> it would cost between $125 million to $1 billion per mile to build the Seattle to Vancouver line
One of the problems with the American rail debate is you have people who like rail and people who like low taxes. The two don't overlap. Thus, the former sees any opportunity to lay rail as an opportunity to hose taxpayers.
"China’s high speed rail with a maximum speed of 350 km/h has a typical infrastructure unit cost of about $17-21m per km, with a high ratio of viaducts and tunnels, as compared with $ 25-39 [million U.S. dollars] per km in Europe and as high as $ 56 [million U.S. dollars] per km currently estimated in California" [1]. The Seattle/Washington per-mile costs above translate to $78 to $625 million dollars per kilometre.
"One of the problems with the American rail debate is you have people who like rail and people who like low taxes."
US citizen here, in the highest of all possible US+California tax brackets, who is very enthusiastic about rail and non-bus public transportation.
It's not that I don't want to pay taxes for rail - I do - it's that we already ramped the tax collection all the way up to 11 without doing any rail.
Once you're at >50% effective tax rate[1], where do you go from there ? I can't possibly favor any tax increase - it doesn't matter what for - since we are already past (what I would consider) "peak" taxes.
[1] 53% - although in my case, closer to 48% due to minor things like 401k and HSA, etc. Yes, I am one of the suckers who is in the highest bracket but pursues no exotic tax avoidance.
How is your effective tax rate 50%? Even if you are in the highest tax bracket, only the income in that bracket is taxed at the highest rate. Even people earning $475000 in California still only have an effective tax rate of ~40%, which is what you'd need to be making to be in the top US+California tax bracket. And if that's the case you are still taking home nearly $300,000 per year.
I'm all for effective use of taxes, but your effective tax rate calculation seems way off.
"I'm all for effective use of taxes, but your effective tax rate calculation seems way off."
I apologize for already going beyond the bounds of politeness, as far as discussing finances go - so forgive me for not going into further details ... but my calculation is about right on.
"And if that's the case you are still taking home nearly $300,000 per year."
That, on the other hand, bothers me greatly - this idea that at some level of income, the proportions stop mattering. The idea that, if one makes X income, it doesn't matter if that was 30 or 50 or 70% of what we made ...
I'm a big fan of rail. I wish we had a bullet train going from E to W coast through Kansas City. I would happily pay more taxes for it.
The thing for me is ive never understood why the cost per mile is so freaking outrageously stupidly full retard high for rail. Road doesn't cost nearly as much.
Is it the material? Labor? There isn't much material per mile. Why is it so high per mile? Who has done extensive looking into this and can explain it?
> I'm a big fan of rail. I wish we had a bullet train going from E to W coast through Kansas City. I would happily pay more taxes for it.
You're in the "people who like rail" camp. So are many of my friends. (I'm the lonely S.O.B. in both.)
> Why is [our cost] so high per mile?
On why rail is so much more expensive here, we don't know [1]. "Many of the world's most expensive projects are in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, which, like the United States, have common-law systems," [2] so it might be that right-of-way costs dominate.
New York's MTA costs $4.11 per ride to operate [3]. The analogs for London and Paris are $2.61 and $1.93, respectively [2]. The cost difference appears to be explained by unnecessarily higher staffing levels in New York. So it might be that public-sector union and well-paid contractor costs dominate.
Measuring these things is hard, perhaps intentionally so.
I'm not an expert, but I've looked into this in the past when I was curious about it.
There's quite a bit of working that goes into preparing and grading the land. There's also the added expense of building bridges and tunnels - with the speed a bullet train is travelling at, you want to avoid at-grade level crossings where road vehicles could get into the train's path. You also probably want side barriers to prevent cows and other large animals from wandering onto the tracks. This means you'll also need game tunnels or bridges to enable animals to get cross under or over the tracks, especially in wilderness areas. The Wikipedia article about TGV track construction [1] provides some helpful information[1].
Acquiring the land to build the track might also be expensive. Although governments have some power to expropriate land, there's often (usually?) significant cost involved.
First, regular railbed isn't nearly as hard to build because the standards are much lower. When you're building for 70mph max freight you have a totally different need than 186mph+ HSR.
For example, HSR uses a high alignment specification. This means a great deal of effort goes into ensuring that there are as few variations in the alignment as possible to ensure it is stable.
