According to a piece in TRAINS Newswire for this date.
President Obama is going to push for a funding package for HSR to the tune of some $53 Billion dollars. His stated goal is to provide 80per cent of the country access to HSR by 2020.
There is a long Thread running concurrently under this topic ‘Passenger’ that is debating HSR. The referenced piece is alluding to Fred W. Frailey’s contention that HSR is now a Dead on Arrival goal. Thus it seems as if the President is working to raise a Zombie (?) from its grave.
There is another discussion running on the topic TRANSIT referencing the projects in Louisiana (at NOLA) and in Minnesota (Minn./StPaul) to spend some $1.2 Billion dollars to fund a total of 13.5 miles of Light Rail and Trolley lines. The givenis that Heavy Rail is much more expensive per mile than the Urban Commuter Services; HSR by virtue of it’s fully enclosed envelope of ROW and the need for crossing both over and under to be bridged makes it Very,Very expensive to Engineer, Buy ROW, and then Construct, finally to Operate.
My question is does anyone have any idea what this $53 buillion is going to buy? I realize that it is most probably just some “seed Money”, but are their any guesses what a completed system might cost.
I would expect that the NIMBY’s along the routes will do everything they can to stop it and make the legal costs virtually astronomical. Adding those costs to the finished product; any ideas as to final cost or bets that it would Ever be done?
I do not know if HSR is DOR. I do wonder if we would be better investing in MAGLEV instead. I believe Japan is getting ready to build a a long distance MAGLEV line, as they believe they have almost reached the maximum speed achievable with HSR.
I do not see how 53 bn is going to enable 80% of the US population within distance of HSR.
I will be very surprised if the president gets $53 bn for HSR. Now if he wanted to buy products offered by the “military industrial complex” he could spend as much as he liked.
FTA: “…[BULLET TRAINS]They need dedicated, carefully engineered lines that might well run $50 million a mile to construct. That would be $20 billion for construction alone (ignoring minor matters such as tunnels under the Hudson River). If they sold 10 million tickets a year on that line, they would have to charge $100 per ticket just to cover the interest on the construction costs.Then there are the land-acquisition costs (which would be huge in this part of the country), the cost of the rolling stock, fuel costs, maintenance costs, labor costs, and so on. Unsubsidized, it would probably be cheaper for a party of six to charter a jet to fly from Boston to Washington than to take the bullet train…”
Isn’t a little redundant to have several threads on the same topic?
If Pres. Obama had said the $53 bil. were going to rebuild infrastructure for our freight railroads, I wonder if the reaction would be the the same on this forum?
The General Accounting Office audited a representative sample of the proposed high speed rail projects. It concluded that the estimated costs for the projects that it studied are iffy at best. If I remember correctly, it did not come up with a total cost estimate for all the projects.
The estimated cost for the California High Speed Project is approximately $45 billion, although it has a lot of wiggle room in it. Given the tendency of major projects to come in over budget, I would be surprised if they build it for $45 billion. Several months ago I worked up the true cost of the CHS Project, assuming that the $45 billion was a good base number. Adding in legal fees, investment banking fees, and interest on the debt, I believe the total cost of the project could top $78 billion.
The CHS Project is just one. Given the other potential candidates identified by the DOT, I can only conclude that $53 billion is a starter number. In any case, no one really knows what the vision for high or moderate speed rail would cost, in part because no one has laid out a comprehensive plan for the various projects on the planning boards or underway.
Not too sure I would agree with your comment about redundancy on the Threads referencing HSR.
Your Thread startd with the comments about the recent accident in the former GDR region of Germany where the DRC[ Diesel Rail Car] was hit head on by the Freight , and the lack of a good functioning instalation of their PBZ ( Their model of PTC). The issue being ,In my reading; the seperation of HSR components sharing Rights of Way with slower services of Freight and passenger users.
HSR certainly , seems to be the safer service when run on dedicated ROWs. I have found the points of discussion of the State run (AMTRK operation) Passenger service to be a discussion of how a well run service can grow while serving the needs of the area it serves.
The HSR in California is a needed service and rovides the Inter-City links needed there. Their population density in the corridors served is enough to make the service a virtual puiblic utility for the citizens. It is apparently the other issues within the State of California and its finances that bring pressures on the CalTrans services.
To your second point; I’d venture to say you are correct, but the arguments would be the issue of government funding in a private enterprise environment.
To my posting of the HSR Thread. I would argue that the ultimate benefits to small segment of the poopulation would make the $53 Billion infusion to HSR to bring HSR to 80% of the population, a situation where the initial $53 B would be virtually just enough to build ourselves into a box of more and more spending; the argument being a sort of self fulfilling
Fred W. Frailey: The curtain goes down on U.S. high speed rail
Why Amtrak is worth continuing and improving
Your point about an environment in which routes can be obtained, etc. is a very important one that others (Phoebe Vet, I recall) have made as an explanation for dithering and inaction.
Random statistic. 40% of North America lives within 500 miles of Harrisburg, PA.
