Various sources like this report an impressive example of first-world public transportation (emphasis mine):
A Japanese maglev that is the fastest passenger train in the world broke its own speed record this week.
Operator JR Central said the train reached 375 miles per hour (603 kilometers per hour) in a test run on Tuesday, surpassing its previous record of 361 mph (581 kph) set in 2003. The train traveled for just over a mile (1.8 kilometers) at a speed exceeding 373 mph (600 kph).
The maglev trains, begun as a project of Japan Airlines and the national railways with government support, have undergone decades of testing. Construction of the Tokyo-Osaka link, which is expected to cost more than 9 trillion yen ($76 billion), began in 2014.
Traveling by rail from, say, Chicago to San Francisco currently takes three days and two nights. America is a HUGE country with geography that begs for technology like this.
The Japanese government and people looked at a SEVENTY SIX BILLION DOLLAR investment and said “YES”. Why can’t we do the same?
in this country has yet to be fully considered. I will be teaching a classes on public projects this summer at a couple of colleges, and the California experience with its major high-speed rail or bullet train project will be a case study. It hasn’t been a smooth ride there, so to speak.
A lot of presumptions among supporters regarding the cost, funding, likely ridership, and economic and environmental impacts of the California HSR project have come under scrutiny and aren’t standing up quite as well to that scrutiny as originally thought.
The very first presumption many have about HSR is that it is ultimately the best alternative among all possible forms of transportation. This, in itself, is a presumption that is not always sufficiently questioned. An example of that starting presumption may well be the statement in David’s post here that: “America is a HUGE country with geography that begs for technology like this.”
Because HSR works in countries like Japan and in some countries in Europe, does that mean it is feasible here? I don’t think the answer is an automatic yes. There’s no question that the prospect of HSR is a dazzling one, but there are alternatives out there, such as improving conventional passenger rail systems, that may be more cost-effective in the long run.
n/t
You won’t get to an automobile by “improving” a bicycle. Maglev is fundamentally different from “conventional” rail.
In my view, there are three categories of passenger transportation:
– Air
– Rail
– Highway
I suggest that we need and should seek an optimal balance of those three. Here are some guidelines that make sense to me:
– The slowest alternative between two points shall be the least expensive to the passenger
– The fastest alternative between two points shall be the most expensive to the passenger
– Travel between any two points shall be possible for every resident
Here are some realities that govern costs:
– Moving mass rapidly costs more than moving mass slowly
– The cost of a given conveyance is inversely proportional to the number of passengers carried on that trip
Exhibit A in doing the wrong thing is the Acela, the closest thing America has to HSR. The Acela is a dollied-up conventional train. Nearly all of the timetable speed improvements of the Acela came from upgrading decrepit right-of-way to allow trains to travel at 40MPH instead of 5MPH. Others came from avoiding lengthy delays while changing from electric to diesel power (in New Haven) and vice-versa. The Metroliner offered essentially the same travel time between Washington and New York (2 1/2 hours) starting in 1969. Even earlier, the GG1-powered “Congressional Limited” offered 3-hour service in 1952. Steam-powered trains made that same route in comparable times in the 1890s. While it’s tilt-train technology was briefly interesting while new, even today the Acela only briefly and occasionally exceeds the speed of “conventional” equipment.
I suggest a rational national policy that followed the above guidelines would include several MagLev-style routes. It would greatly increase the number and frequency of conventional rail service for mid-range trips.
The bottom line is that:
– Air travel would be more expensive than today and would be the most expensive (and fastest) option between mid- and long-range points.
– Highway travel would be more expensive than today and would be the middle option in expense between mid- and long-range points
– Rail travel would be about the same as today for medium range travel outside the NE corrider. It would be less expensive and more frequent than today for long-range travel.
According to the electro-wiki-thimga-ma-bob, the six largest economies in the world (excluding the EU as one bloc) are the US, China, Japan, Germany, the UK and France. Of those six, only the US and the UK have not gone in for high speed rail in a big way. The seventh, Brazil, is building HSR now.
I don’t know that people in China, Japan and/or Germany and France want or need to get where they’re going that much quicker than those of us in the US or the UK. I don’t understand how it can work in one country and not in another. That seems unlikely. Certainly the eastern seaboard, and in particular the Boston-New York-DC corridor is as population dense and with similar a geographic size/area as Japan and/or Europe.
See, there’s the rub. I don’t know of any historical arguments against passenger rail made prior to it being ‘conventional’. There was a lot of speculation and some of it may not have been, strictly speaking, ‘feasible’, but it happened. Nobody, that I know of were able to ‘put the brakes on’ the progress of it. Why is this different? HSR IS conventional passenger rail, only faster. I guess, if we knew then what we know now about economics and physics somebody could have used the sheer gluttonous amount of coal necessary (with the concomitant pollution) as reason to not adopt the steam engine. But nobody did. Maybe we should have. But we didn’t.
In fact, I don’t know from new what is, again strictly speaking, ‘feasible’. Early engines, be they in cars, planes or trains, were poorly engineered, rough hewn and finicky creatures that required a lot of tending and were, in comparison to later advances horrendously inefficient and unreliable. But they were implemented and used. I think the Japanese are advancing HSR to the point that, should we adopt it, we wouldn’t go back to the beginning and use their first, or even second, iteration of it. And we can iterate on their Nth generation even further. That’s called progress and it’s often where the fun and interesting problems are… And eschewing progress because of some inchoate notion of ‘feasible’ doesn’t sound, pardon the pun, feasible. We have to use it to make it better and refusing to use it until it is better shouldn’t be an option.
HSR works to beat airplanes, but only under the right conditions.
Essentially, it’s got to compete with airlines for short distance business trips. This is the Acela model, but with faster, more reliable trains. It makes sense too — airports on the Atlantic Seaboard are jammed. Getting some of those folks who are popping back and forth from NYC to DC or from Atlanta to Charlotte on HSR frees up runway slots, gates, and airplanes for trips that are more natural on a plane (1000+ miles).
The challenge: right of way (ROW). Right of ways in the Atlantic Seaboard are narrow. HSR needs wider ROWs, which means a whole bunch of eminent domaining. It’s expensive, disruptive, and if done poorly can have terrible long term effects. There are lots of highway examples of it, ranging from Storrow Drive eliminating over half of the available land in a city park to Robert Moses’ dividing of poor neighborhoods all over NYC. Hell, the Central Artery was a great example.
For my two cents, I’m not sure that a maglev is workable in the Northeast — maybe the SF-LA route, but not here. We don’t have the ROW width, and what we have has kinks. Instead, I believe that we should (a) continue to invest in the corridor, acquiring adjacent land when possible, straightening track, ensuring that Acela gets “first dibs” on crossings, etc. so that it can run at 100+ mph for more stretches; and (b) extend Acela south. DC – Lorton – Richmond – Rocky Mount – Raleigh – Durham – Greensboro – Charlotte – Spartanburg – Clemson – Atlanta.* Doing so would expand the political popularity of the route into purplish VA and NC among wealthy white citizens.
* Most of that ROW already exists (G’boro doesn’t). There’s also a track from Newport News to Williamsburg to Richmond. I’d add track from Richmond to Charlottesville, where you connect with an Amtrak line straight to Chicago. This would connect the breadth of VA to Acela with one switch in Richmond, and help folks travel to/from Richmond without an auto far more easily. And to be clear, while the ROW exists, it would need significant investment to be Acelafied because Acela shouldn’t have at-grade crossings and most of the current road-rail crossings are at-grade. There’s no reason why in addition to (a) above, we can’t invest on improving the Richmond-DC portion first, and expand Acela one city at a time, so to speak.
