Obama administration cuts 90 minutes off Amtrak trip from Chicago to St Louis

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

It does not preclude the fact the state still needs infrastructure.

I need a new house but I can't afford it atm. Get the picture yet?

[Karee 4,191]

It does not preclude the fact the state still needs infrastructure.

I need a new Ferarri. Trust me it's infrastructure. Can I afford it, NO.

[JohnR! 5,495]

I need a new house but I can't afford it atm. Get the picture yet?

Ergo, if you could not afford a car to drive to work, you would have to quit your job....

I need a new Ferarri. Trust me it's infrastructure. Can I afford it, NO.

I think the question is can you afford not to get the new Ferrari?

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

Ergo, if you could not afford a car to drive to work, you would have to quit your job....

WTH is that suppose to mean?

[JohnR! 5,495]

WTH is that suppose to mean?

It is supposed to mean that your comparison was not germane.

[Karee 4,191]

Ergo, if you could not afford a car to drive to work, you would have to quit your job....

I think the question is can you afford not to get the new Ferrari?

Yeah, I drive my Honda which is what most people would continue to do In California, high speed rail or not. FYI, California isn't the N.E. United States.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

I don't see the problem with that. Chicago has Midway, Houston has Hobby, Washington has Reagan, L.A. has Orange county, Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario etc.

Anyway, I don't really see the correlation between the Wright Amendment and high speed rail in Texas since the Wright Amendment restricted interstate flights out of Texas, not intrastate flights.

That was the problem though. Southwest was restricted in how they were allowed to fly and it cut into their bottom line. They couldn't fly anywhere but Texas and neighboring states with the passage. A HSR network would greatly harm their business.

As far as DFW vs Love Field goes, Love Field was no longer needed and was supposed to shut down, but Southwest was not part of the original agreement to have Love stop commercial flights and fought to stay there. Their fight though is what ultimately led to them being restricted as well.

DFW Airport is the largest Airport in the US (though property 'land' Denver wins) and has so much room for expansion it's not even funny. The cities used that land for a reason, as no other airport would be necessary. The difference with other cities and having multiple airports is about land for expansion, etc. Southwest would probably do a lot better out at DFW now days figuring they are still growing, but Love Field cannot continue to grow without kicking peole out of their homes....

[Karee 4,191]

WTH is that suppose to mean?

Don't bother. No point hopping on that merry go round.

[JohnR! 5,495]

Yeah, I drive my Honda which is what most people would continue to do In California, high speed rail or not.

High-speed rail in the SF-LA corridor would in fact compete with the airlines.

Edited October 22, 2012 by Gegel

[natty bumppo 297]

Isn't that what the article and this thread is about?

JOLIET, Ill. — In a modest milestone for President Barack Obama's high-speed rail vision, test runs started zooming along a small section of the Amtrak line between Chicago and St. Louis at 111 mph Friday.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn were aboard when an Amtrak train hit 111 mph for the first time in Illinois.

"Four years ago we were nowhere," LaHood said after the train reached the landmark speed. "Illinois and the country was a wasteland when it came to high speed rail… This is a dream come true today."

It maintained the high speeds for about 5 minutes along a 15-miles stretch of track between Dwight and Pontiac before braking back to more normal speeds.

"The important thing is it's a step in the right direction, but the question becomes what do we gain by doing this?" said David Burns, a rail consultant in suburban Chicago who drew up one of the first studies for high-speed service on the route more than three decades ago.

so amtrack in illinois finally caught up to the steam engines used in the 30's and 40's ... how impressive ...

lets see ... there was the F7 hudson hiawatha and j-class locomotives which were documented and did operate in excess of 100 mph for the same distance/time as this amtrack recent miracle.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

It is supposed to mean that your comparison was not germane.

Save it. If you don't have a legit answer then skip posting about it. Again how is California going to pay for that new $100+ billion dollar rail when they are already $16 billion dollars in the hole and have the worst credit rating of all 50 states.

Edited October 22, 2012 by Bad_Daddy

[JohnR! 5,495]

If you don't have a legit answer

I always respond in kind.

Edited October 22, 2012 by Gegel

[Karee 4,191]

That was the problem though. Southwest was restricted in how they were allowed to fly and it cut into their bottom line. They couldn't fly anywhere but Texas and neighboring states with the passage. A HSR network would greatly harm their business.

As far as DFW vs Love Field goes, Love Field was no longer needed and was supposed to shut down, but Southwest was not part of the original agreement to have Love stop commercial flights and fought to stay there. Their fight though is what ultimately led to them being restricted as well.

DFW Airport is the largest Airport in the US (though property 'land' Denver wins) and has so much room for expansion it's not even funny. The cities used that land for a reason, as no other airport would be necessary. The difference with other cities and having multiple airports is about land for expansion, etc. Southwest would probably do a lot better out at DFW now days figuring they are still growing, but Love Field cannot continue to grow without kicking peole out of their homes....

Bolded above is ironic isn't it? American Airlines and their congressional allies in Tarrant County spent years fighting to keep the Wright Amendment in place.

