"All Aboard, (Northeastern United States of) America, All Aboard Amtrak..."

It makes me smile when I read about how Amtrak is carrying more passengers and making better financial decisions.

Although, I won't really be happy until I'm traveling inter-city on high-speed rail is connecting every major city so you don't have to worry about snow or bad weather cancelling your flight or making roads unsafe to drive. Kind of like how the Acela proves here:

Why Don't More U.S. Airports Connect to Amtrak? | The Atlantic Cities

Anyone that knows me knows my infatuation with high-speed rail. However, Eric Jaffe of The Atlantic Cities asks a more basic question: Why Don't More U.S. Airports Connect to Amtrak?

This is a good question and worth answering (and I'm more optimistic of the chances of success than the writer is). The airlines' biggest gripe with intercity and high speed rail is it would take away passengers from them. However, rail is more suited for shorter distances to be traveled, which are not well served by airlines nor are they big money makers for the airlines.

However, rail working in conjunction with air travel would go a long way towards making connections easier (like when I was in college and flew from New York to Chicago to catch a mini-jet to Des Moines to take a van to Iowa City) or bringing people from nearby, but not drivable, distances to the airport (like if I had the option to take a train from Iowa City directly to O'Hare to catch a flight to LGA.)

Privately financed and built passenger rail service? Someone is going to give it a shot!

This is going to be very interesting if it proves to be profitable:

"In late March, Florida East Coast Industries (FECI) announced plans to build “All Aboard Florida,” a private passenger rail line that would connect Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa and Orlando. At least for now, FECI is planning to do this without government subsidies — which could make this the first self-funding passenger rail line in the United States in half a century."

This company has a lot of things going for it, as the post mentions, such as ownership of rights of way, faster and lighter freight service existing on those tracks (as opposed to the normally slow and heavy freight service), and real estate holdings near the proposed downtown Miami station that could see an increase in value with a new station.

And oh by the way, it could also prove to be a vital first step in catching up with the rest of the world that has left us behind in rail service. You know, because we "invest" in roads and highways but "subsidize" rail, which is essentially the same thing.

What the Eurostar's Success Means for California HSR | The Atlantic Cities

The point that gets missed, which is what I've been saying all along about high speed rail:

"At a travel time of roughly 3 hours, which is about what California's high-speed rail authority expects, the train would capture about 30 percent of business travelers and 40 percent of the leisure market... In the unlikely chance the fast train can achieve a travel time of 2 hours 25 minutes, it could win about half the market share of leisure travelers."

The Economic Impact of High Speed Rail: Transforming the Midwest

The Midwest High Speed Rail Association issued a report about how High Speed Rail can transform the Midwest:

"As the world’s fifth largest economy, (at $2.6 trillion and approximately equal to France, only the U.S., Chinese, Japanese and German economies are larger) the Midwest possesses a diverse manufacturing, agricultural and business services base anchored by nine major metropolitan areas. High speed rail (HSR) will have a transformative impact that will unify the Midwest and solidify its future position as one of the world’s most powerful economic mega-regions."

Boston to Southern Virginia in three hours? Well, not in the US anyway.

An article in yesterday's New York Times about China's high-speed rail construction also gave some background information on why China is so insistent on building it:

"China’s lavish new rail system is a response to a failure of central planning six years ago.

After China joined the World Trade Organization in November 2001, exports and manufacturing soared. Electricity generation failed to keep up because the railway ministry had not built enough rail lines or purchased enough locomotives to haul the coal needed to run new power plants.

By 2004, the government was turning off the power to some factories up to three days a week to prevent blackouts in residential areas.

Officials drafted a plan to move much of the nation’s passenger traffic onto high-speed routes by 2020, freeing existing tracks for more freight. Then the global financial crisis hit in late 2008. Faced with mass layoffs at export factories, China ordered that the new rail system be completed by 2012 instead of 2020, throwing more than $100 billion in stimulus at the projects."

One other passage that stood out:

"In a little more than three hours, [the Guangzhou-to-Wuhan line] travels 664 miles, comparable to the distance from Boston to southern Virginia. That is less time than Amtrak’s fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston just to New York."

One can only hope...

High-speed rail: the elegant way to travel...

The White House recently had Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood make a trip to Philadelphia's 30th Street station to announce the President's plan to have 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years. (So we can be in 25 years what Japan is like today? At least I hope our streets will be that clean by then.)

Great pieces by the New York Times and Washington Post to report the facts of the announcement. The Wall Street Journal made sure to imply some foreign conspiracy about "Japanese-style bullet trains" and the socialist idea of how Amtrak is the "federally subsidized national railroad operator", which it may be but seems somewhat worse when you describe it in such a utilitarian way. (Of course, that probably was their intent.)

NYTimes.com: Japan Starts to Shop Its Bullet Train Technology

A few points from a New York Times article earlier this week about Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's visit to Japan:

"Of particular interest to the Japanese has been a planned $1.25 billion, 84-mile high-speed link between Tampa and Orlando — the first leg of a corridor that state officials hope will eventually reach Miami. Twenty-two companies are bidding for the contract, and Washington is set to announce a winner this year."