You also have cost of catenary (overhead wires), cost of bridges, tunnels and grading for a much straighter tangent and finally all the electrical and signaling infrastructure behind it.
(Note that the signals are in-cab signals but modern systems such as those from GE/Alstom or Siemens still require lineside equipment.
You have a lot more route flexibility with standard rail as well, since the track doesn't have to be as straight. This is going to translate into lower site acquisition costs.
I agree with OP, though - even taking that all into account it seems like we're getting soaked.
The track side equipment is really expensive and there is little competition in the rail-space. Everything is regulated to death and only huge companies have a chance. So you have maybe two or three companies who can bid.
The rail advocates should fund or conduct an analysis regarding the economic costs of rail-related tax increases vs. that of time saved in traffic, automobile fuel, maintenance and risk, etc..
1. The most realistic speed is actually 186mph (300kmh) max making for a ~90min trip between Seattle and Portland - which is still great.
2. There's a completely alternate alignment for a good chunk of the Seattle-Portland distance (former Milwaukee road branch lines and the old chela is western). There is also a rebuilt alignment of the old Tacoma western that will just went in service that will cut 30min off then trip from Tacoma to Olympia anyway.
3. Interestingly, it shouldn't be thought of as a mid-distance intercity train. It's a commuter train at higher speed. In Japan a huge number of people commute on the Shinkansen. Imagine if you could commute in 20min from Everett to Seattle or Olympia to Tacoma.
Cost by distance is reasonable for talking about construction (the supply side). See
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r... for an overview. Even $125m/mile places the project a little high on that list, among mostly-tunnel and all-tunnel projects, and $1b/mile is in the WTF zone.
Cost by passenger or passenger-trip is reasonable for talking about utility (the demand side).
An important thing is the getting the right of way, because that only gets more expensive with time.
186 mph today, 350 mph in 50 years, which will make the cities commutable. At some point in this century, maglevs will become popular in all those countries that built high-speed rail. In the US, it will be too expensive to build because we thought cars were a better mode.
In addition to right away for high-speed rail only getting more expensive over time, what about the necessary I-5 expansions that will probably be needed sometime this century? I've only driven on I-5 up that way a few times since I'm not from the PNW, but I'm not even sure I-5 could be widened in some areas. It seems that increasing car-traffic flow in the future might be just as expensive as putting in rail.
I hear people complain about light rail and high-speed rail being boondoggles because of their expense, but if the same right of ways needed to be purchase for new road construction, wouldn't road construction cost be pretty close to the cost of the rail line? This doesn't even include the amount of underfunding across the country for road maintenance and the fact that property tax and gas tax don't come close to funding the maintenance needs.
>> "I'm not even sure I-5 could be widened in some areas"
The fundamental law of road congestion [0] states that you can't build your way out of a traffic jam.
This is because adding a new mile of road creates new supply X while simultaneously inducing demand Y, where Y > X in almost all transit markets where anyone wants to live. In e.g. the Seattle area, Y >> X.
As the name suggests, this is the most salient fact about highway construction. Yet it is widely ignored in urban planning circles.
From the abstract of the paper cited, "vehicle-kilometers traveled increases proportionately to roadway lane kilometers for interstate highways and probably slightly less rapidly for other types of roads." Congestion may not decrease but building more roadway lets more people get to travel where and when they want.
Cities are powerful because of ease and variety of people and businesses you can interact with. A fast point-to-point transportation system where one can travel with up to 40 tons stuff seems to me to be a great system. Cars and trucks have large external costs that we should vigorously try to reduce (physical pollution, noise pollution, land use for roads and parking, energy use, time wasted driving, etc.) but forcing people to use less desirable modes of transport by having the desired mode suck more due to traffic seems quite regressive. If we had instant teleportation from point to point, but the machine took up a city block and belched sulfur dioxide, I would hope the impulse for society would be to research decreasing the size and pollution of the machine and not to just restrict by law that there is to be only one machine per city.
What is "the old chela"? Couldn't find anything on the web that seemed relevant - I guess this is a nickname for an obsolete rail line, but where did it run?
Doing separated-grade (that extension is mostly underground) in the middle of a dense urban area is going to cost tremendously more per mile than an HSR line whose tracks are mostly outside urban areas.
I am sure you're right, but it is disappointing that this is the case. Rapid Chinese expansion of HSR suggests that it is technically possible to do it much more quickly.
