic jam I was in was because of an accident or bad weather. Reply + [1fce] 2021/05/13 - 00:02 borners There is something telling that among the major advanced economies that those who have pushed cartopia urbanism have seen their domestic car industries struggle and their car traditional industrial cities decay. Detroit has that silly people mover and in England Birmingham can't even finish electrification. Munich has S-bahn and U-bahn, Nagoya has JR Central/Meitetsu/Subway, exburban Seoul is the centre of the Korean car industry, Wuhan has a metro while being an HSR hub, and even Rennes has a metro line despite being tiny! Its not a perfect alignment, those cities within their own countries tend to do worse than service-sector oriented primate cities on mass-transit mode share. Though I do wonder if there is some causal relationship, as service value-added has become a bigger part of manufacturing, disinvestment in the downtown of your car city comes back to bite you. Services and Industry are actually complements when done right. Reply o [3fbc] 2021/05/13 - 04:29 Herbert How does the Ruhr area as "Germany's rust belt" fit into this? Reply # [1fce] 2021/05/13 - 05:11 borners The Ruhr isn't strictly one of Germany's car towns (it has a bunch...and whatever Lower Saxony is). Its an old 19th century coal-iron-textiles poly-centric urban region, like Ohio-Pennsylvania, England's North Industrial belt, Wallonia, Northern France, Silesia, Manchuria, Don Bas etc. Its struggled to generate new industries compared to Southern Germany and will eventually fall behind Greater Berlin and Saxony. But viewed compared to those others I've mentioned its done much better, close to national average Gdp per capita and relatively high quality of life. Alas pretty good mass transit will not solve your region's skills and specialization problems. That's not just a problem for the Rhineland, the world's richest and largest vintage polycentric "rustbelt" the Keihanshin area has probably the best rail transport in the world after Seoul and Tokyo, but its been losing ground to Tokyo and Nagoya for decades because its too reliant on skilled artisanal manuficiers and doesn't have enough high-valued added services for its size. It also hasn't lucked out the way Nagoya has with Toyota (for now). Its not a problem of downtown disinvestment or transport failure so much as other things (universities universities universities). Reply # [05af] 2021/05/13 - 06:43 Alon Levy I don't think Essen and Dortmund are especially rusty, but then again I live in Berlin and socialize with people from exciting places like Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Saxony. And I also don't think these places are even that auto-oriented? The Kreise are, but the main cities really aren't, the ridership on the Leipzig trams and the S-Bahn, or on the Stadtbahns in Dortmund and Essen, is very healthy. Reply @ [1fce] 2021/05/13 - 09:09 borners The Rhineland urban complex is the healthiest by far of the coal-iron-textiles regions in the world. Its a model that the Midwest and the North of England should have looked to but didn't because they thought they were so awesome (Northern English people make Londoners look modest). They did almost everything right except universities, no craft-unions, pro-competition commercial policy, a region-wide gubernational authority interested urban transport integration etc etc. I was thinking more the contrast of Munich/Nagoya vs Detroit/Birmingham the latter two wrecking their inner cities during their fat years and ignoring transit. Meanwhile Munich/Nagoya invested in their inner cities and transport systems, and have seen their car industries prosper to present. I'm talking domestic car producers not car mode share. o [2e27] 2021/05/13 - 17:20 Sassy > those cities within their own countries tend to do worse than service-sector oriented primate cities on mass-transit mode share. Car factories are massive even compared to most factories which are already much larger than human scale, and are just inherently low density employment centers. Auto R&D also has a lot of space intensive facilities, from prototyping garages to test tracks. It's harder to places these buildings in anything resembling an urban environment, so you end with big employment centers on big suburban industrial campuses. This drives decentralization and encourages car use. Despite the home cities of a lot of companies underperforming the nation as a whole, I think the companies still benefit from the better-than-US mass transit, and from being able to locate some of the jobs that don't take up a ton of space in service oriented transit oriented cities. Reply 4. [3f15] 2021/05/12 - 13:32 adirondacker12800 O'Toole misunderstands this literature. He understands it well enough to cook the books after cherry picking examples. The right wing think tanks aren't in the business of collecting