Amtrak Economics

[Boz]

Don't forget the monkeys -- and, of course, the monkey police -- in India. ;D

I do not want our government to resemble anything approximating China's government. I don't think there are too many people who do. Not Newt Gingrich and not - for all his "wouldn't it be nice" daydreaming - Tom Friedman. (TC I'm not so sure about ;D ).

But I don't think it has to in order for our country to effectively build some high speed rail. Someone put Warren Buffett on the case. We can fuel the trains with natural gas and he'll make a fortune. I mean, another fortune.


Irregardless, nothing we've discussed changes the conclusion that it is sad and inexcusable that, for $117 billion, we can't do something in less than 30 years.

[TC]

Here's the Friedman article where he spells out what Saxa said :

www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1

[theexorcist]

Sept 30, 2010 10:41:53 GMT -5 TC said:

Here's the Friedman article where he spells out what Saxa said :

www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1

One of my favorite sites on the internet is Drew Magary's responses to Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback. The below is my effort to grasp at Drew's coattails.

"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today."

Friedman prefers autocracy. In addition to being to being evil, it's occasionally dumb. From around 1987 to 1997, lots of economists were arguing that the US should get an equivalent to MITI, a Japanese organization that "picked winners" in both specific companies as well as research areas. The problem is that people usually make dumber decisions than the market. No one's favoring MITI now.

"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks."

Like the free speech zones set up at the Beijing Olympics where anyone who wanted to speak got investigated by the government.

"But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. "

EEEEVIL. EEEEVIL.

Anytime someone talks about a "reasonably enlightened group of people", they're always including themselves.

Also, every so often one of the Chinese inner circle gets busted for bribery.

"Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down."

State-directed economies! We know how well THEY'VE worked in the past!

"Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing."

Worse than one-party autocracy, choice of North Korea and Myanmar. Even CUBA gave up on it.

"Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist."

He's not a socialist, but he's not a centrist. Jim Webb is a centrist. Joe Lieberman is a centrist (admittedly a weird one).

"But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions."

Like the fringe left and those who are really centrists. President Obama is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the Democratic Party.

"Look at the climate/energy bill that came out of the House. Its sponsors had to work twice as hard to produce this breakthrough cap-and-trade legislation. Why? Because with basically no G.O.P. representatives willing to vote for any price on carbon that would stimulate investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, the sponsors had to rely entirely on Democrats — and that meant paying off coal-state and agriculture Democrats with pork. "

Wow, that's not very centrist of the bill. If one party has a red line it won't touch, not negotiating with them on that seems pretty my-way-or-the-highway.

"“China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy — an industry that we largely invented — and they are going to do it with a managed economy we don’t have and don’t want,” said Joe Romm, who writes the blog, climateprogress.org. "

Because managed economies don't work over the long haul when compared to the market - especially because the people running them are fallible and can become corrupt.

"The only way for us to match them is by legislating a rising carbon price along with efficiency and renewable standards that will stimulate massive private investment in clean-tech. Hard to do with a one-party democracy. "

With a one-party democracy, Bush started a BLEEPING WAR with few bedrock-solid pretenses! BUSH! The guy that screwed up Katrina!

Even the Democrats did something - Lord knows what - to healthcare.

You're telling me that somebody can't encourage investment in a specific area if it's a really good idea?

"“Just because Obama is on a path to give America the Romney health plan with McCain-style financing, does not mean the Republicans will embrace it — if it seems politically more attractive to scream ‘socialist,’ ” said Miller."

Wow. Just wow. Taking two parts of Republican ideas and combining them into a Frankensteinian monster and saying that it's still a Republican idea is asinine.

"The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. "

What about the burden of long-term research and development? Why not just shift that to the government entirely? Oooh, or how about ownership, with all of its pesky lawyers? Why not give that to the government? And hey, why not give govenment the ability to set production targets?

" No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. "

Great. Start with reforming the H-1 visa process, then secure the border so that the US can start raising legal immigration rates to those with skills needed for the global economy can come in rather than unskilled labor.

"No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. "

So, did that stimulus money provide funds for green jobs or not? Every time I see President Obama travel around the country, he's at some plant producing carbon-neutral eggplants.

"“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.” "

See "the meritocracy"? Friedman's dad was the CEO of a real estate group. Though it does help to play to the audience of NYT subscribers, who think that reading the NYT in bed with your spouse on Sunday defines who's in the meritocracy.

