by hilzoy
"Let’s start with the small-scale stuff that needs doing. There are many examples around the country where a relatively tiny amount of public investment in rail infrastructure would bring enormous social and economic returns. Why is I-95 so congested with truck traffic that drivers divert to I-81 and overwhelm that interstate as well? One big reason is that railroads can capture only 2 percent of the container traffic traveling up and down the eastern seaboard because of obscure choke points, such as the Howard Street Tunnel in downtown Baltimore. The tunnel is too small to allow double-stack container trains through, and so antiquated it’s been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973. When it shut down in 2001 due to a fire, trains had to divert as far as Cincinnati to get around it. Owner CSX has big plans for capturing more truck traffic from I-95, and for creating room for more passenger trains as well, but can’t do any of this until it finds the financing to fix or bypass this tunnel and make other infrastructure improvements down the line. In 2007, it submitted a detailed plan to the U.S. Department of Transportation to build a steel wheel interstate from Washington to Miami, but no federal funding has been forthcoming."
"All over the country there are opportunities like the I-81/Crescent Corridor deal, in which relatively modest amounts of capital could unclog massive traffic bottlenecks, revving up the economy while saving energy and lives. Many of these projects have already begun, like Virginia’s, or are sitting on planners’ shelves and could be up and running quickly. And if we’re willing to think bigger and more long term — and we should be — the potential of a twenty-first-century rail system is truly astonishing. In a study recently presented to the National Academy of Engineering, the Millennium Institute, a nonprofit known for its expertise in energy and environmental modeling, calculated the likely benefits of an expenditure of $250 billion to $500 billion on improved rail infrastructure. It found that such an investment would get 85 percent of all long-haul trucks off the nation’s highways by 2030, while also delivering ample capacity for high-speed passenger rail. If high-traffic rail lines were also electrified and powered in part by renewable energy sources, that investment would reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emission by 38 percent and oil consumption by 22 percent. By moderating the growing cost of logistics, it would also leave the nation’s economy 13 percent larger by 2030 than it would otherwise be."
wrt shovel-ready.
Can you say “NEPA”? More importantly, can you find it in the US Code?
ahem. I apologize for being snide. But a non-controversial EIS takes about a year to finalize, and that’s assuming no court challenge.
Shovel-ready projects are those that have gone through and finished environmental permitting. (NEPA. ESA. Clean Water Act. Clean Air Act. state equivalents.) That’s a much shorter list than those for which 30% engineering drawings have been written and filed some place.
Large-scale transportation projects takes decades to plan these days. The Foothill (South) Transportation Corridor, which was recently killed by the Commerce Department on appeal from the California Coastal Commission under the Coastal Zone Management Act, was on Orange County’s highway master plan in the early 80s. Active planning started in the early 90s and it’s only now going down in flames (whether to be resurrected is a different question).
I have a book called USA by Rail that I bought back when I used to be a (relatively) frequent tourist in the US: I’ve been told that since it’s about ten years old, probably some of the passenger routes it outlines no longer exist.
Railway tracks map the US in an exceedingly patchy kind of way – the UK lost a lot of good railway stations and miles of track back in the pro-car decades, but you can still go almost anywhere in the UK by train (even if privatisation in the 1990s lost us the efficiencies of British Rail).
Improving the railways just seems like a no-brainer in terms of long-term investment in resources, these days. But you know the car lobby is going to be against it all the way…
not by requiring that we all wear sweaters and huddle together for warmth
Actually, this sounds like fun.
I though the huddling together without clothing would be the real fun 😉
—
I expect that investing in rail will be painted as fatal for the car industry by interested circles (who do not realize that ‘hybrid car’ could also mean one with an extra set of railway wheels. Hail the Rail SUV! 😉 ).
I’m a rail (and mass-transit) fanatic, but like Francis, find Longman’s account a little simplistic. He writes: ” The incoming administration is talking of spending as much as $1 trillion to jump-start growth and make up for past neglect…By all rights, America’s dilapidated rail lines ought to be a prime candidate for some of that spending.”
Well, perhaps. The article, however, ignores the tension between the desire to stimulate economic growth, and the need to upgrade infrastructure. The hard truth, as Francis points out, is that rail projects take time. And it’s not just the environmental review process, although that’s certainly a huge hurdle. If we really want to overhaul our rail infrastructure, it’s going to require expanding choke-points and straightening serpentine tracks – and that often means buying up adjoining land and invoking eminent domain. You’re talking about a politically contentious process and years of litigation. Any real reform will also require consolidating control of our piecemeal system of trackage, a topic that Longman treats only briefly. Amtrak’s showpiece Northeast Corridor, for example, is hobbled by the fact that its trains run over tracks owned by Amtrak, MetroNorth, and Connecticut’s DOT. Even freight projects in relatively rural areas take years to plan, approve, and execute. Longman’s chosen example – the Crescent Corridor – would take, according to his reporting, ” a cumulative investment over ten to twelve years” to move 30% of freight traffic back on to the rails.
