Seeking Alpha comments on why railroads will make us richer:
"Along the northeastern corridor, there are cities that made the jump from industrial to post-industrial economy fairly successfully, namely, those that had developed knowledge-intensive industries like finance or technology even as industry was beginning to leave center cities. In between these successful cities are interspersed others that were heavily reliant on industry, and which didn't fare nearly as well over the past half century (Baltimore is the best example).
"But where the industrial core in the Midwest has seemingly entered an irreversible decline, rotting industrial hubs along the northeast corridor hit a bottom and began to recover over the past decade. Baltimore continues to lose people, but its economy is fairly stable, and much of the city has seen significant redevelopment.
"The reason for the turnaround is proximity to thriving markets. The ability to take advantage of certain aspects of the Washington metropolitan market has strengthened Baltimore. Similarly, New York has generated economic opportunity for much of the northeastern corridor, touching off redevelopment in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. One of the chief lessons of economic geography is that a good way to get rich is to be near other rich places; remoteness is costly. If we could shift all the cities in the Midwest closer to each other, and then pick them up and move then nearer to the northeastern corridor, we would go a long way toward restoring the economic viability of many Midwestern cities.
"We can't literally do that, but we can effectively accomplish something similar by improving physical links within the Midwest and between it and other regions. We could decongest highways and airports with congestion charges, for instance, and plow the proceeds into high-speed passenger and freight rail connections among Midwestern cities and between the Midwest and the northeastern corridor (as well as healthy Canadian metropoles. Richard Florida makes the case here).
Absolutely. Amtrak and its Acela have played important roles in the economic transformation not just of Baltimore but of Philadelphia and, I would argue, Washington, D.C. Not to be overly controversial to my Beltway-area friends and colleagues, but there's no getting around the fact that better rail connections have (at least in part) enabled the region's resurgence as in effect a "suburb" of NYC. A whole raft of companies that might have located in the NYC region have been able to locate in greater Washington, D.C. instead, taking advantage of its talent pool, relative lower housing costs, and quality of life. There has been a veritable mass migration of journalistic talent to the region. And my own figures on industry and occupational location show a surge not just in media jobs generally but in broadcasting - specifically, the kinds of jobs which were once more highly clustered in and around NYC. And, of course, the effect of the Metro system on redevelopment in the city and in Arlington is well understood.
So, transportation infrastructure plays a big role in economic
development by opening up new spaces and by allowing for the
redevelopment of old spaces in more intensive ways. There's not many
transport technologies that promise to do that today for mega-regions
straddling major cities except high-speed rail. High-speed rail is a
technology that "fits" the geographic scale of mega-regions and can help spur more intensive
development of them.
The point about the industrial Midwest and Canada is spot on. Momentum is building in Canada for a high-speed rail link from say Windsor (just above Detroit) through Toronto over to Ottawa and onto Montreal and Quebec City. This would be a way of gluing together Canada's largest mega-region and spurring in-fill development along its corridors. With greater Toronto growing and immigrants continuing to flood in, it would stretch out the development frontier, while building size and scale across the entire corridor over time.
There are near constant calls to "do something" for the great
industrial Midwest that "built America." High-speed rail is a much
better way to go than any auto or other bailout. High-speed rail holds
the potential to link declining cities along the Great Lakes corridor
and tie them into the more vibrant economies of Chicago and even Toronto. Baltimore has bounced back in part because of its links to
and cost advantage over D.C.; The same can be said of Philadelphia and
NYC, or Providence and Boston.
Of course high-speed rail will not magically save declining places. The greater Detroit region for example needs to shift its economic base away from autos and toward the research
and technology capabilities of area universities (like the
University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor and Michigan State in not-too-far-away Lansing); and by leveraging the commercial capabilities
of its world-class design and popular music industries: (How to
stem the flow of top commercial talent like Jack White to Nashville?)
But it can also be repositioned as a suburb of sorts for Chicago and
potentially even Toronto. (My wife, who is from greater Detroit, and I
make the drive regularly in under four hours). The Toronto to Windsor
link may be the key here; Windsor is across the river from downtown
Detroit and can be easily connected via subway.
Milwaukee-Chicago is a
no-brainer. Pittsburgh and Cleveland can be tied in too. Perhaps, over
time, Pittsburgh could even be connected to greater Washington, D.C. (When I
lived in Pittsburgh I made the drive to D.C. in roughly four hours). High-speed rail would make this quite manageable especially in jobs that are flexible and require only intermittent commutes.
