No way to run a railroad

No other issue personifies the dysfunction at the heart of America — or as they would say on Twitter, #AmericaFail — as much as the inability to move ahead with high-speed rail. The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress never made a serious effort. The $13 billion initially offered is nothing compared with what's needed. By comparison, China is spending $100 billion a year. Much of the money here would go to higher-speed rail, not the 155-mile-per-hour-plus systems that qualify as genuine high-speed rail. And the choice of Florida for the nation's first HSR line was always misplaced: Florida is a car-culture, suburbanized state, especially in Orlando and Tampa, the destinations of the line, with little appreciation or habit of taking trains. HSR would better be tried in rail-friendly territory, such as California or the Pacific Northwest, or making the Northeast Corridor true high speed. Then Americans could see how well such a system would really work. Now, with Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida refusing the federal money, and the GOP-controlled House solidly anti-rail, it looks as if even this modest start will come to little.

The Republican fetish against trains and transit, so well articulated by George Will (and followed by priceless takedowns by Paul Krugman and Jim Kunstler) has always fascinated me. It was Abraham Lincoln who started the heavily subsidized transcontinental railroad. Republican presidents after him further subsidized more railroads through land grants. "Internal improvements" was a key Republican issue. No more. Republicans routinely refuse to even consider rail or rail transit as necessary options for the nation. They most of all wage war against Amtrak, keeping it too underfunded to succeed with frequent, convenient schedules (and it's still wildly popular). These "conservatives" had no interest in conserving what was once the world's most advanced passenger rail system. Is it that they represent the suburbs and exurbs, so are mindless creatures of car culture. Or is it the billions spent by the oil, auto and sprawl industries to ensure America stays mired in a 1970s transportation system? Indeed, the U.S. government gives oil and gas companies $41 billion a year, nearly 40 times Amtrak's annual budget. As usual, the fecklessness of Democrats enables the problem (oh, for a real opposition party).

In the real world, passenger trains are a major part of the transportation systems of advanced nations. The April edition of Trains magazine, a special report on HSR (not available online, alas), is quite an eye-opener.

Thirteen nations in Europe and Asia operate more than 8,000 miles of true high-speed rail lines. Another 18,000 miles are under construction or are being planned. Fiscal crisis or no, Spain is moving ahead to build more HSR. China has built 2,800 miles, handling more than 300 million passengers a year, and it plans to add thousands of more miles to a nationwide network by 2020. It opened a line from Beijing to Tainjin in time for the Olympics, dropping travel time from 70 minutes to 27 minutes. The line between Guangzhou and Wuhan covers 600 miles in a little more than three hours (imagine, an hour-and-a-half from downtown Phoenix to downtown LA, no airport hassles, no being crammed into an airplane like sardines or prisoners). A milestone will come later this year with the 819-mile line between Shanghai and Beijing. Most operate on their own dedicated trackage. And China is aggressively building freight rail lines, too, keeping more freight on trains instead of moving it to roads. This is the 21st century. Across Europe, HSR has outperformed air travel between many city pairs, in some cases essentially shutting out the airlines.

Do these systems take government subsidies? You bet. But, contrary to GOP myth, no common transportation system exists without them. Freeways and roads don't pay for themselves. The airline industry has benefited from decades of overt and hidden government support. Only trains and transit are supposed to "pay for themselves" in the American mind. Nations that subsidize balanced, forward-looking transportation systems get much in return. We just get rising external costs, however much they are not counted.

In addition to giving travelers choices and cutting congestion, HSR is a significant environmental help, moving far more people via electricity than can be moved with smog-belching cars and airplanes, or with the chimera, electric cars. It allows airlines to focus on what they do best, longer-distance travel. And it's a huge jobs generator. More than 110,000 workers were working on the $33 billion Beijing-Shanghai line in 2009. Entire industries are being created and expanded. That's right, dear business-friendly right-wingers. In shutting down HSR in America, you have shut the door on such global HSR players as Siemens, Nippon Sharyo, Sumitomo, Kawasaki, Skanska, Veolia, who would have employed Americans. And killed potentially American-born companies. Jingos, where's your pride when faced with this further evidence that America can't do great things anymore? We're retiring the space shuttles, essentially bowing out of space exploration (sure, the private sector will do this, sure). A 20-lane freeway is not the mark of an advancing civilization. And, ye hawks, having an inferior rail system is a direct threat to national security because...

The bad news is that a high-cost energy future is coming, whether the clueless drive-a-hundred-miles-each-way American suburbanite wants it or not (I wrote about this in a recent Seattle Times column). Alt-fuels won't save us: They will cost more and require more fossil fuel inputs than the energy they produce. Electric cars won't save us; electric cars are not a power source, and will cost more. Child-like faith in the Bakken Formation of the Dakotas, deepwater horizontal drilling, oil shale and tar sands won't. What oil there actually is will be very expensive to reach and refine, with horrific environmental consequences. Drill, baby, drill is not a solution in a world past peak oil and facing a dramatic rise in demand. Then there's climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels. It will bring economic costs beyond the worst nightmare of any deficit hawk, if that's the only node of one's thinking, not to mention horrendous social dislocations, geopolitical instability and (especially for you evangelicals and Mormons) destruction of the precious planet over which the Lord allowed us stewardship. We couldn't even rebuild our conventional passenger rail system, or use the pause of the Great Recession to retrofit part of suburbia with transit.