… that wheeled trains, be they HSR (like Acela or Frances’ TGV) or not, needing significantly wider right-of-way. Acela was more or less plopped unto existing rail. When France built the TGV they grabbed a lot of right-of-way, but for future use, not because the trains needed it.
I really don’t know, however, if a significantly wider right-of-way is required, either for the engineering infrastructure or for safety reasons, for maglev (about which this diary was started….) Maybe it is.
Rather (my understanding is) the cost of right of way for maglev will be in getting long stretches of relatively straight and flat areas: that is to say altogether new ROWs or doing significant work to ‘straighten’ existing (perhaps this is what is meant by ‘wider’?) The slower the train the steeper the pitch and the tighter the turn it can handle: conversely, maglev won’t be able to use much of any existing rail (no matter the width of ROW) that has tight turns or steep inclines.
I am aware that planned projects like California and the (ostensibly) private Dallas-Houston HSR are facing extraordinary resistance in the hoped for paths through rural areas: rural residents don’t appear to want to give ANY right-of-way, no matter how wide and are forcing the choice of emminent domain. The Texas opposition has, to date, made the claim that the Dallas-Houston HSR will require a right of way the width of three football fields. They say it will be like putting up a “Berlin Wall” through much of Texas The planners dispute this claim.
In the case of the California HSR the largest single cost will be laying track but the second largest cost is projected to be right-of-way acquisition and it is, if you read the link dave-from-hvad posted, the governing factor with respect to progress forward.
High-speed wheeled trains like the Acela require wider RoW so that:
– High-speed passage through station platforms is avoided (safety issue)
– Greater clearance is provided between adjoining tracks (avoid collisions with other trains)
– Passenger trains run on dedicated tracks (scheduling and maintenance issues)
Even MagLev doesn’t require three football fields. That has about as much truth as the claim (also made in Texas) that “Obama wants your guns”.
… I think we could quibble about whether such expansions are “widening” existing or “establishing” new.
Long sections of rail in the New England Corridor are single track and, of course, if you are laying two tracks where only one existed before you are making it ‘wider’… and with the aerodynamic effects requiring distance between the two trains yeah. I can see what you mean by ‘wider’. I was, I guess, stuck on the notion, per track, that if you wanted to put HSR on an existing single track ROW you really wouldn’t have to make it that much wider. But, if you want to put two tracks where one was, or even create a new path of two ( or more) tracks it’s going to be ‘wider’ than the placement of a single track. My apologies for the confusion.
However, other than the aerodynamic issues you cite with HSR passing close to each other, this isn’t necessarily significantly widening ROW with respect to hoped for improvements to ‘conventional rail’ since any improvements to conventional rail would likely specify a similar expansion from one track to two in all the places an HSR would, and for exactly the reasons you cite: scheduling and maintenance. Plus capacity. The difference being that HSR (and in particular maglev) would need a lot of new track (and hence new ROW) where existing conventional rail can (probably) be more or less straightforwardly expanded.
The term “Right of Way”, in this context, sometimes refers to the land on which the track is laid. It is also sometimes used colloquially to mean the structure (ballast, ties, track, etc) that supports one or more parallel tracks, and sometimes it is used to describe a single track (as in pair of rails) itself. A “right of way maintenance vehicle”, for example, uses the second meaning.
Right-of-Way Maintenance Vehicle
As I wrote upthread (and you embrace), the distinction between the Acela and conventional rail equipment is very arbitrary. MagLev is a different beast entirely.
No matter whether the train tilts or not (and tilting is the primary technology enhancement of the Acela), running trains faster generally means increasing track separation, adding parallel tracks, and straightening curves. Between NYC and Boston, the right-of-way is already filled with very tight curves (this was why the tilt-train feature of the Acela seemed promising). Faster trains want to run on the outside of tight curves, whether trains tilt or not. Far preferable is acquiring new right of way that allows the curve to be bypassed altogether (geography permitting).
Conventional trains (including freight) benefit from “super-elevation” — lifting the outside rail higher than the inside rail. The tilt-train technology of the Acela is ONLY for passenger comfort, it does nothing to keep the train on the track. Super-elevation, on the other hand, helps keep each train on the track. Just to further complicate matters, passenger trains that stop or slow too much on a super-elevated curve are uncomfortable for passengers.
I don’t see MagLev being practical on the East Coast north of NYC for geographical reasons, unless a truly astronomical investment was made in right-of-way (meaning 1) acquisition and construction costs.
Simple and straightforward improvement of “conventional” rail can improve ALL rail travel (both passenger and freight):
– Build separate freight-only and passenger-only tracks
– Replace antiquated bridges and tunnels on existing tracks
– Remove grade crossings
– Straighten and super-elevate curves (both passenger and freight)
A political issue with all this is that these improvements, while extraordinarily cost-effective, have little or no “sex appeal”. I think we must collectively decide that what we most value is a 21st-century transportation system. Improvements in basic and mature conventional rail technology get us well beyond the halfway point towards that goal.
I was only familiar with the first meaning of the term.
I like the right of way maintenance vehicle too! I can’t even tell which end is the front, but it’s still cool! Thanks Again
nt
Tough, slow, and back-breaking work.
Too few people appreciate the staggering (literally!) amount of hard physical labor that went into building our railroad system.
is the uncertainty over the funding that is needed for it, particularly federal and private-sector funding. As the GAO has noted, the project’s business plan relies on some $42 billion in federal funding for the project’s construction, which includes the $3.3 billion that has already been obligated. The remaining $38.7 billion in federal funds “have not been identified in federal budgets or appropriations but would amount to an average of more than $2.5 billion annually over the life of the project’s construction.”
In countries like Japan, getting public funding for mega-projects like HSR is apparently not that difficult. It’s a different story here in the U.S.
Chicago is the hub of Amtrak.
In my view, the three candidates for MagLev are the three long-distance trains west of Chicago:
1. Seattle: “The Empire Builder”“, across Montana
2. SanFrancisco: “The California Zephyr“, through Denver
3. Los Angeles: “The Southwest Chief“, through Albuquerque
Each of these is long (3 days, nights), travels through large expanses of relatively flat and mostly unpopulated areas, and connects multiple cities en-route.
I’d like to see national transportation policy adjusted as per the guidelines I cited up-thread so that air travel on these routes, while faster, is also more expensive for travelers.
I think right-of-way improvements can allow Acela-grade service along both coasts. Another Amtrak success worth replicating is the Auto Train, a 900 mile trip between Lorton, VA and Sanford, FL.
Conventional, but fast, service can and should be provided between Chicago and major points east and south: Boston, NYC, DC, Atlanta, Dallas, NOLA, etc.
Amtrak already has a reasonable route system. With RoW improvements made in the context of a sustainable national transportation policy, America can rejoin the first world in transportation.
The above links apparently only work from within the Amtrak browser. 🙁
Here are better links:
The Empire Builder
The California Zephyr
The Southwest Chief
The Koreans built a similar high speed system over seven years in advance of the 2018 games. It was already operational when I stopped over there on my way to the Philippines last year.
the burden of hosting an Olympic Games in return for a functional modern transit network.
There is no reason to believe that hosting the Olympics would do any such thing.
