Discussion on:

Reframing the transportation debate

Er...the trillions spent over the decades on the existing transport infrastructure is a sunk cost.

You think we should swap roads for trains? What makes you think that we havent got the balance between the two forms of transport just about right for our needs as a society?

You think roads will not be "sustainable" because of the end of cheap oil? Havent you heard the GOOD NEWS about gas shale? Or nuclear energy based on thorium? Both are primary energy sources that can and will generate the necessary electricity for all forms of surface transport. And will also provide all our other needs for a low cost, prosperous and happy 21st century.

I am afraid you are living on another planet - not the Smart Planet the rest of us live on.

Stein's law: Something that cannot continue forever will stop.
Shale gas is not an answer. Shale gas is a finite resource, just like oil. Eventually, we'll run out of it too. With shale gas, we're only kicking the can down the road, not solving the problem. That means, shale gas is not smart.

I use to live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The old trolly line from downtown to Britannia Beach has been a bike path all of my life. However, the city is looking at turning it into an LRT to solve the public transit problem. It seems that as we move forward, we're also moving backwards. But this makes sense from a smart planet perspective.

Trollies and trains are from an era before cheap non-renewable energy (oil, shale gas, etc.) A trolly can carry maybe 30 people at 2.5 times the energy cost of a car. We're not talking $ but kW/h. It's significantly more efficient. A train can carry hundreds of people at a fraction of the energy costs over automobiles. We used trains and trollies at the time, crossing the country or just the city, because energy costs at the time were very expensive.

Eventually the shale gas will run out and the cost of energy will again be very expensive.

And that is why we look back to trains and trollies.

Never mind the fact that HSR is neither carbon or energy efficient. Nor can rail, especially HSR go to very many of the places that people want or need to go. No matter how many miles of rail we build, we're still going to need roads and automobiles to get us to and from the train station.

Let me take you back for a moment to 1867. Train tracks crossed the country, moving people and goods long distances from one place to another. Roads were made to carry people and goods to and from the train stations. Towns and villages and even cities grew up around these railway stations. And you are saying this was a problem? How so?

We built that system back then the way it was built because energy was expensive. What Chris is talking about is that this era we live in, with oil and shale gas, is a temporary era of cheap energy. It's not sustainable. It's not permanent. Therefore, how do we build a transportation system in an era when energy is more expensive?

The answer, we've already done it once. It looked like 1867. So we can do it again. It'll likely look much the same, only hopefully better.

And trains are, so far, the most energy efficient means of transportation mankind has yet invented. They move a large amount of goods and people at a fraction of the energy costs of any other form of transportation. They're not as convenient as cars or trucks. And before the invention of containers, loading and unloading of trains was considerably more expensive than simply loading it into a truck once and driving it across the country. But if you're in the business now of moving non-perishable materials around the globe, you load them into containers, and load those containers onto trains to cross the country, and then load them on to trucks for their last mile. With the high price of fuel, it's the most cost effective way to go and it is the way business operates today. It looks nothing like 1967 when everything was loaded onto trucks to move by interstate highway across the country, and looks instead very much like an improved version of 1867.

So this means, we shouldn't be tearing up tracks, but laying new tracks. While HSR is more expensive, it's not so much more expensive than old style rail. If we're going to lay down tracks, we might as well spend the extra and make them HSR. There is nothing to say that HSR can't handle freight as well. And with HSR freight, we'll be able to include the perishables as freight as well.

Let me take you back for a moment to 1867. Train tracks crossed the country, moving people and goods long distances from one place to another. Roads were made to carry people and goods to and from the train stations. Towns and villages and even cities grew up around these railway stations. And you are saying this was a problem? How so?

I don't recall saying this was "a problem".

We built that system back then the way it was built because energy was expensive.

Wrong. Technology was expensive. And the system was built that way because rail was the only technology at the time. And the rail only went to where it was profitable to do so.

What Chris is talking about is that this era we live in, with oil and shale gas, is a temporary era of cheap energy. It's not sustainable. It's not permanent. Therefore, how do we build a transportation system in an era when energy is more expensive?

I don't know yet. But then again, I don't think he does either. But whatever alternative technology that emerges that makes HSR comparatively efficient will also likely make competing forms of transport more efficient as well, keeping HSR as the lesser efficient technology.