We would be screwed by the border crossing from canada to the us. You'd have to completely do it in canada. There's discussion of this below, but since i now live in idiocracy, I have little hope.
I think it's delusional because a neighborhood spur light rail line in Seattle costs about 1/10 of that (and takes about the same amount of forecasted time).
Uhh, we just approved $54 Billion for Sound Transit 3, which adds 62 miles of rail spanning from Everett to Tacoma, so no, light rail isn't dirt cheap. It is very effective at moving people cheaply though, and is a big economic boon to this city.
Going from Capital Hill to UW in under 5 minutes on the train, versus a 10 to 20 minute drive is amazing!
Seconded! Here in Kansas City we just completed our first downtown light rail. And they are already discussing plans to expand it. It's been such a great new mode of transport for visitors and locals. I think most of us couldn't have been happier with it now that it's done.
I've taken the Amtrak from Vancouver to Seattle and Portland and various stops in between. Excepting the low speeds and infrequent departure times it's such a great service. A HSR train that would fix these problems would be a dream and there would surely be a big tourism boost along the corridor.
One of the benefits of rail would be that you have the ability to have downtown to downtown service and you potentially take a lot of cars off the road. Seattle is dramatically improving its transportation system and it's pretty reasonable to think that in the near future it could be totally viable to travel between Vancouver, Seattle and Portland without a car, leveraging public transit and bike share (oh wait Seattle killed theirs...) to get around.
Another big advantage of the train is that it's pretty simple and easy to take a bike along. Pretty useful if you want to go on a bike touring trip in Washington or Oregon or just dash into Portland for a weekend but have your bike along so that you can move about the city easily.
Vancouver is currently undergoing the a planning process for the Flats industrial neighbourhood, which includes the old central rail station. I was the nerd that went to the transportation meeting and stuck the "keep the door open to HSR" post it note on the ideas board. I was happy to see that there was a mention of the potential for HSR in the area in the draft plan, though I doubt city planners really believe that strongly that it's a potential reality.
I wonder what portion of cross-border travelers make transport decisions based on immigration concerns? I sincerely doubt Jay Inslee's feasibility study will look realistically at the role immigration plays in cross-border travel decisions. I was denied entry into Canada in the past few months, while holding an airline ticket from Chicago to Victoria. My Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA) was not approved by Canadian authorities. This left me with no other option other than to change my air travel to fly to Seattle, rent a car, drive across the border to Vancouver (during a blizzard) and catch the ferry to Victoria (all at great extra cost, but otherwise without incident). I was told by several airline staff on different airlines and by border officials themselves that this was all too common. The Canadian eTA web process is broken (I am still unable to upload simple PDF files to my application), and I can only assume such a Bullet Train would require eTA approval.
I disagree. King county voters just funded a $54 billion, 30+ year light rail and transit development plan last November[0]. I actually think this new rail plan has a great chance of happening.
Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, and surrounding areas have a lot of enthusiasm for new transit. The traffic is getting outrageous, and people are genuinely interested in investing in alternatives to cars.
Heck, I take the light rail back from the airport nearly every time now. Plus, every time I drive to Portland I get trapped in Olympia traffic, and there's literally no highway to Vancouver proper. Fast, reliable rail would be a godsend!
The scope for Sound Transit 3 is too small, primarily due to our Legislature kneecapping Sound Transit's taxing authority, and sub-area equity forcing Sound Transit to not build high ridership lines like what was proposed along the 44's route (which would have been the 2nd highest ridership line in the region, after Ballard to Downtown).
The appetite is definitely there, we can't build or zone our way out of traffic, and short of Trump killing Microsoft and Amazon like he did Boeing recently (with the spate of canceled 777 contracts and all), the city will keep growing.
Because Canada has many (more?) of the same geographical and distance/density issues that make most high-speed rail uninteresting in the US unless you ignore economics.
There is a crossover point in distance where it is going to be quicker and cheaper to fly. Except for (Detroit-)Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal the distances are too great.
I don't know the distances in US/Canada, but I want to mention one thing because this annoys me in virtually every discussion here on HN:
How long the travel takes is not the only metric.
We have flights, trains (with different speeds/comfort) and busses in Germany between the same cities.
And all of those modes are used!
And it's not even a money issue, very often flights are cheaper than trains but still people take the train. :)
Yes, but the distances are really much bigger. And I'm a lover of trains and the gentle rattle of an overnight train.
