More Passengers Choose Trains Over Planes In Spain

For several decades, the world's busiest air route was the "Puente Aereo" (air bridge) between Madrid and Barcelona. At a distance of about 400 miles on the ground, it's also a perfect distance for high speed rail. Ever since the AVE line was completed to Barcelona's Sants station early last year, high speed rail has been winning a greater and greater share of the Spanish travel market - despite Spain being hit extremely hard by the global recession, with unemployment of around 20%.

Now the AVE line has surpassed the Puente Aereo in terms of travelers. More people are taking the train rather than the plane between the two largest cities of Spain:

Spain’s bullet train is beating the plane in the race to win passengers. For the first time, more passengers have chosen to travel on the high-speed AVE rail link between Madrid and Barcelona than have opted to fly — a switch that could influence British ambitions for a high-speed rail network and add impetus to the creation of a second high-speed line in the UK.

Between July and September, 651,498 passengers made the 314-mile journey between Spain’s biggest cities (slightly farther than London to Newcastle), a rise of 21 per cent compared with the same period last year.

In comparison, 643,512 travellers made the journey by aircraft during the same period, a fall of 7.5 per cent compared with the third quarter of last year.

Madrid-Barcelona is the fifth busiest air route in the world, with four airlines offering 116 flights a day, according to the Official Airline Guide in July. Since the rail link opened last year, Renfe, the Spanish state rail operator, and the airlines, led by Iberia, the national flag carrier, have fought a fierce battle to win passengers. The high-speed train, which takes 2hr 40min to travel between Madrid and Barcelona, at 236.3 kilometres per hour (146.8mph), has won over commuters with competitive fares, greater comfort and the absence of elaborate airport security. It also offers promotions to attract tourists, as well as business travellers.

Once again, it is worth reminding readers that Spain offers a very good comparison to California in terms of not just high speed rail - but population density and geography. SF Transbay to LA Union Station is 432 miles, and our trains are projected to have a higher operating speed.

Ultimately, the Spanish experience suggests the SNCF report and the Brookings Institution are both correct in suggesting the LA-SF route, the nation's second busiest, will support a high HSR ridership. As our airports already burst at the seams during flush economic times and with rising oil prices, it's clear that we need the HSR option in California. Spain's success story will soon be replicated here.

Sort of fitting given Spain's role in California history...

China HSR Grabs Significant Market Share From Airlines

China, which is engaged in a massive high speed rail expansion project as part of both its economic stimulus and energy independence efforts, is witnessing a major shift of riders from planes to trains. As a result, airlines like China Southern are planning to focus on the international market, as short-haul trips are increasingly taken on high speed trains and not airplanes:

China Southern’s traffic on flights between Beijing and Taiyuan in Shanxi province fell about 60 percent after a high- speed rail link began operations, Si said. There was a 30 percent decline on Shanghai-Wuhan trips, he said....

China Southern Airlines Co., the nation’s biggest domestic carrier, will expand overseas flights in anticipation of a high-speed rail network causing traffic to decline on about a quarter of its internal routes.

Traffic may fall by more than half on 518 of the carrier’s weekly flights, Chairman Si Xianmin said today at a conference in Beijing. Of the airline’s about 160 domestic routes, 38 will compete directly with high-speed railway lines, he said.

“This will force us to expand overseas routes, on which we still have some competitive edge,” he said. “It will eventually cause an impact on the global aviation industry.”

The new rail network, due to be completed by 2020, will offer a cheaper alternative on routes covering about 80 percent of China’s domestic aviation market, Si said. That will force the carrier to challenge Air China Ltd. and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. on international services to offset dropping domestic demand.

“For short haul, passengers definitely won’t want to use the airlines,” said Jay Ryu Je-Hyun, an analyst at Mirae Asset Securities Co. in Hong Kong.

Some of the reasons for the shift:

High-speed train tickets will be about 40 percent cheaper than current air tickets, according to Si’s estimations. A five- hour rail trip from Shanghai to Beijing, for instance, will likely be about 700 yuan ($103), or about 60 percent of the price asked for the two-hour flight.

Train services may also be more convenient as stations are generally located downtown, while airports are on city outskirts. There are also fewer security procedures, which quickens boarding.

“Airlines will lose all their current competitiveness, like saving time,” said Si. “What’s more, the high-speed trains haven’t reported any fatal accident in the past more than four decades. That’s definitely a plus for passengers considering a trip by air or rail.”

Much of this is directly comparable to what will happen here in California. Although one can find some decent fares for a roundtrip flight tomorrow from SFO to LAX (around $100 on Virgin America), it's very unclear whether that will be sustained in a future where oil prices are certain to rise significantly. HSR, powered by renewable electricity, will not have that problem.

And while there will still be those travelers who choose Virgin America or Southwest over the high speed train, the Chinese experience, along with that of Spain and on the USA's own Northeast Corridor shows that many travelers will also pick HSR. HSR's job isn't to kill the airlines, but to enable them and the airports they serve to survive. Without HSR, we're either going to see people priced out of air travel entirely, or if the expected oil price increases fail to materialize, there won't be enough capacity to handle the passenger load. Either way, HSR is a necessary complement to maintain intercity connectivity in 21st century California, and to maintain California's global competitiveness.

LA-SF Nation's Second Busiest Air Route - Shows Need For HSR

The Brookings Institution has released a report today showing that the nation's busiest air routes are growing more congested over time, a condition almost certain to worsen once the economy recovers. And the second busiest corridor in the entire nation is Los Angeles to San Francisco (second only two Miami/Ft. Lauderdale to New York), with one of the main airports in that corridor, SFO, experiencing "worse than average delays."

As even the Wall Street Journal realizes, this is a call for high speed rail:

The Brookings report recommends that these air-travel statistics be used to prioritize investment in high-speed rail. At 400 miles or less, high-speed rail can been air travel in time, typically with less pollution. That makes Los Angeles-San Francisco, Las Vegas-Los Angeles, Los Angeles-Phoenix and Dallas-Houston the most likely candidates for high-speed rail, in that order.

More than 6 million people fly between the Los Angeles basin and San Francisco Bay per year, the study said. In the northeast corridor, Amtrak carried 11.7 million people on Acela and Northeast Regional lines in fiscal 2008, hitting 14 metropolitan areas. The Amtrak ridership suggests high-speed rail would be viable in out busiest air corridors, the study concluded.

This study dovetails with numerous other studies, including not just that of the CHSRA's consultants, but that of SNCF as well, which show the LA-SF corridor as an ideal spot to build high speed rail. We've already seen HSR have stunning success on other busy air corridors: from the AVE on the Madrid-Barcelona corridor, long one of the world's busiest air corridors; to the Acela, which had 40% of the market share of the Northeast Corridor in March 2008. There is every reason to believe HSR will have similar success here in California, especially since it will link the city centers - i.e. the job and business centers - of the state, from SF's Financial District to San José's own growing downtown, to downtown LA and the hub of the city's growing mass transit system.

Every time we discuss HSR and air travel, we usually have to explain yet again the reasons why HSR almost always thrives in competition with airlines on busy corridors. Especially here in California, where people usually say "but I can get a ticket on Southwest to LA right now for $49! why would I take your stupid train?"

And as usual we explain patiently that when you combine total travel time - door to door, including getting to the non-centrally located airport, airport security, time on the runway, and getting from the non-centrally located airport to your final destination, you're about on par with the door to door travel time of HSR. We also explain that Southwest won't be able to offer those fares for much longer - they locked in their fuel costs at $55/bbl through the use of complex fuel hedges that will soon expire and leave them vulnerable to rising oil prices.

Which, we should add, must never be forgotten. Earlier this week Deutsche Bank predicted $175/bbl by 2016 (mark my words: it will happen well before that date) and that such a price rise will "put the final nail in oil's coffin." The key is what happens here in the USA:

US demand is the key. It is the last market-priced, oil inefficient, major oil consumer. We believe Obama’s environmental agenda, the bankruptcy of the US auto industry, the war in Iraq, and global oil supply challenges have dovetailed to spell the end of the oil era.

Deutsche Bank's analysis assumes that electric cars will radically change how we use oil in this country. I hope it does. But electric cars are no substitute for oil-fueled jets for getting people from LA to SF and vice versa. We need electric cars AND electric trains, both for local and statewide travel.

