Green Maned Lion
Engineer
Short of my family picking up and going back to the states, yes we would have.
And I still think my formative years spent there were the most useful and, frankly, enjoyable I've ever had.
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And I still think my formative years spent there were the most useful and, frankly, enjoyable I've ever had.
Federal fuel taxes are a small percentage of the cost of roadways, even assuming the Highway Trust Fund be fully-funded. The most serious investigation I'm aware of was done by the Texas DOT. It looked at the cost to build and maintain a highway vs. the estimated fuel taxes collected from the cars that used the highway. Results varied by road, but no road was better than 50% funded, and one highway recovered less than one-sixth of its cost. That is, gas taxes would have to have been 6-1/2 times higher (between @2.25-$2.50/gallon) to make the roadway break-even.
To my knowledge, that study didn't even consider other costs associated with road use: police and fire resources dedicated to road safety, a highway patrol, hospital/medical costs for injured drivers not reimbursable by insurance, city public works funds, the list goes on. Then there are the opportunity costs associated with the land: the land under roads isn't on the property tax roles and it doesn't generate sales taxes. That's all lost revenue.
Beyond that, there are additional costs, although the accounting becomes more vague. For example, the freeway corridor between the Los Angeles / Long Beach ports and the inland distribution centers is filled with poorly-maintained, owner/operator diesel big-rigs hauling shipping containers. Neighborhoods surrounding the freeway have statistically-significant increases in respiratory illness traceable to diesel exhaust. What price do you put on that?
Roads are f***ing expensive whether or not you personally use them.
ALC Rail Writer
Engineer
At least with rails you don't go around fixing them every year... How much does it cost to build track? On average I'd imagine more than to build the same stretch of pavement. But in the long term I see that costs of maintaining the track versus road will benefit the consumer. (not to mention track is maintained by private companies versus the DOT)
volkris
Lead Service Attendant
And the message to take from this: fuel taxes don't even pay the cost of roadway maintenance, so they certainly shouldn't be diverted to paying for rail too.
So we should increase the auto fuel taxes to pay for more (or all) of the costs of auto infrastructure and rail fuel taxes to pay for a similar share of rail infrastructure. If rail consumers really are benefited AND accepting of train travel, they'll migrate over there. If not, then the advantages of cars are just too much to be overcome by the cost benefits of rail.
Again, the cost of a "true" HSR system build out is trivial. The entire transportation budget of the federal government is only 3% of the federal budget. My back-of-the envelope calculations suggest that a $100 billion ten year program would provide the service (ten $10 billion 300+ mile systems) to roughly 75 million Americans, not counting the NE corridor, which supposedly can be improved significantly by a mere $5 billion.
The system would have to be paid for with taxes. Taxes are not necessarily user fees. Like any network, HSR has long-term, unintended positive effects which are huge. They may not be very well quantified by economists, but the markets have identified them, which is why countries all over the world with very different agendas are building them. Those that have the systems only build more.
Simply by NOT passing Sen. Kyl's estate tax cut would supply about all the money needed.
The system would have to be paid for with taxes. Taxes are not necessarily user fees. Like any network, HSR has long-term, unintended positive effects which are huge. They may not be very well quantified by economists, but the markets have identified them, which is why countries all over the world with very different agendas are building them. Those that have the systems only build more.
Simply by NOT passing Sen. Kyl's estate tax cut would supply about all the money needed.
volkris
Lead Service Attendant
It's a mistake to get caught up in relativism. Sure it's important to keep a sense of context--yes the cost of HSR is small compared to the budget of the entire US government--but that doesn't somehow give it a pass from valuation, making it a necessarily worthwhile expenditure. I see such an argument made frequently in this forum. $100 billion, or $10 billion a year, is not a trivial amount of money in any worthwhile sense. Hell, this week Obama's administration was working hard to scrape up just $100 million!
Billions of dollars are nothing to sneeze at, regardless of how many people may live in areas near the service.
That's an amusing thing to say. Countries "all over the world" are building these systems because of political dictate, not market demand, and the solutions you're suggesting here are more of that. Right or wrong, let's not pretend this is a market-driven effort.
