The answer is high-speed rail. This is a pretty slick presentation. It almost makes me wish we didn't cancel the Texas Triangle project.
Californians could solve global warming, make California a world leader again, create 450,000 jobs and eliminate sprawl. High speed rail is Sierra Club ApprovedTM, and it costs less than half the price of staying up to date with the freeways and airports. Visualize Fresno to downtown LA in 90 minutes! This is sure to be a high-volume route.
Arnie should increase taxes to pay for this. You Californians who whine about taxes, quit being selfish. Pay your fair share, build high speed rail, save the world.
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*beep* *beep* Sorry Lou, that was my cynical radar going off. Actually it's another atempt for the mass transit people to get white and middle class people to use mass transportation. I wish I could find the link but there was something like a 2 or 3k per year difference between the incomes of white people that ride buses and black and hispanic people. The only times that you see a real concentration of white people and people that are in the middle class and above is on trains.
The one thing I miss about living in NYC is the subway. You'd see rich and poor alike riding the subway and for (then) 1.25 you could go literally anywhere in NY. It rocked. However, you'd never catch most New Yorkers riding the buses. The buses were viewed the same way they are everywhere else. I only ever visited Chicago but I bet the feeling is the same about the L.
Funny, but when I lived in Houston proper, I used to ride the bus all over. I hate driving my car and could always toss my bike on the front rack (much to the angry looks of the people on the bus already). But I pretty much stuck out when riding a normal non-commuter route when I was wearing a suit and riding Metro.
I'm trying to goad Rob. He's a big fan of rail.
It worked. Remember, I've been tangentially involve with California High Speed Rail for more than 20 years. It keeps getting refined but for some reason the proponents just don't get it. HSR in California is a waste of limited resources. It is that simple. Yes, HSR will cost lass than half the 90 billion in needed infrastructure updates for roads and air in the entire state. What that doesn't tell you is that it does the work of a single highway lane. I'll have to put up my solution again on my site later today "Pocket Airports."
BTW, I am a big fan of rail. It is nearly untouchable in the transport of bulk time insensitive cargo like coal or chemicals or lumber or grains or machinery even autos. It is helaciously inefficient at time sensitive, delicate, high value objects like people. Better to ship gravel FedEx Air than people by rail.
When it comes to passenger rail I think the U.S. (and California in particular) has totally f-ed itself by banking entirely on airlines and cars. If we had upgraded and improved the infrastructure in place rather than eliminated it over the past few decades, HSR wouldn't cost so f-ing much. Instead, as with everything else the U.S. waits until the SHTF.
Like the former Soviet Union this country is imploding thanks to greed, lobbyists and laziness.
Actually Akubi is somewhat right. The US, since we have what Europe doesn't have like space, not being blown to bits every 50 years or so, space, cheap land (relatively), space, oh, and more space. Rail except for a tiny number of places in the US doesn't make sense since we don't like packed like sardines ala Europe. If we did, then it would make sense.
But if people decided they don't like big dogs, lawns, mobility, etc like we have now in the suburban format we live in, then we'll build and use rail.
Understand HSR in Europe loses money faster than Casey can default and costs more too.
Hear, hear, Dawg! When I lived in Munich, there was a great rail system as well as of course the high population density to support it. Yet the MVV lost *unbelievable *amounts of money in providing the service -- nothing our horrendous taxes couldn't cover, of course.
Myself, though, I kinda liked the trains, but that's because I used the train a whole lot in the evenings and weekends, knowing my tickets were well-subsidised by mine and other people's taxes.
Actually, it was faster than I thought to dig up the info, and it's better than I thought:
The MVV (Muenchner Verkehrs Verein) subsidy dropped from 1.27 Euros per passenger kilometer in 1996 to 1.00 Euros per in 2004.
That's only about $2.50 per passenger mile. Yes, maybe it would be cheaper to give everyone free taxi rides, but then what would that do to traffic congestion?
Actually, HSR makes an operating profit pretty much everywhere. Investment costs for the tracks are subsidized, but then, so are roads and airports. I don't see what the big difference is.
Actually try to find a profitable urban bus line. Some of the commuter lines are profitable but not intra-city. Much like even most airlines today, they have trouble getting an operating profit unless there are massive subsidies of some kind. Look at Amtrack.
I remember Reason a why ago postulated that it may actually be cheaper for municipalities to not collect money because of how little money they actually make and the costs of handling, storing, shipping the money etc. Actually, look how aggresively Metro is towards moving people to the passes. Same is true for the toll road and EZTag.
I'd like to see a intra-city bus system like they have in Mexico here in the U.S.
Doown there, you can get a bus that goes direct from major city to major city (e.g. Guad to Mexico City).
Instead of going through every one-horse town along the way (as does Greyhound)
And Europe so heavily subsidizes mass transit I doubt you could ever unravel whether or not passenger rail service is profitable.
NoVa, it's funny you should mention Munich. I've been there twice. Every time I wondered how the hell they were affording the U Bahn. Especially from the airport. There were literally less than 10 people at most on the trains... and the trains were abject pooheaps to boot. It's like they bought rolling stock from New York City circa 1960 and sandblasted off the graffiti. The local intercity trains are not much better. We traveled from Bamberg to Nuremberg on these two level trains, and only about 20% (at most) of the hard plastic seats were filled at any given time, even during commute times.
Just like here, most everyone drives to work, albeit in smaller cars.
It's actually the S-Bahn that you take from the airport. :-) U-Bahn is "Unter-something Bahn", mostly inside Munich proper; S-Bahn is the (mostly) surface, Schnell-something that extends out to the far suburbs.
But yes, some of those lines are little-used much of the time with empty trains. On the other hand, it was standing-room only many times peak when I was riding it; it really depends on the route you're taking, and the network needs to run frequent trains even at low-load times to encourage people to rely on the reliability of getting places via train.
A quick solution, one might say, is to cut the routes that are near-empty, but all that does is remove those people from the low-capacity feeder lines, as well as (if you cut frequencies) make other customers prefer a car instead of a longer wait for a train.
Deutsche Bahn did such a "reorg" more than 20 years ago (30?), and that just drove more and more people to cars. And once people have cars stuck in their driveways, with insurance and payments being a fixed cost per month, even with $8 gasoline the marginal mileage cost is low enough that they use it for trips that they'd otherwise take on public transport.
> trains were abject pooheaps to boot.
Oh my. It's been some years since I was there last and took the S/U-Bahn (most of my friends are way out of Munich, so we often use DB or drive). Sad to see it get that way. But I could even see in the 1990's how the clean-freak, disciplined German mentality was fading, and so it's no surprise to know that it's all going downhill.
> The local intercity trains are not much better.
Many of those cars were new when I was there, and a pleasure to ride in. Sigh. Or maybe it's just that since I did over 90% of my commuting and shopping by mountain bike, even a hard seat in a dirty train was a pleasure! :-)
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