And trains are, so far, the most energy efficient means of transportation mankind has yet invented??? While HSR is more expensive, it's not so much more expensive than old style rail.

Traditional rail is very efficient. However, HSR is not. It takes tremendous amounts of energy to propel a train past 80 mph, and track stock capable of handing such trains costs an order of magnitude more to construct, maintain, and operate. HSR advocates seem to be either ignorant of this, or just lie about it.

We built that system back then the way it was built because energy was expensive.

Wrong. Technology was expensive.

Yes, technology was expensive, but energy was also very expensive. Trains ran on wood. (Some also ran on coal, but most of the ones in North America ran on wood because wood was plentiful.) Do you have any idea how many man-hours it takes to cut down a tree and chop it into firewood when you have only axes and other hand-powered tools? Maybe you charge nothing for labour but most of us aren't willing to do that kind of back-breaking work for a pittance. The price of cut wood at the time makes the price of oil now look very cheap by comparison.

Traditional rail is very efficient. However, HSR is not. It takes tremendous amounts of energy to propel a train past 80 mph, and track stock capable of handing such trains costs an order of magnitude more to construct, maintain, and operate. HSR advocates seem to be either ignorant of this, or just lie about it.

I guess it depends where you get your numbers from and who's technology your looking at. I get my numbers from Japan and France where the cost of their HSR systems is not at all excessive and with excellent ROI. But I'll admit the U.S. is a different ball of wax.

I'll also admit one other thing, I wouldn't let Americans be the ones designing and building the HSR lines. The U.S. ceased to have decent rail engineers about 50 years ago. Any who are left are well past retirement age. And that means importing the skills which is going to make the project more expensive.

I've always advocated that what the U.S. needs is to spend more money on training more world class engineers who will stay home. If the U.S. is going to have a cost-effective HSR, which should certainly be possible, it's going to need to have people who can design and build it that way, something it doesn't have.

I interpret the article to mean that the status quo is not sustainable. The author has attempted to work out how much was spent to build the transportation infrastructure and how much we spend to maintain it. The author also implies that the past assumptions based on cheap and easily obtainable fuel need to be reevaluated.

This is a more complex problem and should not be quickly dismissed as too expensive or not worth doing. I live in a crowded area where people commute up to 100 miles one way. They live where they can afford a home but work where they can get paid enough to afford the home as well as commute. It would be better for those people if they had more choices locally for jobs instead of commuting long distances.

Where we should want to end up is living in affordable homes a short distance away from the jobs. The jobs should be close enough and there should be several transportation choices from walking, biking or public transportation to reduce congestion on highways and roads. Stores and services should also be close and convenient enough to reduce the need to have a single occupant driving.

Travelling to more distant locations for tourism and business should also be considered. It is possible that with commercial space ports and sub orbital flights that we can make these journeys relatively cheap and fast in the future. High Speed Rail would work only as well as it can take people to where they want to go, if the destination is not on the HSR route then it is not as effective.

People do not flee cities simply because homes are cheaper in the 'burbs. They also flee because they find cities inhospitable places to live and poor places to raise families.

It seems that I say this at least once a week here, but here we go again: If planners want to get people back into living in the cities, then they need to address the reasons that people leave and/or endure painful and expensive commuting.

You are being geo centric, I am not talking about suburbs. I am talking about people who live 100 miles away commuting to their jobs. This is what is going on in the San Francisco Bay area. Part of the problem is a voter initiative that you would have liked, Proposition 13 which was to keep the old folks in their homes without having to worry about rising property taxes as well as other tweaks.

Real Estate prices in the Bay area has not been as effected by the recession as other locations, the housing costs are already back above recession levels. But, the jobs are in Silicone Valley and the Bay Area and cheap housing is getting further away towards the Sierras.

And exactly why would Proposition 13 be wholly responsible for property values in San Francisco?

I'd suggest that the main reason that it's so expensive to live in San Francisco has more to do with local regulation and how difficult and expensive government makes it to create more housing to meet demand than Proposition 13.

The reason why housing is expensive in San Francisco is more demand than supply. This should be obvious to a businessman. SF has finite land, the borders have been set long ago and there can not be any extension of those borders. I did not say that Prop 13 was wholly responsible for property values in SF, read it again and don't add words that weren't there. There are problems not caused by governments or regulations.

