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.

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.

Ryan Avent Demolishes Ed Glaeser's Attack on HSR

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser posted the second in his HSR evaluation series for the New York Times' Economix Blog yesterday. There are several problems with his study, particularly his choice of Dallas-Houston as his example to assess HSR costs. Matthew Yglesias criticized this pick as being unrepresentative and not even being part of the official USDOT HSR route map. I wouldn't hang my hat on that latter factor to undermine Glaeser, since the USDOT HSR map will be updated this fall, and will likely include Dallas-Houston, which is part of the "Texas T-Bone" HSR project.

But is Dallas-Houston a representative corridor? Ryan Avent, writing at Streetsblog Capitol Hill, argues it isn't:

Why would he choose this corridor to examine? Why not begin with the most natural place to construct true HSR -- the Northeastern Corridor -- or the state moving fastest toward building its own true HSR network -- California?

Well, Glaeser was able to use Dallas' low share of commuters taking transit to knock the corridor's estimated ridership down by half. Transit's share of commuting in Los Angeles is nearly three times that in Dallas. In San Francisco, transit's share, at 32.2 percent, is more than seven times larger than in Dallas. Presumably this difference had something to do with his choice.

The Texas T-Bone scored pretty low on The Transport Politic's assessment of US HSR routes. Obviously Glaeser has not picked a representative sample. But Avent argues Glaeser's approach is more fundamentally flawed because of how his metrics work:

This is a bad beginning for Glaeser, but it actually gets worse. He presents a formula for determining whether the direct benefits of rail are worth the costs:

Number of Riders times (Benefit per Rider minus Variable Costs per Rider) minus Fixed Costs.

That seems simple, does it not? Perhaps a little oversimplified? But it must be so, says Glaeser:

I’m simplifying, but a formula needs to be simple if interested parties can seriously debate the numbers, and the only way that America is going to get to the right answer on public investments is if numbers trump rhetoric.

But it matters which numbers we're considering, and omission of important variables that planning experts take seriously is not the way to conduct this debate.

The simple fact is that Glaeser's stripped-down formula obscures far more than it reveals. Again, as I mentioned at the beginning, I am hesitant to judge this series a mere one part in, but the way he has begun here is simply irresponsible.

What are his long-term assumptions? How quickly does he think the population of the Dallas and Houston metropolitan areas will grow? What will that population growth do to the number of people living within easy reach of a train station? How will that population growth interact with planned expansions of local transit systems?

How sensitive are his projections of changes in oil prices? Do they take into account the effect of changing demographics on demand for various kinds of housing and transportation?

In short, Glaeser has left an enormous amount of stuff out of his calculations, exactly as I predicted he would. Avent makes the point Morris Brown expected me to make about the cost of doing nothing:

And that brings us to a final point (which, again, Glaeser may ultimately address): What is the proposed alternative?

Is it doing nothing? Then at what point does the rising cost of congestion justify construction of something? Let's say an alternative is new airport capacity; well, how do the costs and benefits there work out, and how does that math change with oil at $150 per barrel?

Or perhaps an alternative is new highway capacity. Can we see a cost-benefit analysis for that, and how that varies with oil prices, congestion levels, and so on? If we assume that drivers will need to pay the full maintenance cost of the highway network already constructed via a user fee (and currently they're coming up well short), what does that do to expected demand for rail?

Even if you accept the numbers that Glaeser uses (and one shouldn't automatically do so), you're left with almost nothing -- an amateurish, back-of-the-envelope analysis for a corridor that's not even part of the current Obama administration plan. What is this supposed to prove, exactly?

As is typical with conservative economists, HSR is treated as if it will exist in a vacuum, unrelated to any other changes in transportation, land use, oil prices, carbon taxes, population growth, or other costs.

I'm with Avent on this - Glaeser's metrics don't hold up. I'm curious to see part three, but I am not any less doubtful than I was after part one.

BNSF: HSR Funds Should Be Targeted

So says BNSF CEO Matthew K. Rose:

An estimated $13 billion in new federal money for high-speed passenger rail service should go to a single project that demonstrates its effectiveness, the top executive of freight railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. (BNI) said Thursday.

"I'm concerned (the money) will be spread like peanut butter" nationwide and have little impact, said Chief Executive Matthew K. Rose, speaking to the Austin Economic Club, a local business group. "I'm afraid it'll be a missed opportunity."

The federal stimulus package includes $8 billion in seed money for development of high-speed passenger rail service, and U.S. President Barack Obama also has called for an additional $5 billion over the next five years.

Rose said Fort Worth-based Burlington Northern and other freight railroads likely won't see much benefit from the new federal money, aside from possible funding for small projects such as crossing upgrades, because high-speed rail lines require separate, dedicated corridors.

Hmm. "A single project that demonstrates its effectiveness" on "separate, dedicated corridors." Remind you of any state HSR project in particular?!

Rose isn't saying that HSR is a bad idea, far from it:

Still, he described himself as a supporter of efforts to improve the nation's transportation network overall. Rose recently served on a federal commission that examined U.S. transportation needs and potential funding sources.

He estimated Thursday that it could cost $1 trillion over the next 20 years to fully develop 10 to 15 high-speed rail corridors in the U.S.

Despite the daunting sum, "I really do think it's an investment our society ought to make," he said.

But he stressed that the $13 billion to get the effort off the ground won't make much of a dent unless it's targeted.

Separately, Rose noted in an interview after Thursday's event that he has seen little momentum for development of high-speed passenger rail in Texas, despite the new federal stimulus money.

I don't think any of us could imagine that the Obama Administration, which heavily targeted the Midwest for votes in 2008 and will surely do so again in 2012, would stiff them and give the whole pot of money to California, as Rose seems to imply here. But Rose is making a good point that $13 billion is a paltry sum when you get right down to it, and won't do a great deal to build HSR networks or improve freight rail (by moving passenger services onto different tracks).

I also wonder if Rose's comments are designed as a shot at the Texas HSR plan, which doesn't seem to have been making much forward momentum lately. Perhaps someone more familiar with Texas railroading can tell us whether that plays any role.

Still, it's nice to see that there is a major national freight railroad that does not actively hate passenger rail...

(thanks to Matt Melzer for pointing me to this article)