California is poised to lead the path forward. We will use high speed rail to unshackle ourselves from a failing and suicidal dependence on oil, and produce a sustainable economic prosperity, shared broadly, for the remainder of this century.

Comparing Fares for Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Over at The Transport Politic Yonah Freemark has offered two insightful posts this week on the question of HSR fares as compared to those for air and automobile travel (including buses). The first, Getting the Price Right: How Much Should High-Speed Fares Cost? argued that Amtrak has set fares on the Acela too high, though faster speeds and higher-capacity trainsets would enable the operating costs and thus the fares to drop. Freemark compared the Acela to European and Asian HSR systems and found that those systems not only offer better fares than the Acela - they also offer better fares than airline flights on the same route. However, Freemark's analysis suggests that California HSR is poised to replicate the European experience, and not that of Amtrak and the Acela (at least in terms of fares):

The California High-Speed Rail Authority, which is planning the nation’s most ambitious new rail project, has considered the effect of pricing on ridership. It predicts strikingly varying ridership outcomes depending on the cost of its future services; in 2030, with the full system operating, the agency estimates 93.1 million yearly trips if fares are set at 50% of air travel levels and 74 million if fares are set at 77% of air travel levels. Though final fares have not yet been established, one thing is for certain: California will not copy Amtrak and charge customers exorbitant rates to ride the train....

If American high-speed services offered similar prices for time traveled as Amtrak does today — at $45 per hour of running time for standard fares and $15 at reduced prices — on faster trains, U.S. commuters would switch to rail in droves. The San Francisco-Los Angeles route being planned by the State of California, with a travel time of 2h40, would cost $40 for reduced-price tickets and $120 for standard fares; those costs seem perfectly acceptable for just about everyone. A renewed Northeast Corridor, offering travel between New York and Washington in 1h40 (at an average of 220 km/h), would cost $25 for customers buying reduced-price fares. People currently driving their own cars or riding buses between the cities would take a second look at those prices.

Previous statements from the CHSRA have indicated that the fares would be around $55. I have repeatedly said we should not get attached to that number, and Freemark's conclusion that the fares will range from $40 to $120 is much more sensible.

Of course, anytime we have this discussion, you get people arguing that airfares are already cheap, nobody would pick a train over a $49 fare on Southwest or JetBlue. So some remedial discussion of this matter is valuable before plowing ahead.

Those fares are advance purchase and are almost never available on the eve of travel. And Freemark's suggestion is that CA HSR fares will work pretty much the same way. $40 or so for advance purchase, higher once you get closer to the travel date or for a "regular fare." In exchange you get a smoother boarding and deboarding experience, no TSA to deal with, a comfortable ride, and most crucially of all, city center to city center travel. The proposed HSR stations are all in much more centralized locations than the airports in the metro areas they'll serve.

More crucially, the ability of airlines to continue to offer those low fares is very much in jeopardy. Airlines received massive bailouts in 2001, but just a few years later began implementing fees for baggage and other previously standard, complimentary services. That's the mark of an industry in trouble, of an airline crisis that threatens the future not of air travel but of cheap air travel.

Southwest Airlines, which is frequently pointed to as evidence that we don't need HSR (including by someone at the Menlo Park Town Hall), has avoided this fate only through the use of complex fuel hedges. They locked in their price at $51/bbl several years ago. We're at $72/bbl, and virtually every observer expects that price to rise, if not soar, once global economic recovery finally happens. Southwest's fuel hedges expire between 2010 and 2013. There's no way they'll be able to lock in those rates again. And either LUV is going to have to raise fares or cut services.

Freemark's second post on the topic, Reframing the Fare Debate, focuses on what he sees as a more pressing topic: "attracting people away from cars and buses."

There are two ways to encourage people currently relying on road-based transportation to travel by trains: one, lower ticket prices; two, increase speeds. Both actions would provide a substantial motivation for highway users to reconsider their options. The first would put train travel back into the sphere of the economical. Plenty of bus companies market service at less than $20 between New York and Washington. At $2/gallon, a 26 mpg car could be driven between the cities for less than $20 in gas. That number doesn’t account for maintenance and ownership costs, but drivers rarely consider those factors when making decisions about how to get from one place to the next.

By increasing speeds, train travel’s time benefit multiplies significantly. While buses get into traffic, they can still make the trip from the capital to Gotham in five hours — versus the three hours required by rail. This is an advantage for train users, but increasing speeds to allow for a 1h40 trip would make it nearly impossible to justify riding the bus or driving, even at a lower cost.

Freemark's analysis is based on the Acela, but it applies even more strongly to California. Whereas buses play an important role on the Northeast Corridor, they play hardly any role in the SF-LA corridor, especially since Megabus dropped its experiment to provide their cheap service on that route last year. (Intercity buses do play a bigger role on other corridors in California, particularly Central Valley-SoCal-Mexico.)

So we're looking primarily at driving. And a lot of Californians drive from the Bay Area to LA, or from either of those regions to the Central Valley. This is especially true at the holiday season, as I discovered on one 10-hour trip back to Berkeley on I-5 around New Year's 2001.

Let's assume a trip from SF Transbay Terminal to LA Union Station in a relatively fuel efficient non-hybrid car: my 2007 Honda Fit. By car that's a 381 mile trip. I usually get about 300 miles to the tank on the open road, or about 36-39 mpg depending on conditions. That means two fillups - one at the trip's outset, another somewhere along I-5. The first fillup is going to be at least $3/gal, likely around $24 if I'm nearly empty (usually 8 gallons). The second will be about the same. So that's $42 for a one-way trip, and another fillup somewhere on the way back, depending on how much driving I do in SoCal, is going to bring the total in gas to at least $66.

True, that's for the car. I can add several passengers at essentially no extra cost, whereas they'd have to pay their own tickets on an HSR train. Even when you add in wear and tear, which on a newish Honda vehicle isn't all that much, driving is likely going to be cheaper, at least until oil prices rise dramatically again.

But when you add in time, the train becomes a compelling alternative. Google Maps gives a driving time of 5 hours, 51 minutes from SF Transbay to LAUS. If you hit no traffic at all and have lead foot you could do 5:30, maybe even 5:15. But for most people it's at least a 6-hour drive.

Whereas the train is going to take 2 hours 40 minutes. That's about half the time of driving. A lot of Californians will pay a bit extra to take the train in order to get the time savings - that's what "competitive" means. For people looking at a weekend trip, that 6 hours saved is a huge deal - the difference between a Friday evening and a Saturday midday arrival, extra time at the grandparents' or at the beach or at the ballgame.

For others it may not be enough of a compelling alternative. They may want the flexibility the car offers them, or they may have lots of stuff to carry that can't be easily checked onto a train, or they may have other reasons to prefer to take a specific trip in the car. That's fine. HSR isn't about forcing people out of cars.

It's about providing options and choices. Expanding transportation capacity in a sustainable, environmentally and climate-friendly method, giving our freeways and airports a chance to breathe. Giving people a fast way to get between cities without the higher fares or inconveniences of air travel, without the long travel times and other uncomfortable aspects of sitting in a car on I-5.

HSR isn't meant to put the airlines out of business or to eliminate vehicle traffic on I-5. It's intended to give Californians the choice of traveling at a fast speed for a reasonable price, thus fueling economic growth in the 21st century in a way that fossil-fuel based methods of travel are already proving incapable of providing. Californians instinctively understand this - it's why Prop 1A passed last fall.

I'll close this post by letting Freemark explain the reasons why this matters:

There are significant advantages to lowering ticket prices to the lowest level possible while keeping operational finances in the black. California predicts a higher revenue stream for its rail system if it charges customers fares that are at 77% of airline levels: $4.3 billion annually versus $3.6 billion with tickets at 50%, even though the latter would attract 25% more riders. But opening services to a greater percentage of the population has a number of benefits beyond those affecting the bottom line, and American policy should be to encourage low-cost rail travel. It reduces carbon emissions as people choose to drive fewer cars. It encourages the sense that trains are an engine for universal mobility, rather than a limousine on tracks for the rich. It will, most importantly, smash the conception that Americans won’t take advantage of rail services, and encourage the creation of a train-riding society.

