TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Why? What would have to change?
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Rumor Higher Speed Rail from MCO to Disney World
- Thread starter UCF
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JMcMahonEsq
Well-Known Member
For it to be a viable option as an alternative national (or regional) Transporation system it would need to offer at least one of the following:
1) a faster alternative to existing transportation options
2) a cheaper alternative to existing transportation options
3) filling a void or offering a service that is not available by an existing Transporation option AND said void/service is needed enough to make investment either profitable (if commercial) or politically justifiable (if public investment)
4) legislative mandate requiring adoption/expansion of train travel, at the expense of air or cars, likely coupled to some kind of green initiative
Without 1 of the 4 above, there is no reason for people to increase the use of train, or for private/public entities to invest money in the use/expansion of train travel.
Disone
Well-Known Member
To your point I don't think there's a strong enough market but Amtrak is not doing a great job of marketing itself as this type of vacation. And here I would like the stress I don't say that they are not marketing themselves as a vacation, just that they're not doing it well and Maybe if they did... They would have different results?
As for losing money, Amtrak is a service to provide to small communities. I don't know why so many expect Amtrak makes money. The post office does not make money? That's a service too. Plenty of talk of discontinuing the post service and letting the private sector take that over but here we are today and we still have a post office.
Most major airports are paid for through the some sort of government funds, usually a State's funding from its transportation budget. If the airlines had to pay for the construction of the airports how profitable would the airlines be?
And then there is America's car culture. The roads are built with tax dollars. That means everywhere you drive, your drive is being subsidized by the government. Whether you're on a official toll road or not, you are actually are on a toll road.
. The government made that road with funding and revenues it collected from you.Amtrak is a hybrid semi private semi gov't service replacing what used to be provided by the private sector and today still remains mostly funded by the government. That funding is reduced by revenues that Amtrak produces but definitely reduced and obviously not eliminated.
Some sectors make some money or tease that breakeven point such as the northeast corridor. And even the pacific surfliners in California are doing pretty well overall. But most of the long haul trains lose money and that's because the long haul trains truly are more of a long distance commuter rail. Having said that most commuter rails are not making money so I'm not sure why we expect Amtrak to also make money. Sun rail which is commuter rail for Orlando, Tri-Rail which is commuter rail for the South Florida area, or something like Bart which is commuter rail for the bay area, Amtrak is basically long distance commuter rail for small town America to get to other points and big town America.
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TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
So it doesn’t matter how many people choose to use it as transportation - it’s not an actual transportation system without those 4?
October82
Well-Known Member
4) doesn't really have a precedent. Virtually all wealthy nations, outside of the US, have robust auto and train infrastructure with each serving different roles.
1) is what high(er) speed rail does on routes between 50-700 miles. Trains above ~150-160 mph are faster than flying (or driving). 2) Trains are also generally cheaper than driving once you account for indirect costs rather than only looking at, for example, gas costs. As for 3) trains also serve city center to city center direct connections that airplanes don't.
The reason most people in the US are unaware that 3/4 of your four criteria are met by train services is that the US has some of the worst train services in the developed world. The reason for this is a variant of 4), that the US massively subsidizes auto infrastructure, both through direct highway funding and through local zoning rules. It would actually take relatively little in the way of legislative action, mostly redirecting already existing spending commitments, for the US to catch up.
And just to reiterate the point, this doesn't mean that anyone will tell you not to drive or keep you from driving should that be your choice. Outside of the US, people choose to take trains because they're faster, cheaper, and generally better.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Trains are also much more efficient which means much better for the environment.
JMcMahonEsq
Well-Known Member
Sure, if people used it. My point is that it won't be a viable alternative mode of transportation in the US, and people won't choose to use it, or invest in expanding its use on any significant scale, unless one of the 4 happens.