So what you seem to be saying is that if we don't "waste" our money on HSR we'll be able to have an estate tax cut? The point being, this is also a foolish argument as there are any number of ways to rebalance funding in the government... pointing out one particular way doesn't mean much.
ALC Rail Writer
Engineer
Actually ten billion is rather trivial. Consider our defense budget which FY 2008 was somewhere around 430 billion. Obama's plan will bring defense spending down (to the chagrin of the right) to possibly Clinton-era spending which was only around 200 billion. Even if it is bottomed out at 300 billion that leaves a 100 billion dollar surplus in FY 2010 of which 10% can go to HSR, 10% to education (which desperately needs funding as well) and 80% to trying to pay down the massive debt we will incur.
George Harris
Engineer
If it is a good idea and needs doing, it is a good idea and needs doing whether or not the estate tax law changes, whether or not other countries are doing it or what their reasons are for doing it. Going around in circles on these things adds confusion and clouds things up, it does not bring clarity.
I think high speed rail and major improvements in passenger rail otherwise needs doing for several reasons including but not likely all of them:
1. Population and travel continues to increase and we have a fixed land area.
2. Travel demand in many corridors has increased to the point that the mass trasportation capabilitys of rail make good sense.
3. You can fuel these things with many fuel sources other than oil, which so far does not appear to be a likely near term possibility with planes, and only borderline so with automobiles.
4. A well utilized railroad carries a lot more pople than any roadway covering similar ground space.
5. It is becoming more and more impractical to stuff additional automobiles and roadways into our urban areas.
6. It is far easier to serve medium size urban areas between major cities by rail than it is by air.
7. Use of rail will reduce air pollution which is a not incidential benefit but whether it does or not additional travel by rail is a good thing regardless for the reasons previously given.
8. I am not mentioning "global warming" because I am a skeptic on that one. I fear that when, a few years down the road, we discover that the whole global warming whoop de doop was simply a natural cycle that had little to nothing to do with the acts of man, the things that we should be doing anyway to reduce our oil consumption will lose their credibility because they had been promoted on a false premise. "Global Warming" is only the latest of a long series of gloom and doom scenarios that come up every decade or so, and is like a lot of them to prove to be nothing more than a bandwagon on which many people can jump to use as a basis to do things they want to do anyway, and for this one, for the politicians in power to gain a lot more control over eveyone's daily activities.
I think high speed rail and major improvements in passenger rail otherwise needs doing for several reasons including but not likely all of them:
1. Population and travel continues to increase and we have a fixed land area.
2. Travel demand in many corridors has increased to the point that the mass trasportation capabilitys of rail make good sense.
3. You can fuel these things with many fuel sources other than oil, which so far does not appear to be a likely near term possibility with planes, and only borderline so with automobiles.
4. A well utilized railroad carries a lot more pople than any roadway covering similar ground space.
5. It is becoming more and more impractical to stuff additional automobiles and roadways into our urban areas.
6. It is far easier to serve medium size urban areas between major cities by rail than it is by air.
7. Use of rail will reduce air pollution which is a not incidential benefit but whether it does or not additional travel by rail is a good thing regardless for the reasons previously given.
8. I am not mentioning "global warming" because I am a skeptic on that one. I fear that when, a few years down the road, we discover that the whole global warming whoop de doop was simply a natural cycle that had little to nothing to do with the acts of man, the things that we should be doing anyway to reduce our oil consumption will lose their credibility because they had been promoted on a false premise. "Global Warming" is only the latest of a long series of gloom and doom scenarios that come up every decade or so, and is like a lot of them to prove to be nothing more than a bandwagon on which many people can jump to use as a basis to do things they want to do anyway, and for this one, for the politicians in power to gain a lot more control over eveyone's daily activities.
Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
If you consider dollars leaving the US to buy oil, is using 80% of that to pay off the debt (and perhaps start saving up for the costs of dealing with the interactions between rising oceans and people's homes, should the oceans indeed be rising) and buying a more oil really a better deal than spending $100 billion a year on high speed rail, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing the number of US dollars we have to ship overseas to get oil?