The money and impetus for any transit improvements will come from the Government, not the Olympic organizers. We won’t get a dime from Olympic contributors or Olympic revenues to pay for transit improvements.
So the only argument you could make is that we believe that state politicians will be more responsive to Olympic organizer’s demands than they will be to the needs of their existing constituents. If we really believe that, then I would argue we should be working on replacing those politicians rather than trying to bribe them with dreams of Olympic glory as an incentive to provide us the infrastructure we need.
Thinking back to the future what are the projections for the need to have that many working people to actually congregate? I’m out of the game myself but even I attended conference calls which supplanted the need for engineers/salesmen to actually visit customers. Many young people I know routinely work from home when problems prevent their commuting to work. We have SKYPE’d and were able to explain hitting a reset button to someone hundreds of miles away.
Is the increased demand for tightly scheduled rail even going to be there?
If it’s only tourism or entertainment do we need it.
I’ve been working remotely (my employer is headquartered in Austin, TX) since July of 2013. No technology is going to replace face-to-face working sessions of development teams during initial design phases. I’m talking about simple and essential things like having 2-3 people step over to a whiteboard and draw pictures together, or 2-3 people gather around a monitor to tackle a joint coding problem, or a product and development team meeting to lay out requirements and tentative release milestones (a “scrum”).
These don’t have to happen every day. Sales is always going to require face-to-face contact — I doubt that many multi-million dollar deals are going to be consummated without frequent face-to-face contact.
I do think that technology can and will enormously reshape daily commuting patterns. It is insane for companies to demand that workers spend hours each day commuting to and from offices where those workers are LESS efficient than working from home or nearby shared offices.
One model that I think will become very popular, especially in areas like Massachusetts outside route 495 is a hybrid, where workers who live in towns like Ashby or Gardner walk or bike to office space shared with workers from other companies on a day-to-day basis. Some of those (managers, for example) will travel to larger “company hubs” monthly or bi-monthly to help the entire organization stay connected.
I envision a time when the MA Pike is NOT a parking lot on holiday weekends, and when it’s possible to get on and off Cape Code without waiting through a 2+ traffic jam on in-season weekends.
This is done already, but within large firms whose employees travel a lot. I have an old classmate who works for one of the firms like Anderson Consulting, or whatever it is called nowadays. Because their employees spend so much time on the road, they don’t bother giving them a “home” office, only to have it sit empty for 5 out of every six weeks.
So instead they give them an office in the city they are in at the moment– something that is called office hoteling. The difference is that the office “hotels” are still connected to the firm network, and so there are fewer security issues than might exist from just offering a room with a desk and a T1 connection.
But, yeah– that is where things are headed, probably more so than having everyone work from home in their pajamas.
We’re not going to be building new airports in the region, and we’re not going to solve it with air traffic control improvements. You need central locations for a lot of travel so satellite airports are not the answer either.
Improving railing connections to solve the NE airport problem would be the best bang for the rail infrastructure buck in my opinion. I don’t see why a huge rail outlay to travel 1000 miles is necessary when a plane will do just as well.
I had huge hope for Acela when it was new. Even pre-9/11, if you had to do the Boston-NYC shuttle, you had a half-hour cab ride to Logan, half-hour check in and security, 20 min to board, 45 min in the air, 20 minutes to deplane, and 45 min from Laguardia into Manhattan. That’s a little over three hours.
The theory was that rather than spending 3 hours changing from cab to airport, to plane, to airport, to cab– you could spend three hours in one seat working, and then you are already in Manhattan.
It really hasn’t worked. The problems were:
1. Acela not that fast. It just never cut the trip as much as originally advertised.
2. Frequency. Shuttle flights are every 30 minutes. Meeting goes long, just get the next flight. On the Acela, if your meeting goes long, you are on a slow train, and have a 7 hour trip home.
3. Reliability. Discussed enough elsewhere.
4. Ability to work. My few attempts to work on the train were a fiasco. There wasn’t power, there wasn’t wi-fi. The cars were a zoo. In the end, I could get some productive time using the airports, but none on the train. I believe this has been largely fixed through the use of quiet cars and improved technology in the years since I have stopped doing that godawful trip.
5. Cost. In the end, the tickets were not cost-competitive with a shuttle flight, even if you add the cost of cabs to and fro.
I still think the potential is there for NE Corridor rail to make more sense than airline shuttles, but it isn’t there yet.
2. The regional train is only like 20 minutes slower than Acela NYC-Bos. It’s less comfortable, and may not be departing Penn when you’d like… but 7 hours is a bit of an exaggeration.
Of course, making Acela faster and running more routes per day would help to alleviate (1) and (2). It sure would be nice if we spent some more on the Acela line to drive ridership. As it is, Acela makes money for Amtrak.
4. I’ve had noting but success working on Acela. Quiet cars and power were no problem. The wifi wasn’t great — oversubscribed. My work around is to get my email before boarding Acela, and spend the three hours dealing with what’s in my inbox now, rather than try to get new emails over that time period.
5. Your claims aren’t true today. Acela is about $185 each way. You’re telling me you’re catching flights to JFL/LaG/Newark for better than $270 round trip? Because the taxis are at least $100.
I urge you to check again. Acela is a good deal now. It’s not perfect for everyone or every trip, but it’s good. If we spent some more money on its infrastructure, it’d be even better.
I haven’t had to do that trip in quite awhile. I did do it maybe 50 times in the early 2000s, and found that things worked according to plan maybe 3 of every ten trips. One of them was a fiasco– I wound up having my wife drive down to New Haven to pick me up and drive me home.
They didn’t have a quiet car then– that was a great innovation. And if you wound up on the NE Regional, you might as well have taken Greyhound.
I am lucky enough that I need not do this trip anymore. The train doesn’t make much sense anymore– I am not going to take the T from Worcester to South Station, and home again, because that really would make a nightmare. From here, it is far, far faster to just drive than to take any other means of travel, including the shuttle, which is why I took some pains to point out that those observations were not recent.
But my overall impression is that they promised me a Trek 1, and delivered a rusty tricycle that had been left out all winter and been run over by the snow plow.
Really, the train should be the no-brainer best option for either the Washington-NYC run or the Boston-NYC run. I’m not sure that it can ever be competitive for both legs at once– that is, for a one day business trip from Boston to Washington.
I agree. But where it gets interesting is Boston to Philly. Or Providence to Baltimore. New Haven to Dc. Etc. Routes that are a bit longer than Boston to NYC, and into cities not as travel-difficult to NYC. Use for those “intermediate” routes can and will grow with improved service, but by how much and for what cost? Important planning questions, to be sure.
In 1993-1994, before the Acela, I did a lengthy programming engagement with a major commercial bank (BT) in the shadow of the WTC. I tried to leave on Monday mornings and Thursday nights to have time with the family.
Your summary of the shuttle issues missed the one that turned the tide for me — weather. During the winter (any time between November and March), bad weather on Thursday night destroyed the shuttle schedules and made the taxi ride to Laguardia 90-120 minutes rather than 45. Once arriving at Laguardia, the 1-2 flights left were all too often either full or canceled. After 2-3 such failures, I quit trying.