Per one of the latest studies issued by the US Department of Commerce, in connection with the last census, public transportation use makes up about 5% of transportation utilization in the US. This is skewed geographically and you find higher percentages in cities over 2M people like NY or San Fransico. Hell train Transporation didn't even make up the highest percentage of public Transporation use within that 5%, as almost half of that percentage used busses as opposed to trains/trolleys/subways.
A portion of the "subsidy" is from gas taxes.
JMcMahonEsq
Well-Known Member
I definitely agree on your first point. My first vision/view of amtrak was an alternative for people who were scared to fly, and that's coming from someone who helped build/rebuild the north east corridor to allow for the ACELA trains.To your point I don't think there's a strong enough market but Amtrak is not doing a great job of marketing itself as this type of vacation. And here I would like the stress I don't say that they are not marketing themselves as a vacation, just that they're not doing it well and Maybe if they did... They would have different results?
As for losing money, Amtrak is a service to provide to small communities. I don't know why so many expect Amtrak makes money. The post office does not make money? That's a service too. Plenty of talk of discontinuing the post service and letting the private sector take that over but here we are today and we still have a post office.
Most major airports are paid for through the some sort of government funds, usually a State's funding from its transportation budget. If the airlines had to pay for the construction of the airports how profitable would the airlines be?
And then there is America's car culture. The roads are built with tax dollars. That means everywhere you drive, your drive is being subsidized by the government. Whether you're on a official toll road or not, you are actually are on a toll road.
Amtrak is a hybrid semi private semi gov't service replacing what used to be provided by the private sector and today still remains mostly funded by the government. That funding is reduced by revenues that Amtrak produces but definitely reduced and obviously not eliminated.
Some sectors make some money or tease that breakeven point such as the northeast corridor. And even the pacific surfliners in California are doing pretty well overall. But most of the long haul trains lose money and that's because the long haul trains truly are more of a long distance commuter rail. Having said that most commuter rails are not making money so I'm not sure why we expect Amtrak to also make money. Sun rail which is commuter rail for Orlando, Tri-Rail which is commuter rail for the South Florida area, or something like Bart which is commuter rail for the bay area, Amtrak is basically long distance commuter rail for small town America to get to other points and big town America.
Seeing some of the travel youtube channels (thanks kids) they could market the mid west routes through the Rockies as their own destination land cruises. I don't know how big a market there would be for those types of "vacations" but i think it would be worth the effort.
While I don't think/expect that Amtrak is going to be profitable, my point is knowing it is going to operate at a loss as a system, there is less likelhood that there will be private investment (say the fed ex equivalent to the post office) or political will to expand trains as a overall system. I think you might be able find certain isolated niche markets where a train service might be profitable and useful. The brightline route from Miami to Orlando seems like it could be such a service. Just like in NYC, ferry service from NJ to NY and from NYC to other areas of NY is a successful Transporation option. That doesn't mean its ever going to be implemented nationally, or will be a alternative to the general transportation system of cars an airlines
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
People do use it.
Is that including intercity transportation like air? Or are we only looking at public transit in big cities?
That does exist - the Rocky Mountaineer train that travels from Denver to Moab. The market is definitely there - but they are more of a luxury train than Amtrak and they stop at hotels for the overnight.
JMcMahonEsq
Well-Known Member
A couple of people using trains doesn’t make it viable beyond a niche market. Just like some people using a ferry in nyc doesn’t make it viable as a transportation methodology that anyone is going to sink money into.
The figures from the study were for national usage for personal transportation both inter and intra city/state, but excluded freight and shipping, that data was tracked separately.
October82
Well-Known Member
The subsidies I'm referring to go beyond just direct highway costs, which is what fuel taxes are mainly used to fund. Even then, only about 25% of the revenues used for maintaining highways comes from fuel taxes*.
Subsidies go well beyond that - the US provides effectively subsidizes everything from the manufacturing to purchasing, to liability involved with private vehicle ownership. Many of these are indirect subsidies and most people aren't aware the extent to which state, local, and federal dollars are used to support auto infrastructure.
