8 ms·

Assuming 640 billion passenger-miles of air travel, the railway still makes rational sense. Once the land is purchased, levelled, and conditioned you now have

Assuming 640 billion passenger-miles of air travel, the railway still makes rational sense. Once the land is purchased, levelled, and conditioned you now have a space that can have trains running on it for the next fifty, one hundred, or more years. Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting. This type of short term thinking is why infrastructure spending in the US is at an all time low. Instead of spending for tens of years into the future, we only evaluate the costs relative to the next five years and therefore make decisions more valuable to tomorrow than next week. Once CA buys this route, they own this route forever. And in a state gaining more and more people every day, cutting out land for infrastructure is only going to get more painful in time.

jeffrey_t_b 9y ago
Well, even if you say that capital expenses are irrelevant considering the very long time frame, you still have to make the argument that operating expenses of the rail are smaller. What are they, and are they smaller than air travel (~$0.10/passenger-mile)? The only estimate of that I could find with two minutes of googling is ~$0.39/passenger-mile (via http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=88 http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=88 supposedly using the National Transit Database). That means that a rail line is even _worse_ in the long run.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > That means that a rail line is even _worse_ in the long run Critical qualifier: in the United States. The British rail system, as I understand it, runs with significantly lower variable costs than e.g. Amtrak or BART.
- toyg 9y ago
  Rail costs go down as traffic and network expand. Most of the US is under-served by rail, and California is pretty ridiculous too. I was shocked by how few stations Amtrak had when I last visited (about 7 years ago). Like for most things, if you invest, costs go down in the long term.
- deaddodo 9y ago
  The cost for Amtrak and other commuter train services is inflated due to the fact that the rails are owned and/or preempted by commercial rail services. The whole point of California building out the line, directly from tax dollars, is to go around that. A dedicated line drops in price, is far more reliable and can be managed by text according to traffic.
  - Gibbon1 9y ago
    I'm slightly unsure but I think CHSR runs next to freight rail lines for a fair amount in the central valley. And I think CHSR is also paying for part of CalTrain's grade separation and electrification. So benefits aren't exclusive to CHSR.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> Once the land is purchased, levelled, and conditioned you now have a space that can have trains running on it for the next fifty...or more years Look at the route California's HSR takes [1]. That's a map drawn for short-term political gains, not long-term utility. Unless we develop technology that cancels out inertia, that track is speed limited for much of its route. Comparing non-American infrastructure costs and benefits to American infrastructure is misguided because American infrastructure costs unreasonably more [2]. [1] http://www.ushsr.com/images/632_CA_HSR_Phasing_632.jpg http://www.ushsr.com/images/632_CA_HSR_Phasing_632.jpg [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  > Comparing non-American infrastructure costs and benefits to American infrastructure is misguided because American infrastructure costs unreasonably more Can you elaborate why you believe the comparison is misguided? It costs more because it costs more is self evident, but doesn't suffice as an explanation in depth.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > It costs more because it costs more is self evident, but doesn't suffice as an explanation in depth I linked to a New York Times article [1] that analyses the issue well. For a shorter, bloggier read try this CityLab piece [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... [2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastructure-projects-cost-way-more-they-should/8799/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastruc...
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      The Citylab article provides 7 Reasons U.S. Infrastructure Projects Cost Way More Than They Should. That doesn't explain why you believe a non-US comparison is misguided, rather it supports the notion of a non-US comparison. US infrastructure projects cost more because the US isn't Japan or Europe would be a neat summary.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
leovander 9y ago
> Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting. Good point. The government may not run all the trains[0], but the rail companies help with congestion and up-keep as well. And that is just the trains running on the National Rail, not including private rail lines. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_operating_trains_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_operating_tr...
dzhiurgis 9y ago
> Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting That could be the reason why flying is 4x cheaper than trains there.
- toyg 9y ago
  No, the reason for that is that the semi-privatised model failed abysmally, compounding historical lag. Most of Europe pays less for a superior experience. Reasons: Europeans literally rebuilt their networks from scratch post-WWII, and used the chance to electrify and modernise most of them - whereas Britain, that was bombed much less, just kept using very old lines (most of them are STILL not electric, in 2018, which is absurd). That's investment failure #1, driven by short-sightedness. Then you have the privatisation shenanigans from the 90s onward. This is investment failure #2: in order to reduce running costs and avoid having to deal with running trains, every few years taxpayers end up paying huge one-off sums that basically offset any potential savings. In the rest of Europe, despite attempts at privatisation, the old state-funded companies still dominate, achieving economies of scale and efficiencies that private competitors will never be able to match.
  - baud147258 9y ago
    Sorry to blow your rose-tinted bubble about public European rail companies, but they suck sometimes. In France, the push in the last decades for high-speed rail (called TGV) has left wide stretchs of the netword underfunded, there's a lot of short and mid-distance railway that are in terrible shape. Also we had train stations, starting point of long-distance trains in Paris, that had outage (as in no train arriving/leaving) lasting days this summer. Also not all the network is electrified, and never will be. So maybe it would be worse with one or more private companies, but public companies are no silver bullet and will fail sometime.
    - toyg 9y ago
      I'm Italian, I know very well where the state-funded model can (and will) fail. But it's way, way superior to the UK rip-off experience. The fact that the UK basically doesn't actually make trains anymore (the few factories left are foreign-owned and don't really produce much anyway), unlike any other major EU country, is another clear symptom of a broken system.
pzone 9y ago
You aren't saving those $.10 per mile, you're converting them to a different operating cost per mile, with fuel, maintenance, crew, and so on. Any well thought out cost benefit analysis says 64 billion is absolutely unreasonable. You're right that short term thinking and underinvestment in infrastructure is a problem. But you have to choose your projects intelligently: things like revamping BART and New York's MTA, and taking better care of the most-used roads and bridges are far far better uses of public money. Part of the reason we underinvest in infrastructure is that people see these pointless multi-billion-dollar boondoggles and cry out their money is being wasted. If you really want more spending on infrastructure, give up on your dream projects and spend on things that will actually make a big difference in people's lives.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Any well thought out cost benefit analysis says 64 billion is absolutely unreasonable. This desperately needs the support of at least one such “well thought out” cost/benefit analysis.