- Toronto to Winnipeg
-- 2300km via Chicago, Milwaukee; 20h by car non-stop.
-- 2h30 by plane, plus 120 min check-in and TSA buggery
- Munich to Berlin
-- 530km, 6h by ICE train
-- 1h10 by plane, plus 60 min check-in
In Germany we're talking the difference between a pleasant afternoon reading a book and eating pastries, versus the hectic boarding and deplaning from an airport out of town. Consider instead:
- Dortmund to Moscow
-- 2300km, 36h by train (ICE and whatever ancient rolling stock eastern Europe uses).
-- 3h by plane.
One thing you aren't mentioning about trains is they go from city centre to city centre. An airport is often half an hour or more to the city centre. Sometimes is's very awkward and expensive to get from the airport to the city.
I used to live in a little village in the UK. I could walk 200m from my house to the village train station, and from there I could be in the city centre of any city in the UK in a few hours, with the only changes being strolling from one platform to another a couple of times inside a nice train station.
I could have lunch on the train and then work at a big desk with a power socket and WiFi for the rest of the journey. No need for a taxi or bus or anything at either end. I'd be deposited right in the city centre ready for whatever I needed to do. There was almost zero impact on my day compared to being at my home desk. You can't say that about flying.
It says Munich<->Berlin will be around 4h in 2017 thanks to new high speed tracks.
The "vde" is supposed to be a Germany unification traffic project. I can't believe this is only happening after 27 years of East+West :-)
Even on the Detroit-Toronto-Ottawa leg, which should be hugely profitable, Via manages to screw it up. Admittedly my experience is several years old, but I once took the train from Ottawa to London, Ontario. It took over 12 hours which I think was something like 5 hours late. Because all of the passengers to Detroit missed their connection, Via drove them by taxi from London. I asked the porter if this was common. He told me it happened on virtually every run.
I used to take the train everywhere that I could when I lived in Ottawa and the Hamilton-Montreal side was quite a bit better, but still ghastly. If Canada ever gets serious about rail, they need to do something about the rail infrastructure and the Via monopoly. Don't think it will ever happen though.
It has little to do with geography and everything to do with the auto industry. They don't want to allow public transportation as government-sponsored way to reduce the profits of the auto industry.
What active work do the automotive companies do to discourage rail?
The light and high speed rail companies put on a very good dog and pony show to representatives. They shower them with money, explain the economic incentives and all sorts of other items. The government will then actively try to sell it to the tax base. Any person speaking out against it is called as a Luddite or sponsored by the oil industry (although these are contrived, as they are actually representatives of a economic think tank). The head winds for rail is always heavily supported by a directly benefiting industry. So, I am genuinely interested in your source for the automotive statement you made. Also, please do not use l up the unproven "conspiracy" from prior to world war 2.
Usually it comes in the form of telling blue-collar people that any threat to their business model is a threat to their jobs. It seems to be very effective.
It's not so clear cut. The Republicans may be trying to put breaks on the never ending money drain that this project was. FWIW Trump looks to be very pro-High speed rail in general [1] esp as he is going to be pushing through his proposed 1TB infrastructure overhaul.
I would be very surprised if that 1T infrastructure spending bill ever sees the light of day.
Firstly, the US has a massive budget deficit and with upcoming corporate tax cuts the question will be where the money is going to come from. Secondly, the US is approaching full employment at ~5%. Now sure there is significant underemployment but you have to wonder if (a) there is enough people to build out all this infrastructure and (b) if the states even have enough shovel ready projects. Because they sure didn't during the GFC when Obama was looking for an infrastructure stimulus.
The republicans just busted the budget when bush 2 was president, so I expect that to continue. I figure this won't happen because they had the liberal states. But the employment situation is interesting, because we have multiple different worlds in the US. the coastal tech and big city tech economies are mostly great. It's the in between places that trump supports that are doing terrible. Those places need jobs, and there aren't any.
Except job wise, most of those areas have recovered, albeit with service industry jobs replacing industrial, but those jobs as they return to the US are nearly fully automated.
If Trump can stop kicking Boeing and others in the teeth we might even retain those jobs in the industrial sector that have remained thus far. Trump blowing up contracts Boeing has with airlines overseas bodes poorly for that though.
I predict we'll see another bubble since Trump removed most of the financial restrictions put in place by Dodd-Frank, lining us up for another 2007 bubble collapse all over again. Go Trump!
