When will politicians and the voters who put them in office learn that you negate the positive impact of high-speed rail when you put that many stations that close together?
Once again taxpayers will be paying for a high speed train that gets close to its top speed only once in a while. They did not learn their lesson with Acela.
They paid a ton of money for trains capable of 150 mph that rarely exceeds 80 mph. They spend most of their time operating around 45 mph. The over $1 billion worth of Acela trains saves just 18 minutes on the Boston to New York run compared to the standard train.
Here is another important fact. Acela is still almost an hour slower than the old steam-powered express train that ran on the Boston to New York run in the 1940s.
The destruction of the express rails in the 1970s /1980s coupled with the lack of political will to rebuild the express rails on existing rights of way doomed Acela before the first train was delivered.
People who already complained about commuter train noise loudly protested the thought of trains doing 100 mph on reopened express rails. Bowing to the NIMBY crowd is what most politicians do best.
If you’re in a hurry to “win” big in Las Vegas, a train is in the works to get you there faster. At least, if you live in Los Angeles. The high speed rail plan to lay almost 200 miles of track between southern California and Las Vegas cleared one more pass this week.
The Federal Railroad Administration project has released its Environmental Impact Statement for the DesertXpress project. If approved, this would be first high speed rail effort to break ground under the Obama Administration’s transportation initiative.
(This isn’t the first project to complete an EIS. A rail line to run between Orlando and Tampa has gotten this far as well. In February, however, Florida Governor Rick Scott rejected its federal funding so the project may not be in the cards.)
The environmental report lists the preferred path as proceeding mostly alongside or within the medians of Interstate-15, a stretch of highway with a reputation for auto accidents. The corridor passes through public lands within both states and California’s Mojave National Reserve.
Placement and expected ridership for many proposed rail projects have faced scrutiny around the country. This one is no different. At speeds of around 150 miles per hour, travel time between destinations would be an hour and 25 minutes. Depending on traffic, a car trip falls between 3 and 6 hours. With a $100 round-trip ticket, the time savings could be crucial for a weekend getaway.
But to get on board, Los Angeles residents would need to go to Victorville, a drive of 80 freeway miles from downtown L.A. According to DesertXpress, the station would serve as a “natural collection point” within the freeway system for some of southern California’s other residents. Still, the Victorville location concerns some proponents of high speed rail. After all, as a pioneer for future rail projects seeking loan guarantees, DesertXpress’ stakes are big.
LA Weekly quotes Xudong Jia, a professor of civil engineering at Cal Poly Pomona with an expertise in travel-demand management:
The feasibility of this proposal really rests in how confident can they be that they will be able to draw enough passengers away from cars and planes. They have to honestly ask themselves, who is their rider? Where are they? How many of them are there? How often can they realistically be expected to make use of this line? What are they deriving their passenger projections on? Hopefully not Europe or Asia, since this is America and California, where an entirely different culture is in play. They are flying in the dark.
In addition to the passengers that do make the trip, the railway could bring jobs. According to Senator Harry Reid at a press conference last week, the railway could create 35,000 jobs in Nevada’s Clark County and thousands of others in California. A $4.9 billion loan, applied for by DesertXpress, through the Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing program is pending.
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