jeffrey_t_b 9y ago

Well, even if you say that capital expenses are irrelevant considering the very long time frame, you still have to make the argument that operating expenses of the rail are smaller. What are they, and are they smaller than air travel (~$0.10/passenger-mile)? The only estimate of that I could find with two minutes of googling is ~$0.39/passenger-mile (via http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=88 http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=88 supposedly using the National Transit Database). That means that a rail line is even _worse_ in the long run.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> That means that a rail line is even _worse_ in the long run Critical qualifier: in the United States. The British rail system, as I understand it, runs with significantly lower variable costs than e.g. Amtrak or BART.
toyg 9y ago
Rail costs go down as traffic and network expand. Most of the US is under-served by rail, and California is pretty ridiculous too. I was shocked by how few stations Amtrak had when I last visited (about 7 years ago). Like for most things, if you invest, costs go down in the long term.
deaddodo 9y ago
The cost for Amtrak and other commuter train services is inflated due to the fact that the rails are owned and/or preempted by commercial rail services. The whole point of California building out the line, directly from tax dollars, is to go around that. A dedicated line drops in price, is far more reliable and can be managed by text according to traffic.
- Gibbon1 9y ago
  I'm slightly unsure but I think CHSR runs next to freight rail lines for a fair amount in the central valley. And I think CHSR is also paying for part of CalTrain's grade separation and electrification. So benefits aren't exclusive to CHSR.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> Once the land is purchased, levelled, and conditioned you now have a space that can have trains running on it for the next fifty...or more years Look at the route California's HSR takes [1]. That's a map drawn for short-term political gains, not long-term utility. Unless we develop technology that cancels out inertia, that track is speed limited for much of its route. Comparing non-American infrastructure costs and benefits to American infrastructure is misguided because American infrastructure costs unreasonably more [2]. [1] http://www.ushsr.com/images/632_CA_HSR_Phasing_632.jpg http://www.ushsr.com/images/632_CA_HSR_Phasing_632.jpg [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
> Comparing non-American infrastructure costs and benefits to American infrastructure is misguided because American infrastructure costs unreasonably more Can you elaborate why you believe the comparison is misguided? It costs more because it costs more is self evident, but doesn't suffice as an explanation in depth.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > It costs more because it costs more is self evident, but doesn't suffice as an explanation in depth I linked to a New York Times article [1] that analyses the issue well. For a shorter, bloggier read try this CityLab piece [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... [2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastructure-projects-cost-way-more-they-should/8799/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/04/7-reasons-us-infrastruc...
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    The Citylab article provides 7 Reasons U.S. Infrastructure Projects Cost Way More Than They Should. That doesn't explain why you believe a non-US comparison is misguided, rather it supports the notion of a non-US comparison. US infrastructure projects cost more because the US isn't Japan or Europe would be a neat summary.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