Oh, and the "eastern financiers" are giving more money to the Republican party this cycle than the Democrats.

Oh, and almost every single "multinational corporate manager" I know is a staunch Republican.

And, just for the record, there are a variety of free-trade treaties in the Senate that are primarily being killed by the Democratic opposition of the fringe left, not the Republicans.

For "the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears" - I don't know whether to mock that as the guy having just read "Who Moved My Cheese" or mentioning Friedman's heartlessness for those "have-nots" in places like Detroit.

In summation, I award Friedman no points, and may G-d have mercy on his soul.

[TC]

We get on Ambassador when he posts blowhardy 300 line posts, same thing applies for you too. TL;DR

If you're gonna cry about Friedman not demonizing a Communist regime enough in arguing our gridlock sucks, you should do the same to Gingrich.

[jerseyhoya34]

Friedman has brought us Sharia law. Off with his head.

[thebin]

Wait...is Amtrak now officially admitting that the Acela was in no way whatsover a High Speed Rail in anything other than name and maybe cost? Just checking before I move on.....Glad to see it's still got stations in the metropolises of Danbury AND Waturbury and hartford, all of which are a good 20 minute drive from one another.

[Boz]

How did my attempt to hijack this thread into a discussion of monkey police fail so miserably?

It's monkey police, for crying out loud!!!!!

Well, if that won't distract you, how about alcoholic monkeys?




Or perhaps monkeys (and other animals) getting drunk on Marula fruit?



Mmmmm....Amarula. Got a bottle in the fridge at home at all times.

[The Stig]

Sept 30, 2010 12:03:11 GMT -5 thebin said:

Wait...is Amtrak now officially admitting that the Acela was in no way whatsover a High Speed Rail in anything other than name and maybe cost? Just checking before I move on.....Glad to see it's still got stations in the metropolises of Danbury AND Waturbury and hartford, all of which are a good 20 minute drive from one another.

The Acela trainsets are high-speed, but the service isn't. They can reach 165 mph, but 150 mph is the official speed limit for trains that share tracks with non-high-speed trains, and the track south of NYC can only support 135 mph. In practice they average about 70 mph.

In practice the Acelas rarely go much faster than a conventional train could go due to the myriad of restrictions on their speed on shared tracks. These include freight trains, slow passenger trains, commuter trains, frequent stops, improper overhead wires, tight curves, fragile bridges, road crossings, and other operational problems. All of these would be resolved with a dedicated right of way.

Eliminating all the small town stops wouldn't really help because of all the other restrictions. Amtrak experimented with running Acelas from DC to NYC with Philly as the only stop, and it saved less than 15 minutes.

A dedicated right of way would allow for some trains to stop at all the stations along the route without impeding express trains that just run to the big cities.

Also, US federal crash safety standards for trains is much higher than in Europe and Japan (even though the TGVs and bullet trains have almost perfect safety records), making high-speed trains in the US much more expensive to build and operate. Most of these standards are due to fears of passenger trains colliding with heavy freight trains. For example, one Amtrak service has to carry huge cement blocks in the baggage cars to make the train heavier, and thus safer in a crash with a loaded freight train. For obvious reasons, this causes the train to burn a lot more fuel on every trip. The regulations also prevent the US from using existing technology for our high speed trains. You couldn't just take a TGV and put it on an American track, since it wouldn't meet the safety standards (in nearly 30 years of operation, 3 people have been killed on a TGV, and 2 of those were killed by a bomb). Switching American high-speed trains to a dedicated right of way could allow the US to scrap some of these more outrageous safety standards.

[TC]

Sept 30, 2010 12:03:11 GMT -5 thebin said:

Wait...is Amtrak now officially admitting that the Acela was in no way whatsover a High Speed Rail in anything other than name and maybe cost? Just checking before I move on.....Glad to see it's still got stations in the metropolises of Danbury AND Waturbury and hartford, all of which are a good 20 minute drive from one another.

thebin, Danbury is an hour drive up I-84 from Waterbury - maybe 45 minutes driving fast with no traffic and extreme luck (read: not in commute time). Hartford is 30 minutes past Waterbury on 84.

My Dad commutes on Danbury line once in a while - it's Metro North only (no Amtrak trains are going through there) - there's not that many trains and they are always packed.

