Rail: The Case for "Interstate II"

Washington (DC) Highway Transportation Fraternity | May 1999 | Gil Carmichael

[TopDog2]

The only reason that traveling by air is even marginally acceptable is that the time a passenger must be subjected to all the indignities of mass transit is usually only a couple of hours or so. To place a passenger on a train that will take 4-5 times as long to reach its destination is asking too much. I mean how long do you want to sit in a cramped seat, rubbing elbows with smelly people that you don't know?

[Phantom Lord]

Really, who are the top 3 private "train" companies in regardes to transporting poeple. NOT BUILDING TRAINS, but operating a train system.

[Alberta's Child]

The author of this piece has made two points that directly conflict with each other. On one hand, he says that airline passengers are "furious" about delays and overcrowding, but on the other hand he offers no evidence to support his claim that his multi-modal transportation system will not have the same problems.

Let's face it -- highway congestion, overcrowded airports, and poor passenger rail service all have the same cause: people want to get from Point A to Point B, but none of them want to pay the true cost of getting from Point A to Point B. What makes transportation unique in engineering is that it is possible to provide mediocre, or even downright awful, infrastructure without incurring catastrophic results. Nobody in their right mind would knowingly work in a building that met only 75% of the building codes, yet everyone seems perfectly content to live with a transportation system that runs at no better then 75% of its needed capacity.

[Tauzero]

Re: #46

You are absolutely right.

[balrog666]

Efficiency is not an objective term. Calling something efficient or inefficient is a subjective value judgement.

Okay by me. People make their own personal judgement on the best way to travel for their particular needs all the time. For the most part, getting into a car and driving to a train station to then go somewhere else where you will need a car when you get there is less efficient than simply driving there to begin with, whatever it's attendant delays. It's the same reason more people drive short-medium hauls rather go through the time-wasting aspects of airplane travel and car rental.

[biblewonk]

Efficiency is not an objective term. Calling something efficient or inefficient is a subjective value judgement.

Really, are all other scientific terms also subjective value judgements too. You know things like rate and speed and time and mass, those types of things. No wonder we have the theory of evolution when scientific terms are just value judgements.

[Alberta's Child]

Your statement about the revenues generated by auto users is a bit misleading because they only account for capital funding of major projects, not day-to-day operating expenses. The cost of plowing or resurfacing a road is generally paid out of a government's general tax revenue.

[biblewonk]

Well, living here in Iowa I tend to think in terms of freight and Union Pacific. No one travels by train around here. It would be impossible to do that competitively. I think it costs 1000 dollars to travel across country by train when it is about 250ish by plane. Who would want anything to do with a business case like that? But go to your nearest coal fired power plant and see if they haul that coal by truck? How much do you suppose that coal would cost if you have to pay a 300 truck drivers instead of one train engineer? It is also amazing to learn how much energy all of those trucks require to haul the same amount of coal that one train can haul. This article said 9 times as much but I think it's more.

[Tauzero]

Re: #65

Exactly right. When the socialists among us denounce cars as "inefficient", all they're really doing is expressing their personal dislike for the value system of the majority of their fellow citizens, and their desire to veto those individual value judgements with the force of the state.

[Daus]

How about setting up a system of short haul and long haul airports. Say, Chicago for long haul and Milwaukee for short routes. Set up a high speed train between the two.

Because it's already been accomplished with much less infrastructure cost. Private, for profit airlines do a very effective job of moving people (within the timeframe you mentioned 30-40 mintes) between Milwaukee and O'Hare, plus you havent forced ALL of the long haul traffic onto O'Hare in the process, and I can take Midwest Express direct to DC five minutes from my door stop. :)

Part of the answer to the problems trying to be addresses with trains will come about as some of these large airlines begin to break apart and decentralize their hub based systems. The best, most efficient way to get from my house to Orlando is on a direct flight, on a well run airline (maybe someday, there will be more than 3 of those....)

[balrog666]

How about setting up a system of short haul and long haul airports.

That's called a hub system. Almost all the big airlines already use it.

[Tauzero]

"Really, are all other scientific terms also subjective value judgements too. You know things like rate and speed and time and mass, those types of things. No wonder we have the theory of evolution when scientific terms are just value judgements."

Efficiency is a meaningless term when separated from ends.