Of course, roads aren't a bad thing and that's not the point of bringing this up. The point is that we make choices about what to spend on and cars have costs that are disproportionately high compared to other kinds of transportation infrastructure. How we weigh the benefits against the costs is a discussion we should be having given that the US is an outlier among developed countries in how much we spend and on what.
*in reality, much less than this since this is the revenue based number in a single fiscal year, and doesn't account for things like deferred maintenance of the highway system.
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October82
Well-Known Member
Not just is private investment possible, but it's common throughout the rest of the world, and share infrastructure with other nation's equivalents to Amtrak. Most governments invest in high quality infrastructure that multiple operators can use which allows for competition and lower fares on many routes.
Spain's HSR network is a great example of this, with dozens of daily trains between major cities at low costs and operated by the Spanish national operator Renfe (including its low cost brand), French operator SNCF (which has also expressed interest in operating HSR in the US), and private operator Iryo. Intercity service is also provided on similar infrastructure by Renfe. I suspect we will also see Brightline operate on CAHSR infrastructure once subsequent phases are completed, although without Brightline West being electrified it's unlikely we'd see truly great connecting services.
As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the reason we don't see this in the US is that American passenger rail infrastructure is extremely poor. It is optimized for certain kinds of freight rather than high frequency and low cost passenger rail services. Also as mentioned elsewhere, there are around 50-70 intercity routes in the US that meet international standards for high ridership intercity rail services. There are many more than that which meet international standards for essential intercity services and would see high ridership with appropriate investment.
The issue is looking at Amtrak as a serious attempt to provide intercity rail services. While Amtrak (and many commuter rail systems) does remarkably well given how undermined it is by US transportation policy, it is not representative of what passenger rail looks like in most of the world and should look like in North America.
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October82
Well-Known Member
It's really misleading to conclude that because people don't use the bad services we have, that they wouldn't use good services if they were to exist.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Exactly - Amtrak state supported routes in California, Washington state, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois, North Carolina, Maine, etc. all see great ridership and that’s with 90-110 mph maximum speeds and lots of slower running because of freight infrastructure.
Ferries aren’t unique to NYC, they are commonly used in major cities where it makes sense. San Francisco and Seattle are two examples.
JMcMahonEsq
Well-Known Member
Why? You base expenditures on ROI on current and projected market utilization.
If someone had a magic wand, that could immediately alter the makeup of US infrastructure to create a perfect railway system, for free, and take away the past centuries experience of people use cars and then planes for transportation, then sure maybe people would use them. But that's not happening.
So in order to have any meaningful discussion about how trains COULD become a good service, you need a reason/logical path towards why anyone, government or private sector, is going to take the time, effort, and spend the money, to create this new good service, AND explain how this new service, even if better than the train system we have now, is better than current methods of transportation, and is SO much better that it will overtake the inertia of people using what they always have.
So other than showing 1 of the 3 items i listed is possible, or the 4th government intervention comes into play, where is the argument. I mean even if everyone was on board for the idea, the massive cost in land acquisition on a state or federal level to create any meaningful interstate train transportation system would be astronomical, and that's not considering the legal fights/battles that you would have, in order to create any type engineered track path that was straight enough to allow high speed train travel across any meaningful distance, and connect major population centers and destinations. Nor does it consider the land clearing and constrution costs of such a project.
IanDLBZF
Well-Known Member
And also some of the Great Lakes have ferry service as well.
JMcMahonEsq
Well-Known Member
Your understanding of numbers seems confusing.
Yes ferries are used in more than one city. NYC, SF, Seattle, so you got 3 cities in three isolated areas. That a national system does not make. Thats the point. They are oddities, isolated exceptions to the rule.