[thebin]

The Stig- did they not know all of these things when they wasted billions on this fake High Speed line? Why did they put it in at all if now we are talking about a REAL HSR line already? Did they have no clue but we're supposed to trust them now? Was Acela just you know, like a starter kit that we could play around on so we would be able to do it right the next time...a whole 10 years later? How many billions were wasted on installing real high speed trains on slow train tracks? You say eliminating all of the di ps hit stops from NY to DC only saved like 15 minutes....is that very far from the amount of time saved originally by this boondoggle over the old northeast direct? Seems to me another 15 minutes is an unfortunately signifigant number over what this pig of a govt project saved to begin with at astronomical costs.

[rosslynhoya]

Sept 30, 2010 11:54:54 GMT -5 TC said:

If you're gonna cry about Friedman not demonizing a Communist regime enough in arguing our gridlock sucks, you should do the same to Gingrich.

Newt is an absolute dbag for his Friedmanesque adulation of the Communist regime. I attended one of his speeches/lectures last fall on this topic and it was just as disgusting as any of Friedman's "man if only we could have a totalitarian dictatorship for a day, we could...." columns. The only difference is what ends they would use that absolute power to advance.

[The Stig]

Sept 30, 2010 13:03:22 GMT -5 thebin said:

The Stig- did they not know all of these things when they wasted billions on this fake High Speed line? Why did they put it in at all if now we are talking about a REAL HSR line already? Did they have no clue but we're supposed to trust them now? Was Acela just you know, like a starter kit that we could play around on so we would be able out how to really do it right the next time...a whole 10 years later? How many billions were wasted on intalling real high speed trains on slow train tracks? You say eliminating all of the di ps hit stops from NY to DC only saved like 15 minutes....is that very far from the amount of time saved originally by this boondoggle over the old northeast direct? Seems to me another 15 minutes is an unfortunately signifigant number over what this pig of a govt project saved to begin with at astronomical costs.

The Acela project was typical of Amtrak as a whole - there was enough support to do something, but not enough support to do what was necessary.

The problem with Amtrak is that it does too well to make dropping it feasible. It's almost always grown at a healthy rate, lots of people rely on it, and certain parts of the network are really thriving today. But at the same time, it doesn't do well enough to be self-sustainable. Government funding keeps Amtrak alive, but it also comes with so many strings attached that it prevents Amtrak from being profitable. Congress says it wants Amtrak to be run like a real business, but then they demand that it serve every little podunk town in their district, which no real business would ever do.

With the Acelas in particular, there was lots of support for having high-speed rail in the US. With all the success HSR has had in other countries, how could it be otherwise? The problem is that nobody wanted to make the investment necessary, both in money and political capital (eminent domain, changing safety regs) to build a true high-speed line. So you got a typical Congressional compromise - put high-speed trains on existing tracks. Like most Congressional compromises, it looked great on paper. The Congressmen can say they brought high-speed rail to the US, and the costs look nice and low. The pictures of the trains look cool, and the price tag is well below what the French and Japanese paid. Like most Congressional compromises, it didn't work nearly as well in practice, for reasons already mentioned.

Did the train experts know that putting high-speed trains on existing tracks with US regulations wouldn't work? Of course. Did the Congressmen who voted for the Acela money but would have balked at the price for a dedicated right of way know the difference? Probably not.

All that said, I think the Acelas have been good for Amtrak. A big part of the cost of the Acelas wasn't for the trains themselves, but for the upgrades to the tracks to allow something resembling high-speed running. Those upgrades also benefited the conventional trains like the Northeast Direct/Northeast Regional, which created sort of an ironic situation because making the Northeast Direct faster greatly reduced the benefit of the Acelas. Now you can say that they should have just upgraded the tracks for the Northeast Direct without having to pay for the Acelas, but there's no way those expensive upgrades could have gotten through Congress if they weren't bundled with the sexy Acelas.

The Acelas have also been a big boost to Amtrak's image, and they've been very profitable despite their inherent problems. Would biting the bullet and paying for a true high-speed line have been a much better solution? Of course. Look at what a heavily-compromised service like the Acela can do, then imagine what an uncompromised true high-speed service could do. But there was absolutely no political will to do that when the Acela was launched. The compromise that was the Acela was the most that could have gotten funded.

[SirSaxa]

TheStig... thanks for the primer on Acela history, operations and economics! WOW!

Acela points out exactly what Friedman keeps talking about, i.e. the way our political system is working these days, the best we can ever hope for are "sub-optimal" solutions to problems.

He has never advocated the Chinese way or communism. He has pointed out how embarrassing it is that the Chinese are able to do so many things better than we can... especially concerning issues with long time horizons. One can either read what he says and acknowledge its obvious accuracy, or one can deny what he says and label him a communist sympathizer.