You can blame Republicans for opposing it and blame Democrats for treating it like a gravy train and inflating the price, route, and build time, and cutting the speed. We are ten years into the project, and have nothing to show for it. This is how mega projects like this are run, it's hard to blame people for opposing them. Republicans could have been made to look like fools for opposing it if it was on time and on budget, and had a reasonable route. The original promise was $50 tickets & 220 mph speeds!!
Is there a good source to learn more about this, and especially your polarized view? I have friends into this discussion, but never understood the exact details each side was fussing about.
That whole area is completely geologically unstable. Before we build a bullet train we need to reinforce major buildings in Seattle and prepare Vancouver Island for a tsunami
But Japan has taken significant steps to prepare themselves for an earthquake, no? I'm not as confident about Seattle's preparedness. In five years of living here I can only recall maybe two times we were actively encouraged to review our personal preparedness plans. Any other information on the topic is something I had to find on my own.
In the process of drilling a tunnel over 100' under ground (because the existing elevated road can't withstand another earthquake) several older buildings began to shift at the surface. Downtown Seattle is extremely unstable and I'm not confident that the structures in the city are prepared for the type of quake we are about to face. Japan has had a lot of wake up calls and as far as I know has done a lot more preparation.
Before we spend a few billion dollars on a train maybe we should spend some of that cash on making sure our apartments and offices don't end up in Lake Union or Elliott Bay.
Vancouver islander here - tbh, Vancouver Island is mostly okay too. If you look at the map, you'll see that a huge peninsula shelters the most populous area (Victoria) from tsunami. Most of the smaller towns are on the inside passage. The only places that are in real danger are Tofino, Ucluelet, Port Renfrew, and several small native settlements. It's a shame because those are some of my favorite places on earth, but 90% of Vancouver Island doesn't live there.
(I did the research on this last year after I had a nightmare about tsunamis.)
Protect it. I live on the shores of English Bay and the water typically barely ripples, waves are rare and more than that is practically unheard of. Compare this to the Pacific Ocean storms out on the open.
That's not what a tsunami is though. A tsunami is not a wave in the sense you allude to, it is the whole water level rising in unison. A breakwater does not protect you from a tsunami.
Not sure why you're getting down voted... currently looking at relocating to Seattle and this was the first thing I thought of.
If we're going to build such a train it needs to be engineered to be safe from the faults along the cascadia subduction zone - that may be no small feat.
I'm not sure how the two regions compare but I don't think seismic activity alone is the only factor to consider. Much of the Seattle area is at risk of land slides and although we have fewer noticeable quakes we may still see more severe ones with less frequency.
It depends on the association of the for clause in the text. I read it as reinforcing buildings in Seattle (and preparing Vancouver island) for a tsunami. They didn't say anything about earthquakes.
This would be so great, but the biggest impediment to transport between Seattle and Vancouver is the border. Both sides treat incoming passengers in an appalling manner.
You would expect that the US would have costs that align more with Germany, UK, France, or Switzerland, wouldn't you? And yet, those countries' costs look far more like China's than they do the US. The US is the outlier here, not China.
Currently for VAN-SEA train they inspect your passport before at the train station before you board. It also stops at the border but they just walk through the train.
Of course they could hold you then but for the most part you would be denied entry on the train without being detained.
Honestly, I would prefer that Seattle get their own transportation system in order for commuters. Support and focus on a "bullet train" to Vancouver is a rather moot point, especially at the price point.
I kept reading the tweets because I was sure it was a joke. That is bizarre! I wonder how big their corpus of questions is? Are they going to save all the answers to do deep learning on? INS CAPTCHA!
If only I had the balls to put down Gerbil Rancher for profession.
One of the problems with the American rail debate is you have people who like rail and people who like low taxes. The two don't overlap. Thus, the former sees any opportunity to lay rail as an opportunity to hose taxpayers.
"China’s high speed rail with a maximum speed of 350 km/h has a typical infrastructure unit cost of about $17-21m per km, with a high ratio of viaducts and tunnels, as compared with $ 25-39 [million U.S. dollars] per km in Europe and as high as $ 56 [million U.S. dollars] per km currently estimated in California" [1]. The Seattle/Washington per-mile costs above translate to $78 to $625 million dollars per kilometre.
[1] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/07/10/co... 2014