I think the single biggest problem in progressivism today is the failure to understand the gap between obtaining government money like this, and executing effective policy. It's not only that effective policy is good for the things it actually does on the ground. It's that if we want to make the case for a generous and powerful state that helps lift all boats in areas not served naturally by markets, we need to freaking deliver once in awhile.
It's odd how trains attract deep love, fascination and study from a lot of people, far beyond trains' objective importance in the modern world - but apparently not from the people in charge of managing them in the US.
Another suggestion: Make Bus Travel Not Suck. The last time I took Greyhound they started the trip with a broken toilet that made the whole bus smell like a sewer for the entire four-hour trip. Plus, the employees’ motto seemed to be “No Refunds” and the driver scraped the side of the bus on a light rail car as we were pulling into the Portland station.
As I said, my last trip with greyhound.
On the other hand,Amtrak did not start trips with customers trapped in a car with broken toilets. Instead, they would hire a private bus company to take the Portland to Pasco travelers instead. Those buses weren’t as nice as a train—no dining car, the bathroom was worse, and the seats were smaller—but they were miles ahead of Greyhound.
Maybe we should focus on speeding up the airport experience, public transit airport connection and improving flight capacities rather than sinking a few dollars into a decrepit agency?
Do what the transcontinental railroad did. It got 10 miles on other side of the track. In any area the NEC needs eminent domain to straighten the track for high speed, they get a mile or two of land on either side federally zoned for dense apartment buildings to sell off, so the total taxpayer price is $0.
Back then the land was unoccupied (mostly) (at least by white people). High speed rail is only needed between densely populated cities, aka in regions where land is expensive. Eminent domain includes compensating those you take it from. So no, not $0. And the federal government doesn't get to re-zone things.
You buy the single family houses for fair market (i.e. $1 million), then sell the land to an apartment developer for $10 million under new federal zoning, they build a 50 story building, repeat.
>>The other thing that’s great about this is that $30 billion really ought to be enough to make a genuinely transformative investment in the NEC. That’s about $40 million per kilometer of distance. In Spain they’ve built high-speed rail for an average of $21 million per km, and in France it’s $30 million.<<<
HSR in California is costing about $600 million per km, I believe. I know that's a uniquely horrendous clstrfk of a project, but $40 million per km strikes me as a pipe dream to bring actual HSR to the Northeast.
If Amtrak spends the $66 billion and has nothing useful to show for it, where’s the accountability? Are you going to vote for Trump in 2024 because of poor train service? Amtrak needs a better business model, maybe a funding formula that ties subsidies to actual ridership and raises capital from risk taking investors.
Interesting. So if the alternative is sufficiently terrible you would accept them. For context who is the last democratic candidate that you would find acceptable vs a republican?
But hiring foreigners for public sector roles is un-American. Other high income countries sometimes do this. But everybody knows the United States has a monopoly on expertise.
I enjoyed this article and I am going to forward it to my Senators and Congressman. However, as in an earlier article on Amtrak, Matthew is dead wrong on the appropriateness of good rail service in Colorado and surrounding states. We need it to reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality (which is surprisingly horrible in this part of the country) and improve transportation safety. The analogy to beaches is just plain stupid. Those are geographical features completely unrelated to human infrastructure investment (we can’t build a
Ocean in Colorado). I agree that the Northeast should have major investment due to population density, but this continued lack of understanding of the value of investment in the mountain west and Midwest shows a Northeast bias.
I mean, I think Matt is mostly against adding the 40 miles of service from Cheyenne to Fort Collins, not the existence of the Front Range rail project overall.
I think a town with a rail museum and steam engines in parks should have some passenger rail that runs on a reasonable schedule to fly out of DIA.
