If regional rail could be profitable, sure, I'm fine with it.
Wall St will charge so much for the financing that regional rail won't be profitable. Wall St runs America, not Americans.
Same with nuclear power. McLiar said in his campaign that he wanted 100 nuclear power stations, but Wall St would never finance it.
Also, if nuclear power plants had to pay commercial liability insurance (big insurers are essentially Wall St and London and Zurich and Frankfurt) rather than govt-backed insurance, nuclear power would be much more expensive, or dead.
At least I didn't grow up eating paint chips like you did.
Me too. I'm fine with any venture as long as it pays for itself. We simply cannot keep building projects that require tax dollars to operate. We have already run out of enough tax payers to pay for our current commitments.
Stupid, are we?
That was the main reason for Perry pushing the Trans-Texas Corridor...TTC easement acquisition would have allowed high speed rail to be done the "right way" with dedicated high speed tracks. It wasn't Southwest Airlines that killed the deal...It was combined push-back of Democrats (who opposed it because a Republican Governor proposed it) and Property rights conservatives in his own party. The plan was just too bold and required too much eminent domain property condemnation.
I've read this account of Southwest killing the Texas TGV many places, going back to the mid 90s. A synposis:
"Texas
In 1991 the Texas High Speed Rail Authority awarded a 50-year high speed rail franchise to the Texas TGV Corporation - a consortium of Morrison Knudsen (USA), Bombardier (Canada), Alstom (France/UK), Crédit Lyonnais (France), Banque IndoSuez (France), Merrill Lynch (USA), and others. Texas TGV won the franchise after more than two years of litigation instigated by a rival consortium backing German ICE technology.
The plan was to connect the "Texas Triangle" (Houston - Dallas/Fort Worth - San Antonio) with a privately financed high speed train system which would quickly take passengers from one city to the next at prices designed to compete with or beat other transport options. This was the same model Southwest Airlines used 20 years earlier to break in to the Texas market where it served the same three cities.
Funding for the project was to come entirely from private sources, since Texas did not allow the use of public money. The original estimated cost was $5.6 billion, but the task of securing the necessary private funds proved extremely difficult.
Southwest Airlines, with the help of lobbyists, created legal barriers to prohibit the consortium from moving forward and the entire project was eventually scuttled in 1994, when the State of Texas withdrew the franchise.[24]
A more recent proposal for high-speed rail in Texas is part of a larger proposed, state-wide super-infrastructure, the Trans-Texas Corridor.
In 2002, the Texas High Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation [3] (THSRTC), a grass roots organization dedicated to bringing high speed rail to Texas was established. In 2006, American Airlines and Continental Airlines formally joined THSRTC, in an effort to bring high speed rail to Texas as a passenger collector system for the airlines. The Texas High Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation developed the Texas T-Bone and Brazos Express corridors to link Central Texas.[24]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-sp...d_States#Texas
High-speed rail always needs its own, special, seamless/welded extremely smooth track.
That's a gross over-simplification of the TTC. Glossing over Cintra Concesiones role in the TTC and the revenue that they would reap is pretty dishonest. I don't think that TxDot is anywhere near competent enough to handle this either.
Maybe if Southwest Airlines hadn't been ed by the Wright amendment, they might not have felt the need to oppose the rail project.
This, plus the lack of a viable funding source capable of financing the thing.
What's dishonest about it?
The passengers may want to be more comfortable, but actually it's the freight rail which requires stricter controls as to the quality of the track. It's all about the weight.Fair enough. I don't know if you've proved HOW MUCH more costly they'd be, but I can run with the idea that passengers probably want to be more comfortable and travel faster than giant piles of coal.
It makes it "vastly" more logical. Population density is the #1 factor in determining ridership.
And yes, all european rail systems are heavily subsidized.
The latest dedicated high-speed rail scheme has nothing to do with the TTC.
"It's all about the weight."
At 150 MPH+, passengers care about not getting bounced around, and the train driver cares about not getting bounced into the air.
In SA, 410 and 10 are really ty roads. Zachry, etc can't even make a roads smooth enough for a comfortable 70 mph.
Only because officially the TTC doesn't exist anymore.
It doesn't matter what speed you're going, getting bounced around is a bigger problem the heavier the train gets.
Feel free to write your elected representatives and tell them you want more money for better roads.In SA, 410 and 10 are really ty roads. Zachry, etc can't even make a roads smooth enough for a comfortable 70 mph.
I said slightly only because it doesn't seem to be profitable over there, even.
Hm. Thanks for the info.
I don't believe the proposed high-speed track would follow the TTC plan at all since the enormous swath of right-of-way would not be necessary for just rail.
France's Charles de Gaulle airport occupies more surface than the TGV rail line (two rail beds, north and south) from Paris to Lyons.
Yep. When TTC came along there was more or less a shotgun wedding with the high speed rail. TTC folks were hoping rail would increase public support and rail folks were hoping that being part of the TTC would get them some money since Guv'ner Goodhair was behind it. Now that TTC is dead the rail folks are back to looking for corridors closer to the major highways like they were before TTC came along.
CG: Here's why no one should be holding their breath for high speed rail to show up at a town near you anytime soon.
high speed rail = often studied, never implemented.
*********
Could High Speed Rail Stall Completely in the U.S.?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes. We say “unfortunately” since billions have already been pumped into turning the U.S. into a modern rail nation, and the collapse of HSR projects would be an enormous loss to the nation, both in concrete dollars and in the opportunity cost of going another half-century with no national system of mass transit. Over at Progressive Fix, Mark Reutter writes:
Unless the White House acts forcefully and decisively to advance its transportation agenda in Congress, the president’s vision for high-speed rail may get sidetracked by the looming federal deficit.
That’s the growing perception on Capitol Hill as Congress grapples with an infrastructure program that could cost between $22 million and $132 million a mile if developed along the lines of 200-mile-per-hour bullet trains now running in Europe and Asia.
Unlike the health care debate, President Obama has been con uously unengaged from the details of how to move his high-speed-rail (HSR) plan from a one-off award program using Recovery Act stimulus funds to a dedicated multi-year program akin to the scope and ambition of the Interstate Highway System.
And it gets worse: Following the much-ballyhooed $8 billion that the government allotted to states as part of the stimulus bill, it doesn’t look like there’s much more federal money after that. In 2010, Congress authorized $2.5 billion for HSR projects — and for 2011, it’s a mere $1 billion. And given the shambles condition of most states’ budgets, it’s highly unlikely that state governments will be able to write big checks to HSR projects in the next 2 to 5 years.
In other words: If we want any hope of actually seeing an HSR line open, we’d better formulate a longer-term plan, and fast. Many advocates are on the case: One coalition of transportation advocacy groups is holding a press conference in D.C. this week, asking Congress to raise the 2011 HSR appropriation to $4 billion. But HSR needs more than just a couple billion here and a couple billion there — this is a massive national project, and the costs will be serious money. This fact has not been lost on Congress — last summer, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar introduced a draft bill that would add $50 billion to the surface transportation program to fund HSR over the next six years. There’s also that whole idea of a National Infrastructure Bank, which could potentially step in and get some private funds flowing towards HSR.
Still, unless HSR funding becomes a serious, urgent issue in Congress, we could very well find ourselves $8 billion poorer with nothing to show for it.
https://x.com/YIMBYLAND/status/1830680293046427671
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