California's High Speed Rail Project Runs Out of Money

Since you asked about S.F - L.A. and TPA-ORL-MIA, here are the numbers.

San Francisco and L.A. have 18 MM people in their metropolitan areas and 382 miles between them, or 47,000 people per mile. This is borderline for having the population density to break even. The additional cost for building HSR in the U.S. (much less the most environmentally sensitive state in the country) pushes this one towards fail. You have more additional costs on this line, however, with the potential for earthquakes. You can add population to the equation, but doing so will slow down the train as you add stops in San Jose and other smaller cities. A two hour train ride is barely competitive with a 50-minute flight, so a 3-hour train ride (or longer) would be less competitive. The distance between the two major cities makes it somewhat unfeasible by itself. This project has failure written all over it from the start (plus massive cost overruns).

The cities of Tampa, Orlando, and Miami have metropolitan populations combining for 11.5 million people, with a total distance of track of about 321 miles. That's only 36,000 people per mile. You get a slight boost for Disney being a tourist Mecca and being on the route, pushing it a little closer to feasibility, but there are other negatives. There is not much in the way of light rail in any of the cities. The Deep South is no place to be walking several blocks in the heat with luggage and worrying about lightning storms, so passengers are stuck taking a bus or taxi or taking their chances with an Uber driver. This project will fail. People will take it to go to a football game or concert, but that is not enough ridership to justify the massive cost. The only crowded section will be MCO to Disney.

 

If something is a necessity, then it does not need to turn a profit. The U.S. military does not turn a profit, but it is a necessity to prevent other nations from invading us or our allies and trading partners. If you don't have roads in general, then groceries are not delivered to your supermarket, and you have to grow your own food or starve. Can you point to any modern society that does not have roads (because I can point to at least one that does not have high speed rail)? While it may be true that some money is wasted on roads that are not needed, overall, the roads we have are well-used and worth the investment. The rare cases where a member of Congress pork-barrels a road to nowhere (like Ted Stevens' of Alaska and his bridge to nowhere), he is pilloried and ridiculed.

This is typical of the far left wing. You are so blinded by your own partisan viewpoint that you refuse to discuss something as simple and obvious as economic feasibility of a (non-necessary) project. Your side wants it, therefore, we should have it (and "you"--meaning everyone else--should pay for it). It seems to be a lack of maturity on the part of the AOC's in the world and their supporters: Step 1 - shut down discussion; Step 2 - demand what you want; Step 3 - force everyone else to pay for it.

 

Actually, I was just giving you a taste of your own medicine. (MSNBC awaits your arrival, BTW.)

And your reading comprehension is really poor:

1) I did not mention the word "liberal" in my post. The "far left" is presumably a subset of the liberals. And I did not state that you belonged to the far left, I only suggested that you had some things in common with them.

2) I did not say that "all" roads were good.

3) I did not say that trains were automatically pork (read my previous posts--I made a case for building HSR in the NE corridor).


As far as your arguments above, they are rather weak. You can have rail in "dense" areas--in fact, most large cities in the NE already do. It's called "light rail", also known as subway transit and elevated trains. Many larger and smaller towns are visited by Amtrak trains. We have plenty of rail already, just not of the high speed variety. Just because rail might be a necessity, does not mean that high speed rail is a necessity. The cost for HSR is an order or two of magnitude greater than light rail or Amtrak, so it would be wise to give it a lot more thought before you invest in it.

And your argument that whenever a developer decides to put in a neighborhood, roads should not go to that neighborhood, just sounds bizarre. Why would anyone want to live in a neighborhood with no access by road? It is irrelevant whether the developer becomes rich or not from the neighborhood--how is punishing the new residents of the neighborhood going to bring "justice" to the developer? Doesn't the developer pay income taxes? Won't the new homeowners pay property taxes? What do you have against roads, anyway? Do you live in a houseboat or something?

 

He is in for a rude awakening when he finds out that he has to pay $20 to park at the train station. However, if the parking cost is only $18, he will be able to celebrate. Actually, parking at the train station would only be that high if the trains ran mostly full. In Florida, that will only happen for a few hours per week. So parking will probably be reasonable in a nearly empty parking lot, and will be another indication that the rail line is a failure.

BTW, I think he only mentioned the parking cost, and not the ticket price.

 

Rural roads are "extremely expensive"? Compared to what, high speed rail? Let's see, a rural 2-lane road costs $2.5 million per mile. California's high speed rail currently costs $256 million per mile (and they aren't finished spending yet--it could go a lot higher). High speed rail requires stations at each stop, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Rural roads require stop signs, which cost about a hundred dollars each. HSR is literally like, a hundred times more expensive.

Cost Per Mile Models

How do you expect farmers to get their food to market? Mule train? There are also a lot of industries that are located on rural roads. How are they supposed to receive their raw materials and send out their products, especially if they are landlocked and without freight rail service? (And even if they do have rail service, a certain percentage of their products will go out by truck because that is what a percentage of their customers want.) The economy would be crippled without the road system. Our economy is doing just fine without high speed rail, for some reason.

Have you even been to a country with high speed rail? Have you ever ridden on high speed rail? Have you seen how full these trains are during normal usage? I have. I saw a lot of empty seats in three countries that had HSR.

Just because something benefits someone, does not mean that everyone should pay for it. What makes your city dwellers so special? Where are they going that is so important that they need to get there in a hurry? Why aren't Amtrak, Delta, Hertz, and Greyhound good enough for them? They have at least four good options for traveling between cities, and you're telling me that we need to give them a fifth option, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. And unless I'm mistaken, your city dwellers will give us no guarantee that they will even use the fifth option. We are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars with no more than a hope that they will use it. Will they pay more taxes if they can travel on a high speed train? Should we give more more options to the rural residents to make life fair for them? Or are they not special enough for you?

The U.S. is just not a great country for HSR. The country is too large, and it does not have enough people (like China, for example) to justify it. With the clear and obvious exception of the northeast corridor. You have four major cities in essentially a line, with over 33 million people, over a distance of only 237 miles. No other place in the U.S. comes close to that kind of population density in a relatively short distance.

 

You have to vote for the boondoggle to see how big of a boondoggle it is. At least, according to the Nancy Pelosi school of government thinking.

 

It's no surprise to me. Not many billionaires have $98+ billion to spend. Risks and liabilities are high. Chances for turning a profit are low (almost non-existent). Environmental permitting alone can take years, if not decades. If Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos get a little wacky on their deathbed, they might bequeath enough money to someone to build HSR, but I don't expect it.

 

You can't get the speed of a train from N.Y. to D.C. (with stops in Philly and Baltimore) down to an hour, unless you use mag-lev technology (like the Pudong/Shanghai HSR train). A 225 mph high speed rail train would require about 1 hour and 37 minutes. Acela's top speed on that route is 135 mph--nowhere near fast enough to go 237 miles in one hour (not to mention making stops). You really need a 300 mph train to make the trip in an hour, and that assumes that you can complete a stop in 5 minutes or less. There is nothing you can do with $30 billion dollars to make Acela trains go 300 mph, short of strapping rockets on it and launching it into a low orbit.

I think 97 minutes would be fast enough, however, to make HSR competitive with air travel, which is all you really need to do, especially if the stations are located in large airports. A flight will get you there in 45 minutes, but it requires you to arrive an hour or two early to make sure you don't miss your flight. For HSR, you wouldn't have to buy a ticket for a particular departure time, since the trains would leave every 10-20 minutes. So you just need some time to get through security, and wait a few minutes for the next train.