In those days, I didn’t attempt to work while on the train. I arrived at Penn Station a half hour before departure and took my accustomed seat in the business-class car at the end of the train. The crew knew me by my third trip, and I didn’t have to ask for the wine split and almonds to be brought to my seat. At departure time, the green wall of the station platform simply started to slide by. No muss. No “place your seatback and trays in the upright and locked position and please fasten your seatbelts”. LOTS of legroom. For me, sitting by the window reading a bio of Duke Ellington and watching the cities he played in (he spent much of his career working the NE Corridor between Boston and DC) drift past was heaven. Bad weather had NO impact on the train at all. It was especially nice to slip past the highways filled with cars stuck in the snow and simply not care. Those were slow rides (by today’s standards) in the heavyweight equipment now used by the NE Regional.
Fast forward to 2014. My 90+ year old mother lives in Gaithersburg, MD, and I make 4-6 trips per year to see her. I take the Acela each way each trip. I work remotely all the time anyway, so the only difference on board the Acela is I don’t bring my big monitor. Yes, the wifi connection comes and goes as the train moves through towers, but my configuration is unaffected by that. Uploads and downloads pause while there’s no signal, and resume when a connection comes back. I can’t use skype for voice conversations — I welcome the excuse to just work.
I never have issues with power, the schedule of the Acela is far more reliable than airplanes, and the food is fine if you you’re willing to spring for the first-class upgrade.
From the Amtrak website, an Acela leaves Boston for NYC each day at: 5:05a, 6:05a, 7:15a, 9:15a, 11:10a, 12:10a, 1:10p, 3:10p, 4:15p, and 5:20p. There are nine NE Regional trains each day, including two that leave after the last Acela (6:45p and 9:30p). On the return leg, the times are: 6:20a, 8:00a, 10:03a, 12:03p, 1:03p, 3:00p, 4:00p, 5:00p, 6:00p, and 7:00p. As in the south-bound trip, there nine additional NE Regional trains each day, including one that leaves after the last Acela (at 7:50p). That’s ten Acela and nine regionals each day each direction.
The time for the slow train is 4h40m, not “7 hours”. The Acela is an hour faster (3:45). In order to catch the last (7:00p) Acela, you can leave your meeting at 6:30p if you’re lucky and at 6:00p with time to spare. If that meeting runs over — to 7:00p, say — then you can’t get to LGA before 8:00p. If you’re lucky and the flight isn’t full, you might make the last flight at 9:30p. You’ll get into Logan at 11:07p. If you take the 7:00 regional, you’ll get into South Station at 11:40.
I’m not sure how long it’s been since you’ve done any of this, but the material you posted is inaccurate.
I just looked at booking a roundtrip on the Acela between Boston and NYC in mid-May. If you buy a non-refundable seat, the round trip is $340 ($170 each way). If you buy a “flexible” seat, it’s $382 ($191 each way). The first-class upgrade (which buys a meal and beverages), it adds $85. I’m not sure first-class is even available on the shuttle. I don’t know about you, but after that late meeting I’d like to get dinner and glass of wine before midnight.
I’m pretty sure I can get plane tickets on that route for less money, especially on the bargain carriers. I can definitely spend less on gas and tolls driving that route.
Airfares should be more expensive, Acela fares should be lower, or both.
The Acela fares are currently pegged to be as high as possible while preserving market share in the Boston-NYC, NYC-DC, and Boston-DC market. Amtrak currently uses the profits from the NE corridor to fund the rest of the system (because congress keeps Amtrak subsidies so low).
According to Google, the lowest airfare between Boston and New York is $213 one-way. Other sources quote $155, but bear in mind that often those flights require paying extra for a seat reservation.
Not just JetBlue, but even United. I generally don’t consider flying that anyway. That’s a drivable trip as far as I’m concerned.
When it is that close, it falls to other factors.
On the train you get to be in just one seat, so you need not pack up and move as often. The shuttle may offer more predictability. With the schedule stomv referenced above, flexibility may be a push, or even go to the train, if United wants to gouge you to switch flights.
You’ve got to get to the airport in Boston (MBTA = time, auto = less time but parking gees, taxi = least time but most cost).
There isn’t an airport in Manhattan. When you land in LaGuardia, JFK, or Newark, you’ve got to get to Midtown. That’s at least a $50 cab ride. Of course, you’ve got to get back to the airport later, so that’s another $50+. The ground transportation in NYC adds at least $100, plus the risk of traffic on the ground slowing you down.
…whether I pick up either a train or a plane there, so that’s a wash. Of course driving for me means avoiding Boston altogether.
According to Google maps, Lowell to Manhattan is 213 miles. According to AAA, a small sedan costs $0.464/mile. So your drive is going to cost at least $100. Once there, you have to park it, and that’s not free. On another thread, we contemplated a carbon fee of $0.24/mile. If that “small sedan” gets 20mpg, that adds another $20 to the trip.
Even if it is more affordable to drive, my point is that it should not be. The carbon footprint of your drive greatly exceeds the carbon footprint of your seat on the NE Regional in the middle of the day.
I never said driving was free, but I came up with less than $100 roundtrip figuring gas, tolls, and even a fast food meal each way. I thought you were arguing rail was already cheaper – sorry.
Driving from Boston (or Lowell) should be more expensive. Taking the train should be less expensive. It ought to be possible to board a train in Lowell and get to NYC with at most a single transfer in Boston (the much discussed rail link between North Station and South Station).
I don’t have much reason to get to NYC. Maybe those who do are better able to afford it anyway. Where I think the blind spot comes among save-the-world progressives, and one place where there is a noted distinction between them and look-out-for-the-little-guy liberals (hence my references to the real world) is that some of us (NOT just me, thank you, lest someone pounce on that canard again) simply cannot afford increases in our costs which we see by necessity of our situation as immediate rather than longterm. For both our economy and quality of life to be strong we need to have freedom of movement with as little financial burden as possible. Until we figure out how to apparate a la Harry Potter, that means heavily subsidizing mass transit without artificially (by which I mean taxation and tolls as opposed to market forces) raising the costs of getting around by personal means in those cases that mass transit is not available or feasible.
Diesel has more carbon per volume unit, so your carbon charge is probably the same.
But unless you live in town and can walk to South Station, a solution that skips the automotive element in its entirety just isn’t going to work.
Assuming that the MBTA runs in a reliable and timely manner, the very first train from Worcester leaves at 4:45am and arrives at South Station at 6:24am. You have already missed the first two Acela trains, but can make the 7:15, which gets you to NYC around 11:00AM. If the T is the T, you will miss the 7:15 as well, and won’t get to NYC until after noon. So, morning meetings, no.
On the way home, the last MBTA train home leaves South Station at 11:25PM, which means that your last Amtrak home leaves at 6:45PM.
So, you get 11:00AM to 6:45PM to do your thing in NYC. That’s a small window.
In the real world, the MBTA would make that a completely impossible trip– I would either drive and park in Boston, or drive and park in Providence and pick up the train there. At that point, I am already driving and paying to park, so why not pay in NYC? Or Logan?
Or, at the very least, to New Haven and commute in on the MetroNorth? That solution isn’t as brilliant as it sounds, because MetroNorth parking is tough and expensive.
it’s not all about you christopher.
(shrugs)
Just reminding folks that there are real-world considerations that I feel don’t always get factored in with regards to daily lives, especially for those not in Boston. I just offer myself as a stand-in for others in my situation.
The current real-world situation is that the difference in cost between driving and training is significantly less then your comment suggests.