As to amtrack routes, no, they don't see great ridership. Thats the whole point of the Commerce study. They have some riders, and in those areas maybe they are higher utilization than other Amtrak lines, but its not great as compared to other Transporation options as a whole.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Reasons and logical paths -
1. Rail is more efficient - short haul flights are terrible on efficiency and environmental concerns. Personal vehicles are getting better, but rail is store more efficient and better for the environment.
2. Highway overcrowding - anyone who needs to drive through major cities knows that crowding is a major issue on interstates. While cities continue to expand lanes, getting cars off the roads has got to be a solution we look at.
I’ll also add that you continue to ignore the fact that Brightline is a success - people are riding it! Which proves the point - when the service is there and run on a regular basis people will choose to use it. There’s nothing special about Brightline and the Florida market. Yet despite having many daily flights, daily bus service, and interstate and toll road options - people are using Brightline.
October82
Well-Known Member
I'll come back to your comment about ROI in a moment, but I've highlighted the important part. Projected markets are not the same as current markets. Consumers can't react or purchase services that don't exist.
The way you model whether people would use a new service is through demand modeling. This can get quite complicated in the case of transportation infrastructure because you need a full network analysis - and complete networks don't exist in much of the US, which is incidentally going to be a major problem for Brightline West - but the basic model for all transit infrastructure is called a gravity model. As a guide to the ridership potential for different modes, you can take the product of the population of destination pairs and divide by the square of the transit time. When you do these for a representative sample of possible US routes for different modes (airplanes, cars, trains), you find that a large number of routes in the US would exceed ridership of internationally comparable routes.
This is a very simple way of bootstrapping the lack of revealed preferences given the poor quality of existing services. We know from what people empirically choose to do - when given options they don't currently have - that they would choose rail if it were of sufficient quality. When you add in full network modeling, many additional more marginal routes become viable. Much more detailed modeling to determine economic viability is currently being supported through the FRA's Corridor ID program, which is the go to resource for a comprehensive listing of potentially high ridership routes.
To return to your point about ROI - this is really the wrong way to look at transportation infrastructure. None of it generates direct return on investment, including the interstate highway system or much of the existing airport infrastructure. The point of spending on transportation infrastructure is to enable the rest of the economy to function efficiently. Where trains make sense they are a generally lower cost (both in $$$ and time) way to move large numbers of people compared to highways. Again, this isn't a competition - highways are very good at moving most kinds of freight - but all transportation infrastructure requires upfront investment from governments even in cases where private operators ultimately use that infrastructure. We should consider the total direct and indirect ROI and not just, for example, the costs at the point of use.
European and Asian countries have only developed their intercity rail networks in the last several decades. Most people, when given a cheaper and faster way to get from point A to B aren't going to choose a more expensive and slower option. That's the whole reason why people don't use trains now - they're slow and expensive - and why we should invest to bring them up to international standards. If countries as dysfunctional as Spain or Italy can manage to do this at scale in a few decades, American industry should be able to do the same.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's a fact in virtually every other wealthy country. If you want to see how these services work, take a trip on Spain's AVE, France's TGV, Germany's Intercity Express, Japan's Shinkansen, or China's G-class. You'll pay the equivalent of about $20 for a service that beats domestic air travel or driving in any of these countries.
I responded to your comment and pointed out that all three are already met by existing standard services in other wealthy countries. In no country that I know of has the fourth point been born out. People choose high quality trains because they're good, not because they're forced to by policy.
Land acquisition costs are actually not a significant barrier for HSR projects in the US. The main issues are that we lack the engineering experience. Foreign rail operators, such as SNCF, have explored building region scale HSR in the US for around $50 billion, and expected around 50 million passengers/year and profitability within 15 years. Even if you think their cost estimates are too low (which I do!), for comparison, state and local highway expenditures are about $200 billion/year. We're not talking about an insurmountable change, we're talking about redirecting a portion of dollars that are presently going to highway expansion projects towards higher capacity, more efficient, and ultimately lower cost alternatives.
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