And that's why California's HSR matters - as well as why it will be a financial success.

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.

Destination Lindbergh

While the Peninsula debates how to best implement the detailed plans for the high speed rail line that will serve their communities, San Diego is dealing with a somewhat different question altogether - a big picture "how do we bring people to and from our town?" issue that is now centered on Lindbergh Field. And HSR plays a potentially major role in determining San Diego transportation policy for decades to come.

The North County Times has a long article on the debate over Lindbergh Field's future, a debate made necessary by the apparent failure of long-discussed plans to build a new airport at Miramar. The basic problem, as anyone who has ever been to downtown San Diego knows, is that Lindbergh Field cannot be expanded beyond the one-runway configuration it already has. Hemmed in by San Diego Bay, the highrises of downtown, Interstate 5, and a residential neighborhood, it is impossible to expand capacity at Lindbergh Field. So San Diego officials are considering a $4 billion improvement project - and looking at a Lindbergh HSR station as a way to connect the airport to not just the city but the rest of the state, thereby creating new capacity at Lindbergh:

San Diego County Regional Airport Authority board members say they have no choice but to settle for Lindbergh's limited capacity. After a decadeslong search that cost tens of millions of dollars, voters overwhelmingly rejected the idea of building a new airport at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in 2006....

It's not as if increased capacity is totally out of the picture, said committee member Steve Peace, the former state lawmaker who wrote legislation to create the airport authority. He said the train station ultimately would be served by California's planned 800-mile statewide high-speed rail system and indirectly increase the capacity.

That's because 11 percent of Lindbergh's planes fly short hops to Los Angeles, carrying passengers bound for Los Angeles International Airport to catch overseas flights. With high-speed rail, people could take a bullet train instead, Peace said.

Of course, the HSR trains are not going to serve LAX, and even with a Green Line extension to LAX a traveler from SAN to LAX would still have to take two rail lines (Blue and Green) from Union Station to LAX, on top of the HSR trip up from SD. It's not clear that HSR would really work as a connection for those passengers.

A point that Wendell Cox, perhaps the chief HSR and passenger rail denier in the nation, uses to try and call into question the entire "HSR as airport relief" concept:

Cox, the transportation expert who has studied California's bullet train, countered there is "not a chance" that that part of the plan would fly.

For starters, Cox said the huge Los Angeles airport is not on the high-speed rail system, as proposed. And he said that with funding uncertain for the chosen route, it is unlikely the state would find money for a spur to LAX.

If it did, he said, the route would be so circuitous and lengthy ---- passing through Temecula, Riverside, Ontario and downtown Los Angeles before reaching L.A.'s west side ---- that it would fail to persuade many San Diego County residents to take a train instead of a plane.

But let's move this beyond Steve Peace's claim about overseas travel. It *would* make much more sense for folks trying to get to or from San Diego to other destinations around the continental U.S. to use HSR as a connecting system - to Ontario Airport, not LAX. Ontario, unlike Lindbergh Field or LAX, has room to grow, and is already slated to receive an HSR stop on the LA-SD spur. The estimated travel time from Ontario to downtown SD is 57 minutes - a reasonable method of connection for travelers headed to or from SD.

It's also worth considering San Diego's continued importance as a destination for travelers going to or from other destinations in California. Whether it's an Angeleno looking for a weekend getaway, or a family from Fresno looking to visit relatives on the other side of the border, Californians make up a big part of San Diego's travelers. HSR would play an extremely significant role in handling that traffic, easing the burden on not only Lindbergh Field but on Interstates 5 and 15 as well.

What HSR means to Lindbergh Field isn't a different option for folks headed to Tokyo or Sydney to catch their flight at LAX, but a new and expandable method of bringing people to and from San Diego, period. With HSR San Diego isn't forced to shoehorn a huge number of passengers into Lindbergh Field, but now has a completely new and high-capacity option for moving people around. It's no longer "Lindbergh or Miramar or Bust" but a more balanced set of transportation options.

Which makes Wendell Cox's closing line so absurd:

"It's time San Diego woke up to the fact that it is a world-class city, and probably the only world-class city without a world-class airport ---- certainly the only one in the United States," Cox said.

"I continue to be completely amazed that the leaders of San Diego settle for being a suburb of Los Angeles when they should take a back seat to no one. It shows a lack of vision that is astounding."

If "world-class" is to be defined as "on a par with other major first-world cities" then it should seem obvious to everyone except Cox himself that "world-class" cities in the 21st century are defined not by the number of runways at their airport, but by the number of high speed rail lines serving them. San Diego is larger than Málaga and can be compared to Marseille in several respects (both are the third-largest metro areas in their state or country, both are important maritime centers, both serve as a sunny beach destination, both act as a crucial link to the developing world to the south), and both of those cities are important destinations on their respective HSR networks.

Ultimately San Diego should be asking itself how it can use HSR to dramatically improve its connections to the rest of North America, instead of relegating HSR to a role supporting Lindbergh Field. HSR isn't a junior partner to a transportation strategy focused on interstate freeways and airports, but should be seen as a fully equal - and equally important - solution to San Diego's mobility needs for the rest of the 21st century.

Just How Useful is HSR, Really?

That's the question being pondered by one Kent Amberson in a letter to the Merced Sun-Star this morning. While one LTE in a smallish newspaper might not normally be worth talking about, I do believe that our work to promote the usefulness, value, and need for high speed rail continues after Prop 1A's passage. It's likely that many Californians have the same questions as Kent, considering how unfamiliar most Californians are with passenger rail. Here's his question:

How do you get from your house to the train station, and how do you get from the station to where you are going? In Merced you can call Dial A Ride, I suppose, but anybody that has to be in a particular place at a particular time knows that the Dial A Ride is not a solution...

Besides, not every community on the line has a Dial A Ride system. To have somebody drive you to the station is one solution or drive your own car, but where do you park if you need to for several days or even month?...

Then there is the question of when you get where you are going, what do you do?

Imagine getting to Los Angeles by train and your destination is Huntington Beach, Irvine or West Covina to mention a few. How do you get there from here? Perhaps you start looking for a Greyhound bus but again, how do you get to the bus station? Or are you going to try to figure out the local transit system?...

In planning a system like this, there has to be a way of getting to and from the station if it is going to be of any benefit to the paying public....

This is probably the reason most people prefer traveling by their own car.

Some of this is due to unfamiliarity with mass transit options in California - you can get to Irvine from Anaheim via the Pacific Surfliners, for example - and some of it is based on skepticism that other forms of transit will materialize to serve the HSR stations. By 2018 it is likely that the Expo Line will be open from LA Union Station to Santa Monica, and Metrolink service, which reaches numerous communities in Southern California, will be boosted. It's true that Orange County has a lot of work to do in building transit capacity, but a direct bus from Huntington Beach to the Anaheim HSR station (ARTIC) would be a sensible move for the OCTA.

The main problem with Kent's argument, though, is assuming that HSR service is analogous to automobile service. It isn't. The high speed train simply cannot bring you door to door. Neither can an airplane. Driving may solve the door to door issue, but at a very high cost - time, gas, wear and tear on the vehicle. The fuel costs of driving in particular are likely to rise dramatically between now and 2018.

Nor is HSR analogous with airplanes. Instead HSR provides the same travel need - getting from, say, Merced to Irvine - using a third method that provides the speed and convenience of airplanes and some of the flexibility of driving. HSR stations are not going to be located on the edge of town as airports are, but in the middle of the urban area, in places that are already the nodes of local transit systems. It's simply easier to provide transit connections to and from the HSR station than to and from an airport on the edge of town. LAX still lacks a true mass transit link, but LA Union Station is the hub of the entire mass transit system in Southern California.

And HSR will spur better transit connections, just as airports do today. It will bring more people into the city centers, making it easier to get from house to station. Certainly there will be journeys that require a car to complete, but HSR makes that easier and cheaper - you can rent a car at your destination, have a family or friend pick you up, etc, just as is done today.

HSR provides a different option for intrastate travel, matching the quickness of air travel with much of the flexibility of driving (through connections to other transit systems) at a lower price. Certainly California has work to do in expanding its non-HSR transit offerings and this blog strongly supports those projects, such as LA County's Measure R. HSR will never be and isn't intended to be the solution to everyone's point A to point B trip. But it will make those trips across the state much cheaper and much easier.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias reminds us that significant improvements in bus service can be made with a relatively affordable investment. For our own HSR system to be successful that means we need to push back hard against Sacramento's own efforts to further gut bus funding, which has already taken a significant hit over the last two years.

