5 ms·

I like the analysis. But rail is unpopular in US for political reasons, not practical ones.

barbazoo 6y ago
What do you mean by that? Is there a point where if you're on the left of it on the political spectrum you're in favor, and otherwise against?
- geogra4 6y ago
  Somewhat true. Passenger rail is not seen as part of "infrastructure" on the right.
  - labster 6y ago
    Indeed. People on the right wing are saying that Biden’s new infrastructure bill is nearly all pork because only 5% is dedicated to roads. Really only roads and dams count.
  - _delirium 6y ago
    I think generally true, but it can vary by geography. There are a number of Republicans from small to medium-sized towns that either have Amtrak stations, or would like to have them, who are supportive of passenger rail in some form, and some of that support bubbles up to Republican Senators in some states. That's one reason the Amtrak national network continues to hobble along. If its fate rested on purely party-line votes, it would've been killed years ago. For example, Kansas's senators joined with Democrats to keep the Southwest Chief route from getting axed. Texas and Oklahoma, both pretty red states, co-fund a "state-supported route", the Heartland Flyer, from Ft. Worth to Oklahoma City. For somewhat different reasons, Utah has also invested in commuter rail (FrontRunner).
- azernik 6y ago
  Yes. e.g. the California High Speed Rail is a partisan issue in California politics, and generally Republicans are suspicious of commuter and high-speed rail as wasteful environmentalism.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  In general terms, yes. It is just another one of the tribal issues in US politics that gets argued starting from ideology and not debated on the merits.
  - wallacoloo 6y ago
    I think in this case the demographic split actually is correlated to the merits. As in, if you’re in a dense city, you’re probably more pro-rail, because you’ll be the one actually using that rail. If you’re in a culdesac suburb or even further from the city, you’re likely to not be pro-rail because you won’t be using it. You could call that tribal, or you could just call it “voting for your interests”. It feels slightly different from the tribal issues I see more frequently (policing, healthcare, schooling), but maybe I’m fooling myself.
Fern_Blossom 6y ago
The widening of I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs, about a 60 mile stretch, is a great example as to why you're wrong. To add an extra lane to help the load of roughly 20% of Colorado Springs residents (~50k people) that commute between the cities, costs $350 million. To build an HSR would be around $1.8 billion. There was a push to put in a rail as this seemed like a perfect use case (spoiler alert, it showed how niche HSR actually is and how it was a bad idea for lots of places) Even if you charged $10 for a day pass and you had a 100% usage rate by those commuters on every work day (22 workdays a month) that's an income of $132 million a year for the HSR. Hopefully energy, labor, insurance, repair, and upgrades for the rail will be free for the lifetime as well. That's just a constant sink for the public for hair thin marginal benefit. If you make that trip often, you get a fuel efficient car at around 30mpg (what I did). That's about $10 in gas a day. Why would I pay to wait and be on someone else's time? Most commuter rails have narrow commuter hour windows. Not like you can hang out in the city. Worse when you need to travel around the spanse of the city quickly throughout the day. As in, on your time, not on someone else's. Btw, that 50k population ground that commutes, a lot are contractors. As in, they use vans and trucks to carry tools, equipment and materials... so, the practical number of regular users is going to be less. So, will a politician like to try to convince a population for tax raises for $350 million or for something that's 5 times more expensive? Spoiler again, when it comes to you having to pay for it, you're going to be economical. People were cool with the slight tax hikes for the widening of I25. Not for the major hike that the HSR would need. Doesn't seem political to me. Ain't get more practical than that there good buddy. Let that marinate. Source, I lived there when this was going on. It's all easy to research since it was a well reported issue. Also, I made that commute somewhat often. HSR wouldn't have worked for me since I was an IT contractor for different companies in the city and needed to move nimbly throughout Denver.
- thethethethe 6y ago
  Roads don't pay for themselves, we even make them free to drive on. We pay for them with our taxes. Are they a drain on society because there is no revenue stream and they are expensive to maintain? No, of course not, the cost is payed off many times over by the benefits of the economic activity it facilitates. Same thing with HSR. It will shorten commutes for everyone, not just people on the train, enabling those contractors and utility workers do their jobs more efficiently. These things have ripple effects opening up new economic avenues for all different types of people, and not just those who ride the train
burlesona 6y ago
That's not really true. Outside of prewar towns it is unsafe and impractical to walk anywhere, so when the train drops you off there's nowhere to go. Trains are awesome for travel at distances that cars are also pretty good, but if you need a car at both ends of your trip, the train really is impractical. I say that as someone who lived in Europe, loves trains, and wishes badly that we could have a better train network here. But the problem is the US in the 1950's embarked on the suburban experiment and now the majority of the US population lives in either very low density or with unsafe walking conditions (or both), and you really can't serve those areas with trains effectively. If you wanted to do rail and have it become useful, you need to actually focus on local rail first. For example, Houston build an original light rail line that - bucking the trend for most car oriented cities - only served a 7mi track through the core urban area. That rail line actually worked really well. Meanwhile the suburbs to downtown transit is just bus lines because there's not enough demand to justify rail. But if you spent 20 years incrementally reforming land use regulations, redeveloping with better sidewalks and connective safe streets, and gradually better and better local transit to go along with it, then you might end up with a place that was a worthy anchor for regional rail on at least one end. Honestly I don't think that will happen in very many places, though, or at least not in my lifetime. It requires a long-term vision that is still counter cultural, and decades of land use redevelopment.
- billfruit 6y ago
  Why is this an issue? People can take a taxi to/from the railway station at either end of the journey as it is done in other countries.
  - lumost 6y ago
    It's not a great assumption that there is a viable taxi network in most American suburbs with less than 50-70k people. Even with uber, you might be waiting for an hour if it's available. Even if there is a good network you might be out ~20-30 bucks each way and need a taxi between every destination. Given that a brand new car costs around 500/month in the US it wouldn't take many such excursions to make the car worth it. Once you've purchased a car and incur it's fixed monthly costs you're incentivised to use it for everything rather than incur further incremental transit expenses.
gumby 6y ago
> But rail is unpopular in US for political reasons, not practical ones. There is tremendous economic incentive against passenger rail as well; path dependent it may be, but real nonetheless. Specifically: most of the roadway is designed for freight, not humans, and what little passenger rail there is must run over it, typically yielding priority to freight. Thus at this point the network reaches deep into agricultural, manufacturing and port relations and little goes near the major cities. Even Caltrain in the Bay Area runs on a freight line owned by S&P; while I’ve only seen freight on it at night, S&P could contractually push Caltrain aside for freight (though it would cause an uproar S&P would rather not deal with). S& P received Covid relief money to government on its tracks in case caltrain couldn’t pay the rent. The US has the most efficient rail system in the world...for freight. Berkshire Hathaway has been investing. Passenger rail barely exists any more (in fact rails have been pulled up and sold for scrap and the land repurposed over the last century). To bring it back would mean building a lot of infrastructure from scratch. That’s not necessarily bad as the the layout of the population has shifted lever the last century as well.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  S&P? Do you mean SP (Southern Pacific)? They got bought out by Union Pacific over 20 years ago.
Ericson2314 6y ago
On a national scale sure, but that makes mismanagement in solidly democrat areas all the more grating. A lot of this blog is about such mismanagement in ostensibly pro-rail places.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
This misrepresents the situation, and I say that as someone who uses and prefers rail. The economics of high-speed rail in the US are quite poor in large parts of the country for a wide variety of complex reasons that can’t be wished away. In many cases, regional flights make more sense.
pm90 6y ago
Interested in knowing what you mean specifically. Are you talking about the lobbying power of the automobile industry? Or are you referring to NIMBY's not wanting any public transit?

