There is not only lower density, but city itself are very low density, and inner cities are not very attractive except SF, NYC Washington, so for people living in the suburbs it's difficult to go in a train station in downtown.

No, travelling downtown to downtown by rail is better than by air, because you just get to the station, get on the train, read your paper or your book, and then you arrive and you are there.

As opposed to having to arrive anywhere from an hour to three hours early, go through a lot of BS to get on the plane, sit around waiting until they finally get moving, feel crammed in like a sardine (or pilchard, as the case may be), arrive at the airport and sit around waiting until they will let you off, then go through more BS at the airport, then have to get transport to someplace else.

If I didn't have to cross an ocean to get between England and "back home", I don't think I'd ever fly again. It used to be tolerable, but not anymore.

Anonymous says for people in suburbs, downtown train travel is not attractive. Not true if your suburb is on the opposite side of the city from the airport. And not true if the train line runs through, and has a stop in, your suburb.

More fundamentally, good downtown train service would be one of many factors that would help make living quality in dense cities competitive with suburban living. The economic, social and environmental benefits of reducing suburbanization would be considerable.

"There is not only lower density, but city itself are very low density, and inner cities are not very attractive except SF, NYC Washington, so for people living in the suburbs it's difficult to go in a train station in downtown."

It burns!

I suppose Anonymous has never been to Boston, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, or Portland. And those are just the large cities with appealing downtowns that *I've* been to.

Current population distribution and transportation usage are partly a result of the decision made during the Eisenhower administration to use interstate highways instead of rail for military transport. It was assumed that inner cities with their rail hubs would be wiped out by nuclear bombs, so it was deemed necessary to build interstates with beltways around the big cities. Priorities are somewhat different now and different federal policies could change the nature of inner cities. All transportation is subsidized by government, and one of the differences between the U.S. and the other countries is that their governments stuck with rail.

Atrios at Eschaton often discusses these issues.

You have it exactly right Avendon. It takes longer to fly from Indianapolis to Chicago then it takes to drive despite being in the air only 40ish minutes. As you point out, airports aren't conveniently located near the downtowns as they are both noisy and take up a lot of space. Trains already go through the heart of most major cities.

Rail makes sense in corridors like Milwaukee-Chicago-Detroit where auto traffic density is very heavy and the weather can be a factor in the winter as well.

Electric interurban railways were both common and profitable in the US a hundred years ago, when urban areas were less dense than now. They typically ran 60 - 70 mph in open areas.

Density isn't the problem; desire is the problem.

"Robert Samuelson doesn't like trains. He told us that this morning in his column. He didn't tell us anything else."

Not technically true. What Samuelson told us is he doesn't like taxes. This is why we can't have nice things.

Dan F.: "As you point out, airports aren't conveniently located near the downtowns as they are both noisy and take up a lot of space."

Voila: http://manhattanairport.org/
Build more roads. Also.

Voila: http://manhattanairport.org/

That is hilarious. I hope Bloomberg runs on that platform.

Jamey: That is either the most elaborate hoax web site since manbeef.com or the biggest pile of stupid this side of Newsmax.com.

Two

1) An airport in the northeast with no east-west runway? Useless.

2) Wouldn't you love to be the pilot of a 747 on approach from the south? Or better yet, taking off into that row of man-made mountains with a full load?

The anti-transit crowd used the low density excuse to claim that light rail wouldn't work in Houston. Tell that to the nearly 40,000 people who ride it every day, giving the Metro Rail the second highest utilization per mile of any mass transit system in the country.

High-speed rail is not succesful in Japan, that's a myth, except as a succesful transfer of massive government bucks to construction companies. It is simply way more expensive than flying, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

High-speed rail is a huge misallocation of transport funding by the Obama administration, when INTRA-urban train and subway travel needs far more money (cutting way down on commuter car travel is related to one of the major problems of our time, global warming), while 'high-speed' inter-urban travel is simply not a big deal except to a tiny slice of the public, for whom it will increase convenience. After all, we already have 50-80 mph inter-urban train travel on the major east coast corridor, which is relatively fine.

The whole point of Samuelson column was to criticize the need for high speed trains to decrease traffic congestion. His argument wasn't against train. At the end of his column, he even wrote that the trade-off of more spending on high-speed trains will be less spending for mass transit(Meaning less spending for trains used by the DC metro system for example).