The problems here are threefold. First, most State DOTs have extensive experience planning for highway projects, and are constantly moving proposals through the pipeline to compete for federal dollars. So there are loads of actual shovel-ready highway projects, and virtually no rail projects that have advanced to that stage – the funding for the necessary planning simply hasn’t been in place. Which hints at the second problem. With highways, we’re mostly interested in repairing what’s already there: crumbling bridges, deteriorating roadways, and the like. With railroads, we want to expand, overhaul, and fundamentally rethink the system. The entire point is that the present system is inadequate, and needs to be revised. That’s inherently more complicated and time-consuming than simply patching up extant infrastructure. And the third problem is a political one that Longman somehow manages to avoid entirely. The overwhelming majority of rail-infrastructure upgrades would be concentrated in a small number of states and along certain high-use corridors, whereas highway spending can be doled out in every congressional district in America. That’s a problem which has bedeviled rail advocates for decades, and I’m still not sure of its solution.
None of which, Hilzoy, undermines your basic point – that rail infrastructure looks to the future, and highway spending to the past. But I don’t think we’re going to see much of this in the stimulus bill, for the basic reason that it’s not a terribly good short-term stimulus. It is, instead, precisely the sort of long-term investment in our basic infrastructure that our government should always make, and ought to have been making over the past two decades. I’d love to see a comprehensive rail initiative – one that lavishes the sort of dollars Longman’s article mentions on our rail infrastructure. But it will have to come as part of a broader package of rail reform, one that simultaneously addresses track ownership and maintenance, expanding and straightening rights-of-way, and revising the passenger-rail system.
For the stimulus bill, though, rail advocates would probably do better to focus on some relatively modest freight-system upgrades, and some more ambitious commuter-rail proposals. Since state-level agencies control commuter-rail, there tend to be more ‘shovel-ready’ projects at that level than in inter-city or cross-coastal systems. They also get more cars off the roads, and deliver more bang for the buck. Many commuter systems are running at or near capacity, and commuters have recently displayed a willingness to abandon their cars, if there are trains to accommodate them. That’s probably a much better focus for the short-term stimulus bill than a comprehensive freight-system overhaul.
And then, once the stimulus bill is passed, I’d love to see an omnibus green infrastructure bill get proposed within the first hundred days. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the stimulus package is focused on short-term projects. And that’s fine. But we’re going to need long-term investment, working in tandem, to pull out of this slump and grow in the future. And that’s precisely where Longman’s proposal fits in.
I agree with Observer. Just for once. 😉
I though the huddling together without clothing would be the real fun 😉
Ugh. I had rather huddle with people wearing nice fluffy angora or lambswool sweaters than people all nekkid.
I don’t have any idea if CSX would take the strings that came with Federal money or not, I can assure you that the nimbys will be out in force if CSX adds a lot of traffic to its rails, though. Look at what is happening in Chicagoland with a very sensible proposal to improve rail traffic in the area. (Almost) All Aboard does a decent background and shows how much even small towns full of self-absorbed rich people can throw a monkey wrench into economic development.
Railway tracks map the US in an exceedingly patchy kind of way – the UK lost a lot of good railway stations and miles of track back in the pro-car decades, but you can still go almost anywhere in the UK by train (even if privatisation in the 1990s lost us the efficiencies of British Rail).
I agree with both your and Observer’s basic points, but as is so often the case, these kinds of US/UK observations have to be qualified by the fact that you’re talking about comparing one place with a land area of about 94,000 sq mi to one with nearly 4 million sq mi.
Francis and Observer took the words right out of my mouth, sort of. I had the same general thoughts, minus the details. “me engineer me do projects it not that easy” was rattling around in my so-called mind. Regarding NEPA, I spent a day filling out forms and gathering photos to assure the feds that the installation of small, visually unobtrusive security cameras would not diminish the architectural quality of some really boring and relatively ugly transit stations. I’d hate to think of the through-hoop jumping required for major infrastucture overhauls.
There’s got to be a better way to do this sort of thing. From my local paper, we have one woman holding up widening a street and adding a sidewalk on one side. This has been going on for about three years now, I think, and aside from the usual reasons, it’s been pointed out that kids have to use the street to get to the bus stop. Her opposition stems not from monetary considerations but in her words, wanting to refrain from ‘changing the character of the neighborhood’. And of course we have the usual dreary stories of rich holdouts refusing to cede property to the city in order to widen congested thoroughfares. Twelve feet off of a 120 foot (or more) lawn.
Has there been any serious proposal for streamlining these sorts of processes? I know invoking Eminent Domain is supposed to be intentionally clunky, but this is getting ridiculous. In the case of major rail projects, one would think some sort of Transport Czar could be appointed and given broad powers. Why not? We already have a Drug Czar.
