No Time For Trains

[kevin_standlee]

Last night, I went to one of the "Open Houses" that Caltrain and the High Speed Rail Authority are holding to show materials on the various possible ways that the Caltrain line may be rebuilt as part of the California High Speed Rail project. Because I'm packing for SiliCon, I don't have time to write as much as I would like on this, but here are a few observations:

• I'm glad that not every person there was a "no trains, never, never, never" protestor.


• OTOH, the degree of foolishness displayed by some of the people there is dismaying.


• I wish I could have heard the person who submitted the comment "Terminate HSR in San Jose and extend BART all around the Bay" to find out what s/he thought the point of that would be. Cheaper? Less construction disruption? Quieter? Faster? Built somewhere other than the Caltrain corridor? All highly unlikely.


• Speaking of people who Don't Get It, the guy distributing fliers advocating terminating the line at SFO and building a tunnel to Oakland airport instead of going down the Peninsula, while also building an underwater branch to San Jose Airport, is unrealistic on so many levels it's unreal. I guess he thinks HSR is some sort of airport-feeder system and that nobody would actually want to use it to travel to San Francisco.


• Everyone who thinks HSR should terminate 50 miles away from San Francisco because of course everyone will drive to the station since you'll have to have airport-style security and have to arrive two hours before departure.... Sigh. You've obviously never ridden a train before. Or you've never ridden a modern system like those in Europe and Japan.


• Can we please build a first-world rail transportation system in the USA before more third-world countries do so?


• The overhead electric lines (25kV AC) aren't going to irradiate you, kill your children, or make your hair fall out, nor are they going to knock birds out of the sky. Multi-technology equipment (i.e. diesel/25kV AC overhead/third-rail all on the same train) is madness.

Some of the suggestions I saw were so crazy that I can't tell whether the people are just clueless or are deliberately trying to make the project so difficult and expensive as to destroy it so that it will Go Away. Folks, it's very likely that the project will cause some individuals a lot of trouble. We must weigh this against the overall good. Letting a relatively handful of NIMBYs hold back the entire state is wrong and I hope the agencies involved are able to resist the naysayers.

Now I admit that I think that strategically, the route selected by the CAHSR is wrong -- I think the Dumbarton-Altamont route made more sense -- but I also say that trying to hold out for the perfect system is a great way to get nothing at all. If the only choices are the suboptimal Pacheco alignment and No System, I'll take Pacheco. I only hope I live to see the day when you can travel by train as easily between the Bay Area and the LA Area as I did between London and Paris.

Comments

[querldox.livejournal.com]

What I think the real issue is relates to the real cost of doing this. I'm assuming some significant amount of cost overrun from the current estimate; that always happens. But then, particularly given the just done cut in the amount allocated nationwide for high-speed rail, the real question(s) is/are "How much subsidy will such a line need on a regular basis (which also has a component of "what will the fare be and how does it compete with airfare and car trip expense")? and "How committed are we to doing this subsidy long term?".

Yes, I know there are considerable, often hidden, air and car travel subsidies. But the last 40 years or so of inter-city rail history in the US has shown an unwillingness to do similar for rail travel, with frequent cutbacks. So if we did do a high speed rail system, would we maintain it, or would it become a joke within the first decade of operation?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

A true high speed rail system would probably show an operational profit. Eurostar does, for instance. What it would not do is pay for the cost of capital to build and maintain the infrastructure. But that's the same as the other modes as well, particularly as gasoline taxes haven't kept up with inflation sufficiently to maintain the existing road system, let alone demands for expansion. So the long-term concern will be continuing infrastructure maintenance costs, I admit; however, I'm not concerned about the "above the rail" costs because I don't expect there to be any problem with CAHSR funding its own operations.

What I think most Americans do not realize is that true high-speed rail is a completely different animal than conventional American slow-speed rail. Most of our rail infrastructure in this country is stuck at about 1950 or older, with a few pieces on the East Coast that managed to make it to the late 1960s. The rest of the world kept moving, and we stopped, and we seem to not realize that there's any alternative. I've ridden those alternatives and know that it's not pie in the sky -- it really works, today, right now, and has been working for 40 years in some places.

Based on experiences in similar-distance corridors and speeds, we should expect to see HSR take over most of the trips currently taken by air in the current market. In France, for instance, there is almost no internal air market. In Spain, the AVE has become the mode of choice rather than air for trips between the cities it serves. Because of this, I would expect Southwest Airlines to be a big opponent of CAHSR because it would devastate their California business.

The CAHSR business plan calls for fares that are competitive with airfares in the same market. I think that once such a system was running and people got a true feeling that it's really faster than air in terms of total travel time, rail would become the mode of choice. It would also be a boon to the Central Valley cities it serves, giving them much better connections to the Bay Area and LA Area than they currently have. I think this is something overlooked by many people, who think of the system only as an LA-SF connection with no thought for the intermediate cities.

[howeird]

I think part of the problem at the public meetings is the vast majority of us have never seen, let alone been on, a real high speed train. When the best rapid trasit system you know is BART, it takes a lot of imagination to visualize what they have in Japan or Europe.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. When I told people that I'd been in Japan where they have high speed trains -- and yes, they run through urban areas and into city centers -- someone asked, "But they're very loud, right?"

I said, "No louder than any other train, like Caltrain or BART." I have stood on a platform in Japan while a super-express train when through the station without stopping, and it did not seem especially loud to me. And the system is grade-separated, so there are no noisy horns -- those are louder than the sound of the train passing.

Of course, many people object to viaducts or berms going through their cities. I don't find the berm running through San Carlos and Belmont to be a particularly ugly thing -- no worse than any road or highway, and indeed it has a much smaller footprint than a freeway.

I do wish the people living in the cities along the Peninsula would stop trying to pretend that they live in quiet rural towns and aren't part of a large metropolitan area. If you want bucolic rural living, move to the rural parts of the Sacramento Valley. Plenty of homes for sale in Yuba City -- cheap, too.