More Pushback on Major Media HSR Denial

For much of the last week we've been consumed with the news coming out of the Bay Area, from the Menlo Park Town Hall to the Atherton v. CHSRA decision (which both occurred on Wednesday, making that one of the more HSR-heavy days I've had lately). But I wanted to pause for a moment to bring readers' attention to some of the excellent takedowns of the HSR denial we've been seeing in the Washington Post and the New York Times lately, particularly two articles that I'd intended to write about but got sidetracked with the Great Peninsula Debate.

• Over at the Infrastructurist Yonah Freemark offered a thorough, numbers-based refutation of Ed Glaeser's four-part exercise in HSR denial in the NYT's Economix Blog. Freemark's numbers-based assessment shows, as he writes, "In this more comprehensive model that takes into account trivialities like regional population growth and a reality-based route, the annual benefits total $840 million compared with construction and maintenance costs of $810 million. Which is to say, our numbers show that HSR pays for itself rather handily. And this would be early in the lifecycle of the system, with those benefits likely to grow in future decades."
  
  As one of the core problems with Glaeser's faulty analysis was his decision to examine a hypothetical HSR line rather than an actual one, Freemark looks at the actual Texas T-Bone plan. By examining the actual context in which it would be built, he shows how HSR is going to provide benefits far outweighing the costs. But since the US economics field, from academia to the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, is dominated by short-term and flawed concepts of costs and benefits. Freemark's full post is well worth the read.



• The St. Louis Urban Workshop has a great "re-mix" of Robert Samuelson's ridiculous screed, showing how the real transportation boondoggle are the interstate highways that continue to get gobs of federal funding despite bringing diminishing value to the country.

WaPo Joins The HSR Stupidity

Robert J. Samuelson is one of the more right-wing writers at the Washington Post. His previous columns have proposed privatizing Medicare, for example, just to give you a picture of who we are dealing with. And like Ed Glaeser and Ed Morris before him, he has decided to bring a right-wing frame to his attack on high speed rail in today's Washington Post.

The column turns on two basic arguments. The first is that somehow HSR will not pencil out. The fact that every HSR system in the world covers its operating costs is lost on Samuelson, who passes off as fact Glaeser's bad math that we've already debunked. Perhaps expecting HSR supporters to respond with the fact that European and Asian HSR systems cover their expenses through fares, Samuelson then tries to argue the USA is different:

What works in Europe and Asia won't in the United States. Even abroad, passenger trains are subsidized. But the subsidies are more justifiable because geography and energy policies differ.

Densities are much higher, and high densities favor rail with direct connections between heavily populated city centers and business districts. In Japan, density is 880 people per square mile; it's 653 in Britain, 611 in Germany and 259 in France. By contrast, plentiful land in the United States has led to suburbanized homes, offices and factories. Density is 86 people per square mile. Trains can't pick up most people where they live and work and take them to where they want to go. Cars can.

As Bianca pointed out in the comments to yesterday's post, however, California HSR will have a much higher density than the figures Samuelson provided above:

Okay, I pulled the numbers from the US Census site (linked above.) Note these are numbers based on the year 2000, so current numbers are likely higher.

San Francisco County – 9,999
San Mateo County- 1,575
Santa Clara County- 1,303
Merced County- 109.2
Fresno County- 143.1
Tulare County- 76.3
Kern County- 81.3
Los Angeles County 2,344.1
Orange County- 3,607.5

average: 2,138 persons per square mile over nine counties served by HSR.

This is just for the San Francisco to Irvine section, but I think we can safely lay density to rest as an argument.

It is true that the Central Valley cities have smaller densities. But one of the purposes of HSR is to spur that density by providing HSR stations in city centers that can serve as magnets for transit-oriented development. Even with that in mind, the average density of the CAHSR route from SF to Anaheim is significantly higher than the numbers Samuelson provides. It blows his entire argument out of the water.

But as James Carville once said, "when your opponent is drowning, throw him an anvil." We can go further and show that the European nation most closely resembling California - Spain - has had dramatic success with HSR. Bruce McF made that point at Daily Kos today, and Matt Melzer made it here in July 2008 using the following charts:







That last chart in particular is of immense value in discussing American HSR plans. Spain was not the stereotypical European nation that already had a large share of its population using trains. Spain, like California, was primarily dependent on cars and planes to get around the nation. And yet it is Spain that has had the most dramatic success with HSR in the last 20 years.

Samuelson also made another point above, that trains don't work as well as cars because they don't give you door to door service. There are two flaws with this. First, a high speed train from SF to LA is still faster than driving, getting you from point A to point B in about half the time. Sure, you have to drive to a train station, but the HSR stations in both the Bay Area and SoCal will be centrally located.