(Admittedly, the trade balance and the federal debt aren't the same thing. But I suspect a stronger dollar has some potential to help with the federal debt problem, too.)
ALC Rail Writer
Engineer
Hey, I am an advocate for HSR!
Just because I think 10 years of $10 billion each is wiser than a $100 billion lump some doesn't mean I don't want it!
The problem with your final argument is the fact that we've spent the last 30+ years stacking the deck against rail. We've taken fuel taxes from rail to help build our roads, we've dumped billions of other funding dollars into roads, and of course we've dumped billions of gas tax dollars into our roads. This has resulted in such a huge imbalance that at this point in time, most people have no choice but to choose a car over rail. That's playing with a stacked deck.
No amount of tax on RR's at this point can fix that imbalance. We have the same situation with airplanes too; we built the system up to a point where taxes and fees almost do pay for the bulk of the overhead expenses. Until we rebuild the rail lines to such a point where it really is viable to impose meaningful taxes to support the system on its own, we need to provide some alternative form of funding. I don't really care if it's via gas tax, extra tax on airplanes, estate taxes, incomes taxes, or what. But to base rail's viability on whether people will choose it or not, when it isn't a choice for them, isn't the way to decide things.
Besides, when given a viable choice to use rail, people do choose it. Consider Long Island, where the LIRR carries more people each day into Manhattan than the 3 major highways can carry. The LIRR puts more than 150,000 people into Manhattan each weekday. The 11 lanes of highways on LI can at most carry about 70,000 people during a 3 hour rush period. And the LIRR also carries people who never enter Manhattan, or enter via subways from Queens & Brooklyn.
Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
I think in the US as a whole, we have a plentiful supply of land. The problem we do run into with transportation and land area is that we have urban highways and airports that are at or beyond capacity which cannot be expanded within the same mode of transportation without dislocating their neighbors. Rail has the potential to provide many times the transportation capacity per land area as a highway, and also has the potential to help with congestion at airports where expansion is impractical.
Yes.
But to play devil's advocate, if we didn't have automobiles using any oil at all, domestic US oil production exceeds consumption by airplanes in the US, if you're unconcerned about the environmental issues.
I'm still not sure what to make of all the Tesla Model S. They're claiming it seats 7, goes 300 miles on a charge, and will cost a little over $57k without government rebate. Is the argument against it that it costs three times what a similar gasoline powered car would cost, and you're still stuck using the overly congested highways to get to downtown office buildings that don't have enough parking?
Yes, and I think we should be requiring that any highway widening project that gets federal funding have a study of what mass transit alternatives could provide the same peak travel hour capacity, what the relative costs would be, whether after adding one automobile lane worth of mass transit capacity there's a cheap upgrade path to more automobile lanes worth of capacity by running more trains on the same track, how much more oil we'll have to import with each option, and how much more pollution we'll get from each option, along with public hearings and opportunities for written comments from the public.
I'm not sure about this one, either. Are you thinking of something like Quad Cities when you talk about a medium size urban area? If you have to maintain a hundred miles of track for the benefit of passenger service for a single city, whether that's 79 MPH track or 220 MPH track, the track doesn't come free. Is the track any cheaper than maintaining the airport? Is capacity in the hub city an issue? How does the capacity of a station with two lead tracks to the east, two lead tracks to the west, and four platform tracks compare to a typical airport (both on a good weather day and on a poor weather day) if that train station can handle 50 inbound trains an hour and 50 outbound trains an hour?
Mostly 220 MPH hour long commutes (think Albany to New York City, Springfield to New York City, Springfield to Boston) are something that may be difficult to do with any technology other than HSR. There's too much boarding/disembarking overhead with air travel, and the airports generally aren't close enough to downtown, and with the congestion problems discussed above, I don't think it would make any sense to try to build highways that would support 220 MPH single occupancy automobiles.
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Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
I think the amount of HSR we ought to be building is likely to cost $1-2 trillion. If you spread that out over 10 years, $100 billion a year is the right order of magnitude.
ALC Rail Writer
Engineer
That's one hell of a HSR network! There is a point where you do have to draw the line, and I mark mine at a couple hundred billion...
Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
A $1 triilion HSR network will probably have less than half the route miles of the existing Interstate Highway system.
volkris
Lead Service Attendant
So when I point out that relativistic arguments are flawed you answer with another relativistic argument?
The cost is trivial or not trivial regardless of whatever else the government spends. I consider tens of billions of dollars to be a significant amount of money, so we can't dismiss the expenditure as insignificant: it should go through the responsible process of determining whether it contributes to the direction the country wants to go... which has basically nothing to do with other expenditures that the government takes on.
That's a very, very specific case that can't be generalized throughout the entire country. If that's the model you want to propose, though, then fine: let's get the national government completely out of the discussion and let the locality decide whether such commuter service is right for its particular needs. And, if the residents of Long Island can't afford the service they need to support their standard of living, then why should I help fit the bill? Let them figure out how to work their local society; it's none of my business.
Not only that, but it would have all of the downsides that come with rail, including the inflexibility for passengers and problems with scaling to larger numbers of destinations.
HSR makes sense in some cases, but let's not delude ourselves into seeing it as some sort of national necessity or panacea just because we, personally, would like to see it happen.
Green Maned Lion
Engineer
Mein GOTT! We have a resident NIMBY on our board.So when I point out that relativistic arguments are flawed you answer with another relativistic argument?
The cost is trivial or not trivial regardless of whatever else the government spends. I consider tens of billions of dollars to be a significant amount of money, so we can't dismiss the expenditure as insignificant: it should go through the responsible process of determining whether it contributes to the direction the country wants to go... which has basically nothing to do with other expenditures that the government takes on.
That's a very, very specific case that can't be generalized throughout the entire country. If that's the model you want to propose, though, then fine: let's get the national government completely out of the discussion and let the locality decide whether such commuter service is right for its particular needs. And, if the residents of Long Island can't afford the service they need to support their standard of living, then why should I help fit the bill? Let them figure out how to work their local society; it's none of my business.
Not only that, but it would have all of the downsides that come with rail, including the inflexibility for passengers and problems with scaling to larger numbers of destinations.
HSR makes sense in some cases, but let's not delude ourselves into seeing it as some sort of national necessity or panacea just because we, personally, would like to see it happen.
volkris
Lead Service Attendant
Funny, I already have an Amtrak line running through my back yard, and I'd love to see a HSR line put right next to it. Hell, I'd even donate a strip of my back yard to see it happen!
I'm just looking for honest discussion of the matter: maybe $100 billion is worth it, but let's not claim that's an insignificant amount of money, and sure rail is great in many places, but let's not pretend it's a godsend for every situation.
It's really a matter of recognizing that regardless of what I personally want to happen, these costs will be born by citizens across the country, from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of needs and wants. I don't really look forward to paying for improvements that help Long Islanders get to and from Manhattan because they choose to live and work in a place that requires that, but by the same token I don't feel like I should be demanding that Texans, with their huge swaths of emptyness, pay for my rail services between Virginia's relatively closely spaced towns.
Do I want first rate HSR? Of course! And I'd like a puppy and world peace, but like those things it may not be worth the costs or even reasonable to look for.
Anyway, green maned lion, I don't say any of this for your benefit as I'm with those who believe your perspective comes from an entirely different reality. But maybe it will clear things up for others to where I'm coming from. NIMBY? No. Accountant and observer of the political structures? Maybe.
Actually it can be generalized throughout much of the country. I choose that example simply because I know the numbers by heart and I know how many lanes each freeway has, so it was quite easy for me. But the simple reality is that one can find similar results in other places of the country. Even if one can't find such a pristine example, where there are only a few highways that lead to one city and parallel a commuter line, the reality is that there are plenty of systems out there taking cars off the roads.
California's subsidized Amtrak trains move almost as many people every day as Amtrak's Acela does. That represents thousands of cars not on California highways. Chicago's highways are a nightmare every day during rush hour, even sometimes during normal off peak hours. I'd hate to see what those highways would look like if we shut down METRA.
