dpeilow

bobw

The money quote for this thread:

It should have had its own paragraph.

Brent

If I'm not mistaken, the "longer distances" meant here are more than, say, 500 miles. For shorter distances, like Boston-Washington or Los Angeles- San Francisco, trains are incredibly effective. Overall travel time is equal or less than flying, comfort far exceeds airline standards, and travel hassles like security checks are nearly eliminated. Flying really can't compare (and just for reference, I like flying and happen to be a GA pilot). High speed trains decimated air travel in Spain between Madrid and Seville, a distance roughly equivalent to LA-SF. I would expect similar results in California.

bobw

OK. I agree (and said all along, perhaps not clearly) that on shorter, high traffic routes railroads can be competitive. Perhaps SF to LA is one of those routes. Unfortunately, those will not be the only routes built.

Here in Texas there was a proposal for a transportation corridor from San Antoinio through Austin to Dallas. It looks more like a trendy project in search of justification, rather than a solution to a need. (Lets build ourselves a high speed rail line, like those cool Europeans!)

The economic analysis went against it. The package has been defeated, for now, but the pieces live on.

dpeilow

Bob,

The routes on your linked page are around 250 miles on the Dallas - Austin/San Antonio axis and 280 miles on the Dallas - Houston axis. Those conurbation areas contain approximately 6, 4 and 6 million respectively. This is not some long distance route with small population centres - it is very similar in nature to the London / Paris / Brussels geography and certainly well under the distance of many of the routes in Spain. I suspect political and airline lobbying is holding this back more than an economic case, frankly.

Arnold Panz

Amen! For anyone who has had to travel within Texas to these various cities, a high speed rail option would be fantastic. Driving can take 6-8 hours depending on the cities. Flying comes with all of its inconveniences (delays, security lines, far from downtown etc.) for a short (45 minutes to 1.5 hour) flight. It would be fantastic for the economy in Texas to have all of its major cities connected in this way.

bobw

It's not just the distances on the map, or the hassles of driving them.

I too have driven I-45 from Dallas to Houston. It's no fun. The road is in lousy shape. There's almost no place to stop unless you get way, way off the highway.

Is the economic benefit from rail service worth the cost, especially if it also kills Southwest Airlines? That's not an idle concern. Southwest serves more cities in Texas than the rail link would serve. Those cities would be hurt if their air service goes away.

I suspect it's much cheaper to build and run five airports than it is to build and run high speed rail. Especially since we already have the airports.

dpeilow

Heathrow runway may cost £13bn ($19bn) v.s. around $15m per km for HSR (the figure in France or even Spain - Europe's second most mountainous country).

In other words, the proposed Texas system could be built for less than the cost of a new runway and terminal in the UK - if Spanish practice is followed (whom the Californians have hired as consultants).

I'm afraid that's FUD. Europe's HSR routes have decimated air traffic over the past 30 years where they exist, but that hasn't stopped the likes of Easyjet, Ryanair and a plethora of other low cost carriers that mirror the Southwest model from going from strength to strength elsewhere. HSR works well on trunk routes, but air is still very profitable on feeder links and low to medium flow routes.

Furthermore, in the UK case, two different studies cited cost-benefit ratios of a new network between London and Scotland of up to 1:2.8 and 1:4. The former study performed a sensitivity analysis showing that even the least optimistic outcome would give a ratio of 1:1.9. That is still more than enough to move forward with the project under UK Treasury rules, and hence it is.

Brent

Airline business between New York and Washington, D.C. continues to be profitable despite the train, although I would expect flights to fall if true high speed rail were ever installed. If Southwest stays as nimble as it has been in the past, it will find a way to make money.

I suspect that airlines ultimately will have more difficulty from rising oil prices than from competition from trains. To put it another way, with or without trains, people will stop flying when it gets too expensive. When that happens, rail may be the preferred (and only) solution.

dpeilow

It should also be remembered that there is nothing fundamentally stopping airlines from running the trains. This is what Air France-KLM is likely to do on routes including Paris-London and Paris-Amsterdam when the European market is deregulated next year.

Further to this, SNCF has found that rail still takes 50% market share on journeys of four and a half hours (rising to 90% at two hours). The former is enough time to reach Chicago from New York or Washington, or for Seattle-Portland-San Francisco.