Flawed LA Times Article on Prop 1A

The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote an excellent argument for Prop 1A earlier this month. Unfortunately Eric Bailey's feature article in today's paper misses the mark and fails to provide readers an accurate picture of the HSR project - particularly by presenting some flawed claims from HSR deniers without independent verification or refutation.

First up is Richard Tolmach who engages in some of the worst kind of exploitation - using the horrific Chatsworth disaster to argue that HSR is somehow similarly unsafe:

"After all the crashes -- the train crash and the market crash -- supporters may have a lot more trouble than they anticipated," said Richard Tolmach, president of the nonprofit California Rail Foundation, a Proposition 1A foe.

Eric Bailey does provide refutation of this egregious bit of nonsense:

Metrolink-type collisions wouldn't be an issue, they say, because the train would run on tracks separate from freight lines. Bridges and other grade separations would keep the rails away from cars.

But unfortunately Bailey does not include refutation of the Reason Foundation's nonsense - even though this blog has provided a thorough deconstruction of that deeply flawed study, including the following points:

A report commissioned by the Libertarian think tank Reason Foundation and other foes compared California's plans with what is rolling on the ground right now in Europe and Asia.

Instead of a profit, the California trains could yield financial losses up to $4 billion, the report contends, predicting at least 60% fewer passengers than promoters project.

mike specifically refuted that point:

So [the Reason Foundation study's] claim that CA HSRA is using numbers higher than those achieved on any other system in the world is absurdly false - in fact, CA HSRA's numbers are only 1/3rd of what has been previously achieved.

Unfortunately Bailey just lets them rant on:

The final construction tab, they say, would swell beyond $80 billion, and other studies support that sort of conclusion. A Danish researcher who analyzed more than 250 big infrastructure projects around the world determined that new rail lines typically cost 45% more than originally estimated.

That Danish study has been challenged before. The LA Times can look a few blocks from its downtown headquarters to see the Metro Gold Line extension is on-time and under-budget. It is entirely possible that we will see cost overruns, but you can't pull a number out of thin air like $80 billion. If you're going to talk about overruns you need to explain precisely why and how those costs will rise. If you can't, then you're just making stuff up, and the LA Times shouldn't be allowing its pages to be used for that purpose.

The article also digs up an anti-HSR prof at USC:

Professor James Moore, director of USC's transportation engineering program, calls it "a dumb project" with overblown ridership and construction estimates, inflated profit forecasts, and wildly optimistic speeds and travel times.

"It's technologically impossible to do what the High-Speed Rail Authority claims can be done, for any amount of money," he said. "When it comes to predicting the actual cost of systems like this, I just say a zillion and leave it at that."

But Moore doesn't explain himself. At all. "A zillion?" That's not intellectually defensible.

The deeper issue Moore is likely referring to is whether the 220mph speed can be achieved. It's worth noting that 220mph is not intended to be the average speed, but the top achievable speed. The HSR deniers' strategy is to claim that if we can't meet the exact specifications that the CHSRA is promoting, then the entire concept is bad and should be rejected.

Which doesn't make any sense. HSR is a good idea not because we can achieve 220mph but because we can get quite close, providing very fast service that will still attract riders and meet our fundamental goals of sustainable, non-oil based, profitable transportation.

We don't have to speculate here. We can look at the evidence. The Madrid-Barcelona AVE line was intended to accomplish 217mph (350kph) with Siemens train technology. But the best they've been able to accomplish is 186mph (300kph). 186mph is still VERY fast, and it hasn't hurt the success of the new AVE line. In six months the AVE trains have taken 30% of the market on the Madrid-Barcelona route. The AVE trains are so successful that Spain's airlines have had to cut flights because their passengers are flocking to HSR.

Madrid-Barcelona is in fact a very good comparison to SF-LA. The Madrid-Barcelona corridor was one of the busiest airline routes in the world, and are Spain's two primary urban centers. SF to LA is one of the USA's busiest airline routes and are California's two primary urban centers. Madrid and Barcelona are 385 miles from each other by rail; SF to LA via the HSR route is 432 miles. Even if we cannot achieve 220mph, which IS technically possible, a top speed of 186mph would put the cities roughly three hours apart. Given the convenience of train travel and the added time costs of flying this still compares favorably to the airlines, especially when you consider the cost of expanding airports to meet demand, and especially the cost of fuel (and therefore airfares) in ten years' time.

The details do matter. And the details are likely to change. That's the nature of large infrastructure projects. You don't always come out with exactly, precisely the same thing you went in with. That's not a bad thing - projects need to be adapted to conditions if and when they change. Those who claim "omg they can't reach 220 so this is DOOMED!" are merely trying to pull a fast one on Californians, hoping that voters' lack of knowledge about HSR and general distrust of government can cover up the basic fact that even at 186 mph HSR is going to be profitable and popular.

Sadly, this is how American journalism works these days. Journalists become stenographers, quoting "both sides" and leaving it at that, even if one side's flawed arguments are left unrefuted. That's a major reason why this blog exists - to push back against this and provide Californians the truth.

Note: I've had to turn on comment moderation for the time being, since one particularly determined spammer chose to repeatedly post the same personal attacks. I will approve submitted comments as quickly as possible. As usual, I will not reject comments merely for criticizing HSR and Prop 1A. The only out-of-bounds comments are those that engage in personal attacks or those that are cut-and-pastes of entire articles. If you have any problems submitting comments, send an email to my last name at gmail dot com.

Update: Air France is getting into the HSR business, and will operate trains between Paris and London that reach a maximum speed of 224mph.

Do the HSR deniers still want to say that 220mph is impossible?

Prop 1A Misinformation in Long Beach

Today's Long Beach Press-Telegram editorializes against Prop 1A. As is becoming depressingly common with newspaper editorials, the Press-Telegram's anti-HSR screed contains a number of out-and-out lies that need to be called out here. The editorial staff does its readers a disservice by misleading them on some of the most fundamental aspects of Prop 1A and our state's high speed rail plan. Some examples:

That's the measure that would borrow $10 billion and spend it on promoting, not building, a high-speed train system. This is a colossal ripoff with no promises of any results except that the money would get spent.

AB 3034 changed the proposition to ensure that no more than 50% of bond funds could be used to build the system to ensure that we must have matching funds to proceed. The editorial somehow turns that into a negative, which is absurd. Their claim that the bond money wouldn't go to construction is a lie, plain and simple.

Worse, it would get spent with no oversight, and participation on the campaign's "finance committee" by nobody other than politicians and bureaucrats. Supporters brag that the $10 billion would not require a tax increase, but what they don't say is the obvious, which is that the money, $20 billion including interest, would come straight from the state's deficit-ridden general fund.

Another lie - AB 3034 created an oversight committee that Republican Roy Ashburn fought hard to include. The editorial misleads readers about the cost - $20 billion would not be spent all at once. The bond has a 40 year life, meaning the cost would be closer to a manageable $500 million per year.

If the project ever actually got built, supporters say the cost would be $40 billion, but skeptics say it would be more like $100 billion. The expectation (which seems more like a fantasy) is that the rest of the money would come from the federal government and the private sector, neither of which is standing in line with checkbook in hand.

There is NO evidence for the skeptics' $100 billion claim. None whatsoever. But there is a LOT of evidence to suggest Congress actually has the checkbook ready - John Kerry and Johnny Isakson are proposing a multibillion HSR funding bill and if he wins, Barack Obama has shown a desire to build HSR as well. As to the private sector, nearly a dozen companies responded with interest in helping fund HSR.

High-speed trains are wonderful assets in Europe and Asia, where they whisk travelers to their destinations at speeds of 180 miles an hour or faster without the misery of airport security lines. It's a concept that works well between Washington and New York, or between Paris and the chateau country. But those aren't 400-mile trips. The ideal travel distance for a high-speed train is a couple of hundred miles or less, or, as in Tokyo, less than 50 miles or so from an airport to an urban center. Trying to connect San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles, Fresno, San Jose, Sacramento and San Francisco is a far more daunting task, and not likely to put any airlines out of business.

