Wednesday Open Thread

by Rafael

a mixed bag of HSR-related news today, some new, some that fell through the cracks over the past week or two.

• The Trade Commission of Spain in Chicago is hosting free webinar on HSR on Tuesday November 10 at 2pm Eastern. Note that Patentes Talgo S.A. recently inked a deal to set up a train assembly plant in Wisconsin.
  
  UPDATE: A similar event will be hosted on Monday, Oct 26 from 8:30am to 2pm at the Omni Hotel in Los Angeles. One of the panel sessions will be on high speed rail. (h/t to commenter Susana)
  
  
• Gov. Quinn of Illinois supports the state's grant application for a Chicago-St.Louis HSR line at 110mph, but the speaker of the state's House has introduced legislation to block the use of state funds for the preferred route past his apartment on 3rd Street in Springfield.
  
  
• Secr. of Transportation Ray LaHood warns Florida state legislators to commit to funding the Tri-Rail and SunRail regional/commuter services or he'll reject the $2.5 billion grant application for Florida HSR. Note that Yonah Freemark over at the Transport Politic considers its route to be fatally flawed.
  
  
• Meet the Texas Mini-Triangle, a hybrid of the triangle and T-bone concepts.
  
  
• Trains4America has video highlights from rail planning consultancy Steer Davies Gleave’s High-Speed Rail Summit 09. It was held in the context of HS2, which will connect London, the north of England and eventually, Scotland with true bullet trains. Variations on this theme are now espoused by all of the major political parties in the UK. Speakers included executives from railways that already operate HSR trains today.
  
  
• The prime ministers of Russia and China have just signed a $3.5 billion security and trade deal that includes oil and gas exports as well as new high/very high speed rail lines in Russia's Far East based on Chinese technology. Russia is looking to establish a national HSR network with nearly 11,000km of tracks by 2030.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Thomas Downs (chairman of the North American Board of Veolia Transportation and a former president of Amtrak) argues that various levels of government in the US continue to subsidize car-centric mobility to the tune of $100 billion a year out of their general funds, over-and-above income from fuel taxes. Add to that an eye-popping $200 billion in health care costs related to road traffic accidents.

From Russia With Love

Is California's high speed rail future on display in Russia? According to Siemens and the New York Times the answer just might be "yes":

Siemens’s new train — the Sapsan, Russian for peregrine falcon — is a candidate for the high-speed link planned between San Francisco and Los Angeles that may open in 2020. Alstom, the maker of the French TGV trains, and Bombardier are also contenders. Japanese bullet train designs by Hitachi, which are lighter but less secure in a low-speed crash, the only type of collisions survivable, are another option.

The technological breakthrough of the Sapsan is that the train has no locomotive. Instead, electric motors are attached to wheels all along the train cars, as on some subway trains. (Passengers sit in the first car too.) Its top operating speed is 217 miles an hour, though in tests this model has reached 255 miles an hour, or about half the cruising speed of some jet airplanes.

For now, though the Sapsan will only be traveling at about 150mph over Russia's dilapidated rails.

Siemens is aggressively pursuing the US market, particularly us Californians:

The United States “is a developing country in terms of rail,” Ansgar Brockmeyer, head of public transit business for Siemens, said in an interview aboard the Russian test train, as wooden country homes and birch forests flickered by outside the window. “We are seeing it as a huge opportunity.”

To position itself to compete in the United States, Siemens has placed employees from its high-speed train division at its Sacramento factory, which produces city trams.

California desperately needs jobs like those that would be created building high speed trainsets in Sacramento. Opponents of HSR argue that the risk of a "boondoggle" is greater than the value of the jobs that would be created - 160,000 for the construction of the project, and 450,000 ongoing jobs, according to CHSRA estimates. I have a very difficult time believing that to be the case, especially when California faces the highest unemployment since the end of World War II.

But back to Russia (for a moment). Jaunted, a "pop culture travel blog," wondered if this was a case of "the space race race moving to the rails." It would be nice if we could move past Cold War metaphors when comparing the US to Russia, but clearly the space race was an iconic era in the 20th century, where international rivalry produced major human accomplishments that might not otherwise have gotten done. And as much as I support space exploration, it is undeniable that HSR provides more immediate and tangible benefits than putting a man on the moon.

What really matters is that nations like Russia, Poland and others are recognizing that having a high speed rail network is essential to their future economic prosperity. The US is not immune, despite what those who refuse to admit that the transportation models of the 20th century no longer work would have us believe.

I don't have any plans to be in Russia anytime soon, but if I did, I'd take time to ride the Sapsan.