You are disingenous Mr Baker.

The fact that people like Samuelson have jobs at "premier" newspapers is why students at
Bejing University regard the full faith and credit of the United States as a joke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2AEiYEei3o&feature=related

The Chinese have every reason to laugh. The US private sector hasn't netted one single job in nearly 10 years. A country 'dedicated' to business can't even employ one person. That is laughable.

Fair enough. Now will you pick apart Krugman's fact-free rant? I've ridden a lot of trains as a resident of Tokyo, Paris, London, and NYC, so I have a few thoughts--but without knowing more of the economics (hard numbers), they are of limited value. Maybe if someone was paying me for my opinion twice a week, I'd overlook my lack of knowledge and pull something out of my butt like Samuelson and Krugman do twice a week.

Please DO NOT overlook your lack of knowledge. It's your primary characteristic. Well, that and pulling something out of your butt. As the saying goes, opinions are like a**holes: everyone has one, and most of them stink.

Cute how you are positing your stinky opinion as something that supposedly negates the work of someone like Krugman. Let me know when you win the Nobel Prize for Stink.

@ David in NYC: Robert Samuelson is not Paul Samuelson ... he is not the Nobel-Prize winning economist.

And your criticism applies with greater force to Robbie Samuelson, who is writing about something on which he quite clearly knows very little, cobbling together arguments that do not hold water when put under examination.

We don't necessarily need high speed trains but we do need reliable trains doing maybe like 75 mph. We should start with that and build from there.

I agree completely with Avedon. We tend to think, for instance, that it only takes an hour for me to fly from San Diego to San Francisco, but in reality it's at least four or five times that, by the time I drive to the airport, park the car, get through security, get on the plane, and disembark in SF. That's if I already have my ticket and am not checking bags! A fast train would, simply, be AT LEAST as fast. And odds are I could then jump right on BART without even needing a rental car.

>The density for the United States as a whole would be relevant

The country isn't dense, just its columnists.

Maybe Samuelson is a car guy. In his recent book , The Great Inflation , he argues that the Energy Crisis and oil embargo had little to do with the onslaught of inflation which plagued the country during the 70's.

This kind of twisted, Robert Moses type logic got us into the energy crisis in the first (and second and third place). I live in New Jersey and can tell you the traffic relief that an updated rail system would bring would be unbelievable. Samuelson is an idiot who is probably chauffered from one stop to another. It boggles my mind to hear that France has designed a train which does 350 miles an hour and doesn't run on fossil fuel while a few years ago when I was working in Jersey City I road in railroad cars that i know I was riding in college. This nation has a rail system which, as James Howard Kunstler said, Bulgarai would be ashamed of.

To Chris and several others: the huge increase by the Obama administration in funding is for high-speed inter-city rail, not commuter rail. It's precisely not funding that will relieve urban congestion. It will greatly convenience those traveling from Indianapolis to Chicago, perhaps, but is _that_ and similar the crux of our nation's transportation problem, or our world's global warming problem?

Oops, previous is from me, fairleft.

There's a saying among private pilots: "With time to spare you can go by air." In trips of less than 500 miles, this applies in almost all cases except to light planes in small airports in hilly/mountainous territories where straight line (air) distances are much shorter than twisty (highway) distances.

Of all the places in the world I have flown airlines, Chicago to Detroit was by far the worst. I did take the Blue Line rapid transit from my home to O'Hare, but Detroit Metro is so far from the downtown that the cab fare was almost as much as the air fare.

Chicago to Milwaukee? Rail is already cheaper and quicker than air.

Finally, Anonymous clearly has never lived in or around Chicago. I lived 25 years in a north suburb and now 15 years right downtown. Suburban train service is wonderful -- took it to work every day, but living right in the city is even better.

The population densities of much of the United States are very comparable to the regions in Europe through which high speed rails travel.

Regional densities aren't much more relevant than national ones. What matters is the population sizes and densities of the metro areas for which HSR service is proposed. Outside the northeast corridor, I doubt any proposed HSR route in the US has favorable densities. Our metro areas are just too spread out. There aren't enough people living and working close to downtown, where the trains stations are located, to make HSR viable.

I'm not entirely sure he doesn't have a point regarding the issue of density.

Mind you, I'm talking off the cuff, but (going on the presumption that dense population *does* favor high speed public transport) it may be that there is a feature of not only dense population, but dense population throughout the route.