You said, above, that you came up with “came up with less than $100 roundtrip figuring gas, tolls, and even a fast food meal each way.” That is, frankly, preposterous. I haven’t look at tolls. A “fast food” meal on the highway will set you back $10 (ok, maybe $8). The AAA (link cited above) says 40.4 cents/mile. It’s more than 200 miles. You have to do something with your car while you’re in New York.
Fifty bucks one-way, including food? Nope. The numbers you’re citing don’t add up.
n/m
A tank of gas each way at about $40 per tank at current prices. Actually, I can probably get one way on a bit under a tank since when driving to DC from Lowell if I start with a full tank I don’t have to refill until the NJ Turnpike. There’s a 50 cent toll each way on the MassPike (290 to 84) and within the city depends on exactly where you are going and what bridges you use. Even if you add NYC parking you still don’t get anywhere close to what you originally cited as a rail fare.
Let’s say $40 each way for gas.
Let’s say $11-$13 for tolls (50 cents each way for the Pike plus $9.75 or $11.75 for the NYC bridge of choice, but only into NYC).
Let’s say $0 for food since you could bring the same food driving and on the train.
Let’s say $20/day for parking. It could be less, but it could be much more. Depends entirely on where you are. How many days are you staying?
There’s no question that, under some circumstances, driving is cheaper. Going with a group? Driving is certainly a better deal than the train or the plane, even if you’re paying a lot for parking.
There’s also no question that each of us value time differently. Driving isn’t productive and safe — you can rock your cell phone the whole time to be productive, but it’s demonstratively not safe. You can drive safely the whole time, but unless it’s your job to listen to music or podcasts, it isn’t productive. It also may take longer to drive, depending on day/time you travel. There’s also the risk of damage to your vehicle, both when its driving and when its parked in NYC. The risk of tickets, moving or parking infraction. And, there’s always the question of who’s paying for it. It’s not a coincidence that most of the people flying or railing it BOS-NYC during the weekdays are traveling for work, and not paying out of pocket.
christopher is a guy on a tight budget. For him, taking the bus BOS-NYC is cheaper than driving.
s’tom is a time-is-money guy, and also a too-old-for-this-shit guy. For him, the productivity and reduced stress is worth the price of the train ticket.
For me to go back and forth to NYC with my nuclear family, it would cost about $1000 on Acela, and the bus is simply not an option because of the age of my kids. For my family, the cheapest, option is to rent a car and drive, and pay for parking [and least stress isn’t low stress, to be clear]; the least stress option is to take the train and enjoy the time with my children — both are compelling.
During times of peak travel BOS-NYC, the airports are jammed and the roads are jammed. If we want to allow more people to travel between the cities, the way to make that happen is to expand the capacity of rail travel.
I think stomv has again nailed it.
Perhaps exercises like this can demonstrate the importance of price signals sent by our national and local transportation policy. Today, we have no intentional policy and as a result the mix that stomv describes is biased in directions that worsen our carbon footprint, clog our highways, and cause our public transportation systems to fail as they did this winter.
I suspect that if the participants in this exchange were gathered around a white board, and had a few laptops in the room for consulting Google for data, we could rather quickly come to agreement on an overall mix of air, rail, and highway for the region that makes sense to all of us. I think this example of the Boston-NYC trip is a fine example for motivating that discussion. I think it might be constructive to do a similar investigation of a trip like Lowell, MA to Burlington, VT.
The great thing about numbers is that once we all agree on the goals we seek, and all agree on the formulae that connect those goals to individual experiences like ours, then we have a framework within which to answer questions and objections. It allows us to transform “too expensive” into an assertion about the framework. If the way to resolve the “too expensive” observation into “about right” causes the result to stop meeting its goals then we can either revisit the goals, seek an undiscovered alternative, or suggest that the observer adjust his or her opinion.
I think that we urgently need dialogues like this at both the national and the local level. I want the new transportation board to be having the analogous conversation about public transportation in MA. I don’t care about the party affiliation of the participants — I care about the results.
I think NYC has been my actual destination just once in my life. For me it’s a city to drive through on the way to DC. People from other parts of the state have to adjust accordingly, but I was once advised and found to be true that if I am crossing the Merrimack River at 7:30 AM I can drive to DC and basically miss every city’s rush hour, including crossing the GW Bridge without traffic. To be clear I think stomv’s analysis is good and I’m not making this comment to be argumentative. My other quirk is that my cell phone is usually off when I drive and I find it physically difficult to read while in motion.
Now that my mother has sold her car (she’s 90), we often drive from Boston to DC (actually Gaithersburg, MD) so that we’ll have a car to use while we’re there.
We prefer a somewhat longer route that avoids the I-95 corridor altogether. We take the MA Pike, then I-84 across CT, NY, and into PA. We then cross PA on I-80 or I-84, to I-81, take I-81 south to Harrisburg, and come into the DC area from the west (I-70 from Hagerstown, MD). In nice weather, that can be a very nice ride (the trucks on I-81 are tough and Harrisburg is often a choke-point).
One reason we like that route is that the only rush-hour we hit is Harrisburg, PA, and that can be avoided by a well-timed lunch stop earlier in the day. It’s about a 6-8 hour ride altogether (sometimes 10 when we get distracted by sights and picnics along the way), depending on construction and traffic.
We’ll be doing that round-trip in two weeks for Mother’s Day. We’ll camp our way back, spending a night in Hancock (very nice camping on the C&O canal towpath and Potomac river) and another night in the Delaware Water Gap (a true jewel surprisingly close to NYC).
…fewer tolls.
1. I have kids, and so I do the McD breakfast thing on the way to grandma’s (NYC). 4 people, two coffees, to milks, 4 egg/bagel things, $20.
2. The 46 cents per mile figure is extremely fishy. It looks like they include insurance costs, registration fees, and the like, which are costs of vehicle ownership, but are the same even if the vehicle sits unused in the driveway. I am not sure that is a good figure to use in this context.
Honestly, I do this drive quite a bit to visit family in NYC. It is a 3-hour trip. I drive a TDI, so the cost of fuel is around $25 for the entire trip (that is, around a half tank of fuel– I don’t have to buy fuel in NYC unless we drive around a lot while there). I pay more for tolls in NYC than I do on gas and the obligatory McD rest stop, combined. The MBTA bridges and tunnels are $9 per trip, because they use them to subsidize the crap out of the subway system. The Port Authority bridges are expensive because they probably have special “doing business in North Jersey” expenses.
I would not even consider a “public” transportation option for that, ever. It would cost a stinking fortune to transport 4 people plus one dog plus luggage by air, bus, or train, and it would be as unpleasant as a trip could possibly be.
It looks pretty close to the IRS guidelines for reimbursement.
Hey, we are going to tax your existing transportation options into complete uselessness! What, you won’t be able to make the mortgage, your car payment, or your grocery bill?
Well, you should live somewhere else, shouldn’t own a car, and should eat more locally grown organic produce and less meat anyway! It isn’t all about you.
That was weird.
Hey, we are going to tax your existing transportation options into complete uselessness! What, you won’t be able to make the mortgage, your car payment, or your grocery bill?
Well, you should live somewhere else, shouldn’t own a car, and should eat more locally grown organic produce and less meat anyway! It isn’t all about you.
When you travel to NYC with your family, you’ll probably always drive. I do the same, from Somerville.