What do you mean by that? Is there a point where if you're on the left of it on the political spectrum you're in favor, and otherwise against?

geogra4 6y ago
Somewhat true. Passenger rail is not seen as part of "infrastructure" on the right.
- labster 6y ago
  Indeed. People on the right wing are saying that Biden’s new infrastructure bill is nearly all pork because only 5% is dedicated to roads. Really only roads and dams count.
- _delirium 6y ago
  I think generally true, but it can vary by geography. There are a number of Republicans from small to medium-sized towns that either have Amtrak stations, or would like to have them, who are supportive of passenger rail in some form, and some of that support bubbles up to Republican Senators in some states. That's one reason the Amtrak national network continues to hobble along. If its fate rested on purely party-line votes, it would've been killed years ago. For example, Kansas's senators joined with Democrats to keep the Southwest Chief route from getting axed. Texas and Oklahoma, both pretty red states, co-fund a "state-supported route", the Heartland Flyer, from Ft. Worth to Oklahoma City. For somewhat different reasons, Utah has also invested in commuter rail (FrontRunner).
azernik 6y ago
Yes. e.g. the California High Speed Rail is a partisan issue in California politics, and generally Republicans are suspicious of commuter and high-speed rail as wasteful environmentalism.
rootusrootus 6y ago
In general terms, yes. It is just another one of the tribal issues in US politics that gets argued starting from ideology and not debated on the merits.
- wallacoloo 6y ago
  I think in this case the demographic split actually is correlated to the merits. As in, if you’re in a dense city, you’re probably more pro-rail, because you’ll be the one actually using that rail. If you’re in a culdesac suburb or even further from the city, you’re likely to not be pro-rail because you won’t be using it. You could call that tribal, or you could just call it “voting for your interests”. It feels slightly different from the tribal issues I see more frequently (policing, healthcare, schooling), but maybe I’m fooling myself.