The Madrid-Barcelona AVE train is a similar distance to SF-LA, and is pressuring airlines there. Passenger rail already connects the cities the editorial claims can't be linked - HSR merely provides a much, much faster service.

Additionally, the editorial makes the common media mistake of not explaining the cost of doing nothing. Nowhere are rising oil prices mentioned. Nor are higher airfares, nor are flight cutbacks, nor the environmental savings of reducing carbon and cutting oil consumption, nor the $80 billion price tag of expanding freeways and airports to meet the demand HSR will serve, nor the cost to the economy and the state budget of not creating 160,000 jobs. Instead the editorial board relied on misinformation and lies to give readers a deeply biased picture of Prop 1A.

The editorial board should know better than to write an editorial that has not been fully researched and vetted. Journalistic ethics do not end at the opinion page. The Long Beach Press-Telegram owes its readers a correction and an apology for this flawed editorial.

Oil Prices Soar

Up by $31 in the last couple days according to the New York Times, currently at $122/bbl. Sure, crude prices have been coming down since their July peak, but as I explained last month the long-term trend remains upward for fundamental reasons, including peak oil and the global surge in oil demand.

Even if oil prices were to level off around $100/bbl high speed rail would be a good deal for Californians. But what this recently rally reminds us is that upward pressure is still there and the days of $100/bbl are probably over. We've seen 30% year over year increases in the price of oil since 2002. As we know, this has a dramatic ripple effect throughout our transportation system. The airline crisis is one of them, as higher fuel costs lead airlines to cut routes, flights, and raise fares.

The only way out of this is to build sustainable mass transit that is fast, reliable, and not dependent on oil. High speed rail meets all those needs. We've already waited long enough - time to get started by passing Prop 1A.

Prop 1A Endorsements: The Good, The Bad, and The Stupid

First, the good news. The California transit and environmental community is beginning to unite around high speed rail and Proposition 1A. Last week the board of the Transit Coalition, based out of Southern California and usually focused on improving Metrolink and Metro Rail, unanimously voted to endorse Prop 1A. One of the major statewide rail advocacy groups is about to finalize its Yes on 1A endorsement, and tomorrow we expect one of California's leading environmental groups to announce its strong endorsement of 1A as well. Apologies for the lack of specificity on the latter endorsements, but the specifics are embargoed until tomorrow, when you'll see much more detail and analysis from me.

We already knew that the CA Chamber of Commerce opposed Prop 1A, for reasons that are backward and nonsensical - after all, we already used part of the state's bond capacity in 2006 to pay for "other priorities" such as new freeway lanes. Time for passenger rail to get its share, a share that will reduce congestion and promote economic growth.

That was the "bad" endorsement. The stupid, "wow this makes no sense" endorsement against Prop 1A comes from the Media News Group of papers, which includes the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times. Their arguments are full of the usual HSR denier claims - it's as if they turned the editorial page over to Martin Engel for a day. Nowhere in the editorial is global warming mentioned, nor energy independence, nor the airline crisis. And on many of their points, they are just plain wrong. The Media News Group editorialists clearly don't know the first thing about the project, and should have remained silent instead of speaking out against the project from a position of profound ignorance.


Some of the most egregious examples:

But the costs, now estimated to be at least $43 billion, are excessive and likely to be far higher before the project is completed.

Does anyone who has followed the saga of the Bay Bridge debacle really believe the high-speed rail system will cost less than $60 billion, or $80 billion?

This is the usual argument from the anti-government crowd, that any government infrastructure project will inherently be so far over budget as to be not worth it at all. But here they show their willful ignorance. The Big Dig and the East Span of the Bay Bridge involved first-of-their-kind engineering that caused the costs to soar. Stupid political meddling - the Massachuetts Legislature in the first case, the mayors of San Francisco and Oakland in the second - also helped drive up costs. But the editorial ignored the numerous passenger rail projects around the country that have come in on time and on budget, including urban rail such as LA's Metro Gold Line extension and Seattle's Central Link light rail.

Further, while some cost overruns are inevitable with the declining dollar and rising construction materials costs, these are likely to be on the order of one or two billion. The 50% to 100% cost increase projections that the editorial throws out there are not only lacking evidence, but lacking credibility.

Besides, the timing couldn't be worse. California has many far more pressing needs. The state faces a huge budget shortfall, a weakening economy, a home foreclosure mess, a drought and the need to expand its reservoir system and repair levees.

Moreover, California's highways are among the worst in the nation. A recent study by the Reason Foundation found that California leads the nation in congestion and ranks among the worst on cost-effectiveness in spending on roads.

We are 48th in the condition of urban interstates, 41st in rural highway conditions and 44th in state highway performance and money spent on maintenance.

Wait a minute. I thought the editorialists just got done telling us how bad government infrastructure projects were. Now they want us to give government the green light to build dams and freeways? The editorialists' hypocrisy is laid bare.

As to the economic problems, high speed rail is a solution to those problems. If job losses are the concern, wouldn't the editorialists support a project that will create 160,000 construction jobs and an estimated 450,000 long-term jobs? If finances are their concern why are they ignoring the Green Dividend and leaving billions on the table? I'm all for rebuilding existing freeways, but why don't we stop the construction of new roads and lanes and rechannel that money into rehabbing what we've already got?

High speed rail will also help solve congestion problems in the Bay Area and Southern California by providing fast commuter service. The grade-separated lines will also allow commuter rail services like Caltrain and Metrolink to achieve faster speeds and quicker travel times - further reducing congestion.

Additional money is expected to come from a federal government that simply does not have it. Backers of the train also believe there will be billions in private investment. Really?

This is perhaps the most blatantly ignorant part of the entire editorial. It never ceases to amaze me how newspaper editorial pages believe that the same practices fact-checking and adherence to basic journalistic standards they enforce on every other page don't seem to apply to the editorials. We have strong indications of interest from members of Congress and from one of the presidential candidates. As to private enterprise, at the June CHSRA Board Meeting a group of potential investors explained the results of their survey of private backers, showing strong levels of interest from the private sector.

Yes, one of those was Lehman Brothers, which just went belly-up. But they weren't the only ones to indicate interest. Companies from SNCF to Alstom to Goldman Sachs all submitted statements of interest. In fact, the current financial crisis actually makes HSR a more attractive investment for capital - instead of being stuck in increasingly precarious financial instruments, or dependent on rapidly fluctuating commodity prices, HSR provides a stable and reliable source of return on investment. Rafael explained this very well in a comment from yesterday's open thread, which deserves to be put on the front page:

paradoxically, institutional investors may now be more - rather than less - interested in the opportunity afforded by California's HSR project.

Since no-one really knows when the US housing market will stabilize, lenders will be reluctant to pump more money into it for quite some time. Meanwhile, falling house prices and a low savings rate mean that US consumers will be keeping their wallets closed, which will depress stocks. On the other hand, US treasury bonds generally feature low yields.

As an investment, HSR should fall in-between these extremes of risk and reward, which makes it an attractive proposition for institutional investors. However, CAHSR still needs to make that case in a prospectus.

Exactly. Back to the editorial:

Making matters worse, Union Pacific Railroad has told the state's High-Speed Rail Authority it won't sell its rights-of-way for the planned 700-mile bullet train network.

The Authority never counted on that ROW. The plan was always to follow the UP route, up to but not over the ROW itself.

Even if the $43 billion were on hand, it would be a colossal mistake to spend it on a high-speed rail system that is likely to cost riders more than airline service and have the same security issues as airports.

More important, the number of potential riders simply does not justify the costs. The money would be far better spent on highways, schools, reservoirs and levees.

The current estimate is that a ticket on HSR from SF to LA will cost around $55. You can't get that cheap a ticket on the airlines unless you buy early and get a really sweet deal. Further, it is highly unlikely that airfares will remain where they're at. The airline crisis is already driving carriers to raise fares and fees, cut back on flights between LA and SF, and in some cases go out of business entirely. As oil prices continue to rise it is likely that airfares will cost MUCH more than an HSR ticket.

As to "number of potential riders" the editorial gives no specifics here, but soaring ridership on California passenger trains should suggest the silliness of that particular argument.