Nobody is suggesting that we “tax your existing transportation options into complete uselessness”. If a family is so close to the edge that a modest increase in the costs of operating their vehicle causes them to miss a mortgage payment, car payment, or go hungry, then they already have a problem. It could be that a more rational and sustainable transportation system would attract higher-paying employers to wherever they live. It could be that wouldn’t need to use their car so much, and so their repair costs would go down — maybe they might even be able to keep their car after they finish paying it off (car payments are among the worst possible uses of money). Maybe they wouldn’t need a new car with expensive payments, and could pay cash for a less-expensive used car. So long as our government sends price signals that encourage unsustainable behavior, more and more families will end up trapped in the dead-end you describe.
I strongly suspect that it will not be possible to address the multitude of real and present costs of our current transportation system without somebody spending more, at least initially. If you’ve allowed your car to become a junker, it already costs you too much and it also costs money to replace it. That’s reality. We’ve allowed our rail system to become a junker. Our highways are not that far behind. Our airlines survive on indirect government subsidies.
When you travel to NYC for business, there should be a convenient, fast, and affordable rail option for you. It could meet the Acela in Providence, and should take no longer than the existing commuter rail to South Station. In fact, as stomv observes elsewhere, the existing interstate map provides a reasonable first approximation to where new rail lines might go, or to where existing abandoned routes might be re-activated.
The point is that continuing to subsidize unsustainable air and highway use, while discarding rail, is not even penny wise and is certainly pound foolish.
It has, in fact, created the exact situation you describe for too many families. We must break our petroleum habit, not squander ever more societal wealth to maintain it.
I do think that people are inflating the car expenses in order to make it seem like a reasonably comparable cost, when it really isn’t. Sure, automotive transportation is subsidized, and the cost doesn’t reflect externalities, etc., and pricing should be modified until it does.
But until that happens, you can expect people to be economically practical.
It sounds like we agree (“Sure, automotive transportation is subsidized, and the cost doesn’t reflect externalities, etc., and pricing should be modified until it does.”).
I want people to have a sustainable, convenient, and affordable way to get from Lowell or Worcester to NYC or DC. I mean “sustainable” in its broadest sense — sustainable land use patterns, sustainable environmental impact (including carbon footprint and climate change), sustainable economic impacts. I mean “affordable” in its broadest sense as well — low out-of-pocket costs in the short run (after the changes are in place), and low long-term costs (see “sustainable”).
It appears to me that our dependence on cars and trucks is crushing our rural areas as well as our cities. I want to revitalize both, and I think that 21st century transportation infrastructure, 21st century communication infrastructure, and 21st century energy infrastructure (heating, cooling, agriculture, manufacturing, etc) are each crucial to accomplish that.
If that vision truly cannot be turned into a successful campaign slogan, then I suggest that our political system has failed.
and hear, hear
at airfares between BOS and NYC and rarely check Amtrak any longer. Buses between So Station and NYC take you directly into the city, have wifi, allow you to bring your own food (like a reuben or pastrami from the Stage Door Deli – yummy!) and tix can often be bought for under $30, one way. Total travel time is less than by air, sometimes considerably less if NYC traffic is especially bad, and comparable to rail.
I don’t understand why nobody is making the obvious connection to this efficient means of travel that does NOT require massive new investment in infrastructure. Probably for the same reason that most people consider MBTA buses less desirable than rail.
The buses are much better, no doubt.
They suffer from the same weather, traffic, and seasonal holidays that rail does. They’re nowhere near as fast as Acela — which also, btw, allows you to bring your own food and bev.
The buses are great. They’re far lower cost, which allows students, seniors, and others without the expendable income to travel. But, they’re not equal to Amtrak, not by a long shot. They’re not as comfortable, not as fast, etc. They both provide value, and they’re not substitute goods. Plus, the bus can’t go any faster than the speed limit. Amtrak, on the other hand, can get faster and faster as we invest in its infrastructure. Time is money, and providing an even faster option is a good thing, as is an option that doesn’t add to the congestion of the highways during rush hour or during vacation driving days.
Like CMD, I fear you are offering inaccurate information. Today’s schedule for a bus trip from Boston to NYC, according to sites like this, is 4:40 — exactly the same as the slow NE Regional train. Buses are exquisitely sensitive to both traffic and weather, far more so than airlines. Travel by bus on Friday evening by bus is by far the worst of the three. On 2 of the 3 times we attempted it, it was the worst trip EVER for me between Boston and NYC — including two separate pre-Acela periods when I commuted between NYC and Boston for 1-2 year consulting engagements. At least when weather made my return trip impossible (when I used the old Eastern shuttle), so that I had to stay an extra night, I was informed by the airline before I wasted the 3-hour round-trip between LGA and my Manhattan hotel by taxi.
I’ve done three round-trips using Megabus between Boston and NYC. My daughter and her husband lived in the Bronx for about 3 years. They made many trips here, with similar experiences.
On my first Megabus trip, we planned to leave Boston (South Station terminal) at 6:00p (or thereabout) and arrive in NYC at 10:40p, as scheduled — in time for a chic and urbane late-night supper downtown with my daughter and her husband. It was raining in Boston. We arrived at the bus terminal, to find that NO NYC buses from any carrier had arrived at all because they could not get into the city. Period. Megabus provided no information at all. Our 6:00p bus, together with the 5:00p and 7:00p departures (I think they were hourly), didn’t go because there was no bus to send. The terminal was jam-packed with shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, and my wife and I went to a nearby restaurant for dinner. We returned to the terminal at 9:00p to find that Megabus “hoped” they could send our bus at 10:00p. We were finally able to board at 10:30p, and arrived in NYC at 3:30a.
Being in South Station, I stood on the platform and watched one Acela and two regionals leave on time. It took enormous discipline for me to not buy tickets and board them.
My daughter and her husband are both professional chefs. When they visited us, they left after their shifts (sometime between 1:00a and 3:00a) and took an overnight bus — reversing the process at the end of their visit. They learned, the hard way, to use the early-morning Acela or Regional for holidays or when bad weather was forecast.
Buses are only “efficient” when the highway infrastructure is already in place. While they are preferable to automobiles, and have a place as feeders to a subway and commuter rail system, they pale in comparison to rail for medium- and long-distance travel.
Regarding MBTA buses, a bus less desirable than rail (when rail is available) because rail is faster, less sensitive to weather (in a competently operated and maintained rail system), and completely insensitive to traffic. Boston has a radial subway and commuter rail system. Buses make perfect sense for connecting points on one line to a different one (such as the 66 between Harvard and Brookine).
Service between Cambridge and downtown is provided by the Red Line, and takes 15-20 minutes between Davis Square and Park Street or South Station at the height of morning drive-time. That same trip by car is at least a half hour, and by bus twice that (because of the intermediate stops).
I don’t want to be overly argumentative, and at the same time we face a genuine crisis. There is far too much misinformation being bandied about, along with unsupported implications about the motivations of participants.
The reason why most people consider MBTA buses less desirable than rail is that buses are slower, less predictable, and virtually unusable when public transportation is most needed — at drive time and during extreme weather. That’s also the reason why wealthy neighborhoods like Cambridge and Brookline have rail service, and poor neighborhoods get buses.
I never suggested that everyone should take the bus exclusively and regardless of circumstances when traveling to NYC. You would have to be nuts to do that and you are equally excessive to hint that I suggested that. Traveling by bus into or out of either city at rush hour, especially on a weekend would be a huge error. The bus is often a great alternative at a fraction of the cost and a great option I have used around twenty times, not just three as in your experience, including for both business and pleasure.