Mega-region hubs are becoming more economically central to our spiky
world. There's no getting around this. Chicago has in effect sucked up
scads of economic functions that used to be done by other second- and
third-tier Midwest cities. On the east coast, Baltimore and
Philadelphia and, yes, Washington, D.C. have prospered because of transit
connections, including relatively fast rail, which has allowed them to
grow by hiving off pieces of economic activity attracted into the world city orbit of New York.
What we are seeing is the further deepening of the spatial division of labor: Suburbia is being stretched in a process of ever more intensive and expansive geographic development.
There's a lesson there for the industrial Midwest and for other regions of the country, North America, and the world. Those places that positon themselves for this new era of spiky, geographic growth and which have the infrastructure that connects them to major centers will prosper, while those that do not will likely fall behind even further.
Richard Florida
$8 billion is a start, but when you have columnists starting to question high-speed rail with the question "How much would you pay to get to Milwaukee 10 minutes faster?" (Chicago Tribune op-ed -- and granted, it was a fairly inane column), I think there are still too many hurdles to overcome before the next outlay of federal funding.
I have no idea if this has been done yet, but I think it would be a good exercise to project actual benefits of the Chicago-Milwaukee, Chicago-Madison, Chicago-Minneapolis and other corridors based on what has happened in Europe. Even though I support the idea, it's hard for even me to imagine how 3 hours to Minneapolis-St. Paul versus 7 hours by car would create a thriving market where one didn't exist before.
It is worth noting that all the vitality and economic benefit that has accrued in the Boston to Washington corridor has done so because it had RAIL, not high-speed rail. And the 4 major metropolitan areas on that corridor, Boston, NY, Phil, and DC all had extensive and well established regional and commuter rail and public transit systems. This network is what allowed the free flow and easy distribution of resources across a mega-region of 50M people. None of this had to do with knocking 45 minutes off the NY-DC train trip.
While HSR may serve to connect far-flung points in the midwest, without all the other pieces of the public mobility network (which I argue should come FIRST) you'll only have white elephant projects connecting isolated downtown islands to each other.
The stimulus funds will barely pay for a few feasibility studies before the economic crisis abates and people get back in their cars and forget about pipe-dream HSR projects. The money would have paid for a lot more local and regional transit that would provide immediate and tangible benefit.
But this is America - why do something sensible and prudent today when you can just keep dreaming about hitting the lottery tomorrow?
What high-speed rail, as distinct from just trains, does is save time. It is a potentially worthwhile time saver over distances equivalent to shortish airplane flights. Well and good. If it attracts traffic from planes it also saves energy and emissions.
Its capital cost is damnably high, especially if it is routed through developed land with high real estate values. That is one reason why private entrepreneurs don't try to build unsubsidised high speed lines.
The other reason is the large and long gaps between trains on present high-speed lines. If high speed rail had anything like the traffic separation distances we have on highways, or even the 60 second separation between movements that airport controllers work to, the amount of potential traffic over which you could write off the costs of a high-speed line would make profitability and pricing look very different. Since a new high speed line is a very well controlled environment, it is very odd that these systems are not engineered to these traffic densities. Until they are, high speed rail is just a complicated way of:
1. Subsidising the well off who can afford the high prices on the few trains; and
2. Bringing the emissions burden of transport forward into the line building period.
Rockfish hits what our correspondent misses
there must be something there when you get off the train
waliking out of the train station in baltimore is ugly, you better get a cab. it doesn't matter if you just got off a nice Acela car
if I take a train from Chicago to milwaukee, what awaits me? Lansing Michigan, another dead zone. (I've taken Acela on NE a LOT)
If there is no "city" there, resurrecting inter-city rail is tough, why have rail-to-car, rather than car-to-car? to quote Rockfish ""without all the other pieces of the public mobility network (which I argue should come FIRST) you'll only have white elephant projects connecting isolated downtown islands to each other. " "
Build up the regional transit (and fix the cities first) the Amtrak will not do the trick if there is no There once you get There
I would like to combine two elements of the posts above. The first is the simple statement that the NE corridor has long been served by a first class rail network. It's success in moving resources where they are needed do not seem to be in dispute. There's not much to compare to the corridor in the midwest. However if the Chicago-Milwaukee link were to be expanded to a Detroit-Minneapolis system - an I-94/I-90 corridor - we might have something like the required scale. IF the system is to be expanded, why not expand it with the best available technology? A 10 minute time savings between Chicago and Milwaukee might be one result, but a full work day on a train surrounded by wireless capabilities instead of a 7 hour dead-time car trip from Detroit to the twin cities would be another.