Phil: these kinds of US/UK observations have to be qualified by the fact that you’re talking about comparing one place with a land area of about 94,000 sq mi to one with nearly 4 million sq mi.
India, which is admittedly only about 1/3 the size of the US, has a much more comprehensive rail network than you do. Ah, if only you guys had stayed Colonials until after the British Empire got into building railways… 😉
India has a higher population density than UK, and a much higher PD than the US. Not much comparison to be had there.
The US has something like 11 states that are each larger than the UK, and none of them has anywhere near the population density that UK does.
Different set of problems; different solutions. None of which is to say that we’ve got anything resembling an optimal one.
Just to put things into perspective, India has ten times the population density that the US does, and nearly half again what the UK has.
Which is not to say that decent rail infrastructure is automatic, but there’s a much greater need for one there.
…so, you see, the ridership is going to be more than enough to keep trains on tracks, running frequently.
While you aren’t going to get a rail system like the UK, a bullet train like rail system from Boston to DC (700 km) or SF to LA (600 km) would be similar to Fukuoka to Tokyo (500 km)
Just wanted to point out, as someone above mentioned, that I think the trucking and automotive industries would disagree with you rather emphatically on that point.
While I am certainly in favor of all of the results you mention, things are rarely so clear cut or universally beneficial as one would wish.
Certainly for the average driver and citizen, a reduction in the long-haul trucking traffic of 85% is desirable. But if you are a trucker, or own a truck stop, or live in one of the myriad small towns supported by these facets of our industrial complex, these ideas are probably not quite as attractive. Granted many of those small towns are perpetually financially distressed, but still …
Some places in the US could do with more train lines though, at least the local commuter light rail type. There are already train lines aplenty in the NYC metro area, but they mostly feed into Manhattan (or Secaucus) and some old ones have been transformed into running paths (which is nice in itself, but train lines would be better). Train lines running concentrically around NYC as well as into it is what I’m imagining. Whether this is practical I don’t know–right now, people are too wedded to the cars to change, I’m guessing and maybe population densities in the suburbs are too low for suburb to suburb train lines that don’t go into Manhattan. But that, along with little shuttle buses from train stations to various points in town sounds nice to me.
Certainly for the average driver and citizen, a reduction in the long-haul trucking traffic of 85% is desirable. But if you are a trucker, or own a truck stop, or live in one of the myriad small towns supported by these facets of our industrial complex, these ideas are probably not quite as attractive. Granted many of those small towns are perpetually financially distressed, but still …
You’re absolutely right about that, nick. But this line of thinking can perpetuate all sorts of subopitmal endeavors and uses of resources. I think we should make reasonable efforts to assure that any changes to the way we do things cause as little harm as possible to individual industries (really, the people employed in those industries) significantly impacted by those changes, but I don’t think preserving less efficient of transportation (or anything else) is a good thing for anyone in the long run.
The word “modes” should come before “of transportation”, if you haven’t figured that out already.
It would be so nice to see a post like this that expounds upon the benefits of mass transit without resorting to the Boogeyman of greenhouse gases.
I guess we can continue to increase our use of fossil fuels indefinitely without any environmental concerns then, Madrocketscientist?
I think a recommitment to rail would be a Very Good Thing, but it’s definitely under the “easier said than done” tag. And you really need two separate rail systems: A high-speed passenger system that operates regionally (say, for trips under 500 miles), and a long-haul freight system. Currently in the US, with the exception of portions of the Northeast corridor, passenger and freight lines share the same rails, and thanks to antiquated rail regulations, the freight trains own the right of way. So if the City of New Orleans is chugging through Mississippi and there’s a freight train coming the other way, the passenger train has to divert to a side rail and wait for the other train to pass.
“It would be so nice to see a post like this that expounds upon the benefits of mass transit without resorting to the Boogeyman of greenhouse gases.”
Please, allow me to accelerate the deterioration of this post, so we can get it over with quickly: not only is dealing with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses a crucial factor in developing new transportatation infrastructure, but we’d have fewer needs if we accelerated abortions by 100-fold, and instituted infanticide and euthanas, while keeping riders safe by issuing sidearms to all; best that all be advised to emulate the leadership of Captain Kirk, a far better leader than Captain Picard, whose mistaken attempts to use the MacOs was part of his downfall, when he clearly should have used the superior Linux; this would have happened if not for Bush’s stealing the 2000 election via Bush v. Gore, which was due to Robert Heinlein’s fascist nature, or so I heard from Harlan Ellison, who can always be relied upon; this proves that the Iraq invasion was justified.
Wow. That was the densest troll I’ve ever seen.
Gary’s “no hot button left unpushed” educational plan 🙂
He did leave the Israel/Palestine hotbutton untouched, but I think that’s more temptation than most people can resist.