Likewise, I never hinted that an MBTA bus is always the better choice over a subsurface rail. I have been riding the MBTA system for more than half a century and don’t really need the kind of pedantry you wrote. But sometimes it is the better option when a rider is traveling less than the distance between two rail stops. If you are in Harvard Square and going half way to Porter Sq, taking the Red Line is stupid, since you are going to have to walk back to your destination, and you do not even account for that simple fact. Yet I have seen people do that.
When you wrote:
Buses are only “efficient” when the highway infrastructure is already in place. While they are preferable to automobiles, and have a place as feeders to a subway and commuter rail system, they pale in comparison to rail for medium- and long-distance travel.
you were partly correct. I say partly because you forgot the other half of the equation: buses pale in comparison to rail when the RAIL INFRASTRUCTURE IS IN PLACE. Your suggestions about expanding HSR between a lot of small and distant cities in the midwest and the west fails to account for that. Worse still, you do not provide any numbers about who would be served and at what cost per passenger mile traveled.
Before your write again about “too much misinformation being bandied about”, perhaps you could start with yourself. Don’t trash other ideas based on your faulty interpretation of them. And then, please provide BMG readers with real information about your proposals, especially those crucial numbers about cost per PMT. Then tell us which members of Congress are going to create a majority to pump billions of dollars into isolated geographies. Are the GOP members who represent those districts going to get a lot of votes from urban Democrats on the coasts and the big cities of the midwest to strip their constituencies of billions of dollars for needed services to satisfy a few hundred commuters daily?
And since you included the profoundly offensive language “along with unsupported implications about the motivations of participants” in your response to my simple and gentle original post, think about whose intentions you are maligning.
n/m
Having said that, I apparently misinterpreted the tone of your comment.
You led with “I don’t even look at airfares between BOS and NYC and rarely check Amtrak any longer.” I therefore wrongly interpreted the rest of your comment as dismissive of Amtrak. I apologize.
Similarly, my “unsupported implications” comment was in response to the last sentence of your post. I mistakenly interpreted that as a negative implication about those of us, like me, who view our historical tendency to provide poor communities with buses and wealthy communities with rails as an indicator of our similar historical bias against the poor and working class. I apologize.
I agree with both you and stomv that bus service is an integral and vital part of a functioning urban transportation system. I also agree with you that buses only “pale in comparison to rail” when the rail infrastructure is in place.
My (hyper) concern is that decisions about infrastructure investments will be made based on invalid assumptions about the cost and efficiency of highway transportation (including buses) in comparison to rail. I cite Christopher’s upthread comment that he prefers to drive as evidence of our need to reshape our assumptions about national transportation policy.
In my view, when it comes to long-term sustainable transportation options, driving from Boston to New York should be viewed as a conscious and more expensive choice than taking a train or bus. Since a train load of budget-conscious students, seniors, and others is significantly more fuel-efficient and comparable in schedule even with today’s infrastructure, I think the very fact that a bus is so much cheaper is an example of sending the wrong price signal.
I think the NE Regional train ought to be the most affordable means to get between Boston and NYC, and ought to be as convenient as the bus during the time periods when most people travel. I think the bus has a place for late night and overnight travel, when demand doesn’t justify hauling two or three mostly-empty steel passenger coaches 230 miles.
I think the added convenience of having a personal vehicle and complete schedule flexibility (given weather and traffic) ought to come at a premium above lower-cost rail and bus alternatives.
I think doing the trip by air should be prohibitively expensive — both BOS and LGA are already too busy (LGA especially), and making the trip by air is, to me, analogous to driving a car two blocks to pick up a carton of milk in the city.
I really do sincerely apologize for being offensive, that was not my intent.
out and about again, and it has been some time since once of them burst into flame, or rolled over.
Not FungWah, but still all too representative of the bus industry — maybe you missed the story of the charter UConn Bus that burst into flames and burned on the MA Pike last weekend. Fortunately, the 52 students aboard were able escape without injury.
A maglev from Chicago to San Francisco would be at the absolute bottom of my priority list. There’s so many places where “normal speed” rail of 110 MPH would be a huge gain at faction of the cost.
(Chicago-SF is 6x the distance of Osaka-Tokyo, hence the number)
Like the Big Dig, the projected cost of the Japanese MagLev includes a significant fixed component that has nothing to do with distance traveled. The Big Dig cost about $14.7B, and added about 7.5 miles of new highway. That’s about $1.96 billion dollars per mile. According Google Maps, I-95 between Boston and NYC spans 233 miles. It did not cost $457 billion to build that highway.
There are several cities between Chicago and San Francisco that might benefit from improved passenger rail connections:
– Des Moines, IA
– Omaha, NB
– Denver, CO
– Salt Lake City, UT
– Reno, NV
– Sacramento, CA
I don’t pretend to know what the right mix is of conventional and cutting-edge (like MagLev) technology. I agree with you (and wrote upthread) that increasing the speed and frequency of service on our conventional rail routes would be a huge gain at very modest cost.
Perhaps a better question is to look at government and industry spending on transportation technology research and ask what portion of that makes sense for MagLev and similar rail technologies. How much has been invested in Boeing (public and private) over the past 20 years (both military and commercial)? How much has been invested, in total, in ATC and airport construction over a similar period?
By those standards, I’m not sure that MagLev is outside the envelope of what America is willing to invest in when America values the result.
I can’t help but notice that the Interstate Highway System is just about the perfect ROW for HSR. Wide, smooth curves, near cities, no at-grade crossings, etc.
I’m not arguing that we should replace a highway with HSR. I am pointing out that America has had the wherewithal to acquire the broad, straight ROWs necessary for HSR within sommervilletom’s lifetime.
…what is the primary problem that HSR will solve?
Is it environmentally cleaner?
Will it create demand that Amtrak currently doesn’t, thus leading to few cars on highways?
Is it to be less expensive than air travel?
Will it service more or different routes than traditional rail?
Don’t get me wrong, just getting places faster is always a plus. I’m just trying to figure out what the return on investment is.
“Create jobs and improve the local economy of the regions served.”
It’s a good question that requires more than casual thought, as well as data, to answer. This entire thread is filled with relevant discussion.
Just to clarify, by “HSR”, do you mean faster Acela-style trains, MagLev, or something else?
n/t
The California 2000 HSR business plan defines HSR as a form of rail transport in which trains are electrically propelled at speeds exceeding 150 miles per hour. The business plan noted that two HSR technologies existed at the time: steel-wheel-on-steel-rail systems and magnetic levitation (Maglev) systems.
I think that attempting to do HSR using steel-wheel-on-steel-rail is analogous to attempting to do hi-speed internet over copper wire instead of fiber optic. At best, the effort involves squeezing even more performance out of an already mature and already optimized technology.
I therefore tend to group s_w_o_s technologies with conventional rail (that’s why I view Acela as conventional rather than HSR).
…People are getting more numerous and current infrastructure can’t barely handle it as it is. The current highways were built in the 40’s and 50’s and the airports not much longer along than that… The situation in Calilfornia, in fact, is not dissimilar to the impetus for the Big Dig here in Mass: when the Big Dig was planned people were spending hours in traffic daily and projects were that by 2010, absent changes, whole days would be lost to sitting in traffic. Massachusetts was really bad and Ca isn’t there yet, but they are approaching.