Besides, that wasn't the main point of my arguement anyhow. I simply choose that as an example of when people have a choice between rail and road, they often do choose rail. When they have no choice, then they choose road because it is the only choice.
We need to restore the balance that we disrupted when we choose to focus on roads to the detriment of rail.
But that is exactly how this country runs and has run for years basically since its birth, and I see no way to ever change that formula without hurting this country in multiple ways. We have to work together for the collective good of the country, even if sometimes it seems like our area is getting less.
I've no doubt that some of my federal monies have ended up in VRE, especially with the federal funding that they just got for new engines, and I've no doubt that a few of my tax dollars helped paved an Interstate Highway in Virginia.
volkris
Lead Service Attendant
I don't believe that's true. The scope and influence of the federal government was not nearly as great a hundred years ago, and it certainly wasn't that way since the founding. Remember state appointment of senators? That was in place specifically to maintain the significance of states in the face of a federal government that was threatening to become what it has become today.
And it's not about one area getting less or more; to me it's about the homogenization of the country where we're all expected to live under the same regulatory details, asserting that we all have the same values, when in reality our values vary quite a bit. With this philosophy that we have to pick a single direction and set of priorities handed down by the congress in DC we lose the diversity of experience and thought that, in my mind, made this country the vibrant place that it has been.
Coming back to earth now, let's let California and the NEC build the rail infrastructure they want without having to beg Washington for cash--without having to seek approval of the other states for whom rail is simply not a priority. The current need to "work together" ends up translating to congressmen bribing each other into agreement, and spending us all to death.
Well Volkris, I admit I sometimes have trouble understanding Libertarian arguments. I tried to make the point that the cost of a decent high speed rail system was chump change in terms of the national budget. You criticize this as "relativistic" Well, yes, that is the nature of any discussion of money so far as I know. It is significant, for example, that Bernie Madoff stole $45 billion dollars rather than 45 cents. The reason we have money instead of a barter economy is to encourage relativistic thinking.
As far as your criticism about having to help pay for the Long Island railroad, this is the deconstructionist dead end that is Libertarian thinking. I probably have never been to your town. I will never send you a postcard. I will never benefit from your training in accounting. I will never call you on the telephone. Therefore: You should not have a post office, a federally regulated long distance telephone system, a federal judiciary, protection from the military (unless you happen to live in a place that is strategically important to me). To the extent your University education was federally subsidized in any way, you owe the rest of us a refund.
I notice that you seem to favor local government as far as I can see, although you don't explain why. Where do you draw the line? Is a commuter system bought by a village OK? If so, what is wrong with a rail system paid by a county or a state? And if a state run system is OK, why not a national system? If smaller government is always better, then the Indian reservations would have total, not partial sovereignty, and the Indian tribes themselves should be able to subdivide into ever smaller factions and localities, all with full sovereign attributes. If the Indians can do this why can't any random county turn itself into a country?
I'm struck with the ease with which you argue with the markets when they disagree with your preconceived notions. To be sure, governments are "responding to political forces" when they buy a system, but that says nothing. A 13 year old girl who buys expensive lipstick is "responding" to fashion rather than attempting to maximize a utilitarian purchase of lipstick, but she is no less a participant in the markets. There are a million non-utilitarian decisions that go into a large purchase, but only the Marxists reject the validity of non-utilitarian reasons. The point is, the governmental purchaser has any number of competing purchases which to some degree satisfy political pressures and other needs which may or may not be utilitarian. The purchassers of HSR always want more. You either believe in markets or you don't. If you believe in a market economy you have to accept that the serial purchase of HSR by so many disparate market participants shows that HSR probably serves an important purpose, even if you don't recognize it. I merely suggest that the cause is probably powerful network effects that are not well described, much less predictable, by academia.
Your final point, that many people who would not use the system would object to paying for it, is fair, but entirely relativistic. In a relativistic vein, I merely point out that forgoing a tax cut that benefits 0.75% of the population, would benefit 75 million people.
volkris
Lead Service Attendant
Who said I was a libertarian? Certainly my support of government-subsidized rail and HSR programs puts me at odds with them.