For example, a motor that does nothing but cause vibrations is efficient for a hand-held massager, but very inefficient for a car. In the first case, the mechanism produces the desired end, and in the second it does not.

When someone calls cars "inefficient", and seeks government intervention for the sake of "efficiency", all they're doing is expressing a personal preference and trying to impose that preference by force on their fellow citizens.

[balrog666]

When the socialists among us denounce cars as "inefficient", all they're really doing is expressing their personal dislike for the value system of the majority of their fellow citizens, and their desire to veto those individual value judgements with the force of the state.

Well said. That's just what socialists do. And it doesn't matter whether you are talking about railroads, SUV's, logging, national parks, endangered species, "global warming", abortion, "gay rights", or any other liberal feel-good cause.

[biblewonk]

When someone calls cars "inefficient", and seeks government intervention for the sake of "efficiency", all they're doing is expressing a personal preference and trying to impose that preference by force on their fellow citizens.

I can go two directions here. The interstate system itself is a government intervention, where is your outrage about that? When talking simple scientific terms, efficiency is a function of energy put into a system and work returned from that system, nothing more. When it comes to cost effectiveness, it certainly costs a lot less to pay one guy to run a back hoe to dig a hole for a foundation than it would cost to hire 20 or 30 guys with shovels. When we are talking trains we are talking efficiency regarding the amount of freight tons miles/gallon of fuel and we are talking cost effectiveness when we consider the number of operators required. If it weren't for the interstate system, government intervention, you would see a huge difference in the placement of many businesses relative to the nearest railroad.

[Alberta's Child]

I think it costs 1000 dollars to travel across country by train when it is about 250ish by plane.

That is part of the problem. You are only comparing the costs that the consumer pays -- when the overall costs are compared, I'd bet that air travel is actually grossly inefficient. Remember, when you look at the total performance of the entire airline industry since it began, the industry is still operating in the red! After 75 years or so!

[backup]

Not to butt in, but why the heck do you have a steak in your bicycle?

[biblewonk]

ROTF I'm meant steal.

[Cleburne]

I am not aware of any land transportation in American history in which the government was not heavily involved. Beginning with roads, progressing to canals, then railroads, then highways, then airlines, and ship ports and waterways everywhere in between, one would be hard pressed to find a viable transportation method that has not bee nheavily supported by the government. Sure, there have been many industrial railroads that were paid by solely by the company hat owned them, and parts of the other industries were fully privately owned, but without governemnt assistance, we would in all probability still be riding horses on narrow Indian trails. Railroads especially (the driving force behind our country's rise to prosperity) were massively subsidized in their construction, though the railroad remained in private hands of course-and some railroad men scalped the government. I recall one story of a dinky line railroader in South Mississppi who insisted that his railroad-a three-foot gauge logging line that terminated off in the woods and was constructed of second hand rail, dirt ballast-was worth, per mile, the same as a transcontinental railroad being built at the time. I believe he actually got some money for it! And after te Civil War, many a crooked Yankee speculator robbed the Southern states of tax money in fradulent railroad schemes, adding insult to injury and endearing Northern folks to Southerners for years to come! Of ocurse, the industrialists that came South with real money helped salve things over a bit...

[biblewonk]

That is part of the problem. You are only comparing the costs that the consumer pays -- when the overall costs are compared, I'd bet that air travel is actually grossly inefficient. Remember, when you look at the total performance of the entire airline industry since it began, the industry is still operating in the red! After 75 years or so!

I'm sure you are right. There are a ton of hidden costs in air and interstate use that are hard to count. Imagine how expensive a bus ride would be if the bus company had to own the whole road from point to point b or lease any part that it didn't own. Air doesn't have to worry about that cost but it has a lot of other costs. If we federalize safety, we will all be paying that. Imagine the cost of a bus ride if you had to have a bus marshal and 3 levels of baggage check in and an FAA and all that stuff too. It would be nifty if the gmt had to match money spent on interstate systems with rail systems that were free for all railroads to use. Then you would see the competition equalized.

[Cleburne]

Even small towns of ten thousand people in Mississppi once had "interurban" service-my little town of three-thousand amazingly had a streetcar line that connected it with a larger town to the north. However, I seriously doubt such a thing would be feasible today in all but the largest cities, but where it could work it would, and does, work well. Of course there's always "IT"-maybe "IT" will help interurban rail!