What I'm picturing in my head is this - Although Japan does not match the population density of New Jersey, the population of Japan is distributed everywhere they might wish to travel - so you have as many people going from a to b as from b to c and from c to a - the routing is equally efficient everywhere.

In New Jersey, although there may well be higher density, the person from New Jersey may well be traveling to Philadelphia or some other location, but there are not going to be *as many* people going the other way, introducing inefficiency into the system.

Which makes trains less useful.
Which means he can't get *everywhere* by train.
Which means he still needs a car.
Which means he takes the car to New York City even though a train might be more comfortable.
Which introduces the inefficiency even into the train route that would seemingly be more efficient.

Is that completely inept, or might that be a factor?

Jonnan

Anonymous (Samuelson?)seems to disregard the contingency that better local rail systems would increase the viability of inter-city rail.

I found Anon's initial claim -- that urban areas have train stations in blighted areas -- to be quite suspect. This anti-urban or anti-minority claim is both specious and offensive.

High-speed rail, like smart grids, really is a horrible waste of money. It would make a lot more sense to go for the low-hanging fruit: fix the cheapest bottlenecks in conventional rail that would result in the largest expansions of overall capacity at the lowest prices. A few hundred billion $$ worth of such fixes would make it possible to move almost all truck-borne cargo to freight trains. That's a lot more important than business travel for yuppies (especially when most of it could be avoided by telecommuting and teleconferencing anyway).

It would be interesting if we could first determine which potential HSR line in the US would be the most needed and beneficial through some form of consensus. Let's say 90+% of a large enough pool of planning "experts" said YES to a given line. Start building it, then go for the 2nd most needed and beneficial ...

It would very helpful if the Obama Administration actually had a fully fleshed-out policy not only for HSR, but coordination between HSR and all other forms of ground transportation, including automobiles, walking and bicycling. See the document I co-wrote, IIRA Policy Brief: Connecting the Spots: Twenty-First Century Electric Interurban Railways to Meet Strategic Transportation Goals, located at http://www.iira.org/ in the "News" column.

It's sort of a cart before the horse argument. Without mass transit we're forced to travel by car which lowers density and pushes housing (and businesses, jobs, stores, anything of interest) further and further away to make room for more cars, which requires more roads, and more driving, and more cars.

While building more roads brings more cars and lower density, building rail would increase density. Done right it IS a case of "if you build it, they will come (and live here)".

The alternative is more roads which we already know will lower density. But I suppose it's the Devil we know. How scary if trains were actually successful

@Urbanfundamentalist

"building more roads brings more cars and lower density, building rail would increase density ... "if you build it, they will come (and live here)".

This is true, I've witnessed it firsthand when I lived in the Chicago area.

While repeating comments may not be usefull... I thought the other strong point here is that one has to compare the distances between dense hubs -- just having hubs with similar population density is not sufficient.

Additionally, we need to consider whether we have other reasons that favor keeping the cars/roads combination. Does our natural land make it better to transport goods by truck? If so, we may need to keep the roads anyway, in which case the marginal environmental (and traffic) cost of using cars for intercity traffic may be better than building rail.

BUT, Dean's correct that the article he points at does make fallacious arguments.

In Dallas when we had street cars throughout the city and interurbans in the region we actually had a higher population density then than now.

I am a big proponent of streetcars especially for the newer cites in the West. (The East has much better mass transit than we do already)

When an appraiser finds the highest and best use for a lot to be parking, we might reconsider mass transit.

To the fellow who suggested that rail could replace most of our trucking, I think you are not thinking clearly. Trucks bring goods from rail depots into various stores and such throughout the city.

Many industrial areas are well served with rail lines, though retail spaces not so much. No one has ever proposed replacing this last critical stage of the distribution process with rail.

Some of the new train stations will be at airports, such as the one recently opened at Billy Mitchell Field in Milwaukee for the new train link with Chicago.

From what I understand, in the USA mass transit uses more fuel per passenger mile than our current fleet of cars uses. High speed rail is especially bad.