Fern_Blossom 6y ago

The widening of I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs, about a 60 mile stretch, is a great example as to why you're wrong. To add an extra lane to help the load of roughly 20% of Colorado Springs residents (~50k people) that commute between the cities, costs $350 million. To build an HSR would be around $1.8 billion. There was a push to put in a rail as this seemed like a perfect use case (spoiler alert, it showed how niche HSR actually is and how it was a bad idea for lots of places) Even if you charged $10 for a day pass and you had a 100% usage rate by those commuters on every work day (22 workdays a month) that's an income of $132 million a year for the HSR. Hopefully energy, labor, insurance, repair, and upgrades for the rail will be free for the lifetime as well. That's just a constant sink for the public for hair thin marginal benefit. If you make that trip often, you get a fuel efficient car at around 30mpg (what I did). That's about $10 in gas a day. Why would I pay to wait and be on someone else's time? Most commuter rails have narrow commuter hour windows. Not like you can hang out in the city. Worse when you need to travel around the spanse of the city quickly throughout the day. As in, on your time, not on someone else's. Btw, that 50k population ground that commutes, a lot are contractors. As in, they use vans and trucks to carry tools, equipment and materials... so, the practical number of regular users is going to be less. So, will a politician like to try to convince a population for tax raises for $350 million or for something that's 5 times more expensive? Spoiler again, when it comes to you having to pay for it, you're going to be economical. People were cool with the slight tax hikes for the widening of I25. Not for the major hike that the HSR would need. Doesn't seem political to me. Ain't get more practical than that there good buddy. Let that marinate. Source, I lived there when this was going on. It's all easy to research since it was a well reported issue. Also, I made that commute somewhat often. HSR wouldn't have worked for me since I was an IT contractor for different companies in the city and needed to move nimbly throughout Denver.

thethethethe 6y ago
Roads don't pay for themselves, we even make them free to drive on. We pay for them with our taxes. Are they a drain on society because there is no revenue stream and they are expensive to maintain? No, of course not, the cost is payed off many times over by the benefits of the economic activity it facilitates. Same thing with HSR. It will shorten commutes for everyone, not just people on the train, enabling those contractors and utility workers do their jobs more efficiently. These things have ripple effects opening up new economic avenues for all different types of people, and not just those who ride the train

burlesona 6y ago

That's not really true. Outside of prewar towns it is unsafe and impractical to walk anywhere, so when the train drops you off there's nowhere to go. Trains are awesome for travel at distances that cars are also pretty good, but if you need a car at both ends of your trip, the train really is impractical. I say that as someone who lived in Europe, loves trains, and wishes badly that we could have a better train network here. But the problem is the US in the 1950's embarked on the suburban experiment and now the majority of the US population lives in either very low density or with unsafe walking conditions (or both), and you really can't serve those areas with trains effectively. If you wanted to do rail and have it become useful, you need to actually focus on local rail first. For example, Houston build an original light rail line that - bucking the trend for most car oriented cities - only served a 7mi track through the core urban area. That rail line actually worked really well. Meanwhile the suburbs to downtown transit is just bus lines because there's not enough demand to justify rail. But if you spent 20 years incrementally reforming land use regulations, redeveloping with better sidewalks and connective safe streets, and gradually better and better local transit to go along with it, then you might end up with a place that was a worthy anchor for regional rail on at least one end. Honestly I don't think that will happen in very many places, though, or at least not in my lifetime. It requires a long-term vision that is still counter cultural, and decades of land use redevelopment.

billfruit 6y ago
Why is this an issue? People can take a taxi to/from the railway station at either end of the journey as it is done in other countries.
- lumost 6y ago
  It's not a great assumption that there is a viable taxi network in most American suburbs with less than 50-70k people. Even with uber, you might be waiting for an hour if it's available. Even if there is a good network you might be out ~20-30 bucks each way and need a taxi between every destination. Given that a brand new car costs around 500/month in the US it wouldn't take many such excursions to make the car worth it. Once you've purchased a car and incur it's fixed monthly costs you're incentivised to use it for everything rather than incur further incremental transit expenses.

gumby 6y ago

> But rail is unpopular in US for political reasons, not practical ones. There is tremendous economic incentive against passenger rail as well; path dependent it may be, but real nonetheless. Specifically: most of the roadway is designed for freight, not humans, and what little passenger rail there is must run over it, typically yielding priority to freight. Thus at this point the network reaches deep into agricultural, manufacturing and port relations and little goes near the major cities. Even Caltrain in the Bay Area runs on a freight line owned by S&P; while I’ve only seen freight on it at night, S&P could contractually push Caltrain aside for freight (though it would cause an uproar S&P would rather not deal with). S& P received Covid relief money to government on its tracks in case caltrain couldn’t pay the rent. The US has the most efficient rail system in the world...for freight. Berkshire Hathaway has been investing. Passenger rail barely exists any more (in fact rails have been pulled up and sold for scrap and the land repurposed over the last century). To bring it back would mean building a lot of infrastructure from scratch. That’s not necessarily bad as the the layout of the population has shifted lever the last century as well.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
S&P? Do you mean SP (Southern Pacific)? They got bought out by Union Pacific over 20 years ago.

Ericson2314 6y ago

On a national scale sure, but that makes mismanagement in solidly democrat areas all the more grating. A lot of this blog is about such mismanagement in ostensibly pro-rail places.

jandrewrogers 6y ago

This misrepresents the situation, and I say that as someone who uses and prefers rail. The economics of high-speed rail in the US are quite poor in large parts of the country for a wide variety of complex reasons that can’t be wished away. In many cases, regional flights make more sense.

pm90 6y ago

Interested in knowing what you mean specifically. Are you talking about the lobbying power of the automobile industry? Or are you referring to NIMBY's not wanting any public transit?