Southwest could move to DFW and put the final nail in the coffin of American Airlines tomorrow. I think the saying is something like "Be careful what you wish for"

Edited October 22, 2012 by Karee

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

http://nexus.umn.edu/projects/hsr/hsr-factsheet.html

California's High Speed Rail: Some Facts

David Levinson, University of Minnesota

email: dlevinson@umn.edu

The proposed California High Speed Rail line would be more expensive than every other active HSR proposal in the country put together. While subsidized by everyone who pays the regressive sales tax, its users would have a higher than average income, so it is a subsidy from the poor to the rich. It would cost about $600-$1000 person or $2000-$3000 per California household before a single trip is made. This money could support about 20,000 teachers or police perpetually. For every $1 spent by the passenger, it would entail $4 in public subsidy, twice the annual expenditure of the State Transportation Improvement Program

Costs

While it is too soon to know for this system, cost estimates have already doubled. Forecasts of demand for transit are typically 25-50% too high. Estimates of costs for major infrastructure are significantly off, for instance the cost of the Denver Airport tripled from beginning to end.(See: Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition by Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius, and Rothengatter or Mega-projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment by Altshuler and Luberoff)

Technology

Conventional High Speed Rail is basically 19th century technology spruced up; there is no reason to expect that it won't work technologically.

Speed

HSR is slower than air travel in the main Bay Area to Los Angeles market. While proponents claim fewer delays at train stations than airports, that assumes lessened security precautions. Rail systems are at least as vulnerable to terrorism as air systems (See Madrid 3/11.)

Congestion

The HSR system will take less than one lane of traffic off the major North-South highways. Airports will soon have extra capacity as they increase operations in bad weather with instrumented flight controls.

Energy

A study of BART (Lave 1976) estimated that more energy was used to build the system than will ever be saved by it.

Environment

Other modes are steadily getting cleaner, for instance fuel cell powered vehicles will emit only water and carbon dioxide. Any benefits from HSR depend on unproven forecasts. The energy for HSR must come from somewhere, if electric than probably coal or nuclear, both of which have some problems.

Planning and Urban Design

BART has not been particularly successful at attracting development outside of downtown San Francisco, why would HSR? It is likely that HSR will promote sprawl into the Central Valley.Advocates of rail (traditionally urban subways and light rail) claim that new rail will result in the redevelopment of "good neighborhoods" around the stations. This is true to a limited extent (e.g. in San Francisco and selected other stations, such as Rockridge), but not universally. Rail tends to promote dispersion ... park and ride lots promote what those advocates would consider "bad neighborhoods", i.e. auto oriented suburban neighborhoods, enabling people to live very far from the central city (Dublin, Pittsburg etc) and still work downtown. We can hypothesize that HSR will promote even more "bad neighborhoods", particularly in the central valley, as people choose to live 100 miles from the city and use HSR to commute into San Francisco and Silicon Valley.Downtowns as a share of regional jobs have been declining steadily for 50 years. Hence any system focused on downtown is serving yesterday's travel demand pattern rather than tomorrow's (unless it can reverse the trend, which is rather like tilting at windmills). There is little evidence that new rail starts do much to reverse the trend.

Alternatives

What is the best use of $20,000,000,000 to $30,000,000,000 ? For that amount of money it would be very easy to provide improvements to air travel into the central valley, along with many other things. HSR is the least cost effective way to provide transportation services between the Valley and the coastal cities.

Who's Behind It

There has been significant lobbying for HSR by Engineering Consultants, Construction Companies, Rail Car Manufacturers, and Local Developers. Many of the companies involved are foreign owned and controlled, including those that built the money-losing systems in France and Japan. The commission has visited these systems on foreign junkets. There is also some nostalgia on the part of train buffs and those yearning for a simpler time.

References

Lave, Charles. 1976. The Negative Energy Impact of Modern Rail-Transit Systems Science, February 11, 1977. Vol. 195, pp. 595-596..

Pickrell, Don. 1992. A Desire Named Streetcar: Fantasy and Fact in Rail Transit Planning: Journal of the American Planning Association 58:2 158-76

Levinson, David. 1995. Rail Reinvented: A Brief History of High Speed Ground Transportation (Article)

Levinson, David. 1996. The Full Cost of Intercity Transportation. Access Magazine #9: 21-25. (Article)

Levinson, David, Adib Kanafani, and David Gillen. 1999. Air, High Speed Rail or Highway: A Cost Comparison in the California Corridor. Transportation Quarterly 53: 1 123-132 (Article)

Gillen, David, and David Levinson. The Full Cost of Air Travel in the California Corridor. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 1662: 1-9. (Article)

Levinson, David, and David Gillen. The Full Cost of Intercity Highway Transportation. 1997. Transportation Research 3D:4 207-223. (Article)

Levinson, David, Adib Kanafani, and David Gillen. A Comparison of the Social Costs of Air and Highway. 1998. Transport Reviews 18:3 215-240. (Article)

Levinson, David, Jean-Michel Mathieu, Adib Kanafani, and David Gillen. 1997. The Full Cost of High-Speed Rail: An Engineering Approach. Annals of Regional Science 31:2 189-215 (Article)

Levinson, David, Jean-Michel Mathieu, Adib Kanafani, and David Gillen. 1996. The Full Cost of Intercity Transportation: A Comparison of Air, Highway, and High Speed Rail. research report UCB-ITS-RR-96-3 prepared for California High Speed Rail (Full Report)

King, Norman. An Expensive Train to A Slower Ride (Article)

Note: To read the articles, you will need a standard reader for Portable Document Format (PDF) such as Acrobat which is available free from Adobe.

Edited October 22, 2012 by Bad_Daddy

[JohnR! 5,495]

so amtrack in illinois finally caught up to the steam engines used in the 30's and 40's ...

That ought to tell you how far behind we are, as a nation in our rail infrastructure.....