[thebin]

Fair enough Stig. I'm a guy who's lived in DC, NY and Boston and who does not like airports...I'm not reflexively anti-rail at all. I remember being excited about Acela, then being crushed when I heard how little time the trains spent going 150MPH and then angry when I read why. I just feel burned, so when I see eye watering numbers for a "lets do it right now" project, I get angry....especially when it will obviously have to prominently feature large scale Eminent Domain, which as a concept makes me me want to vomit. In my opinion Kelo was the most offensive Supreme Court decision since Plessy.

[theexorcist]

Sept 30, 2010 13:55:57 GMT -5 SirSaxa said:

TheStig... thanks for the primer on Acela history, operations and economics! WOW!

Acela points out exactly what Friedman keeps talking about, i.e. the way our political system is working these days, the best we can ever hope for are "sub-optimal" solutions to problems.

He has never advocated the Chinese way or communism. He has pointed out how embarrassing it is that the Chinese are able to do so many things better than we can... especially concerning issues with long time horizons. One can either read what he says and acknowledge its obvious accuracy, or one can deny what he says and label him a communist sympathizer.

It's a suboptimal solution, but it's not a bad one - Acela makes money and goes fast. It's not perfect, but it's good.

Friedman is right - autocracy is faster. If you want to go back to pThe Republic, the best government is that of a philosopher-king - autocrats who know what's best. I have been to autocracies, and they have the ability to do amazing things.

But people who look at China and marvel at the Beijing Olympics or the maglev trains or the Three Gorges Dam and don't think about the human cost are kidding themselves. It rots the soul, because you can't protest against the person who controls whatever it is because they have that position. You can't vote them out - they're there until people even higher up decide that they're not doing a good job.

There are elections in this country for lots of positions - there's no cabal that appoints governors from Washington. If you don't like how things are getting run, you can run for a position from dogcatcher to President. Barack Obama had been a senator for less than a full term before winning the presidency. His campaign upset the Democratic party hierarchy. This doesn't happen in China, where there are about four candidates for the next party chairmanship.

There are too many people who visit autocracies and come away impressed, and China's the worst offender. Speed comes with a cost. That cost, to me, is the acceptance of evil.

PS - the monkey police are cool. I prefer the snake charmers, though.

[The Stig]

The thing is, speed doesn't have to come at the cost of accepting evil or dictatorships.

Take a look at this picture: www.airliners.net/photo//1194776/L/&sid=3bca75ce3e77f2bc24b563ffdaf2bb66

It's an aerial view of Tokyo's Narita airport, built in the 1970s in Japan. Take a look at the runway on the right, and you'll notice that it's split into two sections. That's because the farmer who lived on the land between the two sections refused to sell his land to the airport, and Japan's lack of eminent domain laws meant that the authorities couldn't force him to sell. The same issue affects the runway at the bottom of the picture, to the point that it can't be used as a runway. Therefore, an airport that should have had 3 long runways now has 1 long runway and 1 short runway.

Another view of the runway on the right: www.airliners.net/photo//0874120/L/&sid=3bca75ce3e77f2bc24b563ffdaf2bb66

Now you can debate the merits and justice of eminent domain laws all you want, I don't have a very strong opinion on that issue. My point is that, despite lacking strong eminent domain laws, despite having a much higher population density than the US, and despite having a functional (if not perfect) democracy, Japan was still able to build a nationwide high-speed rail network. Not only were they able to build such a network, but they did it before anybody else and arguably still have the best network in the world. Despite their lack of a Mussolini-like dictator, the trains run on time (average delay: less than 20 seconds), have huge numbers of riders, and form an absolutely integral part of the nation's economy.

Do we need to copy China's political system to build a true high-speed rail network? NO! We can do it with our current system, with minimal modifications to our current laws, and with current technology. Will it cost a lot? Yes. Would it cost less in China? Yes. But people need to stop pretending like dictatorships suddenly now have a monopoly on great infrastructure projects and technological progress. If we just pull our heads out of our a**es, grow a pair of attachments, and use some common sense we can do just as good of a job.

For what it's worth, the Chinese Maglev project suffered from a lot of the same problems that we've seen in American projects. The only operational Maglev right now runs from Shanghai's new airport towards the city. It cost a ridiculous amount of money, and because of high costs they couldn't build it all the way into the city. They just stopped it in the middle of nowhere, so you still have to take a subway to get into the city. Nobody really bothers to take the Maglev to the subway to the city, since you can just take the subway itself all the way from the airport to the city!