Not content with being in a deep hole, the editorialists keep on digging:

California already has a huge bond debt to pay off and certainly cannot afford to add tens of billions debt on such a questionable project.

The only kind of "good" bond debt is infrastructure bond debt, where money is borrowed to build infrastructure that lasts beyond the life of the bond, creating long-term value and spurring economic growth. HSR certainly fits that model. Should we not have built the bay bridges during the Depression? Should we not have built the State Water Project during a recession? The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst already determined the budget can afford Prop 1A. So what exactly are these editorialists talking about?

One might think by now that the high-speed rail plans for construction, operation and investment have been worked out in great detail with considerable confidence in their success. Even after spending $58 million over a decade in planning, that is decidedly not the case.

Yet voters are being asked to finance the fantasy of duplicating a 200-plus mph rail system like the one in Japan or France through the Central Valley.

But those plans ARE worked out in great detail - or do the editorialists not know how to read an EIR? Their use of "the Central Valley" is a deliberate attempt to mislead readers - the HSR line will run through much of the Bay Area and Southern California as well. There are plenty of low-population rural spaces the French TGV runs through as well, same with the Spanish AVE - California's proposed system compares quite favorably to those successful trains.

Embarking on this rail system would be highly questionable at any time, but it is particularly irresponsible now. California is in financial trouble and is in need of massive investment on a number of far more important projects.

We trust voters will place reality ahead of fantasy and soundly reject Prop. 1A's Boondoggle Express.

California is in financial trouble because we misinvested our money on a deluded and ultimately failed attempt to prolong the 20th century. The surest way to dig our financial hole deeper is to ignore environmental, energy, and economic realities and refuse to invest in the only transportation system that can thrive in 21st century conditions. We need massive investment in passenger rail if our cities and our economy is to thrive.

We trust voters will place reality and facts ahead of ignorant nonsense and soundly reject the Media News Group's stupid editorial. Instead voters will embrace Prop 1A, embrace high speed rail, and embrace the future.

CA Chamber of Commerce Out to Lunch on Congestion Mitigation

The California Chamber of Commerce, a reliably right-wing organization, has announced its opposition to Proposition 1A, the high speed rail bond on the November ballot. Their reasoning is as follows:

“California will need to invest at least $50 billion to complete a statewide high speed rail system. There are other projects that mitigate congestion that should be a higher priority,” said [CEO Allan] Zaremberg.

First, Zaremberg's math is off. CA will invest $10 billion and the rest comes from feds and private enterprise (which will get something in return - isn't that what the Cal Chamber is all about?). Nobody is talking seriously about $50 billion, at least nobody outside the usual HSR denier groups.

But I want to instead focus on the notion that "other projects" are the solution. Such as?

Seriously. What "other projects" would these be? Shouldn't they be specifying what they would do with the money instead of just saying "nope, sorry, not gonna do it"?

We can get a sense of what the Cal Chamber probably supports from Lee Harrington, chairman of the Southern California Leadership Council, a group of businessmen. Harrington was on KQED Forum back in May with Quentin Kopp and also said we should use the bond money for other priorities. Here was my take on Harrington:

His arguments against HSR were incredibly weak and boiled down to his preference, as executive director of the Southern California Leadership Council, that the state's bond capacity be preserved for something like port capacity expansion, freeway widening, airport expansion, that sort of thing. He had no concept of why HSR is needed to keep California moving, and even parroted the discredited "Southwest Airlines offers cheap travel" nonsense. Kopp was especially effective in smacking down that claim, pointing out that the Texas high speed rail project so memorably killed by Southwest and others in the 1990s has been revived, with support from other major airlines. Harrington gave the impression of a man hopelessly stuck in the 20th century, unable to grasp that the basic economy of transportation has undergone a sea change in the last 5 years.

Harrington does not speak for the Cal Chamber but it seems reasonable to assume that his reasoning is similar to that used by the Cal Chamber to oppose Prop 1A. The Cal Chamber prefers to see freeway widening, more airport gates, and more port capacity. The latter is all well and good but won't help move passengers around the state. And as we have repeatedly explained here, expanding freeways and airports will cost between $80 and $150 billion, double to quadruple the cost of HSR.

And those projects are not likely to successfully mitigate congestion. Few airports in the state have room to expand, and the same holds true for the freeways. The phenomenon of induced demand suggests that to try and build your way out of congestion is to chase a mirage. HSR provides certainty on congestion management by getting people out of cars and plans and into a new, fast, convenient alternative.

As many California businesses are aware, high fuel costs are eating into their profitability and causing them to lay off workers. High speed rail helps provide stable passenger transportation costs, saving them money. It also provides greatly expanded commuter rail capacity, especially on the most heavily traveled routes in the Bay Area and Southern California.

The Cal Chamber is turning its back on jobs, profits, and economic growth by opposing Prop 1A. High speed rail will create 160,000 immediate jobs and in the long-term create at least 450,000 more. It will help produce a green dividend that will grow the economy by freeing up money not spent on gas to be spent elsewhere, including in businesses that are members of the Cal Chamber.

As a rather ideologically conservative organization the Cal Chamber's opposition should not be that surprising, and although it's nonsense it will also not likely affect Prop 1A's fate. The far more interesting endorsement discussion is instead happening within the Sierra Club. We'll have more on that one tomorrow.

Taiwan's Airlines Reeling From HSR Success

In the year and a half that Taiwan High Speed Rail has been in operation it has captured a significant chunk of the island's domestic travel market. It has already achieved profitability and now the island's airlines are reeling:

Since the high-speed railway service began, half of the air routes between Taipei City and the country's western cities have been discontinued, with those from the capital to Taichung and Chiayi closed last year and the one to Tainan ended in August. While flights between Taipei and the southern cities of Kaohsiung, Pingtung and Hengchun--home to Kenting National Park--are still in service, operators recently stated that their future is uncertain, with reductions or cancellations being considered.

Mandarin Airlines, a subsidiary of Taiwan's China Airlines, is the only company still running flights between Taipei and Kaohsiung--once the nation's most lucrative domestic route that was also operated by three other local airlines, Uni Air, TransAsia Airways and Far Eastern Air Transport (FAT). Despite reducing its Taipei-Kaohsiung service to one flight per day Aug. 16, Mandarin Airlines also applied to the Civil Aeronautics Administration under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to pull out from the route as of Sept. 1.

"Summer is supposed to be the peak season of air travel, but our passenger occupancy rate is barely over 50 percent," said Irving Hsu, spokesman for Mandarin Airlines. "Airlines cannot survive with occupancy rates lower than 60 percent. It is increasingly difficult to maintain operations as more travelers now choose to take THSR's trains," Hsu explained.

Soaring ridership is the global rule and should finally put to bed any lingering argument that California high speed rail will have any problem meeting ridership projections.

The Taiwan Journal article I linked above used the headline "Romance of rail jeopardizes domestic air routes." But I'm not sure it's romance that's at work here. Instead it's likely simple efficiency and common sense. High speed rail is a fast, reliable way to travel. It's easier to do work on a train - you can make calls, perhaps get WiFi, and not be as crowded in as you are on a coach airline seat (with my 6'2" frame it's nearly impossible for me to even open my laptop fully). HSR trains usually serve city centers, whereas airports are typically located on the urban fringe by necessity.

Taiwan's experience, alongside that of Spain, France, and Japan (to name but a few) proves that if given a choice between flying and taking a high speed train, many if not most travelers will choose the train.

What of the economic impact on the airlines? They are already in crisis, and already cutting flights between LA and SF. US carriers are shifting their business model to emphasize medium and long-haul flights, and smaller cities like Fresno are in jeopardy of losing air service entirely. In this context HSR helps fill a vacuum for Californians and helps get the airlines make a shift they're already looking to make. The fact that no airline is spending a dime to fight Prop 1A should suggest how they really feel about it.

Additionally, the carriers that serve intra-California routes are not dependent on those routes. The days of PSA and AirCal are long gone, and even Southwest can survive without the LA-SF corridor.

High speed rail is essential to California's future. The airlines cannot be relied on to provide us fast, cheap transportation with our state. If we act now and pass Prop 1A we can ensure that California has affordable transportation for decades to come - an absolute necessity to a prosperous and competitive 21st century economy.