We're quite giddy here in the Northwest because of the decisions in Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida. It means more money for the highly successful Amtrak Cascades corridor that runs from Vancouver, B.C., to Eugene, Ore., and particularly for train service between Seattle and Portland. The Cascades began in 1994 and have expanded gradually, based mostly on Washington state funding. Now, with $590 million in new federal money, the system can be expanded beyond the four daily round-trips (along with Sounder commuter trains in the Seattle area and the Coast Starlight long-distance train). It's a good model of how sustained state support, working with the freight railroads and an open-minded populace, can make trains work even against the resistance nationally. Imagine if Phoenix and Tucson could even recover the three round-trip trains they enjoyed until the late 1960s.

Still, it's a small accomplishment against such looming troubles. The shock and awe are on their way, and this time we'll be on the receiving end.

 

Comments

[soleri]

America's central political battle isn't ideological or even cultural. It's geographic. Ideology only comes into the argument late, to intellectually bolster the arguments of the suburban/exurban axis. And the culture war is merely politics by other means (to paraphrase and invert Clausewitz). It's not an accident that the energy industry underwrites so much of the right's politics. Their paradigm - intensive energy use and sprawl - may be a dead-end economic strategy but it's really all they have. And when the well runs dry? The buzzards can pick our collective bones after for all they care.

We're not going to compete with the rest of the world by overconsuming diminishing resources. To suggest our way of life isn't negotiable (as Big Oil's Dick Cheney once put it) is another way of saying we're going to hold our breath until reality meets our demands. The sheer nuttiness of their politics directly emerges from this bravado. The anti-science and anti-environmentalism of the right is, essentially, a temper tantrum disguised as tough-guy chat.

The politics of defunding rail neatly dovetails with this agenda. Limiting transportation choices so people are forced to drive and fly is a crucial part of their strategy. People who live disconnected lives in suburbs vote Republican because they don't see the intricate webs of interdependence supporting our lives. Instead, they fixate on myths like "rugged individualism" to describe themselves and their ideals. And it's here that their pathos often becomes blatant hypocrisy, as when they demand the government keep its hands off their Medicare.

A nation that is hamstrung by a false debate like this one can only tread water for so long before it drowns. We are not going to march boldly into the future by denying physical reality and its laws. Even David Brooks, the bard of suburbia, is finally recognizing this. Cities are our future if only because they buy us some time as we figure out how to live with much less. It's not going to be easy under the best of circumstances. And it will be impossible if we wallow in cornucopian wishful thinking while much higher energy costs stare point blank at us in our disbelieving faces.

[cal Lash]

Hi folks, I am up late so I just left what I dreamt at the end of the end of City Hall

[Jim Hamblin]

Soleri nails it! The Flat Earth Society has all sorts of bizarre notions about our finding enough oil to slake our thirst. Country club/cocktail party science, maybe? The special interest folks certainly have a well-oiled bafflegab machine that's lubricated by campaign contributions and lobbyists.

My Dad was a railroader whose prescient legacy was a pretty good piggyback (trailers on rail cars) strategy that hatched about 60 years ago. Even then he told me how much more fuel efficient it was but the Rock Island railroad was slow to embrace it.

Maybe someone can 'splain how and why this happened??

[cal Lash]

Quoting Soleri, "Cities are our future if only because they buy us some time as we figure out how to live with much less." My response to that is Sustainability is a passe word the new thing is reverse growth or as I call it REVGROW. It's no longer a question if humanoids will have to inhabit other planets it's just a matter of when?
Jon I sent your article onto my my redneck republican friend that has an entire basement devoted to Americas great train systems. Be interesting to see his response

[koreyel]

Just finished "Bradbury Speaks."
The following 1968 essay was included in the collection...
It reminded me of you when I read it Jon:

Any Friend of Trains is a Friend of Mine
http://bit.ly/hucCRQ

And you are right Jon:

Plastic cars are a superficial palliative.
They fool only fools...

All of India wants to drive...
All of China wants to drive...
All of America wants to drive...
There is a finite amount of oil available...
And more and more cars demanding it...
So go fish on the moon...
Fool.

As soon as we speed past 5 dollars a gallon for gas...
And accelerate towards 10 dollars a gallon,
Just so, and only just so...
We'll build trains and monorails with sudden urgency.
And not a silly simple second beforehand.

All that is inevitable.
Because...
America will never do the right thing ahead of time.
Without a hot crisis staring her down...
America goes no where and does nothing important...
Without a hot crisis nipping at her heels...
America is a nation of empty old talking heads...
Like George Will's....
And McCain's...
Passing fatuous gas off as learned helplessness...