I agree, and in addition people in Cheyenne go to Fort Collins for specialty medical care and shopping at Costco. They will use the service. His disagreement with investing in 40 miles of service to Cheyenne is why I think he doesn’t get the needs of people in the mountain west. Any Colorado state
To be fair, I don’t see much of a use case for a train from Cheyenne to Fort Collins. I just can’t see any reasons for people who have ads to use the train instead. The traffic is not that bad on that stretch of I25, and neither city is particularly transit-oriented. I will get stuff delivered before I take a train to Costco. There’s a population that doesn’t have a car or can’t drive, but they could be served by regional buses, which could start and end more places than a regional rail.
There is a case for Cheyenne to Denver, though—I25 south of Fort Collins sucks, everyone in the region uses the Denver airport and getting to it sucks, and Denver has a transit system and it’s downtown is not as car friendly as Fort Collins. A reasonably priced and timed train would appeal to the car-owners of Cheyenne.
Okay, I’m pretty sure Cheyenne is included in the Front Range rail plan.
Probably will be one of the last legs built. By that time maybe there will be demand. Traffic in Fort Collins is getting worse every year and parking downtown is a huge issue. Fort Collins has prioritized and invested in improving multi modal transport. The train could stop at two of our transport centers and frequent bus service is available from there. Slight inconvenience is offset by improved safety, reliability and reducing carbon emissions. Our air quality is horrible and people need to change their behavior and stop relying on our gas guzzling SUVs. I get how hard it is for Americans to give up their cars, but they won’t give them up if we don’t build an alternative infrastructure. I also get that EVs are an alternative.
The problem with bus service on interstate highways is that they are subject to traffic and road conditions just like cars.
Anyway there wouldn’t be a separate rail line from Cheyenne to Denver that bypasses Fort Collins. Might as well have a couple of trains stop in FoCo to service elderly and poor, etc.
On absolutely. Run the train from Cheyenne to Colorado Springs with all the stops in between. I just think most of the riders who get on in Cheyenne will not be getting off in Fort Collins.
I guess I have never been in Fort Collins downtown—Costco and the main shopping centers with REI and Trader Joe’s have had plenty of parking and no worse traffic than Beaverton, which is not a transit-oriented suburb. I would love it if both cities became more transit oriented, but until they do, a train with one or two stops in Fort Collins is not going to be the favored method.
Of course, it might get that way in ten years.
Right now, I would like better bike lanes in downtown Cheyenne. There are some good protected bike trails but to get to the southern ones from my house I have to ride on unprotected downtown streets.
I'm not sure what MY used as a basis. I do know the Front Range urban corridor is reasonably well populated, but high-speed rail (MY's focus here) requires a certain level of density as well as intercity distances to work. There's a threshold at some point--what point I forget--and I don't know if the Front Range meets it. It's possible MY is correct about this on high-speed. That being said, there's also the possibility of regional service and S-Bahn (the last of which is closer to subways/transit) that have lower density thresholds or serve smaller areas where rail probably is a good idea in CO. However, that stuff would fall under state/metro/local transit, not Amtrak specifically.
Clarification: Regional and commuter service often is provided by Amtrak, but usually under contract with a state government or transit agency (like the MARC Penn Line he mentioned in the article), but that's not what the BIF Amtrak funding is for. (Commuter service, as MY has previously mentioned, is the inferior fake S-Bahnen we have in North America.)
FYI - now that Colorado is completely under Democratic control, we are moving forward on Front Range rail service. A law was passed in the 2021 legislative session to establish a funding mechanism and begin the planning. This will be in partnership with Amtrak and there will be Federal funding. It will take a long time, probably 10 years. Federal government funding is needed to connect major Midwestern cities. MY doesn’t seem to think this is appropriate. I disagree. Citizens of Midwestern cities would benefit greatly from this investment. He doesn’t understand the dynamics of the Midwest.