So the Chinese have ended up with a compromised system that looks great on paper but doesn't actually do anything special. Ticket prices are ridiculously high, ridership is very low, and I'd imagine it loses tons of money on operating costs alone. In other words, it's just like the Acela, only worse. For all its faults, at least the Acela has lots of riders and makes a nice profit.

[Boz]

Well said, Stig.

As Jonathan Mardukas once said, "I love to travel by train."

[theexorcist]

Stig said it all.

See this article, particularly the last paragraph:

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/30/AR2010093003416.html?hpid=topnews

"There is, however, at least one government structure that works: the Delhi Metro. A fully owned state company, it laid 77 miles of track in less than five years to meet the Commonwealth Games deadline. It helps that the Delhi Metro has as its chief executive an award-winning, tough-as-nails railway engineer named E. Sreedharan, who does not tolerate bureaucratic or political interference and treats targets as sacrosanct. "

[kchoya]

Sept 30, 2010 14:51:48 GMT -5 The Stig said:

The thing is, speed doesn't have to come at the cost of accepting evil or dictatorships.

Take a look at this picture: www.airliners.net/photo//1194776/L/&sid=3bca75ce3e77f2bc24b563ffdaf2bb66

It's an aerial view of Tokyo's Narita airport, built in the 1970s in Japan. Take a look at the runway on the right, and you'll notice that it's split into two sections. That's because the farmer who lived on the land between the two sections refused to sell his land to the airport, and Japan's lack of eminent domain laws meant that the authorities couldn't force him to sell. The same issue affects the runway at the bottom of the picture, to the point that it can't be used as a runway. Therefore, an airport that should have had 3 long runways now has 1 long runway and 1 short runway.

Another view of the runway on the right: www.airliners.net/photo//0874120/L/&sid=3bca75ce3e77f2bc24b563ffdaf2bb66

Now you can debate the merits and justice of eminent domain laws all you want, I don't have a very strong opinion on that issue. My point is that, despite lacking strong eminent domain laws, despite having a much higher population density than the US, and despite having a functional (if not perfect) democracy, Japan was still able to build a nationwide high-speed rail network. Not only were they able to build such a network, but they did it before anybody else and arguably still have the best network in the world. Despite their lack of a Mussolini-like dictator, the trains run on time (average delay: less than 20 seconds), have huge numbers of riders, and form an absolutely integral part of the nation's economy.

Do we need to copy China's political system to build a true high-speed rail network? NO! We can do it with our current system, with minimal modifications to our current laws, and with current technology. Will it cost a lot? Yes. Would it cost less in China? Yes. But people need to stop pretending like dictatorships suddenly now have a monopoly on great infrastructure projects and technological progress. If we just pull our heads out of our a**es, grow a pair of attachments, and use some common sense we can do just as good of a job.

For what it's worth, the Chinese Maglev project suffered from a lot of the same problems that we've seen in American projects. The only operational Maglev right now runs from Shanghai's new airport towards the city. It cost a ridiculous amount of money, and because of high costs they couldn't build it all the way into the city. They just stopped it in the middle of nowhere, so you still have to take a subway to get into the city. Nobody really bothers to take the Maglev to the subway to the city, since you can just take the subway itself all the way from the airport to the city!

So the Chinese have ended up with a compromised system that looks great on paper but doesn't actually do anything special. Ticket prices are ridiculously high, ridership is very low, and I'd imagine it loses tons of money on operating costs alone. In other words, it's just like the Acela, only worse. For all its faults, at least the Acela has lots of riders and makes a nice profit.

Here's an article on the problems with building a golf course in China:

parforchina.com/940

[hoyawatcher]

Interesting reaction / demonstrations in Germany to the expansion of their high speed rail lines.

www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.50cde88a891bb4f2c3adb2ce3e936445.861&show_article=1

Usually I think of Europe as being highly supportive of their high speed rail links and using rail instead of airlinks but I guess the support isn't as universal as I thought. I don't claim to know the specifics of the issues and concerns about this new link in Germany but I wonder if we wouldn't get some of the same reactions in the US if we went to set up new right of ways for a NE high speed rail link.

BTW - I would love to see a new and real high speed rail link through the NE corridor and think it is something we really ought to do. I wish I knew how much push back there was to the $50K per foot cost of this proposal. Seems outrageously high on the surface.