Really my perspective comes from living in various parts of the country and seeing that the peoples' attitudes really are different. Watching the news, reading various studies, and looking at how states handle their own policies only underscore what I've see with my own eyes. Through all of that I'm really tired of watching the crowd in Washington work so hard to form consensus among people who honestly and simply disagree on matters of subjective opinion. Then I get sick to my stomach watching that consensus formed through what amounts to bribery: the gentleman from Texas hands California some of Wyoming's money for HSR in exchange for the gentlewoman from California handing back some of Iowa's money to fund steer research. You see what I'm saying.
The need to force agreement between people who simply disagree leads to corruption, debt, and withholding, as nobody gets what they want while the politicians trade their favors.
How local is local enough? People who study the geography of attitudes are certainly able to group people with similar feelings. It varies from issue to issue and from location to location. Heck, it doesn't even have to be a contiguous area: a piece of California might just join up with all of the North East, for example, to prioritize rail, and they'd be able to do it much more quickly than under the current mindset where all of the states, through Congress, have to agree on the plan.
Anyway, so no, it's not about Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian; it's about giving areas more of an option of finding which one of those they'd rather lean towards, about letting peoples' governments reflect their values more closely, and, of course, about letting states try different things, learning from each others' failures and successes.
Just think: Californian or New England HSR might have become a reality a decade go, had DC been bypassed, demonstrating just how trains can apply to modern American society, and other states in turn might be honestly clamoring to get on board after seeing the successes.
Really my perspective comes from living in various parts of the country and seeing that the peoples' attitudes really are different. Watching the news, reading various studies, and looking at how states handle their own policies only underscore what I've see with my own eyes. Through all of that I'm really tired of watching the crowd in Washington work so hard to form consensus among people who honestly and simply disagree on matters of subjective opinion. Then I get sick to my stomach watching that consensus formed through what amounts to bribery: the gentleman from Texas hands California some of Wyoming's money for HSR in exchange for the gentlewoman from California handing back some of Iowa's money to fund steer research. You see what I'm saying.
The need to force agreement between people who simply disagree leads to corruption, debt, and withholding, as nobody gets what they want while the politicians trade their favors.
How local is local enough? People who study the geography of attitudes are certainly able to group people with similar feelings. It varies from issue to issue and from location to location. Heck, it doesn't even have to be a contiguous area: a piece of California might just join up with all of the North East, for example, to prioritize rail, and they'd be able to do it much more quickly than under the current mindset where all of the states, through Congress, have to agree on the plan.
Anyway, so no, it's not about Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian; it's about giving areas more of an option of finding which one of those they'd rather lean towards, about letting peoples' governments reflect their values more closely, and, of course, about letting states try different things, learning from each others' failures and successes.
Just think: Californian or New England HSR might have become a reality a decade go, had DC been bypassed, demonstrating just how trains can apply to modern American society, and other states in turn might be honestly clamoring to get on board after seeing the successes.
Noticed the HSR plan got a mention on the BBC website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8010221.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8010221.stm
Green Maned Lion
Engineer
Ah yes, an accountant. A man who understands the cost of everything, the value of nothing. The world can't be run thinking of spending today, or the ROI over a 5 year plan. I understand the working of money, too, damnit. I have a B.S.B.A. and am working on an M.B.A. and studying to take my C.P.A. too, dude.
No, we must think of the ROI over the course of 100 years, 200 years, 500 years, even a thousand years. The accountants said the Brooklyn Bridge was overbuilt and overpriced. Stand on the shore of Manhattan or Brooklyn and tell me that again! Hundred and thirty years after it was built, it still stands. The basic structure needs little work. And the return on investment? Dangit, that overbuilt investment created the first steps to make New York the city it is today. Because lets face it, it was built not between Manhattan and Long Island, but between New York City, and the City of Brooklyn.
I don't live in an alternate reality. I live in the same reality you do! I just happen to have the foresight, the intuition, and the power of observation to consider it untenable. I long for a world that can continue on sustainably. I am not naïve enough to think it will happen. I think my generation may be the last to live out its natural life expectancy, honestly. I just wish you people wouldn't sit around talking about pointless trivialities and get down to doing something!
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