That leads to the next point that Samuelson almost totally ignores. Yes, as he says, beyond 400 or 500 miles high speed trains don't compete well with planes. But most US HSR plans, including California's, fall into the sweet spot. SF to LA via HSR will be a 432-mile journey. Madrid to Barcelona is about 385 miles. And that corridor, once the world's busiest air corridor, high speed trains have had a smashing success, grabbing 40% of the market share in just its first year of operation.

It should be quite clear that Samuelson's attack on HSR is not based on evidence at all. Rather, as Dean Baker points out, it seems based solely on hatred of trains. Weak stuff indeed.

Finally, as Rafael noted in the comments to yesterday's post, it's a shame we're even having these discussions. California voters have made their decision - they want high speed trains. President Obama ran on a winning platform that included frequent and prominent references to high speed trains. Glaeser, Morris, O'Toole and Samuelson seem interested in using their prominent media platforms to try and reverse these outcomes. Yet they cannot do so on the evidence alone. They either have to structure their analysis in such a way that ignores the whole context and leaves a lot out, as Glaeser and Morris have done, or they have to ignore evidence entirely, as O'Toole and Samuelson have done.

One wonders when the NYT and WaPo will be publishing pro-HSR op-eds in their pages and on their blogs.

The New York Times' Second Punch on HSR

Yesterday we looked at Edward Glaeser's silly attack on HSR in the New York Times' Economix Blog. Today we have another attack on HSR in the New York Times - this time from Eric Morris at the Freakonomics Blog. Ryan Avent summed it up well via Twitter:

Eric Morris closes HSR series by referring readers to Randal O'Toole. You know, in case you thought he and Glaeser were aiming for an honest critique.

Sure enough:

Certainly neither Glaeser nor I pretend to have the last word on this topic. We are looking to start some debate, not finish it. So if you want to learn more on the pros of true HSR, check out the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s site, or this report for the views of an articulate critic, the Cato Institute’s Randall O’Toole.

Either Morris is joking or is even more in the tank against HSR than we ever thought. Randall O'Toole as a credible source on passenger trains?!?! This is the same guy who thinks riding a train is more harmful than driving an SUV and whose difficulties with facts and evidence has been well documented.

But it's not just the company Morris keeps that damns his blog post. Morris has a rather interesting justification for his work on HSR planning:

I have extensive experience planning, designing, constructing, financing, and operating HSR networks; these have spanned the nation and have been terrifically elegant, with state-of-the-art locomotive technology and thousands of miles of flat, straight track to keep speeds high.

However, those HSR systems were built from electricity, not steel. And while the HSR currently being proposed will cost tens of billions, the cost of my HSR network was comparatively modest: perhaps $30 in fixed costs for the purchase of the computer game Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon, plus negligible variable costs for the power to run my computer and depreciation on my mouse button. The sum total of the utility I experienced from this kind of HSR paid for those costs many times over.

That's like saying I can run a street gang because I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. How ridiculous do economics bloggers for the NYT not named Paul Krugman have to get before we stop taking them seriously?

The primary problem that afflicts Morris's attack on HSR is the exact same problem that afflicted Edward Glaeser's articles as well: they persistently refuse to examine HSR costs in context:

Costs in the real world are quite different. HSR is an exciting idea, and if we could make it appear by magic wand it’d be a terrific addition to our transportation network. But everything has a price, and the way things currently stand, the projected costs look like they outweigh the benefits. If the thought of some ominous budget numbers lurking on a piece of paper in far-off Washington doesn’t move you, consider the opportunity costs of this spending, in terms of health care, education, the economy, defense, or a (more effective) method of slowing global warming. Or if you want to keep the money in the realm of transportation, it could go to address what I consider to be the more serious problem we are facing: moving people around within our cities, not between them.

There are innumerable flaws with this analysis, which is actually the heart of Morris's post. Morris claims to speak of opportunity cost, but where is the estimate of how much it will take to expand roads and airports in California to handle the passenger loads that HSR will handle? Estimates for that range from $80 billion to $160 billion. But nobody aside from Morris Brown thinks California HSR will approach even the lower range of that estimate.

Morris appears to think that air travel will continue to remain cheap, plentiful and affordable. A kind of perpetual 2007. Last year we talked quite a bit about the airline crisis - how rising oil prices have jeopardized the easy air travel that we have come to expect here in the US. Airports in smaller cities have begun bribing airlines to maintain service, and cities like Fresno and Bakersfield have struggled to maintain the airline service they still have.