That's the bad news.

The good news is:
There is an oil crisis a few turns up the road.
I can hardly wait...
But wait I must...
As there's still some cheap oil in the ground...
And to paraphrase Buckminster Fuller:
"Americans will only do the right thing,
When they have exhausted all other possibilities."

So let's just all give pause...
And room...
And let our fellow American fools...
Exhaust themselves in febrile splendor...

Drill. Fool. Drill.

[Rogue Columnist]

Jim,
The short answers:
1. Government aggressively subsidized highways and prohibitively taxed and regulated railroads through most of the 20th century, allowing trucks to take away much of the freight business. Yes, railroads like the Rock Island (CRI&P) and Pennsylvania pioneered piggyback (TOFC), but it could never undo this advantage.

2. Even when I was a child, railroads still had "less than a carload" freight operations. This brought much smaller freight into city freight stations (the Phoenix AT&SF station is still standing), where it was transferred to trucks for local delivery. Looks like a smart system now, but it was killed off. (And of course America made most things back then).

3. Railroads did themselves no favors with entrenched management and unions, although there was tremendous innovation mid-century. But it couldn't undo the government subsidizing trucks and airlines, especially with the advent of the Interstate Highway System.

[Casey Jones]

Derailed.

[soleri]

Cal, I think the ethical imperative here is to gradually shrink our numbers and consumption without creating such a backlash that it does more damage than good. We don't have the luxury of much time, unfortunately, and our political process has been monkeywrenched (le mot juste) by the plutocrats. I'm not even saying there's much if any probability of a soft landing. Places like Phoenix will crash regardless of mankind's overall fate. But we have to act as if human life is still inherently good because the alternative is simply too horrifying to consider. It's going to take an agonizing amount of patience to unwind this feeding frenzy that's devouring the commons. I don't know how we do it. I just know that we must try.

[Johm Henry]

Hammered.

[Rogue Columnist]

I think he meant "Jawn Henry." The Norfolk & Western's failed, experimental steam turbine locomotive in, I believe, the 1950s. Welcome rail fans to Rogue Columnist.

[AWinter]

One little objection to your Seattle Times column. I think (Emil probably agrees with me) you should retire the notion of Peak Oil being the halfway point of reserves, which is more of a rule of thumb. It's important to be precise about it. We should go back to the original definition: "Peak Oil refers to the maximum rate of the production of oil in any area under consideration, recognising that it is a finite natural resource, subject to depletion." Most people don't even have a concept of how the oil age will end. They think it will end someday, somehow; "We have 44 years of oil left." - as if oil production will suddenly stop overnight one day in the 2050s. It hasn't entered their mind that there will be a peak and subsequent long decline (possibly near-term) and that together with rising demand that will constitute a potential predicament. A lot could be gained if people knew this simple fact. "Half-way through the reserves" doesn't really tell the story.

@soleri
"There are lots of people, who are living in places that are currently unsustainable, who have signaled their intention to fight to the political death to keep living they're living now. If it means melting Antarctica and bankrupting the US government so be it." I'm usually not a fan of Alex Steffen and his gizmo approaches to 'sustainability' but here he said it right.

[azrebel]

Lots of good stuff.

Even RC got himself excited. If you post comments on your own blog is that like talking to yourself in a mirror? ( : - )

I don't blame him, I really like trains.

REVGROW, I think my wife puts that stuff on her plants. They usually don't look too good.

We need to have a discussion sometime where you are only allowed to post one word. Could be interesting.

Today marks another day that went by with us losing out on the beak/chicken feet market in China.

As I am writing this, cal should be getting stuck in the metal detector at Phx. City council.

[cal Lash]

AZREBEL, I made it and out of city hall OK. Hearing went well. I am winding up my 320 square feet of somewhat sustainable living space to head off into sajuaro land. That would be my motor home. A great improvement in spot and my life Since I unloaded that monstrosity of a house on South Mountain a few years ago.

[phxSUNSfan]

I never understood the reasoning behind the Florida HSR line. The cities that were to be connected are among the worst in the nation for transit in city limits. I would love a Phoenix to L.A. true HSR line in order to replace the ridiculous number of flights from LAX, Burbank, etc to Sky Harbor. It seems like common sense that a route as busy as LA-PHX would be among the first to receive funding.

One big advantage is the relatively flat terrain and mostly open desert between the two metro areas. Imagine being able to ride the rail for a day trip to L.A. to catch a Lakers/Suns game, visit family, museums, friends, etc without having to get in a car! Would be fuckin' great...

[Jim Hamblin]

With apologies for dragging an otherwise scholarly discussion down to the hormonal level of my life as a college student: the Rocky Mountain Rocket between Iowa City and Denver was the most wonderful place to find babes! It is one of the most cherished chapters in my fuzzy-cheeked past.