Any increase in mobiliity hastens the formation of a regional economy, and if stimulus funds can be used merely to show that it is possible, its a good use of stimulus funds. Let the economic growth pay for the actual construction.
One problem is that the density difference from the NE to the Detroit-Minneapolis corridor is still less than the density difference between Detroit-Minneapolis and points west. Once you clear away from the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, things get really sparse. A solution for the central midwest is still not on the horizon.
Time-competitive rail service from Minneapolis to Chicago would transform the market dramatically. Currently there are three main options:
* By car, which is 400 miles each way and takes seven hours, without traffic. With traffic, it's quite a bit longer. The cost is dependent on gas prices, but if you are going to Chicago you have to worry about parking, and tolls
*By train/bus, which takes about the same time as driving. By bus, it's seven hours in a airplane-legroom seat (hell on wheels); by train it's more spacious and more expensive
* By plane, which is pretty quick (1:20 in the air plus an hour-or-so on each end) but has extremely variable costs. Since Southwest is flying the route and demand is low, tickets with advanced purchase are currently about $100 roundtrip. Last summer, however, when only Northwest, American and United were "competing," tickets cost on the order of $400. And without 14 days advanced notice, tickets on the route are over $200 even now.
In other words, travel by air is relatively fast but has a very variable costs, and is quite dependent on fuel prices. Travel by road or rail is cheaper, but the time cost of at least half a day makes it very unattractive. There is currently no middle ground--a relatively fast service which has relatively low prices and does not have draconian fees for booking at the last minute. This is one market which currently does not exist.
The other markets which do not currently exist are for intermediate city pairs. The most logical route (despite what various Minnesota politicians continue to argue) is via Saint Paul, Rochester (Mayo Clinic), Winona (Winona State Univ.), La Crosse (Univ. Wisconsin campus), Madison and Milwaukee. Looking at it in a similar manner to a recent post on this blog:
Route, Gmaps driving time, distance, 155 mph HSR time, daily flights
Saint Paul - Chicago via Milwaukee, 7:05, 422 miles, HSR: 2:43, Flights: 50,
Saint Paul - Chicago direct Chicago - Madison, 6:33, 401 miles, HSR: 2:35,
Saint Paul - Rochester, 1:33, 78 miles, HSR: 0:30, Flights: 6*,
Saint Paul - Winona, 2:21, 113 miles, HSR: 0:44,
Saint Paul - La Crosse, 2:42, 150 miles, HSR: 0:58, Flights: 6*,
Saint Paul - Madison, 4:22, 262 miles, HSR: 1:41, Flights: 5,
Saint Paul - Milwaukee, 5:19, 328 miles, HSR: 2:07, Flights: 17,
Rochester - Madison, 3:30, 211 miles, HSR: 1:22,
Rochester - Chicago, 5:41, 350 miles, HSR: 2:15, Flights: 6,
La Crosse - Madison, 2:30, 143 miles, HSR: 0:55,
Madison - Milwaukee, 1:25, 79 miles, HSR: 0:31, Flights: 4*,
Madison - Chicago, 2:34, 147 miles, HSR: 0:57, Flights: 11*,
Milwaukee - Chicago, 1:42, 92 miles, HSR: 0:36, Flights: 12*
I threw in daily flights as an afterthought, and it's not all it might seem to be, since both Minneapolis (Northwest) and Chicago (United, American, Southwest) are hubs. So a lot of people on those flights are going somewhere else and just making the first leg of their trip. I put an asterisk (*) where it seemed most of the flyers were in this group; flights where it wouldn't make sense to fly for such a short leg. Some of these routes, particularly Madison to Milwaukee, could easily be replaced by rail service if it existed (Milwaukee has an airport train station). In fact, I was once on a Midwest flight which had a cracked windshield and we needed a new plane, so they pulled one off the Milwaukee-Madison route and, presumably, put the passengers in a couple of cabs to Madison.
Routing some trains via O'Hare could potentially eliminate a lot of short, inefficient feeder plane trips, which the airlines might actually want to drop. You can already buy a plane ticket and travel portions on TGV or even Amtrak (anywhere between New Haven and Wilmington to Newark, for example). If you're on Continental flight 94XX, you're on a train.