For Morris to basically ignore the problems of the airlines he has to ignore the all-important question of whether oil prices will remain at the same price they're at now. There is ample reason to believe they will not. Even during a severe recession gas costs at least $3/gal across most of California, the threshold that once crossed in 2006 helped burst the housing bubble. Once growth resumes, whenever that might be, oil prices are widely expected to rise again, especially considering the steady increase in global demand.

HSR is not the same as ongoing expenditures for health care or education. Like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Shasta Dam, it is a piece of infrastructure that enables economic activity to continue and grow well into the future. It enables health care and education spending to continue, rather than become strangled by gridlock.

And yes, Eric Morris, HSR will help intracity transportation just as it will provide intercity transportation. In California HSR will be used by commuters within regions just as it will be used by commuters between regions. The HSR route will serve as a transit spine for the state, with its key nodes (SF Transbay, SJ Diridon, LA Union Station) becoming the centerpieces of local rail. HSR is a rising tide that lifts all transportation boats.

Unfortunately, Morris is so in thrall to Randall O'Toole's anti-rail jihad that he won't stop to consider these aspects. Instead he uses the same arbitrarily limited and therefore insufficient scope to mislead readers about the true costs of projects. The Golden Gate Bridge might not have penciled out in the first 5 years from its opening in 1937, but hardly anyone today would argue the Bay Area is better off without it. 30 years from now, when Californians travel around their state on high speed trains, they too will wonder why anyone thought building it was anything but a sensible and farsighted idea.

Edward Glaeser Continues His Assault on HSR

Part 3 of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser's series on HSR costs and benefits is up at the New York Times' Economix Blog. This week's entry focuses on the environmental impact of trains, and "other social benefits" that are rather nebulously defined. Parts of his entry are less objectionable than in the past, but overall Glaeser's approach to HSR, based on an arbitrarily limited set of factors, continues to produce anti-HSR conclusions that lead me to wonder if that was his goal all along.

Before getting into the meat of his analysis, Glaeser took a moment to defend himself against criticism, including from this blog, about his choice of a Dallas-Houston HSR route:

As in the previous two posts, I focus on a mythical 240-mile-line between Houston and Dallas, which was chosen to avoid giving the impression that this back-of-the-envelope calculation represents a complete evaluation of any actual proposed route. (The Texas route will be certainly far less attractive than high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor, but it is not inherently less reasonable than the proposed high-speed rail routes across Missouri or between Dallas and Oklahoma City.)

This is a totally misleading comparison. It's not Texas vs. the NEC, or even Missouri vs. the NEC. Although the blog post is headed with an image of a California high speed train, Glaeser never once mentions the California route. Nor does he mention the other federal HSR corridors, many of which connect cities with denser populations than the Sunbelt cities he insists on examining. Glaeser's entire argument is basically an examination of Texas HSR, and not of the actual national HSR plan. So his entire exercise is somewhat suspect in my mind.

Glaeser's focus is on carbon emissions, and here he isn't quite wrong:

If I assume, relatively arbitrarily, that one-half of the rail riders used to take cars and one-half used to take planes, and that there is no extra travel generated by the rail line, then each 240-mile train trip eliminates 113 pounds of carbon dioxide for each passenger in our atmosphere. These estimates suggest that trains are green, which differs from the studies, which include the emissions from building the rail system, cited by Eric Morris at Freakonomics.

Which confirms some of what we have been saying on this blog for quite some time. The CHSRA's own studies have predicted that 12 billion pounds of carbon emissions per year would be eliminated. Obviously one can and should debate those numbers, but that's pretty compelling stuff, and it's good that Gleaser understands the role HSR can play in reducing emissions.

Glaeser doesn't stop here. I think it is a sound concept to try and place the reduced emissions in a broader context. But Glaeser hasn't really done this in an effective way:

Combining reduced carbon emissions, reduced congestion and reduced traffic mortality provides an extra $21.63 million worth of benefits a year from the rail line, which increases the $102 million benefit minus operating costs figure from last week to $124 million, which is still far less than the $648 million estimated cost per year of building and maintaining the infrastructure.

The environmental and mortality benefits of rail are real, but the magnitude of the social benefits from switching modes seems is quite small relative to the cost of the system.

I'll let someone else check the numbers here. What bugs me is that yet again Glaeser assesses this on its own. What of the cost of doing nothing? How much savings would the trains be over the costs of building new roads and airports to handle any increased demand?