India, which is admittedly only about 1/3 the size of the US, has a much more comprehensive rail network than you do.
Here is the Amtrak national routes map.
Among the places Amtrak does not go are Phoenix AZ, Las Vegas NV, Boise ID, Nashville TN, any city in Kentucky other than Fulton, or any city at all in Wyoming, South Dakota, or New Hampshire.
If you want to go to Chicago, you are golden.
As others have noted, passenger rail outside of the Northeast Corridor shares track with, and takes a back seat to, freight. Besides the scheduling problems this creates, it means that track maintenance is only up to freight standards, and you are in for a bumpy ride.
I recently took a long rail trip (AZ to MA). For one leg of the trip, the toilets in my sleeper car did not work.
Rail can actually be a very pleasant way to travel, and it’s not hard to imagine a network of high speed connections between hub cities combined with regional lighter rail being both practical and popular.
Building that would probably be an effort comparable in scope, expense, and time to complete to the Interstate Highway System.
Initial “gleam in the eye” planning for the interstate highways began in the 20’s, then more serious planning in the 30’s. We actually broke ground under Ike in 1957, and the effort was more or less considered complete in 1992, 35 years later, with the completion of I-70 in Glenwood Canyon.
I’m all for rail travel, both local and intercity, and would support any useful project that will improve infrastructure and put people to work. But IMVHO a really comprehensive passenger rail network in the US is, at best, decades away. We’ll probably have teleporting before we have good passenger rail service in the US.
They’ll have to figure out the conservation of energy part first, russell. That may take another couple of decades.
Whatever the overall merits of Longman’s article, he is probably right that there are small-scale improvements that would be hugely beneficial.
I ride the Boston-NY Acela every couple of months. It’s 3 1/2 hrs from South Station to Penn Station (middle of town to sort of middle of town, depending), 200+ miles. It’s comfortable, security-hassle-free, and generally on time. With improved railbed the time could be significantly shortened, to the great benefit of everyone except the airline shuttle services.
Why not spend money on this? After all, it would be nice for me. And there are probably lots of similar rail projects that would be nice for other people too.
Bernard:
It’s a perfect example.
Upgrading the Acela corridor is small-scale in its impact, not in its requirements. The tracks over which you travel on your journey are owned by three separate entities – Amtrak, CDOT, and the MTA’s MetroNorth. The latter two have been incredibly slow to improve their track. Even the segments owned by Amtrak are less than ideal, turning and twisting too much to allow for true high-speed operation. Adding to the problem is the fact that tracks running in opposite directions are crowded too closely together, further impairing the ability of the train to run anywhere near full speed. And when it runs over shared tracks, it often needs to obey other speed limits – down to 75 mph. The train hits its maximum speed for a total of 18 miles of your journey.
The ideal solution would be to construct an entirely new right-of-way just for the Acela. That would allow the train to run at its maximum designed speed – 200 mph. As it stands, it can’t top 150. We used to do this for highways all the time. But, realistically, the project would take tens of billions of dollars, and at least a decade to complete. It would also involve seizing thousands of properties through eminent domain – leaving most of their owners highly miffed. And, with just 9,000 people a day riding the Acela, it’s a little tough to justify that level of investment. A more modest proposal would involve upgrading the track infrastructure, dealing with a handful of crucial chokepoints, widening the existing right-of-way, and centralizing control of the track. Even that is largely a matter of long-term investment; none of it is shovel-ready.
There are a handful of little improvements that could be made in the next year or two on our rail system, and they’re well worth making. But the rail investments that will yield the biggest dividends are located in the urban and suburban areas through which rail runs – the higher the population density, the greater the payoff and the higher the costs. It’s worth doing, in general, for the economic benefits. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for a short-term stimulus.
Observer makes a good point, which needs to be expanded: any true modernization of the nation’s rail infrastructure (for both freight and passenger rail) will necessarily involve nationalization of the existing rails. Right now, most of them are privately owned.
Also, mine’s nowhere near as good as Gary’s, but I still can’t resist:
It would be so nice to see a post like this that expounds upon the benefits of mass transit without resorting to the Boogeyman of greenhouse gases.
It would be so nice to see a post like this that expounds upon Middle Eastern politics without resorting to the Boogeyman of radical Islam.
There, fixed it for ya.
or so I heard from Harlan Ellison, who can always be relied upon
BWAH!
Densely-packed and obscure hot buttons. Why is there no major religion dedicated to Farber worship?
Observer,
Thanks for the response and information.
One point: I don’t think the 9000/day who currently ride the Acela is the number to think about. Rather, it is all the individual Boston-NY travel, and some Providence/New Haven folks too.
It’s a huge amount of traffic, and getting more of it on an even somewhat faster railroad would be pretty productive. Highways and airports are not free.