The other market this opens are the various intermediate markets along the route (and similar markets exist along other routes, for sure). First of all, several cities become suburbs. Rochester (home of the esteemed Mayo Clinic) and Winona (two colleges) become suburbs of the Twin Cities, and the Mayo Clinic becomes a quick trip from Saint Paul or Minneapolis. On the other end of the line, Madison and Milwaukee become suburbs of each other, and both become suburbs of Chicago.
La Crosse would be a bit more than an hour from the Twin Cities and Chicago, wuoldn't quite be a suburb of either, but its location in between the two could be quite advantageous. The same can be said for Madison, which would be less than two hours from the Twin Cities. Each city would be linked with several major Creative Class-type economies (Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis).
Finally, some other intermediate trips link rather interesting pairs. Milwaukee-Madison-La Cross link three of the campuses of the University of Wisconsin. Rochester, which is currently an hour, by road, from Winona and La Crosse, would be linked in less than half that time. And Winona and La Crosse, now a 45 minute drive (with no real public transport) would be a 15 minute trip by train.
(cross-posted on the Amateur Planner)
Diversity brings up an issue that has been conveniently ignored in all the HSR discussion so far - who runs these trains, and how much do they cost? We all know that Amtrak only breaks even on the NE corridor, and loses money on every other line (even though it does not bear the costs of maintaining those tracks, which are owned by others.) Aside from some hopeful pleas about getting private investment, nobody has broached this topic.
I know that Germany, which does not even have the best HSR system, subsidizes its rail system by about $2B a year. Tickets on their HSR train from Frankfurt-Berlin (about 300 miles) are $230 ONE WAY. Even if these lines get built, and get massively subsidized, is this a realistic price point?
As for the in-depth analysis of route planning, bear in mind that as you add stops along these lines you greatly increase your end-to-end travel time. The vast majority of these trips (those under 200 mi or so) would be better served by normal rail, at greatly reduced effort and expense, and greatly increased odds of happening. Do you really need a $20B, maglev train to cut your 90 minute Chicago to Milwaukee drive down to 45 minutes? Seems crazy to me.
Just a note about SeekingAlpha's original note. He says:
"In between these successful cities are interspersed others that were heavily reliant on industry, and which didn't fare nearly as well over the past half century (Baltimore is the best example)."
Huh? Baltimore is hugely demonstative of a balance between a vibrant industrial economy, a gigantic shipping industry, a major education/research center, a massive military complex, a reknowned medical presence, and an excellent quality of life.
Add to that a presence of per-capita rail transportation options (freight, light rail, metro, and passenger schedule/station options) that is surpassed only by Chicago. Baltimore is ranked #3 as best places to move after graduation... it is the best place (out of 10 cities) I've lived in!
Without a long-winded commentary here, let me just say that infrastructure for infrastructure's sake is useless--and this seems to fly in face of the predominant thinking here. Infrastructure (railways, in this case) only can aid naturally occurring economic growth--not create it! A lagging post-industrial city, once connected with high speed rail, will then be.....A lagging post-industrial city with a high-speed rail connection! If there's no economical reason to locate in such a spot, making it easier to get there will not suddenly improve things. THE PROBLEM LIES IN THE CITIES; NOT ACCESS TO THEM!!!!
Cities are not arbitrarily born. Check history--they have sprung up and thrived due to location, native industries, and other market principles dictating growth. Sadly, the original industries once fueling massive growth in the Midwest have mostly dried up. Don't compare such cities to those on the Eastern seaboard that continue to prosper.
Infrastructure (railroads of any type) is an economic magnifier--it can't create something out a nothin'.
Yes Jewel Thief, the Midwest has nothing value. Unlike the thriving environs of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC during the seventies and eighties, its cities are decaying empty husks, ruins of the rust belt.
In all seriousness Ari's assessment of the program is pretty much spot on. Its primary purpose will be to further integrate the commercial and industrial hubs of the midwest with Chicago. Chicago is not Detroit, and it has spent the last decade going through something of a Renaissance for the last 10 years. Its deemed to be a desirable city by the creative class, its found itself quite adroit at pilfering corporate headquarters from other cities, and it seems to be the likely choice for the 2016 Olympics. Chicago will benefit the most from highspeed rail, but it has enough clout and capital to spread the benefits around.