I don't know, I'd have to look into it. But his focus here was on HSR; to my understanding the planned Front Range service is standard-speed regional; I think that makes sense, and I suspect MY might agree. But I think if you put it to the kinds of Asian and European rail experts MY is talking about in the article, they'd probably say that while a good candidate for regional service, the corridor is too short (125 miles) and too centralized on Denver for HSR specifically to make sense. Basically, you want HSR when there would also be a reasonable business case for a commercial flight from one end of the line to the other; as of now, there isn't even a business case for flights to Pueblo and Fort Collins from Denver, even as connectors (Pueblo gets EAS subsidies, Fort Collins gets nothing). All that said, the same facts mean there's a case for *regional* rail along the Front Range. Maybe even an S-Bahn, though I don't know if that would go all the way out to Pueblo or Fort Collins.
(As an aside, I'm originally from the Midwest (Michigan), though I live in the NEC now, so I do get it. Chicago-Detroit is long enough to justify wanting a high-speed train, but the ridership is questionable unless the line extends into Canada to Toronto/Montreal, which creates a whole other dimension of problems.)
The main point that I got out of the article is that we need to bring in competent people to manage Amtrak and I appreciate MY bringing attention to that. You are correct, the front range rail will probably not be high speed. It will, however, connect Fort Collins to Pueblo. I lived in Metro New York for 33 years and used Metro North and the NYC subway. I’ve also used the S-Bahn in Germany and the trains and Tube in London. Once a person uses rail service, car travel is less desirable along congested routes, I-25 is very congested with collisions nearly every day. I think once train service is available, people will use it.
You seem to be a transport expert.
I also live 5 miles from the Fort Collins airport and I don’t want commercial flights 😉. We already have train noise and trains will use clean energy.
Lol, I'm an enthusiastic amateur at best. (I do have the peculiar honor of being close friends with an honest-to-God professional transit consultant, which I suppose makes up for a lot.) And agreed, it's far better for Fort Collins to be served by rail than EAS.
I will say that while geographically a Cheyenne-to-Fort Collins train makes some sense, I don't know the Cheyenne end has enough demand to justify the cost. Not because people in Cheyenne won't use it, but because Cheyenne is pretty small (or at least it is now) and trains are pretty expensive to run. I'm not coming down on the question either way, mind, I just see what the objection might be.
My pet-peeve suggestions for low-cost Amtrak improvements: 1) build platforms at stations that are level with the train's floor (as in NY Penn Station), so that passengers don't have to clamor up and down steep, narrow steps (with luggage) to get on and off. 2) Add digital signage in all passenger cars with real-time info on the current and upcoming stops. Then, reduce the repetitive, annoying intercom announcements for each station (and other useless announcement-talking, like "be sure to gather your belongings").
I'm not crazy about Buttigieg either (although I'm fine with him running something highly technical, like transportation policy). But the Twitter hate from the left doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
A modest proposal that I think is much much better. Rather than import a handful of foreign top end transportation specialists and engineers to try and assert top down control of rail transit consider spending a few tens of millions of dollars sending American engineering and logistic specialists to those other countries to learn for a couple of years. You would wind up with a lot more expertise who actually had knowledge of American urban and intercity transport problems and new knowledge that may be applicable.
Never is. However the Yglesias proposal via Alon-Levy is to parachute a bunch of foreign execs in to be the boss of American workers and implicitly make war on them. Good luck with that.
As a proud Californian who enjoys taking the train all along the coast the idea posited here that we would take the $30 billion and spend it entirely on the NEC strikes me as . . . . really solid.
I wish we could have given all the money wasted so far on the California HSR to the NEC as well (the Federal part, that is). You guys in the Northeast can have all the high speed rail as long as we get to keep the Pacific Coast Highway and Amtrak's Surfliner and Coast Starlight.
Bore that board!
I think the single biggest problem in progressivism today is the failure to understand the gap between obtaining government money like this, and executing effective policy. It's not only that effective policy is good for the things it actually does on the ground. It's that if we want to make the case for a generous and powerful state that helps lift all boats in areas not served naturally by markets, we need to freaking deliver once in awhile.
It's odd how trains attract deep love, fascination and study from a lot of people, far beyond trains' objective importance in the modern world - but apparently not from the people in charge of managing them in the US.