According to proponents of the California HSR the equivalent expansion of roads and airports will cost greater than twice as much ($68b for HSR v $170b for improvements to highways and airports ) to handle projected travel demands of the future. So, if you believe them, HSR is significantly less expensive. I’m not sure their numbers are strictly sound, but opponents of the proposition almost never (that I can see) bring up alternative infrastructure spending. It just seems they want to put the brakes on without considering that we’re going to have to build out some new infrastructure or renovate existing to handle demand. HSR doesn’t strictly speak to demands of today but to expected demands of tomorrow.
other supporters of HSR. People are dazzled by HSR, by the thought of traveling at 200+ mph. They start, therefore, with the presumption that HSR is absolutely essential, and then they do a cost-benefit analysis. Somehow, it seems the ROI always comes out positive when you start from that assumption.
I think it will be more productive to start with the framework I attempted to describe upthread.
I suggest that we start with a national transportation plan, specifically addressing a mix of air, highway, and passenger rail that makes sense now and is sustainable in the long run. I think explorations of particular components of that plan are most constructive when done in the context of the larger picture.
To pick on one aspect, consider the mix between personal/recreational and business travel. People who are traveling on business have very different cost and schedule sensitivities than people traveling for pleasure. Meanwhile, excluding the Northeast Corridor, many of today’s Amtrak seats are sold for personal/vacation travel. Yet, influenced largely by government subsidies and implicit transportation policy, airfare is cheaper than rail. The perception of the public is that driving is “free” (or determined by the price of gas).
If (I’m speculating here) a set of HSR expansions could be funded by reducing air subsidies or sending accurate price signals to automobile users, we might end up with significantly more affordable vacation rail fares on trains with trip times that are 5-10 times shorter than today’s Amtrak schedules.
In short, it is very hard to do cost-benefit analysis without enumerating and realistically monetizing each benefit.
Perhaps a future-history exercise about fiber optics is a constructive comparison. A generation of communication companies did that, as recently as the 1970s, and concluded that fiber optic was not interesting. Most of them are dead today.
While it’s true that Verizon continues to flog FIOS, it’s also true that the technology is essentially a dead end.
n/m
I was thinking of DSL, not FIOS.
They stopped expanding FIOS fiber infrastructure a few years ago. All the commercials are just selling it where it already is.
You are correct that Verizon doesn’t seem to want to bring FiOS to Boston, perhaps because the profit margins aren’t as high as in the suburbs, but I don’t see anything better coming along. I don’t see this as a technological “dead end”.
It might be the telecommunications infrastructure of the future, but it sure isn’t the telecommunications infrastructure of the present, because no one is actually investing in it.
There have also been a number of communities that have built their own networks. I sure wish Marty Walsh would do something about getting Boston a fiber network instead of pushing for the Olympics. That is the kind of thing that would genuinely make Boston more competitive in the world marketplace whereas hosting the Olympics feels more like a promotional stunt.
Is there some better technology coming along for delivering high-speed internet?
I was referring to the decision by AT&T and its affiliates to push DSL over copper as “high speed internet”.
I think that copper is to steel-wheels-on-steel-rail as fiber optic is to MagLev.
Should be “DSL-over-copper”. DSL is/was a way of squeezing more bits through copper.
Similarly, in the primordial days of the first laser discs for video (a few years before CDs and long before DVDs), RCA did great damage to the nascant “Video Disk” market by promoting technology that used a then-conventional stylus tracking a groove in a rapidly-spinning disk to play video. The revolutionary (at the time) alternative was the “Laser Disk”, using a laser to read big (12″) plastic disks encoded like CDs. The bone-headed decision by RCA nearly killed the new technology because the market lumped the two competing approaches together. The result was that laser technology came to music first (as CDs). The widespread availability of affordable high-quality video disks (at least in the US) was delayed until the DVD emerged.
My point is that it is often — even usually — better to invest in the learning curve of an emerging technology (like MagLev) than to squeeze the last little bit of performance out of a mature technology.
DSL doesn’t even do that: it’s an electrical engineering hack that takes advantage of the fact that the POTS network in the 60’s was ridiculously over-engineered. Kinda like if you bought a bicycle that was built so strongly that that you could stick a lawnmower engine on it, tie a rope to it and pull a car… for very short distances. It’s a mature technology that’s reached a dead end so they thought, ‘let’s pump up the Hz! What’s it gonna do, work?”
Comparing DSL to transportation is like suggesting we use the highways for extra runways for the airports.
If I am reading your comment correctly, you are saying that it is unwise to invest limited resources in the technology that is already nearly obsolete.
Transportation, like large-scale wired networks, is a very expensive infrastructure investment. It would make little sense, in 2015, to invest in copper wire (or coax) for telecommunications infrastructure, because fiber has thoroughly surpassed copper wire in every way. And that it should have been plain, 20 years ago, that copper wires were over, and that further investment therein would be unwise.
You are suggesting that that steel-wheels-on-rails is likewise a technology nearing its end, and will likewise be surpassed by other types of “rail” technology, and that further investment therein, in 2015, is unwise.
I am not sure that I agree that steel wheels are that close to dead (Jagger may be old, but the Steel Wheels will go on forever), but that is a certainly a sensible argument and a perfectly fine analogy.
In communications systems, the place where copper was king until the cellphone made linelines obsolete was in solving the “last mile” problem — how to get the service from the fiberoptic trunk to the subscriber. Even today, if you buy a landline, you get copper.
Similarly, steel wheels will be the preferable answer for at least decades (IMHO) for short- and perhaps medium-distance trips. Steel wheels and steel rail are likely to be the best choice for, say, CHI to DC (through the Alleghenies) for decades.
Another place the analogy falls down is freight. HSR (like MagLev) is only suitable for passenger service. Steel wheel and steel rails will be used for freight for the foreseeable future.
I know this is getting really tangential, but…
I don’t believe that is true if you have FIOS available in the neighborhood. All of the new installs in my area have been FIOS and I don’t think copper is an option as Verizon is trying to eliminate it completely, where it can, in the existing customer base. I get several letters and calls (which I don’t answer) a month asking me to set up an appointment to change my copper line to fiber – no charge.
Of course, from the FIOS box to the phone itself is still copper.
It’s that copper subscriber drop that I meant. The fiberoptic trunk goes by on the street. Each of the gazillion subscriber drops in an urban neighborhood are copper.
The situation in rural and ex-urban neighborhoods is even tougher. If there’s a fiber-optic trunk at all, there’s still a much longer copper segment needed to get from the trunk to a house or business set back by, say, a few thousand feet.
Even high-speed internet service is often challenging. In Brookline Village, for example, there are industrial blocks (I’m thinking Station Street) where cat-6 cable has to be strung a few hundred feet over, through, or around existing structures. At least as recently as 2005-2006, that was still very much an issue for commercial internet service.
I believe that FiOS installs due in fact run fiber up to your house. Not copper.
A couple of Verizon links regarding TV and phone service over FIOS.
When I’ve talked to them about the transition, they have indicated that the FIOS equipment for phone needs power from inside the house, unlike the current NID I have which is powered from the street (and stays up even if I lose power).
I appreciate the update, I didn’t realize that Verizon ran fiber all the way to the house.
FWIW, our cable and landline phone service (local and LD) is provided by RCN. They have a fiber trunk running by the house, and run a coax drop to the house. The upstream and downstream bandwidth is enough that our performance is limited by the servers we’re connected to (and our home network and machines) and not the connection.
We don’t have cable TV, and our combined monthly bill for internet and phone service runs about $130/month.
This organization exists and looks good.