Also left unstated are the other economic benefits of rail. What of the jobs it creates? And the tax revenues those jobs create? What of the green dividend - the new economic activity created by freeing people from congestion and oil dependence?

Once again Glaeser fails on this. He uses an unrepresentative HSR line and assesses it outside the full context, without discussing the true costs and the true benefits.

Note: I am currently in Pittsburgh, PA for the Netroots Nation meeting of progressive bloggers. My posting may be a bit sporadic, but I hope to keep up with the one-a-day ideal.

Yesterday was a travel day for most attendees, as it was for me, and thunderstorms caused major delays at airports here in the northeastern US. Some were stuck on their landed planes, sitting at the gate, unable to deplane because of the possibility of lightning striking the metal jetway. Friends of mine who came to Pittsburgh from nearby eastern cities frequently remarked how much easier this would have been had there been a high speed train available - one that can operate in a thunderstorm.

Will the New York Times Provide A Fair HSR Assessment?

The Economix Blog at the New York Times is launching a multi-part series on high speed rail, beginning with this post by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. As a general rule I tend to dismiss any analysis of passenger rail that thinks a Simpsons episode has any role to play in the assessment (but then I did live through the endless and ultimately self-defeating debate over the Seattle monorail project, so perhaps I'm biased). But Glaeser has a high-profile soapbox to make his assessment, and as he is promising a fair analysis, it's worth taking this seriously.

Glaseser's basic approach can be gleaned from the following quotes:

I would be delighted to share the president’s optimism about high-speed rail, but if benefits do not exceed the costs, then America will just be living through a real-life version of “Marge vs. the Monorail,” where the residents of the Simpsons’ Springfield were foolishly infatuated with a snazzy rail project oversold in song by Phil Hartman’s character.

Economics doesn’t have any inherent opinion on trains, but it does strongly suggest the value of cost-benefit analysis, which may be the best tool ever created for evaluating public investments.

Already Glaeser is off to a bad start. By framing HSR as presidential optimism bordering on hucksterism and demanding a "cost-benefit analysis" he is assuming HSR is guilty until proven otherwise. HSR is cast as an unproven, almost mythical concept. Nowhere in this introductory post does Glaeser mention other HSR systems around the world, all of which generate operating surpluses and have successfully met their ridership goals (although it usually takes several years to reach that point).

In fact, as Glaeser lays out his methodology for the series, it seems that the numerous other HSR projects aren't going to put in an appearance at all:

I will spend the next three blog posts on the major costs and benefits of high-speed rail. The costs include up-front construction and operating costs. The benefits include direct benefits to riders, indirect benefits include reductions in carbon emissions and traffic congestion, and any indirect aid that rail gives to local economies and to national economic recovery.

I'm not quite sure how a credible analysis can be given without looking at the experience of other HSR projects around the world. But even if we were to limit our study to the US - flawed methodology, but let's play along - Glaeser's metrics leave quite a lot out.

Glaeser is likely going to assume that the cost of doing nothing is zero, as he gives no indication that the construction and operating costs will be compared to the construction and operating costs of new freeway lanes and new airport terminals and runways that will be needed to handle future traffic. We spent virtually all of 2008 on this blog reminding people that the cost of doing nothing is NOT zero - that any assessment of HSR's costs must be done in the context of the costs of alternatives.

This is almost never done for passenger rail, let alone HSR. The default assumption, even among academics (and especially among economists) is that the cost of not building passenger rail is always zero. Rail projects are usually framed as a new, novel, and probably unnecessary cost. It gets held to standards and metrics no other form of transportation is ever held to, especially automobile transportation, whose costs are not only far from zero, but are far higher than the cost of HSR.

The list of benefits of HSR also seems unusually limited. Glaeser doesn't include the savings on oil consumption, or the financial benefits of reduced pollution. He does plan to mention "indirect" benefits, hopefully to be measured along the lines of the green dividend, but he apparently isn't going to examine the benefits of greater urban density that HSR will encourage.

Granted, this first post is like the introduction of a dissertation - doesn't really offer much in the way of hard analysis. But what analysis is advanced here isn't exactly encouraging:

The up-front costs of rail are primarily the cash outlays, and these are perhaps easiest to quantify. The Government Accountability Office’s summary of building costs in Europe range from $37 million to $53 million a mile. The Japanese lines cost from $82 million to $143 million a mile. (Higher costs in Japan reflect difficult earthquake-prone terrain and expensive land.) Cost estimates in the United States range from $22 million a mile, for a Victorville, Calif., to Las Vegas route, to $132 million a mile for connecting Baltimore and Washington.