Taking the Coast Route

(This was supposed to auto-post at 3PM yesterday. Bloggered again...)

ABC News has a high speed rail story up on its site this morning, about the proliferation of HSR plans around the country. They quote some skeptics, including William Garrison, a retired civil engineering professor at UC Berkeley:

William Garrison says there is little national demand for high-speed rail. He says the push for high-speed rail is merely a new way of doing something old. "While the high-speed trains look nice, they're just polished-up, old, sterile technology," he says. "They're like I am. I am an old man with a new haircut."

It's conceivable that Garrison has not been to Europe or Japan anytime in the last 30 years to see the cutting-edge, extraordinarily popular high speed trains there. It's possible, I guess, that he hasn't even been to the western edge of his city to see the frequent, high-ridership Capitol Corridor trains. And it's more than possible, but quite likely, that he's just an old-school freeway builder who convinced himself in the 1960s that rail was dead and 40 years later cannot bring himself to admit new evidence and new realities.

Ironically Garrison himself coauthored a book attacking that kind of thinking:

Major themes of the book include the pervasiveness of conventional wisdom, its often unfortunate role in shaping policy, and the need to resist it. Another theme is historic path dependence, in which initial decisions when a technology is young lock systems into development paths out of inertia (as in the case, say, of railway gauges), so that they become historic artifacts rather than dynamic transport systems. The authors also address the maturity of our transportation system (and its possible senescence). That creates the danger that new ideas will be suffocated or starved, especially given the present preoccupation with polishing and fine-tuning obsolete systems, or tinkering around the edges, refining and optimizing in small increments what is already deployed.

Despite this undercurrent of dismay, the authors claim to be writing out of a sense of optimism. "We need to think harder. We need to do better," they write, with the implication that that is possible.

The book includes an attack on high speed rail, which is directly contradictory to its stated themes:

At the same time, the authors suggest that the passenger railroad is a dying technology, suitable for a select few settings, but extremely limited in its practical usefulness overall. They analyze the prospects for high-speed rail in the U.S. market and, contrary to some widely publicized views, conclude that it is not likely to succeed on its own merits. In the two places where high-speed rail has enjoyed some of its greatest success, Europe and Japan, other factors contributed to the outcome. Regulatory schemes artificially inflated airfares, so airlines could not compete for customers on price. And because Europe and Japan are more densely populated and have more severe congestion and capacity problems, high-speed rail has an easier time of matching the convenience of air, creating the high-volume, short-distance market for which high-speed rail is most suited.

So how do they explain the Acela's success?! European air travel has been revolutionized by low-cost carriers such as easyJet and Ryanair, but high speed rail has still beaten them. Matt Melzer destroyed the "more densely populated" argument here on the blog last month, showing that Spain has very similar conditions to us in California, and Spain's successes can be repeated here. Finally, the notion that air travel is "convenient" just doesn't seem true any longer - when American travelers are given a choice between flying and high speed rail, they're choosing the rails.

Garrison and his coauthors go on:

Finally, they argue, high-speed rail is too late: "In mature systems, the benefits of new infrastructure in an already well-served area are elusive." Tinkering with an older system will yield only minimal gains. "Whether high-speed rail is a new story, or simply the final chapter to the history of conventional passenger rail, waits to be seen," they conclude.

Of course, California is not a "well-served area." HSR isn't "tinkering with an older system" and his implicit notion that passenger rail is headed for some dustbin of transportation history is belied by the reality that surrounds us.

Ultimately Garrison's argument is really little more than libertarian anti-transit nonsense dressed up in academic speak. Their book purports to explain why "the math" doesn't work for transit, but this ignores the massive subsidies given to freeways - meaning "the math" doesn't work for them either. And nowhere in their book, published in 2006, do they discuss the impact of higher gas prices or global warming mitigation costs on transportation - both of which suggest that HSR will be effective from both a transportation and an economic point of view.

Garrison's arguments are the last gasp of a dying 20th century model. The 21st century model is one that emphasizes sustainability, in our case through modernized passenger rail. I love riding the Coast Starlight, but give me high speed rail and I'll choose that over Amtrak, driving, or flying any day.

Travelers Seeing Rail As Superior to Planes

It's a frequent canard raised by the HSR deniers - that nobody would choose even a bullet train over a plane to get between the two halves of our state. Soaring passenger rail ridership belies this argument, as travelers see the benefits - in terms of comfort and economy - of rail travel. The Washington Post explored this dynamic in today's paper, interviewing Acela riders to explain the shift:

Jada Golden stood in the waiting lounge at Union Station, explaining why Amtrak is a better way to travel than an airline.

"It's as heavy as we want," Golden said, pointing to an oversize suitcase. "We can put it on a rack in the rail car and get things out of it."

Golden, 36 and a Boston schoolteacher, pointed to another bag -- a large paper grocery bag filled with sandwiches, salads, water and fruit. "You can bring food," she said.

She continued. On the train, she's free to pick her own seat and doesn't have a flight attendant telling her when to use electronics. And then there's the airline stress factor -- the security headaches and the delays.

"You're always delayed in the airport," Golden said. "You always have connecting flights."

Security theater, high fuel prices, an aging infrastructure, and corporate nickel and diming are all driving passengers away from planes and to the trains. On the Acela passengers are free to talk on their cell phones, getting work done that they couldn't get done on a plane. It's a superior method of travel, as more and more Americans are discovering.

Of course it helps that the Northeast Corridor has something like the Acela, a quasi-high speed train that is competitive with flying times between DC and NYC. Here in California we just don't have that option. The Coast Starlight, which I'm riding to LA tomorrow, takes about 12 hours to get from the Bay Area to SoCal. There's just no way that can ever shift travel habits in any lasting or meaningful way. I love riding it, but most Californians can't afford to take two whole days to get between LA and SF. Compared against the Coast Starlight, yeah, flying is generally the better option.

And that's where high speed rail makes such an enormous difference. Two and a half hours on a train is certainly competitive with flying, especially when the security theater, travel time to and from the airport, waiting in the terminal, and frequent flight delays are considered. You can conduct business on the train, with a cell phone and likely by wi-fi once our project is built. It provides a stable cost of transportation, as opposed to flights which are dependent on an ever-rising cost of oil.

Already airlines are cutting flights between LA and SF, which is likely to continue as fuel costs eat into profit margins. To believe we can rely on airlines to handle our intrastate travel needs is to deny reality. Americans are already demonstrating that they WILL take high speed rail if it's an option, just as Californians are riding the Amtrak California lines in massive numbers. Put together it's a solid argument for high speed rail in California.

Ill Advised?

I really should be packing for my trip to Seattle, but this could not pass without comment. Tim Hunt has an op-ed in today's Oakland Tribune calling high speed rail "ill advised". Far as I can tell the only thing ill advised is his op-ed:

And, when it comes to transportation, the bullet train is a remarkable boondoggle. Its board approved the environmental impact report last week that identified costs between $42 billion and $45 billion. If costs were half that much, it's way past time for voters to end this fantasy of politicians who love to spend your money.

This is ignorant nonsense. Because a $10 billion bond will not be floated all at once, but dribbled out over time and as needed, it is not likely to necessitate a tax increase. If it did the cost to the average Californian would be $750 total - going off of arch-conservative Tom McClintock's own numbers - or $37.50 a year if paid in annual installments. I just paid that much to fill up my car last night, whereas high speed rail would save me money.

Remarkably Hunt does not mention anywhere in his column the high price of gas. Nowhere does he mention the airline crisis. Nowhere does he mention the energy or climate crisis. And if it's the economy he's so concerned about, what does he have against the 450,000 jobs that this will create, many of them coming within the next few years when they will be desperately needed?

The language of the "boondoggle" is frequently used by transit opponents. Any government project with a big price tag is immediately seen as a recipe for ruin. The involvement of Parsons Brinckerhoff usually amplifies these cries - but as we have explained before this is to miss the key details entirely. The Big Dig, the usual whipping boy of anti-government critics, was a highly unusual and deeply mismanaged project. Rail projects, especially high speed rail projects, have routinely been delivered on-time and either on or very close to the original budget projections - including here in California.