If you define “within” rather broadly, say 100 miles, then if you do the Tampa - Orlando line, Charlotte to Richmond, Chicago - Detroit, NY - Buffalo, Eugene to Vancouver BC, and LA to SF - and maybe something in TX, you’d come pretty close. Most of this would be HrSR, though.
$53B @ $2.2B = 24 B2B Stealth Bombers at todays prices, there are 19 in service today.
$53B @ $18B = 3 Seawolf Attack Submarines, the actual number built including development costs
Compare this -vs- creating a nationwide approach to creating a viable (basic-not even world class) HST system to drag some of us kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
How much public benifit are B2’s against those high tech anti-radar goat shields in wherethehellarewe-istan? Seawolfs against Kalashnikov armed Somali pirates in rowboats…yeah right.
The B2 was developed during the cold war (and the ones built were turned out almost 2 decades ago) so I’m not sure how that’s relevant to discussing HSR investment in 2011…I kind of agree with you on the Seawolf, in that they were a cold war design that the Congress was convinced to build only 3 of “to preserve the submarine technology base”…
Just pointing out that similar amounts of money have been spent in the past without blinking, and similar amounts are and will be spent now and in the near future. Not many batted an eye at the B2s initially even though it was completly clear they were redundent given the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new nature of terrorist warfare, where the enemies deadliest technology is at the level of a cellphone.
Air travel in this country has become so unpleasant that tourists (foriegn and domestic) are staying away, people only travel by air when they have to, and I’m not just talking about TSA touching your junk, its the whole affair, lousy air service, lousy schedules, overbooked planes, no food service, paying for anything other than your ticket, I mean its awful, why a
$53B @ $2.2B = 24 B2B Stealth Bombers at todays prices, there are 19 in service today.
$53B @ $18B = 3 Seawolf Attack Submarines, the actual number built including development costs
Compare this -vs- creating a nationwide approach to creating a viable (basic-not even world class) HST system to drag some of us kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
How much public benifit are B2’s against those high tech anti-radar goat shields in wherethehellarewe-istan? Seawolfs against Kalashnikov armed Somali pirates in rowboats…yeah right.
The B2 was developed during the cold war (and the ones built were turned out almost 2 decades ago) so I’m not sure how that’s relevant to discussing HSR investment in 2011…I kind of agree with you on the Seawolf, in that they were a cold war design that the Congress was convinced to build only 3 of “to preserve the submarine technology base”…
Just pointing out that similar amounts of money have been spent in the past without blinking, and similar amounts are and will be spent now and in the near future. Not many batted an eye at the B2s initially even though it was completly clear they were redundent given the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new nature of terrorist warfare, where the enemies deadliest technology is at the level of a cellphone.
Air travel in this country has become so unpleasant that tourists (foriegn and domestic) are staying away, people only travel by air when they have to, and I’m not just ta
Don: Many good points. i will add that I have heard on the news that the airlines at O’Hare have now decided they don’t want to pay for the airport expansion (already well underway) because they don’t need it. Turns out there were over 100K fewer flights last year than the prior year. Now isn’t that nice!! Wonder who will pay? The general taxpayers who may never even use that airport.
It’s a total of $53B over 6 years with $8B for next year (on top of the $8B from the stimulus from last year). Its to be a mix of stuff, like they laid out about a year ago. Some 150-220 mph, some 90-125mph and some 79 mph stuff. They have names for each type of service that only DC could come up with…
“Such corridors would be divided into three categories: “core express” for trains achieving speeds of between 125 and 250 miles per hour or more; “regional” lines for trains traveling between 90 to 125 miles per hour and “emerging” rail lines for passenger trains traveling as much as 90 miles per hour.”
The HSR needed for passenger trains to average 79 MPH between endpoints. That is really all we need. That is feasible on a well-dispatched single track main. Unless the HSR provider owns the rails, it will never achieve a goal of 125 MPH. The NEC is the only area where the service provider is in charge of everything and it is mostly a four track main dispatched for the benefit of passenger trains and it still barely reaches HSR performance. We simply have to be realistic about what we call it and what we need to get people onto trains and off the roads. I’ve said it before, and no one has convinced me that I should think otherwise, passenger trains are needed in high volume, short time frame corridors. Leave everything else to someone who can figure out the routes and the frequencies to make money outside those corridors.
Amtrak’s $117B proposal was for a 30 year project that included projected inflation estimates over the 30 year period. I think if it was in current year dollars, it was around a $40 to $50 billion proposal. But it was more of a rough outline “Vision” than a concrete proposal. The Amtrak “Vision” included several very expensive components: a new station in downtown Philly under Market East with a 7.5 mile tunnel running under much of Philadelphia and a 11.8 mile tunnel under NYC with deep underground stations at NYP and Grand Central. Cut those back to something more reasonable - a new HSR station at 30th Street station with a new tunnel running under the river to North Philly and stick with the new NYP Gateway project with 2 new East River tunnels rather than a new deep 11.8 mile tunnel running from NJ under Manhattan to the Bronx - and it become more reasonable.
Other countries with much smaller GDPs than the US have built HSR without great financial difficulty. If we can keep the HSR projects from getting overly gold plated, the US can afford to build a lot of HSR corridors.