Another suggestion: Make Bus Travel Not Suck. The last time I took Greyhound they started the trip with a broken toilet that made the whole bus smell like a sewer for the entire four-hour trip. Plus, the employees’ motto seemed to be “No Refunds” and the driver scraped the side of the bus on a light rail car as we were pulling into the Portland station.
As I said, my last trip with greyhound.
On the other hand,Amtrak did not start trips with customers trapped in a car with broken toilets. Instead, they would hire a private bus company to take the Portland to Pasco travelers instead. Those buses weren’t as nice as a train—no dining car, the bathroom was worse, and the seats were smaller—but they were miles ahead of Greyhound.
Maybe we should focus on speeding up the airport experience, public transit airport connection and improving flight capacities rather than sinking a few dollars into a decrepit agency?
Do you mean that Pete should run Amtrak or that he should lead the charge on finding someone?
Do what the transcontinental railroad did. It got 10 miles on other side of the track. In any area the NEC needs eminent domain to straighten the track for high speed, they get a mile or two of land on either side federally zoned for dense apartment buildings to sell off, so the total taxpayer price is $0.
Back then the land was unoccupied (mostly) (at least by white people). High speed rail is only needed between densely populated cities, aka in regions where land is expensive. Eminent domain includes compensating those you take it from. So no, not $0. And the federal government doesn't get to re-zone things.
You buy the single family houses for fair market (i.e. $1 million), then sell the land to an apartment developer for $10 million under new federal zoning, they build a 50 story building, repeat.
>>The other thing that’s great about this is that $30 billion really ought to be enough to make a genuinely transformative investment in the NEC. That’s about $40 million per kilometer of distance. In Spain they’ve built high-speed rail for an average of $21 million per km, and in France it’s $30 million.<<<
HSR in California is costing about $600 million per km, I believe. I know that's a uniquely horrendous clstrfk of a project, but $40 million per km strikes me as a pipe dream to bring actual HSR to the Northeast.
Somehow Gavin Newsom promised and then failed to cancel the California HSR project. It is baffling and depressing.
If Amtrak spends the $66 billion and has nothing useful to show for it, where’s the accountability? Are you going to vote for Trump in 2024 because of poor train service? Amtrak needs a better business model, maybe a funding formula that ties subsidies to actual ridership and raises capital from risk taking investors.
“Are you going to vote for Trump in 2024 because of poor train service?”
Well, I doubt I would vote for Biden, and voting for Harris is pretty much completely inconceivable to me.
I'd be interested to hear what would get you to vote for him/her?
The alternatives would have to be pretty awful. The worst the US has ever seen.
Interesting. So if the alternative is sufficiently terrible you would accept them. For context who is the last democratic candidate that you would find acceptable vs a republican?
“So if the alternative is sufficiently terrible you would accept them.”
If by, “accept,” you mean ‘vote for,’ no.
“For context who is the last democratic candidate that you would find acceptable vs a republican?”
Obama. Man, what a disappointment.
But hiring foreigners for public sector roles is un-American. Other high income countries sometimes do this. But everybody knows the United States has a monopoly on expertise.
I enjoyed this article and I am going to forward it to my Senators and Congressman. However, as in an earlier article on Amtrak, Matthew is dead wrong on the appropriateness of good rail service in Colorado and surrounding states. We need it to reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality (which is surprisingly horrible in this part of the country) and improve transportation safety. The analogy to beaches is just plain stupid. Those are geographical features completely unrelated to human infrastructure investment (we can’t build a
Ocean in Colorado). I agree that the Northeast should have major investment due to population density, but this continued lack of understanding of the value of investment in the mountain west and Midwest shows a Northeast bias.
I mean, I think Matt is mostly against adding the 40 miles of service from Cheyenne to Fort Collins, not the existence of the Front Range rail project overall.
I think a town with a rail museum and steam engines in parks should have some passenger rail that runs on a reasonable schedule to fly out of DIA.