In fact, I used to live in California. And the Progressive insanity promulgated by the denizens of places like San Francisco is one of the reasons I left.

Having built homes, I can also tell you for a fact that local and state governments are responsible for much of the high cost. In fact, I find it most ironic that the same politicians who constantly bemoan the dearth of "affordable housing" are usually the same ones behind legislation that makes building housing even more difficult and expensive.

nt

They need to make the changes needed to support moving mail and small packages on passenger trains as they once did. I???ll bet a well designed work flow would be more cost effective for moving small cargo between major cities than shipping by trucks and planes as USPS, FedEx and UPS do now. Build it and they will come when you show them the savings.

They also need to establish rail hubs at port terminals so that shipping containers can be moved rapidly from ship to rail. Every month tens of thousands of shipping containers leave US ports on trucks bound for cities in middle America. Rail is the perfect mover for such long distance shipments, but has never made the connection.

And HSR is a waste of money. Europe has proven that. It???s post WW II express trains running at close to 100 mph were extremely profitable and cost effective to maintain. HSR as developed in Europe has been a money losing venture from day one with excessive startup and operating costs.

The US needs to bring back the express rail service it had until the 1950s. It is a sad state of affairs when todays HSR, and high price tag, Accela train between Boston and NY City is HOURS slower on that trip than the 1940s steam train than ran that ran between those cities.

Accela train between Boston and NY City is HOURS slower on that trip than the 1940s steam train than ran that ran between those cities.

Wow! I've never been on that line and now I think I'll avoid it.

And HSR is a waste of money. Europe has proven that. It???s post WW II express trains running at close to 100 mph were extremely profitable and cost effective to maintain. HSR as developed in Europe has been a money losing venture from day one with excessive startup and operating costs.

I'm going to agree and disagree here. Spain does well. France does well. Italy is doing all right. Britian does - saying they've done it badly would, I'd be forced to say, be an understatement. Looking at their costs, I'm thinking they should be putting their Flying Scotsman (a steam train) back into service. The HSR wasn't a significant improvement in performance but was a significant increase in cost!

A big problem in Britain is that few of the trains have the running room to work efficiently. They are all built for the chunnel, not for their routes.

In Japan, you could (pre-tsunami) go from the northern end to the southern end in under 5 hours. But that train only had something like 6 stops. You'd take a slower train to one of the stations it stopped at and then get on it. There was enough ridership for it to be cost-effective.

The thing with HSRs is that their cost effectiveness goes up with both ridership and the longer the time/distance they can spend running at or near full speed. It makes no sense to put an HSR between NY, NY and Newark, NJ. If you're putting in an HSR, something like a ZEFIRO which can reach speeds of up to 380km/h, anything more than one stop in a state is probably a waste of money. A NY to LA with maybe a dozen stops relatively equally spaced along the way would be a cost effective alternative to flying. However, it the HSR never gets past 160km/h (about 100mph), then you've wasted a whole lot of money on overkill. And reading some more about the Accela trains between Ny and Boston, that seems to be the biggest problem. It's a good train in the wrong place.

Nothing is as bad as mis-applied technology.

Chris Nelder does a good job of highlighting the lack of attention paid to the costs of our transport regime. $1.6 trillion (?) is a lot of money.

There are a couple of other points: one is that the money spent in aggregate on our transport and what it connects is stranded which means it cannot pay for itself. Infrastructure does not earn much of anything from its use, it's a gigantic toy with a large criminal element.. Users are required to borrow 'earnings'. What is the endless complaint of the establishment, today?

Excess debt.

The purchasing power of the economy is declining because of debt deleveraging. The cost of debt has become unaffordable. Cheap debt has been a lifestyle subsidy along with cheap credit. 'Old' oil was very cheap and easy to come by. 'New' oil at the bottom of the sea is costly to extract ... also too costly to afford. When debt is unaffordable along with the the new oil, there will be a lot less oil in a hurry.

When the shortages hit it will be because oil is unaffordable ... the shortages will be permanent. OPEC can cut production all it likes but if oil is unaffordable @ $70/barrel it will be just as unaffordable @ $100/barrel. Oil will instead be extremely cheap but nobody will have any money.

