I started this group hoping to bring focus to infrastructure here at Daily Kos. There really aren’t enough of us writing about something that effects us every single day, and the US’s infrastructure is vast. It is a little tough to get ones conceptual hands around it. But, there really hasn’t been any new news on it, despite That Person’s claims he’d rebuild everything (yes, I know, he lied, because that’s all he does.)
Some things this week:
CA HSR TRUNCATED...FOR NOW
Governor Gavin Newsom basically has canceled the Merced-San Francisco and Bakersfield — Los Angeles segments of California’s High Speed Rail in his State of the State address.
I thought the project was, conceptually, a great one. The Central Valley segment that will be completed will likely be very good for the Central Valley, so it’s not a complete failure. That said, the time probably just wasn’t right. California is the perfect size for a high-speed bullet train network---actually many states are whether they realize it or not, but this should have been built in 1968. Sometimes the stars align for megaprojects---like it did for the interstate highway network in the US, or the Chunnel that links Europe to the UK, but often times they do not.
The HSR Authority made several mistakes too and I’ll note here that this is my opinion, but not my opinion alone:
- CA’s economy probably can finance this by itself, but the state required federal assistance as part of its funding, and devolution of transportation funding from the Federal government back to the states has been an ongoing thing for 30+ years now, and this current regime at the Federal level is definitely not coming up out of them pockets,
- They built (or are building) the “easiest” segment first---Merced to Bakersfield, instead of electrifying the tracks on the San Francisco peninsula (waiting again for the Feds, who fucked them when 45 became President, and securing a right of way over the mountains and down into Los Angeles,
- According to Alon Levy, because local planning officials in Los Angeles County want to develop Palmdale (i.e. sprawl it out), they insisted on taking a longer and more expensive route to do so, instead of an easier route although that route, through the Tejon Pass, would have been a formidable right of way acquisition.
All in all, this was probably a pragmatic choice on Newsom’s part. There’s no money coming in to build it. It’s deeply disappointing for we train fans, who hoped that someday we’d see a renaissance in rail, but I imagine a good many others (who drive, or like to fly, or are hoping for magic from one of our various tech gods) don’t care, or are delighted. Gov. Newsom didn’t cancel it forever (and the “takes” on this span the map), but in effect that’s what it’ll be for at least the next few years. Environmental reviews for the entire route still continue, meaning the project isn’t dead.
GREEN NEW DEAL’s HSR
I’m perhaps a bit cynical, after all this field is also my day job. The Green New Deal details NoFortunateSon has written are amazing, and I really don’t want to take anything away from them.
But we’ve been here before. President Obama proposed such a high speed rail system, and we all know how that worked. Nothing was ready for construction, except for a few segments, and unfortunately, those states were run by Republicans vociferously opposed to everything President Obama did, so they rejected all funds. I note with irony here that one of those segments, between Orlando and Tampa, now has interest again and likely will be built by Virgin Trains USA at some point (but, maybe not!), after then Gov. Scott rejected the funds. If he hadn’t, it’d be open for business right now---it would have been open years ago, but I digress. Same in Wisconsin. Can you tell I’m bitter? I am.
I think the US should have a high speed rail network. The geography within many states, and the distances between most city pairs in the US, should support it as an alternate (not a replacement) to air traffic—it hasn’t replaced domestic air traffic within Japan, France, Spain for example at all. Texas, for example, geographically is the same size as France and while it may have about 40 million fewer people than France, it has large, fairly dense cities that are at distances from each other that’d make HSR there profitable. Bummer the airline industry felt so triggered it sandbagged the state’s effort to try building this two decades ago, and I remain baffled by the state’s current hostility toward a Dallas-Houston bullet train that is 100% entirely private and won’t cost its taxpayers anything.
I want the Green New Deal to succeed. The resolution is just very thin for me, and I need more details. I also liked this Citylabs piece.
QUESTION, FOR DISCUSSION
I was mulling over this back at Thanksgiving and I’m still thinking about it now. I live about a three hour drive from my parents. I also do not drive, I’ve never had a license, and when I acquire one later this year or next I will be buying a $500 to $2500 used car and calling it a day—I refuse to borrow money for anything that depreciates the moment it leaves the lot, I mean how stupid. I usually take Greyhound, but Greyhound (itself owned by a Scottish-based private transportation company—we’ll talk about that someday) has been steadily eliminating routes across North America, and many alternate intercity bus companies are folding and ending service, which isolates a lot of small towns. We used to have 6 buses a day between my region and the DMV, now there’s two. So, I take Amtrak despite the route being circuitous and the ticket price being a tad pricey (I mean, I’m notoriously cheap).
I was pleasantly surprised in November. The Philadelphia to Washington DC. segment used to be three hours---I rode this a lot as a kid. I settled in for what I expected to be a long ride when I met my train in Philadelphia. It was not. Improvements made in the last couple years have eliminated an entire hour from that trip. There are still bottlenecks, especially through the tunnel system beneath Baltimore, but I was so surprised that Amtrak is going to be my go-to travel for the holidays from now on.
I’ve never gotten anywhere fast. I don’t drive, so I’m dependent on rides from others, or Uber and Lyft, or my region’s awful transit service (which is why I use Uber and Lyft or rides if I have to travel outside of my normal bus commute which is actually good considering who runs it). Growing up, my parents were the type to tell us to take the bus somewhere, or walk. They weren’t like their contemporary parents of that era who drove their kids everywhere and then bought their kids cars (mine refused to have driving teenagers, so they did not participate in that!), or like parents now too. Getting places slowly never bothered me, and still does not. I do have my limits—I loathe flying but I’m not that likely to take Greyhound or Amtrak across the country because I don’t really have the time to travel that way, at the moment, for three days, but I don’t have a problem sitting on a train to go to Boston (it’s 7 hours, sit on the right going north because it’s quite scenic in Connecticut) or to Pittsburgh (also the same time).
That was a long story to get to my point about what I was mulling over: why do we need to get everywhere so fast? Proposals for transportation, like Musk’s hypeloop, involve small passenger pods shooting within a vacuum tube at 700 miles an hour, a technology that’s old, but not proven to work at human scale. The House GOP’s “Freedom” Caucus wants to eliminate restrictions on supersonic flight so supersonic, cross-continental passenger flights will be legal. There have been proposals for suborbital passenger planes---New York to Sydney in 3 hours?---for many decades. The nation currently spends billions to widen highways to alleviate congestion to shave 2 minutes off of commutes (incidentally, this never, ever, ever works).
What’s the rush? I still do not get it. Perhaps this is worth discussing. Efficient need not mean super fast, I think. It’s true our system is not efficient, but like I noted with my recent Amtrak trip, spot fixes go a long way.
Anyway, discuss.
