[lbo-talk] billions for high-speed rail!

Jordan Hayes jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com
Tue Feb 17 23:11:17 PST 2009


Max writes:


> Some of this is for Amtrak and may succeed in raising its average
> speed above a puny 79 mph.

That seems unlikely, since going faster than 150mph at this point requires dedicated trackage. Acela is basically tapped out speed-wise without a huge investment in trackage; there's no incremental upgrade path.


> Not clear how much pump priming would work, since the value of a
> system lies much in its network nature, being able to get from San
> Diego to SFO/Sacramento. A segment doesn't do much in that way,
> unless it's a pretty big segment.

I think it's the opposite: the long segments are so expensive and take so long that you can't use them to convince anyone of anything. San Diego -> SF (500+ miles?) is about 85% of the whole plan and includes 3 incredibly difficult engineering feats: getting into LA, getting out of LA, and getting into SF; I'd rather see them do SF-Sacramento -- or better, BART/Richmond -> Sacramento (72 miles). It presently takes 1:25 ... if you could do it in half an hour, that would be a great accomplishment and would likely get a lot of people out of their cars.
>From there to downtown SF is 35 minutes; right now it's 1:38 to
Emeryville, a 2 minute connection to a bus across the bridge, and a total of 2:10 -- half that would be a big difference and make the point, too.


> No system is going to happen without substantial input from state govs
> and the private sector. The Feds are not going to bear the whole risk
> of a complete system.

Then Obama should keep his little token $8B to himself, because it's just not going to happen at the state level.

/jordan



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