Unfortunately he goes on:

And for those who still dream about BART extending to Livermore, the bullet train is yet another negative. The approved EIR shows the route coming over Pacheco Pass and then up the Santa Clara valley to San Jose and then north along the Peninsula to San Francisco. Livermore advocates hoped for a route that went through the Altamont Pass to a high-rail connection in Livermore between BART, ACE and the high-speed rail. Pleasanton would sue the pants off of any agency wanting to move more trains — let along high-speed trains — through its downtown, but it might live with a few more ACE trains with most of the passenger traffic taking BART.

The high-speed rail board decision ends that possibility and should send a clear message to Valley voters as well as those voting across the state.

That's odd. Here I thought there was a meeting just last week on extending BART to Livermore. And this notion that the HSR authority "ends the possibility" of more ACE trains or undermining BART to Livermore? Did he miss the part of the plan where Altamont is specifically designated as an HSR corridor that will get funds even though it's not on the main track? That such funds would almost certainly lead to an ACE boost? That plan would be immeasurably boosted by passage of AB 3034 but instead of bashing Republicans that have held it up, he goes after the Authority with a charge so baseless that it leads me to wonder whether Hunt has even the slightest clue of the basic details of the project.

This is a silly boondoggle and deserves to be buried now instead of consuming more precious public funds.

Remember, the state is still $15 billion-plus out-of-balance and could not afford this silliness in the best of times, let alone now.

This is sleight-of-hand, as the deficit and HSR are totally separate issues. The state Legislative Analyst, a respected nonpartisan office, concluded the state could afford this bond. More importantly, not building this will worsen the budget gap as Californians lose jobs and reduce spending due to high gas prices they can't avoid. Again Hunt completely ignores the crippling impact of those high prices on our economy, to which HSR is a partial but valuable solution.

High-speed rail may have its place in America — most likely moving freight between the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to processing centers in the Inland Empire around San Bernardino — but it's certainly not trying to ship people north to south to compete with airlines.

Why not? Acela has taken 40% of the market share on the Northeast Corridor from the airlines. HSR in Spain - which is very similar to California in how its cities are distributed - is successfully challenging the airlines, especially on the Madrid-Barcelona route, one of the world's busiest.

Hunt seems to be completely ignorant of both the stunning global success of HSR as well as soaring ridership on California trains. Were he better informed he might not be making these kind of arguments.

Voters likely will face a $10 billion initial investment to be followed by several more bonds. It's well past time to stop throwing good money after bad on this project that is so ill-conceived that it doesn't even have a business plan.

Wrong again. It does have a business plan. 8 years old, yes, but it exists. AB 3034 would mandate that the Authority update the plan, but Republicans opposed it. Not exactly a good way of holding government accountable or providing the public the latest information, is it?

And, what's more, the current legislation in Sacramento calls for the engineering to be done by Caltrans instead of contracted to an outside firm. Caltrans already is a major roadblock to getting projects moving. That provision to require Caltrans engineering is a sop to the engineers' union and other public employee unions, and another strike against doing things efficiently. Caltrans, despite some good efforts by appointed leaders, defines government bureaucracy that consumes vast amounts of taxpayer and private money with little to show in progress or improvements.

Again, this is simply false. The provision in question was struck from the bill when it was amended in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Once again Hunt fails on even the basic facts of high speed rail. If he can't get those facts right, can we trust his arguments? Of course not. The only thing "ill advised" here would be assuming Hunt's op-ed is of any value in assessing Proposition 1.

HSR as Strategic Value

There's a fascinating op-ed in the Yomiuri Shimbun by Yoshiyuki Kasai, chairman of the Central Japan Railway Company, focusing on the strategic importance of HSR. Kasai makes a point I've been trying to push out here on the blog - that in the 21st century, a global economy is simply not competitive without something like high speed rail. Dependence on oil is the mounted cavalry of our time.

I don't agree with all that Kasai writes - he supports maglev, for example - but it's a useful read on how the global perspective is changing. Non-oil based infrastructure projects aren't just a way to move people. They're a sign of modernity, of a society that has both feet firmly planted in the 21st century, of a society that looks ahead to the strategic challenges of a new era and chooses to meet them sensibly, instead of choosing to foolishly cling to the delusional belief that the 20th century can continue.

Railway services are regaining importance in the 21st century as a high-speed means of transit amid the global recognition of energy security and environmental protection as the most pressing priorities for mankind in the new century

In the 19th century, European states regarded railway construction as a synonym for industrialization and expansion of imperial rule. In the United States, private companies, spearheading transcontinental railway construction, played the strategic role in opening up the frontier and, with state-sanctioned privileges, developed vast areas at their discretion. For its part, Japan joined the railway development race half a century later. By the end of the 19th century, 750,000 kilometers of railroad tracks had been laid around the world.

It may be hard for us to imagine, but the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Transcontinental Railroad were the moon shot and ICBM of their time. Before the cheap oil boom temporarily revolutionized transportation, nations understood that a vibrant rail infrastructure was essential for economic development. Today most nations now understand that HSR is similarly necessary for strategic advancement - witness the massive HSR program in Spain, or the continuing expansion of the French syste, or the project in places as diverse as Argentina, Morocco, Iran, and Vietnam. If California thinks they can remain globally competitive without a reliable method of moving people around the state that isn't dependent on sky-high oil prices they're insane.

Today, a short while after the beginning of the 21st century, high-speed railways are gaining a new dimension of strategic importance. Needless to say, high-speed railway operations that ensure safe, punctual and rapid mass transit have tremendous advantages in meeting 21st-century requirements, such as advanced energy consumption efficiency and the use of nuclear electric power and other clean energy sources.

Notice what Kasai points out as having "strategic importance" - safe, punctual, rapid mass transit. Advanced consumption efficiency, the use of clean energy sources. Nuclear is surely controversial, but California's wind and solar potential is among the most promising in the world. The CHSRA is expected to release its own study on renewable and carbon-neutral energy sources anytime now, and BART has embraced solar power. The strategic challenge of the 21st century is no longer to build enough aircraft carriers or freeways - it's whether we can build infrastructure that can keep a modern society functioning without being dependent on fossil fuels.

Many countries, including the United States, which has so far been less enthusiastic about high-speed railways, are showing interest in rapid transit development. Such a situation effectively means that Japan, which boasts a decisive edge over other countries in the fields of high-speed transit technology, expertise, installation and operations, now has a strategic card in its hand.

Japan has a right to brag here. A nation that is famously dependent on imported resources can boast a transportation system that is largely, if not totally, self-sustaining. France can make the same boast, as its power comes mostly from nuclear sources. Does California really believe it can keep up with just Southwest Airlines and Interstate 5?

Kasai argues that the US should follow the European model and use public funds to build the infrastructure while using HSR fare revenues to pay for the operating expenses. It would be an investment on par with those we made in the middle of the 20th century, when we built bridges, freeways and aqueducts with public money that were essential to California's dramatic late 20th century economic prosperity. If we wish our prosperity to continue we need to make a similar investment in our time - and HSR is that investment, as Kasai argues:

If a maglev train plan is adopted by the United States, Japan should consider exporting the best of its high-speed railway system to its ally. Now that high-speed railway transit is considered essential for the strategic needs of the 21st century, it is significant that Japanese technology could contribute to such a U.S. initiative as a key step to consolidating the alliance between the two countries.

How secure an alliance is can be determined not only by military cooperation, but also by multifaceted and collaborative relationships through the sharing of roles and interdependence in industrial fields.

That's how Kasai ends his article, and though we can substitute HSR for maglev, I really like how he closes. Global relationships in the 21st century will not be sustained by military cooperation, but by the "multifaceted and collaborative relationships" described here. America's longtime allies in Japan, France, and Germany have an enormous amount of technical skill and innovation to share with us - as well as capital. Perhaps it is time for an American Marshall Plan, where those nations we helped in the late 1940s can come and return the favor in the 2010s by providing the technical knowhow to help California join the 21st century and build high speed rail.

As with the original Marshall Plan, though, the benefits weren't given - you had to ask for them. President Truman didn't ride around Europe throwing dollar bills from the back of a truck, and nobody will do so today. If Californians don't pass Proposition 1 this year, they will be consigning themselves to permanent and fatal dependence on an obsolete model of fueling our economy. Friends around the world like Yoshiyuki Kasai want to help us help ourselves. Why would we say no?