Milwaukee for instance is your quintessential Midwestern metropolis. Its glory days were in the 50's and 60's when it was both the world's brewery and tool maker. The 70's and 80's were hard, the city lost a great deal of its manufacturing and population. But the decline has stabilized, manufacturing is still there, but joined with medical technology, and insurance.
Now one may question the benefits of tying it to Chicago with a high speed rail line, if it only shaves 10 minutes off of the commute. There already is a lot of traffic between the two cities given their proximity. However if you extend the line to Madison (which incidentally is a major center of Biotech and Medical Technology) you have connected the regions economic heart, a manufacturing center, and a research hub together in a degree that makes quick and frequent travel between them practical. People from Madison could conveniently work in either Milwaukee or Chicago (or any combination thereof) without suffering from the commute. The same argument could be made in favor of connecting the Twin Cities to the line, as Ari beautifully outlined, or Indianapolis. The already healthy cities will benefit the most from the new infrastructure, but it improves the accessibility of the lesser cities along the line as well. Who knows what an entrepreneur from Chicago might see in Lacrosse, or one from the Twin Cities might see in Fort Wayne.
There's a lot of misinformation in and around this thread, so let's begin.
1. Chicago-Milwaukee High Speed Rail as per the stimulus is estimated not at a 10 minute time savings, but at close to a half an hour time savings. Currently, it takes 89 minutes. That is projected to drop to 64 minutes with the 110mph upgrade. "True" HSR could potentially get that down to about 30 minutes without stops using the fastest point to point timing on the French railways as a blueprint, or about 40 minutes with stops. A 25 minute savings on a 1 1/2 hour trip is a substantial difference that makes the difference for many people between a commutable and non commutable journey. That French rail timing is the current 36 minute schedule for the TGV from Lorraine-Louvigny to Champagne-Ardennes, a distance of 104 miles, versus the 86 from Chicago to Milwaukee.
2. Frequency also makes a difference, not just speed. On the Northeast Corridor, there's an Acela an hour, plus a regional service every hour, and additional regional services at peak times. In other words, there's "always another train." The only other place in the US where that applies is between Sacramento and Oakland, which, not coincidentally, has seen huge ridership gains since the switch to more-or-less hourly service -- despite being limited to 79 mph and suffering from reportedly spotty cabin crew service. When you go to hourly or better service, you create something that's "always there" for short-term travelers, and you have something that equals or beats driving for convenience. And the stimulus provides that approach in places; if Midwest High Speed Rail goes ahead, Chicago to Milwaukee will go from every two to three hours to every hour, and Chicago to St. Louis will go from five times daily to about every two hours.
3. Rockfish's post on German rail is full of inaccuracies. The fare is a walkup fare; most people aren't paying that. He's also off by a factor of more than ten on subsidies; between passenger and freight, including commuter and local services, Germany subsidizes rail by well over $20 billion a year. But the reward is that it's easy to live there without a car, even in rural areas. Nonetheless, it's not really an applicable model for the US; very high population density, very little sprawl. Better for us to look to the French, who have the same moderate population density that we have in the Midwest and in many cases the same kind of sprawl, replete with box retailers and strip malls, yet still manage to deliver an overall faster rail system than the Germans at less than half the cost and with more than a billion passenger rides a year.
4. Like it or not, rail is intricately related with there being a "there." Philadelphia has been as hammered by deindustrialization as Detroit or any one of a number of Midwestern cities. But you don't have to run the gauntlet of the inner city or the interstate to get downtown (or more importantly to leave downtown), because close to its heart is America's most purpose-built, least knocked-around major train station. If you want to live downtown, this is a huge asset, and it has preserved downtown Philadelphia as a beachhead from which to recolonize bombed out portions of the inner city. Establishing a new "there" is harder than preserving one, but look at how DC's Metro system has utterly transformed Arlington from a seedy first-ring suburb into THE place to live in the capital area. Since the arrival of Metro, the allegedly built-out Arlington has grown in population by a third, yet the traffic congestion simply isn't as bad as farther out in the suburbs, because those new folks are using Metro. What about a new "there" with intercity rail? Well, we haven't really tried it in this country, but there's little question that downtown Manchester, England, has tremendously benefited from running times to London dropping from three hours to two and service increasing from hourly to every 20 minutes with an upgrade of existing track from 110mph to 125mph combined with the removal of a lot of bottlenecks along the way.