I agree, and in addition people in Cheyenne go to Fort Collins for specialty medical care and shopping at Costco. They will use the service. His disagreement with investing in 40 miles of service to Cheyenne is why I think he doesn’t get the needs of people in the mountain west. Any Colorado state
Government gets it.
To be fair, I don’t see much of a use case for a train from Cheyenne to Fort Collins. I just can’t see any reasons for people who have ads to use the train instead. The traffic is not that bad on that stretch of I25, and neither city is particularly transit-oriented. I will get stuff delivered before I take a train to Costco. There’s a population that doesn’t have a car or can’t drive, but they could be served by regional buses, which could start and end more places than a regional rail.
There is a case for Cheyenne to Denver, though—I25 south of Fort Collins sucks, everyone in the region uses the Denver airport and getting to it sucks, and Denver has a transit system and it’s downtown is not as car friendly as Fort Collins. A reasonably priced and timed train would appeal to the car-owners of Cheyenne.
Okay, I’m pretty sure Cheyenne is included in the Front Range rail plan.
Probably will be one of the last legs built. By that time maybe there will be demand. Traffic in Fort Collins is getting worse every year and parking downtown is a huge issue. Fort Collins has prioritized and invested in improving multi modal transport. The train could stop at two of our transport centers and frequent bus service is available from there. Slight inconvenience is offset by improved safety, reliability and reducing carbon emissions. Our air quality is horrible and people need to change their behavior and stop relying on our gas guzzling SUVs. I get how hard it is for Americans to give up their cars, but they won’t give them up if we don’t build an alternative infrastructure. I also get that EVs are an alternative.
The problem with bus service on interstate highways is that they are subject to traffic and road conditions just like cars.
Anyway there wouldn’t be a separate rail line from Cheyenne to Denver that bypasses Fort Collins. Might as well have a couple of trains stop in FoCo to service elderly and poor, etc.
On absolutely. Run the train from Cheyenne to Colorado Springs with all the stops in between. I just think most of the riders who get on in Cheyenne will not be getting off in Fort Collins.
I guess I have never been in Fort Collins downtown—Costco and the main shopping centers with REI and Trader Joe’s have had plenty of parking and no worse traffic than Beaverton, which is not a transit-oriented suburb. I would love it if both cities became more transit oriented, but until they do, a train with one or two stops in Fort Collins is not going to be the favored method.
Of course, it might get that way in ten years.
Right now, I would like better bike lanes in downtown Cheyenne. There are some good protected bike trails but to get to the southern ones from my house I have to ride on unprotected downtown streets.
I'm not sure what MY used as a basis. I do know the Front Range urban corridor is reasonably well populated, but high-speed rail (MY's focus here) requires a certain level of density as well as intercity distances to work. There's a threshold at some point--what point I forget--and I don't know if the Front Range meets it. It's possible MY is correct about this on high-speed. That being said, there's also the possibility of regional service and S-Bahn (the last of which is closer to subways/transit) that have lower density thresholds or serve smaller areas where rail probably is a good idea in CO. However, that stuff would fall under state/metro/local transit, not Amtrak specifically.
Clarification: Regional and commuter service often is provided by Amtrak, but usually under contract with a state government or transit agency (like the MARC Penn Line he mentioned in the article), but that's not what the BIF Amtrak funding is for. (Commuter service, as MY has previously mentioned, is the inferior fake S-Bahnen we have in North America.)
FYI - now that Colorado is completely under Democratic control, we are moving forward on Front Range rail service. A law was passed in the 2021 legislative session to establish a funding mechanism and begin the planning. This will be in partnership with Amtrak and there will be Federal funding. It will take a long time, probably 10 years. Federal government funding is needed to connect major Midwestern cities. MY doesn’t seem to think this is appropriate. I disagree. Citizens of Midwestern cities would benefit greatly from this investment. He doesn’t understand the dynamics of the Midwest.