Right now the fuel shortages in China are ongoing, Fuel at today's high price is still too low to bring sufficient fuel to satisfy the Chinese market. yet a higher fuel price cannot be afforded by China's customers. Is this dynamic coming to the US?

Coming? It's here!

Most of you guys are missing the point.

All of your concerns and ideas for transportation change are predicated on the assumption that energy prices will become more and more unaffordable with the consequence that all of us will have to take drastic measures and settle for a lower cost living style.

The fact is that energy is going to remain cheap enough for the forseeable future (despite current oil price rises which are nothing to do with fundamental scarcity). Shale gas is coming on stream very fast now and is likely to be good for hundreds of years. I really don't think we should be radically altering transportation because of a hypothetical threat a couple of centuries down the line.

In the longer term energy costs are much more likely to go down as safe, efficient thorium-based nuclear plants come on stream (thorium is in effect a safe and limitless fuel). Our descendants in 150 years time wont thank us for making crazy retrogressive changes to our transportation infrastructure because of what, by then, will be regarded as the quaint old notion their great grandparents had that energy supplies were going to dry up.

In short this is all about hysteria from the environmental crowd who actually hate the world as it is and hate even more the prospect of how it might become in a steadily improving future. Well thats fine - everyone is entitled to their point of view. But they should not be able to impose those views on the vast majority of us who simply want to leave the world a better, not an impoverished, place for our great grand children to enjoy, at a standard of living that, looking back, will make us seem like paupers.

What I'm proposing, especially the port terminals, would help current transportation problems like traffic congestion and would make passenger rail service profitable as it once was.

It also make sense. They are looking at spending several billion dollars to widen I93 from the MA/NH state line up to Concord NH over the next 20 years to support NH commuters working in MA. A closed parallel rail bed exists that could be rebuilt, train stations reopened and cost effective diesel electric express trains put on it for half the cost. They are looking at a similar situation in Connecticut and western MA with I 91. That discussion on trains is further along than the I93 project, but has hit a cost road block because they are talking of costly Acela style trains.

And nothing quite as wonderful as perfectly applied technology.

That idea of reopening that abandoned rail line is a good one. It would be cheaper by far. And the train doesn't need to go faster than 80MPH, which is faster than the cars can travel on the highway.

Which means, Acela, while a good train, is the wrong tool for the job. There are plenty of very good commuter train models that would fit the bill much better.

Actually, most European rail providers are not losing money. They are now completely self-sufficient right out of the fartebox. SNCF continues to turn a profit and is continuing to expand its high speed footprint throughout France. DB is doing likewise. And this year DB and SNCF will be operating trains through the Channel Tunnel, whereas before it was just Eurostar. And Alstom just late last year delivered its first AGV trainset to Italian operator NTV. It's a step up from the TGV, in that it uses distributed power. Each bogie on the train is a powered bogie. This allows for more passengers, because what used to be the power car up front and at the back can now seat passengers. It is much more efficient. When braking, power is taken from the bogies and fed back into the power grid. I don't know why so many people believe that just because the train travels along at 360 km/h that it is less efficient. That's not the case. They are almost 5 times more efficient than a diesel-powered locomotive. GE's newest and largest Diesel-powered locomotive generates approximately 6, 250 horsepower or 4.660 MW, while the AGV generates 6.080 MW And even the newer diesel-powered locomotives still emmit tons of oxides of nitrogen and other pollutants. But, as with so many other things, we have the need to re-invent the wheel every time we do something. Their train technology surpasses anything we have in the U.S., but current regulations do not allow its use here, and will have to be changed before the California system is operational. And, Amtrak is a joke. Stainless Steel cars versus aircraft grade aluminum on the European rolling stock. Amtrak's Acela travels at 150 mph for just 10 miles out of 457 in the Northeast Corridor. It will be five to ten more years before they will have finished upgrading the track throughout the corridor. But even with those upgrades, Acela still will not be able to operate at high speed for most of its run because of the many turns in the corridor. The Chinese just finished laying over 1,000 miles of track in two years and their newest high speed train is now operational. And here we sit watching the world pass us by. For crying out loud, even Uzbekistan has HSR between their two biggest cities.