"Central Japan Railway, which is based in Nagoya and is more commonly known as JR Central, is promoting its N700-I trains, which are in use in Japan and can run at a top speed of about 330 kilometers (205 miles) an hour.

"But JR Central has also been showing off its MLX01 maglev bullet train, still in its testing phase, which in 2003 clocked the world’s fastest trial run of 581 kilometers (361 miles) an hour. "

In case you're doing the math, the JR Central line in use in Japan today would make the Tampa to Orlando trip in 25 minutes. The MLX01 maglev would do it in 14 minutes.

For some reason people would rather sit in traffic for two hours and pollute the environment. Go figure.

“Life is like a box of chocolates.”

In a blog post on October 6th, I said that the Republican candidates for Governor in Ohio and Wisconsin were only using the issue of high-speed rail for political posturing and really had no intent to turn away free federal money that would create construction jobs in their states.

I guess I was wrong because The New York Times now reports that California, Florida, and a handful of other states will be receiving the funding that Ohio and Wisconsin are turning away. (Update: The Wall Street Journal also reported this story on December 10th.) For those states, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

As far as the newly-elected Governors of Ohio and Wisconsin are concerned, another Forrest Gump quote comes to mind:
“Stupid is as stupid does.”

He Don't Know What He Don't Know

The New York Times' Tom Friedman writes an uncharacteristically humerous column today about what a WikiLeaks document from the Chinese Embassy in Washington would look like. After taking a very accurate cheap shot at Amtrak's Acela:

"The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time!"

Friedman goes on the state the obvious fact very few politicians are willing to say:

"But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind."

Unfortunately this has always been the case in this country. For example, we also complain about how high our taxes are in the United States even though our tax rates are among the lowest in the world. It's not surprising then that the places with the highest concentrations of immigrant populations as well as people that vacation abroad tend to be blue states. People living in those states actually have a clue as to how the rest of the world lives.

Stories of high-speed rail's death have been greatly exaggerated...

A blog post at NYTimes.com yesterday talks about the likely incoming House Transportation Committee Chairman, Rep. John Mica (R-FL). Unlike other Republicans, he's not interested in killing high-speed rail outright but rather redirecting its funding elsewhere.

I still think the Regional Hubs identified by the White House make sense and the incoming Wisconsin Governor does need to think twice about whether or not it makes business sense to sever the link between Chicago and Minneapolis that will run through his state. It's likely to generate quite a bit of revenue and I still stand behind my initial assessment that it's nothing more than political posturing for an election and not an actually policy decision that will be made.

Or at least I hope so, because I'd really like to arrive in Milwaukee one day in a train station that looks like the rendering of the proposed Milwaukee station pictured above.

I know we're trying but we really have a LONG LONG way to go...

A White House blog post this week talked about the Department of Transportation awarding $2.4 Billion as part of its efforts to develop high-speed rail in the United States. Now everyone that’s reading this knows how I feel about high-speed rail. What solidified it much more for me was what a colleague of mine from our Shanghai office told me. He’s working out of the New York office for two weeks and he said his hometown of SuZhou is roughly 74 km (46 miles) from Shanghai. He said the new high-speed line cuts the 45 minute ride of the older trains down to 25 minutes.

Someone show me a new train anywhere in the United States that covers roughly 50 miles between two major cities in under an hour, let alone 45 minutes or 25 minutes?

This is what high-speed rail really looks like...

Why is this hard for people to understand?

"...passengers would be able to travel from London to Frankfurt in five hours, Deutsche Bahn said. That compares to an almost two-hour flight — not counting time getting to and from the airports and going through security and check-in. A trip from London to Amsterdam, which takes just over one hour by plane, would be a four-hour train ride." {emphasis mine}


Now compare that to the proposed "high-speed" rail for Ohio, which will go a whopping 79 miles per hour, or roughly 121 mph slower than the trains discussed in the New York Times article.

"WTF C.C.?" (No, not C.C. Sabathia, the bigger C.C.)

Short-sighted, misguided, and downright insanely ludicrous. There are no ways to even give Gov. Chris Christie the benefit of the doubt on finding other alternatives to the THE Tunnel. Though he seems like he would be a nice guy in person, the reality is he represents the 'Old' New Jersey, where the automobile was king, rather than the 'New' New Jersey that has to deal with scarce parking, high gas prices (even with the lowest gasoline tax in the country), and pothole infested roads that you don’t have to worry about while you’re listening to your iPod and reading your Kindle while riding NJ Transit.

Paul Krugman takes a more political and economic perspective but still explains it pretty straightforwardly in his column today, where he says:

“So, about that tunnel: with almost 1,200 people per square mile, New Jersey is the most densely populated state in America, more densely populated than any major European nation. {emphasis mine} Add in the fact that many residents work in New York, and you have a state that can’t function without adequate public transportation. There just isn’t enough space for everyone to drive to work.”

"If you build it, they will come."