Floccina:

You need to stop listening to uninformed pundits & commentators, and begin doing your own research. Stop letting your fear of taxes spew forth like a teabagger with a gun. ;)

Public transportation reduces US gasoline consumption by 1.4
billion gallons each year.

http://www.apta.com/research/info/online/documents/apta_public_transportation_fuel_savings_final_010807.pdf

@Anonymous
The relevant stuff starts on page 285.
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2008/pdf/entire.pdf

I am an American Ex-pat living in Munich - the interplay between high speed rail, commuter rail, light rail, and busses works perfectly here as do many other systems such as coupled co-gernative power - long distance heat systems.

And that is why Munich uses only 40 % fossil per capita fuel consumption. It is also why Germany companies are contracted to build high speed rail systems all over the world, such as the new
Sapsan high speed train between St. Petersburg and Moscow. (russia is not a densely populated coutnry but uses high speed rail where necessary to cut consumption and move people quickly, safely and effectively. The sapsan took a few billion in r & d because it runs with 300 kmh wind chill factors at temepratures down to - 50 celsuius. Siemens built it in conjunction with Russian rail. German rail and Siemens also have plans for brining excellent rail to the U.S.

Fact: one mile long freight train hauls as much freight as column of trucks ten miles long. Rail provides jobs and railroad people pay taxes. Goodness, the U.S. used to have the greated rail and light rail sysem on earth.
If the U.S. would rebuild rial it could cut consumption by 30 - 35 % and save on its disasterous balance of trade deficits.

Germany has good rail. Gemany makes trains. Germany sells them like it sells its excellent automobiles. I prefer public transport and rail when I can use it. As much as I love my Audi - ìts cheaper to use public transport and rail. Who is kidding whom. Rail part of Amrica`s great past and it will again become a part of its great future.

All the Best

Kent Doering

Jonnan: that's hilarious your argument that people will only go from New Jersey to Philadelphia but not want to come back.

I'm afraid, judging from the debates about transit, energy policy, health care etc. that the United States is intellectually and culturally incapable of reform.

My comment.

Floccina:

Boy do you look stupid, you didn't even read your own post did you?

Page 285 shows transit motor buses are 10% better than passenger cars, and 30% better than SUVs. Amtrak is 100% better than SUVs.

The BTUs consumed means lower is better - and public transportation is better both rail and bus than individual cars.

No wonder you conservatives are so impossible to debate with, you seem to be completely illiterate on every subject you pundit on.

You did give me a good laugh though! Better luck next time loser! LOL! ;)

Anonymous I posted the link just wanted to get the information out. Yes I was off in my original post but the case is not as clear as you make it out to be. 10% or 30% over the average car for the average bus/rail is not much of an argument for expansion. The expanded capacity would tend to be less used while new cars get better millage. Also the car on average takes one closer to the final destination and perhaps in a more direct route.

Here is a guy who did some charts based on that data:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

Of course if people use more mass transit where it is already available that will reduce fuel consumption.

Boy do you look stupid, you didn't even read your own post did you?

Stupid is not the same as being mistaken and my source may have been bad but there is some nuance and so they still may be correct. You on the other hand look like the kind of person who calls others stupid, a bully maybe.

The efficiency of mass transit depends mainly on ridership. An empty bus or train is less efficient than even the most disgusting SUV.

The point of Templeton's statistics is that the US transit system is inefficient because it is underused and outdated. It has been neglected for many decades in favor of the car. This has been a deliberate political decision and it will take a deliberate political decision to reverse the trend.
One sad irony is that in the last couple years, when demand for transit soared and ridership exploded due to the rise in gas prices, some transit systems actually had to cut services and lay off drivers because they had no money to offer the services people need. Under these circumstances, transit has no chance to be attractive and efficient.

Let me add a couple of more things in my first post I used:

"From what I understand"

1. So as to show that i was not sure.
2. What I was saying was based on a report of study that I think I saw on Yahoo so it was no from a necessarily right wing source.

Anonymous wrote this stuff:

Boy do you look stupid, you didn't even read your own post did you?

You did give me a good laugh though! Better luck next time loser! LOL! ;)

Mass transit need more money

Mass transit need to be on top road should not any money at all

"At the end of his column, he even wrote that the trade-off of more spending on high-speed trains will be less spending for mass transit"

But that's stupid and wrong. We spend ten times as much on roads as on all forms of rail transportation combined, so just take the HSR money from the god-damned SUPERHIGHWAY budget and the mass transit money from the LOCAL ROAD budget.

Or, use some of the $500 billion/year we're wasting on the military.

The stupid, it burns....