These figures are all debatable, but anyone who thinks that the G.A.O. got it wrong needs to come up with alternative figures that are equally plausible. As such, the cost of a 240-mile line, like the one that could connect Dallas and Houston, would probably run about $12 billion, but it could be as cheap as $6 billion or as expensive as $24 billion, and these are the numbers that we have most confidence about.

Actually, what is most in need is a clear definition of what makes a cost estimate "plausible." We need to see the logic and methodology behind an estimate. Land, labor, materials, etc - these costs can be estimated, and even though the estimates sometimes vary, there should always be a measurable reason for the variation - different assumptions about how land values will change in coming years, etc.

One reason I am so persistently critical of the "omg California HSR will cost $80 billion" claims are that those estimates are never explained. They're numbers pulled out of thin air. If someone sat down and looked at every single expenditure, questioned the assumptions, gave their own estimates for those expenditures, explained the reason for giving a different estimate on each piece, and then totaled it up and said "hmm this is higher than predicted" then that analysis would be quite welcome.

Unfortunately there's just something about passenger rail that seems to make some people think that it's perfectly fine to just pull numbers out of thin air and pass them off as if they are reasonable and credible. I don't know if that's Glaeser's plan, but what he's offered here isn't exactly encouraging.

So we will watch the next posts in the series (to be published once a week) with interest, but with skepticism. It's hard to shake the feeling that we're playing with a stacked deck on this one.

Freakonomics: High-Speed Rail and CO2

by Rafael

Eric A. Morris has published a post on the Freakonomics blog of the New York Times entitled "High Speed Rail and CO2". IMHO, his is a poorly researched and extremely biased article since it completely disregards research commissioned by CHSRA.

Before I explain my gut reaction to Mr. Morris' hit piece, please bear in mind that reducing CO2 emissions is not the core objective of the California HSR project. Rather, its principal purpose is to enhance population mobility at the medium-distance scale by giving residents and tourists a safe, affordable and environmentally responsible alternative to long drives and short flights.

The CO2 emissions avoided during construction and operations are a result of rail technology, i.e. making do with just a narrow strip of land, avoiding asphalt and using grid-electric traction. Personally, I think of any direct reductions in CO2 emissions as icing on the cake.

What follows is a cross-post of my comment on the NYT blog.

• First of all, Mr. Morris' article portrays the cost estimate of $80 billion produced by one person in Minnesota as gospel while failing to mention that the California High Speed Rail Authority's (CHSRA) own forecast is around $33 billion for the SF-San Jose-Fresno-LA-Anaheim starter line and another $12 billion total for the phase II extensions to San Diego, Irvine and Sacramento, respectively.
  
  It also neglects to mention that phase II construction will be funded with non-state bonds backed by operating surpluses from phase I. It is completely disingenuous to report that California taxpayers will be burdened with the cost of funding the entire network. Indeed, the language of California AB3034(2008) includes numerous safeguards to ensure the state's contribution remains limited to $9.95 billion, of which $950 million is reserved for capital projects of local and regional agencies that operate connecting transit.
  
  All this must be compared to the cost of doing nothing and also to the cost of building more roads and runways instead. Both alternatives were estimated to be much more expensive, with the cost of the no-build alternative measured in lost productivity and other opportunity parameters. This aspect of the program EIR/EIS study did not even include the option of providing reliable broadband internet access to HSR passengers.
  
  
• Second, wrt to CO2 emissions: it beggars belief that the author should compare a study for HS2 in the UK - which assumes the extra electricity would be produced mostly from coal - with the California situation. CHSRA decided before the election last fall that the entire system would operate exclusively on renewable electricity, with new wind turbines being the cheapest way to implement that. Using renewables will eliminate most of the 19.1 million barrels of oil equivalent* that would otherwise be required each year (vs. 24.3 for the no-build and 24.5 for the modal alternative). CHSRA estimated the additional power requirement for peak period operations in 2020 is 480MW, about 0.6% of total generating capacity in the state at that time.
  
  As for the energy required for construction, CHSRA estimates 152 trillion** BTUs, equivalent to 26.2 million barrels of oil equivalent. That's comparable to about 16 months of operations - not trivial, but not terribly significant relative to a system life expectancy measured in decades. For reference, the construction of highway lane-miles and airport runways under the modal alternative would require 37% more energy. Again, the overwhelming majority of total energy is consumed during the years of operation.

For more details, please consult the document library at the CHSRA web site.

* CHSRA Final Program EIR/EIS Chapter 7.1.1 (Library -> Archived Materials)
** The document actually interprets 1 MMBTU as 1 million BTUs but that strikes me as a clerical error.