A number of Republican Gubernatorial candidates claim to be opposed to construction of high-speed rail networks in their states. The reality is it’s going to get built anyway and these candidates are simply using it as an election issue to show their opposition to President Obama than any actual opposition to building high-speed rail. To understand why the lines will get built, look no further than:

1) The money set aside in the stimulus is strictly for high-speed rail construction and if it’s not used for that purpose it must be returned to the federal government.
2) The article cites many Republicans supporting high-speed rail construction projects, such as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (R-IL), and former Medirian, MS mayor and Reconnecting America President John Robert Smith (R-MS).
3) Alaska’s At-Large Member of the House, Don Young (R-AK) wrote an op-ed piece that I blogged about on the need for high-speed rail.

So long story short, this is just election posturing and nothing more. And sadly, Democrats voting against these candidates will call them hypocrites while the Republicans voting for these candidates will forget they ever opposed the projects in the first place. Hopefully the country will not lose out from all of this superficial bickering.

Does it really take 30 years to make a modest improvement?

"...the Next-Gen High Speed Rail line would reduce the travel time between Washington, D.C., and New York City from 162 minutes to 96 minutes. The travel time between New York and Boston would go from 215 minutes to 84 minutes."

So if you do the math, Washington, D.C. to Boston currently takes 6 hours and 17 minutes, not counting delays due to MARC, SEPTA, NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the MBTA Commuter Rail clogging up the tracks. The vision is to reduce this travel time to 3 hours to cover the same 440 miles by the year 2040. So instead of covering a maximum 70 miles per hour, we'll have trains that can go a maximum of 147 miles per hour 30 years from now. A nice improvement but, the Chinese already have a line in existence today that covers the 75 miles from Beijing to Tianjin in 25 minutes (or, 180 miles per hour. TODAY!)

So, in other words, is our vision to become today's China in the next 30 years? Not really, but why should it take us 30 years to do what's best for commuters (faster trips), the environment (fewer cars on the road), and national security (reduced usage of petrodictator's oil and you can't fly a train into a building unless there are tracks that lead to one)?

Climbing aboard my soapbox again for high-speed rail...

Yes, I'm on that high-speed rail bandwagon yet again. This time even the Economist weighs in on high-speed rail as part of its commentary on American infrastructure overall, stating:

"America's rail system is inadequate and in need of repair and expansion." and "America could probably use a new high-speed rail network..."

At least the Infrastructure Bank proposed by the Obama Administration is a start but it will not be enough and, as The New York Times and Huffington Post point out, we are already far, far behind not just the rest of the world but even our own-country compared to 70-plus years ago.

I'm on my high-speed rail bandwagon again...

To be more accurate, rather than climb onto a bandwagon, I'd rather be on high-speed rail without having to leave the United States. A couple of great posts recently on Huffington Post about this topic:

• Chris Matthews writes about how high-speed rail construction can help improve our crumbling infrastructure and provide vital construction jobs at the same time.
• John Robbins writes about how we Americans tend to thumb our noses at public transportation, which is a phenomenon created by automakers and oil companies conspiring to drive people from the rails to publicly subsidized and built roads and highways.

Alaska Republican Congressman: Time to get moving on high-speed rail

Alaksa's House Representative, Don Young, wrote this great piece in Politico recently about the need for the United States to build a new high-speed rail infrastructure. What's interesting is Congressman Young is a Republican, so this isn't what the political right would typically call a left-wing tax-and-spend/government works scheme. The Congressman clearly lays out the needs in terms of reducing energy usage (specifically fossil fuels) and improving transportation capabilities by easing congestion on roads and airlines. Please read it and tell me what you think.Thanks!

Plains, Trains & Automobiles? Ditch the cars and planes for the TRAINS!!

People that know me well have known that I am very much a railfan. As a kid growing up in Queens, I memorized the entire New York City Subway Map when I was only five years old. I would make each stop on a subway line with my toy train without ever looking at the subway map. In fact, my parents would often just send my sister and me to take out-of-town guests sightseeing, often to the astonishment of our guests that two schoolchildren would be showing them around New York City.

On one occasion when I was six years old, I even navigated five of us that went sightseeing back home when our usual train line was suspended due to a derailment. This interest even continued in high school, when some of my friends would make me sit on the train with my back to the map and quiz me on stops, transfer points, and the service hours of specific subway lines, betting that I would get one wrong (I never did; a friend once tried making up station stops with fake street names just to stump me.)

That's why trains mean a lot to me and I am happy to see rail service in this country get the political recognition that it deserves. In January, Vice President Joe Biden penned a nice column in Huffington Post about why America Needs Trains. As a daily train commuter, he spelled out quite nicely how trains are not only greener but can be more reliable and secure than airline travel.

Today's New York Times has another opinion piece about a strategy that the writer believes should have been implemented when high speed rail funding was included in the stimulus. I don't entirely agree with his disapproval of the two projects that were part of the stimulus. After all, very few people outside of the northeastern United States have commuter rail service in their locality or have even ridden on a train for that matter and the exposure of new rail construction and the initial fanfare would be a good introduction for them. However, the writer does make some good points about why the Acela service in Amtrak's Northeast Corridor would be a logical choice for an upgrade to true high speed service.

Read it and feel free to tell me what you think. ENJOY!!!