facts and explaining conclusions. They are in the business of collecting conclusions and desperately trying to find something somewhere that supports it. Even if they have to cook the books. Reply + [94a5] 2021/05/12 - 15:48 Benjamin Turon So true Reply + [3f3b] 2021/05/13 - 11:44 kArl Human beings act on feelings and back fill with reasons. aka --> cherry picking. if you're human, you do it too. Reply o [3fbc] 2021/05/13 - 15:45 Herbert Science is supposed to minimize that Reply 5. [3fbc] 2021/05/13 - 04:19 Herbert The problem with this writeup is similar to the problems of much of the stuff written about SCOTUS. It implicitly assumes O'Toole is acting in good faith and his methods just "happen to" lead to certain conclusions. No. The end point is the starting point. The process is not "where do I get by dispassionately starting from xyz" but rather "my conclusion is abc, which way can I finagle an argument that sounds at least half way plausible" Reply 6. [f263] 2021/05/13 - 06:03 Mark N. That anyone takes seriously (let alone publishes) a "policy analysis" that begins with "High- speed trains were rendered obsolete in 1958..." is the real story. Reply + [7c0a] 2021/05/13 - 08:26 Henry Miller If your idea of HSR is 1958 trains that do 90mph at best, then that would be correct. For most rail fans in the US that seems to be the case - the miss the days of steam engines, and think that is fast enough. By 1958 you could buy a car that did 100 mph (faster than the train), and there were highways that allowed getting up to those speeds. Since then we have slowed cars because we have learned humans are not safe at those speeds (also fuel economy), but even at today's speeds (70 mph) 1958 trains are not enough enough faster than cars as to be worth it vs just driving for any trip that you are not flying. Trains have got faster in ways cars cannot of the years. Nobody in the US knows that, the Amtrak trains we have in the US were obsoleted by the car in 1958. Reply 7. [b6b0] 2021/05/13 - 09:16 Peter L I usually read every post here, but in my experience Mr O'Toole is never right and is, mostly, an internet-type troll who has managed to get some traction elsewhere. I don't need to read rebuttal of his fantasies because ... why? Otherwise, keep up the good work. Like the scathing review of the recent Amtrak's corporate ignorance. Reply + [05af] 2021/05/13 - 11:26 Alon Levy Because I have an entire section, conveniently located at the beginning of the post, that goes over the situation of the TGV network, with links to construction costs and planning practices that I found while constructing an HSR cost database. Reply 8. [1fe6] 2021/05/13 - 10:06 Kevin I think "globally ignorant US libertarians" has more to do with a bias against rail, not incuriosity per se. For example, for air reform Reason seems to do a good job summarizing different ATC funding and government mechanisms worldwide, and discussing successes and failures of airport privatization worldwide. I'm not a subject matter expert so perhaps their discussing is inaccurate, but at least they attempt. Further, Cato is about the only significant US policy group that points out how economists interpretation of financial regulation/history is typically drawing only on the highly idiosyncratic US experience. Reply 9. [56a5] 2021/05/13 - 11:27 Gregg I live in Tokyo, Japan and I absolutely love the train system. I can decide on a whim I'd like to visit my friends in Kyoto (~450km, ~300miles) and just take a local train to the high speed station and get on a high speed train within 10-20 minutes. No reservations needed (except during 1, 2 crowded weeks). That said, while I 1000% wish we had ubiquitous high speed rail in the USA it will fail without a corresponding massive local rail in each city. In Europe I take high speed rail From/To Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London, Barcelona, others and at each stop I transfer to local trains and subways and easily get where I want to go. Same in Japan, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and all the other major cities have excellent public transportation which makes taking the high speed rail so convenient. The same is not true in the USA. Most major US cities have pretty poor public transportation, especially compared to their European and Asian counterparts. Let me also add, Japanese trains are privately owned. Tokyo for example has at least 10 different train companies covering different parts of the city (JR, Eiden, Tokyu, Keio, Odakyu, Tobu, Keikyu, ...). Osaka and Kyoto also have many different companies running many different lines. Often there are multiple ways to get somewhere via different companies lines. AFAIK part of the way they make money is they own or buy the land near the stations and build up buildings to which they can then rent out store fronts. Since people exit at the stations it's prime real estate. I have no knowledge of the details or ultimate repercussions but it certainly appears to be working here. Reply + [3f15] 2021/05/13 - 13:41 adirondacker12800 They fly places without taking their car with them. Reply + [05af] 2021/05/13 - 13:47 Alon Levy Sure. But, two things: 1. O'Toole is not saying "the Shinkansen and TGV are great, but it's difficult to replicate them in the US without connecting transit." I would be sympathetic to such an argument, which Richard Mlynarik would make in comments circa 2009-10 attacking California HSR ridership projections. 