[lbo-talk] Fun With Technology

Jordan Hayes jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com
Sat Apr 7 16:12:34 PDT 2007


Gar writes:


> Economics are different. When you are not living your passengers into
> the stratosphere the inch or two they save making airline seats
> uncomfortable won't be as worthwhile.

Apparently not true for Eurostar (the Channel-Tunnel TGV-style train) where seat pitch is about 33" just like your standard 737.

http://www.eurostar.com/UK/uk/leisure/travel_information/on_board/seating_plan.jsp

Of course BizyClass is better: 37", a little shy of the standard 38" on a domestic US 2-cabin first class flight.


> In short for the same money, rail will always
> be able to afford more room.

Ah, but will they give it to you?


> Something like this can apply to security too. The great fear with
> airplanes is that you can not only kill the passengers or people
> waiting in a station, but people in the building you fly the plane
> into. With train the last does not apply.

See my earlier posting about how Eurostar has airline-style security.


> Lastly Jordan argued that trains can never substitute for plane
> because a train can only go where the tracks go. But large planes,
> though they can take many routes still have to start in an airport,
> and end in an airport.

Which at last count is on the order of 1000 times more flexible than a train; that's the approximate number of paved runways in the US that are at least LGA-sized which can handle most of the commercial airliners out there.

FWIW, I didn't say never; I said not for longer trips. Then I went on to list several promissing routes, though there aren't many in the US. But this business about 1000+ miles trips is just pure fantasy. It's extrapolation-to-the-large and actually kind of funny. Trains just don't scale that way; the record set last week shows how close to some of the limits they are: that stunt cost nearly $30M including needing to _restring 30 miles of catenary_ ... and it took nearly 17 years to break the previous record by only 40mph.


> A high speed rail network that covered every major U.S. airport would
> end up with about the miles of track as our current freight network.

And: it would be incredibly expensive, given that high-speed rail is about 15-18x more expensive, mile-per-mile, than roadway. And that's for the routes that have been built so far, clearly the easy ones. France now (after 40 years) has about 2000km of high-speed rail, Germany about 1000km. A single SF-NYC line would be longer than both of those country's entire networks put together (about 4000km). At about $11M/km (the cost of the line used in last week's record), that's $50B -- IF you could possibly build it for that price, which I'm sure you can't: the ~600mi California project is estimated (before overruns, which were 80% on the London-Paris route) at $40B. So let's call this one route $200B. The Rocky Mountains are _way_ more challenging than the English Channel.

Here's a sketch of something much less grand than your "every major airport" ...

Mileage Route

677 SEA-PDX-SFO

440 SAN-LAX-SFO

2520 SFO-RNO-SLC-DEN-MCI-STL-IND-CMH-WAS

822 LAX-LAS-DEN

2550 LAX-PHX-DFW-ATL-MCO-MIA

930 BOS-NYC-PHL-WAS-CLT-ATL

1350 MSP-CHI-STL-MEM-HOU

776 CHI-DTW-CLE-NYC

Let's say you can go as-the-crow-flies and there are no mountains to go around, etc. There's 10,000 miles and we hit only 29 major airports (most of the current hubs). The US Interstate Highway System is about 4x larger, of course, and you can just imagine all the places you can't get to on the Interstates (Fresno, CA; Ithaca, NY; Atlantic City, NJ; Lancaster, PA -- all places you can fly to). Don't forget that this $11M/km doesn't include things like difficult tunnels -- the Channel Tunnel is ~30 miles long and cost $15B. Speeds are of course limited to about 100mph in the tunnel ...

(I'm not sure where you get your numbers from, but I see ~140k miles of freight rail in the US)


> If you get the general cost per mile
> of track for high speed rail down to something comparable to heavy
> rail for freight the rest is doable if we have the will.

I think we're back to talking about my pony :-)


> And to people who pointed out that rail a lot slower than 300 mph
> can substitute for short plane trips - absolutely. 150 mph light rail
> can be built fairly inexpensively; it could be substitute for trips of
> 400 or 500 miles that commuter planes make at 300 mph..

This is just pure fantasy. First of all, 400-500 miles is a lot further than the proposed ~$40B California HSR project, and no one is talking about anything but heavy rail. Where are these cheap 150mph light rail projects you're talking about? You're just making this stuff up. It's not even on the drawing board.


> Again, it is not necessarily quite as fast as a commuter plane, but
> short enough that the difference is tolerable. (Of course commuter
> planes don't average 600 mph - more like 400 ).

Just for fun, let's look at all the places you can go that are ~400 miles from, say San Francisco. Hell, let's stick to 250 miles, which is plus or minus the entire state. There's commercial air service to ~24 cities with a total of about 35 city pairs. You're going to run light rail to all these places, for what, 150 passengers per day to Redding, Chico, and Visalia?

It's just absurd: it doesn't scale, your numbers are off in many cases by a factor of 3-5 ...

/jordan



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