I don't know, I'd have to look into it. But his focus here was on HSR; to my understanding the planned Front Range service is standard-speed regional; I think that makes sense, and I suspect MY might agree. But I think if you put it to the kinds of Asian and European rail experts MY is talking about in the article, they'd probably say that while a good candidate for regional service, the corridor is too short (125 miles) and too centralized on Denver for HSR specifically to make sense. Basically, you want HSR when there would also be a reasonable business case for a commercial flight from one end of the line to the other; as of now, there isn't even a business case for flights to Pueblo and Fort Collins from Denver, even as connectors (Pueblo gets EAS subsidies, Fort Collins gets nothing). All that said, the same facts mean there's a case for *regional* rail along the Front Range. Maybe even an S-Bahn, though I don't know if that would go all the way out to Pueblo or Fort Collins.
(As an aside, I'm originally from the Midwest (Michigan), though I live in the NEC now, so I do get it. Chicago-Detroit is long enough to justify wanting a high-speed train, but the ridership is questionable unless the line extends into Canada to Toronto/Montreal, which creates a whole other dimension of problems.)
The main point that I got out of the article is that we need to bring in competent people to manage Amtrak and I appreciate MY bringing attention to that. You are correct, the front range rail will probably not be high speed. It will, however, connect Fort Collins to Pueblo. I lived in Metro New York for 33 years and used Metro North and the NYC subway. I’ve also used the S-Bahn in Germany and the trains and Tube in London. Once a person uses rail service, car travel is less desirable along congested routes, I-25 is very congested with collisions nearly every day. I think once train service is available, people will use it.
You seem to be a transport expert.
I also live 5 miles from the Fort Collins airport and I don’t want commercial flights 😉. We already have train noise and trains will use clean energy.
Lol, I'm an enthusiastic amateur at best. (I do have the peculiar honor of being close friends with an honest-to-God professional transit consultant, which I suppose makes up for a lot.) And agreed, it's far better for Fort Collins to be served by rail than EAS.
I will say that while geographically a Cheyenne-to-Fort Collins train makes some sense, I don't know the Cheyenne end has enough demand to justify the cost. Not because people in Cheyenne won't use it, but because Cheyenne is pretty small (or at least it is now) and trains are pretty expensive to run. I'm not coming down on the question either way, mind, I just see what the objection might be.
Whether you are a conservative or liberal, you should want things to work
Three cheers for effective management!
My pet-peeve suggestions for low-cost Amtrak improvements: 1) build platforms at stations that are level with the train's floor (as in NY Penn Station), so that passengers don't have to clamor up and down steep, narrow steps (with luggage) to get on and off. 2) Add digital signage in all passenger cars with real-time info on the current and upcoming stops. Then, reduce the repetitive, annoying intercom announcements for each station (and other useless announcement-talking, like "be sure to gather your belongings").
Everyone likes Pete Buttigieg? Have you ever visited a little website / smartphone application called "Twitter"?
#notreallife
I'm not crazy about Buttigieg either (although I'm fine with him running something highly technical, like transportation policy). But the Twitter hate from the left doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
A modest proposal that I think is much much better. Rather than import a handful of foreign top end transportation specialists and engineers to try and assert top down control of rail transit consider spending a few tens of millions of dollars sending American engineering and logistic specialists to those other countries to learn for a couple of years. You would wind up with a lot more expertise who actually had knowledge of American urban and intercity transport problems and new knowledge that may be applicable.
Why not both? A knowledge exchange program is never a bad idea.
Never is. However the Yglesias proposal via Alon-Levy is to parachute a bunch of foreign execs in to be the boss of American workers and implicitly make war on them. Good luck with that.
As a proud Californian who enjoys taking the train all along the coast the idea posited here that we would take the $30 billion and spend it entirely on the NEC strikes me as . . . . really solid.
I wish we could have given all the money wasted so far on the California HSR to the NEC as well (the Federal part, that is). You guys in the Northeast can have all the high speed rail as long as we get to keep the Pacific Coast Highway and Amtrak's Surfliner and Coast Starlight.