2. In Japan, a gravity model looking only at metro area populations and distance and nothing else is very accurate at predicting rail traffic volumes between everywhere in Honshu and Tokyo; it overpredicts inter-island rail traffic, where the air/rail modal split is atypically favorable to air by Honshu or European standards, and through-Tokyo rail traffic (Osaka-Sendai, etc.). The upshot: there is similar propensity to take the Shinkansen to and from Tokyo in Osaka, with excellent rail transit; Sendai, with meh rail transit; and Aomori, with barely any rail transit. This suggests to me that to the extent connecting transit matters, it only needs to be good at one end, not both. I take it into account in my modeling and do not recommend the construction of lines that rely on connections between two no-transit cities, like St. Louis and Dallas. I do recommend high-speed rail between a no-transit city and a transit city, for example New York-Cleveland, and if you believe my model, then 70% of Eastern US HSR ridership would be to or from New York, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, or Montreal. Reply o [3f15] 2021/05/13 - 14:30 adirondacker12800 Cleveland has transit that runs most of the day. Even with the lousy frequency on the trains and buses people still fly to Cleveland. I would have to be extremely motivated to drive to Cleveland. There are no non-stops to Cleveland from Albany at the moment but there are to Detroit. And hour and half-ish. Three hours airport curb to airport curb. Connecting flights are three and half-ish which is longer than changing trains in Schenectady would be. Either way, plane or train, my car is still in New York. All the methods I could use at an airport will work at a train station. Reply o [3fbc] 2021/05/13 - 15:50 Herbert Beetroot stations wouldn't work if people only used train stations that have high quality public transit access... Reply 10. [b0b5] 2021/05/13 - 17:49 Ted Can anyone link me to a summary of Alon's issues with public choice theory? It seems to get used as shorthand on this blog for "systematically distrust government workers' domain expertise" (1), when I generally understood it to mean "make sure people's actual incentives line up with the stated goal of the larger organization". (2) As a New Yorker, a painfully salient example of where I would have loved to see public choice theory applied (as I understand it) would have been in the employment contract of Andy Byford. One would expect that Byford, as NYC Transit Authority head, would be rewarded for improving transit in NYC. And he did improve transit in NYC! It was great! Why did he end up resigning? Because it turns out, regardless of his job title, his actual incentive structure wasn't "improve NYC transit", but rather "make Governor Cuomo happy". A plausible interpretation of public choice theory could have suggested that maximizing NYCTA effectiveness would necessitate placing _greater_ trust in Byford the domain-expert bureaucrat; specifically, remove Byford's perverse incentives by insulating him from the whims of a capricious and vindictive governor. I generally think that public choice theory makes a lot of sense, but Alon's a sharp guy who does his homework, and I tend to broadly agree with him, so maybe I've missed a beat here. Perhaps this is the sort of motte-and-bailey (3) argument where your Cato Institute types commonly advocate actual arguments like "distrust the lazy workers", but when challenged they retreat to the more defensible position of "be careful to align incentives", and then Alon and I end up talking past each other because we use the same term to describe two basically different things? 1) https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/06/11/ managerialism-and-civil-service/ 2) https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicChoiceTheory.html 3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy Reply Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here... [ ] Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: * * * * Gravatar Email (required) (Address never made public) [ ] Name (required) [ ] Website [ ] WordPress.com Logo You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change ) Google photo You are commenting using your Google account. 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