leovander 9y ago

> Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting. Good point. The government may not run all the trains[0], but the rail companies help with congestion and up-keep as well. And that is just the trains running on the National Rail, not including private rail lines. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_operating_trains_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_operating_tr...

dzhiurgis 9y ago

> Look at the UK's railway lines, some of them have been operating for two hundred years and counting That could be the reason why flying is 4x cheaper than trains there.

toyg 9y ago
No, the reason for that is that the semi-privatised model failed abysmally, compounding historical lag. Most of Europe pays less for a superior experience. Reasons: Europeans literally rebuilt their networks from scratch post-WWII, and used the chance to electrify and modernise most of them - whereas Britain, that was bombed much less, just kept using very old lines (most of them are STILL not electric, in 2018, which is absurd). That's investment failure #1, driven by short-sightedness. Then you have the privatisation shenanigans from the 90s onward. This is investment failure #2: in order to reduce running costs and avoid having to deal with running trains, every few years taxpayers end up paying huge one-off sums that basically offset any potential savings. In the rest of Europe, despite attempts at privatisation, the old state-funded companies still dominate, achieving economies of scale and efficiencies that private competitors will never be able to match.
- baud147258 9y ago
  Sorry to blow your rose-tinted bubble about public European rail companies, but they suck sometimes. In France, the push in the last decades for high-speed rail (called TGV) has left wide stretchs of the netword underfunded, there's a lot of short and mid-distance railway that are in terrible shape. Also we had train stations, starting point of long-distance trains in Paris, that had outage (as in no train arriving/leaving) lasting days this summer. Also not all the network is electrified, and never will be. So maybe it would be worse with one or more private companies, but public companies are no silver bullet and will fail sometime.
  - toyg 9y ago
    I'm Italian, I know very well where the state-funded model can (and will) fail. But it's way, way superior to the UK rip-off experience. The fact that the UK basically doesn't actually make trains anymore (the few factories left are foreign-owned and don't really produce much anyway), unlike any other major EU country, is another clear symptom of a broken system.

pzone 9y ago

You aren't saving those $.10 per mile, you're converting them to a different operating cost per mile, with fuel, maintenance, crew, and so on. Any well thought out cost benefit analysis says 64 billion is absolutely unreasonable. You're right that short term thinking and underinvestment in infrastructure is a problem. But you have to choose your projects intelligently: things like revamping BART and New York's MTA, and taking better care of the most-used roads and bridges are far far better uses of public money. Part of the reason we underinvest in infrastructure is that people see these pointless multi-billion-dollar boondoggles and cry out their money is being wasted. If you really want more spending on infrastructure, give up on your dream projects and spend on things that will actually make a big difference in people's lives.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Any well thought out cost benefit analysis says 64 billion is absolutely unreasonable. This desperately needs the support of at least one such “well thought out” cost/benefit analysis.