Pete Buttigieg has been a disappointment as Secretary of Transportation. If smart, young technocrats we’re good for anything, it would be lowering construction costs. He seems to have done zero on that front. He hasn’t even done a symbolic house cleaning at Amtrak. Google him and you’ll see he recently visited a UPS facility and has been active talking about LGBT rights.
This is very sad because his incentives are almost perfect. He will never win a statewide election in Indiana. His only viable paths are moving to a different state or running for President or Vice President. Cutting through red tape and bashing entitled bureaucrats to build eco-friendly rail and mass transit would be a great strategy for capturing the vital center. And yet this extremely disciplined, smart dude hasn’t made any changes that matter.
Is it accurate that his incentives are perfect? The way I see it, Secretary Mayor Pete would need to (1) pick a bunch of fights with entrenched interests; (2) win those fights; (3) build the infrastructure and systems to implement "his" plans; (4) wait to see if it actually works.
Picking a giant fight with all the players necessary to achieve 1-3 in favor of train riding coastal élites? With hugely uncertain payoffs and a planning horizon many years in the future even under the best of circumstances?
Although it's not the outcome *I want to see,* I can understand why Secretary Mayor Pete would say no thanks to all that, let's just talk about amazing unions, dole out money, and not rock the boat too much. Have Amtrak put out these maps, get the rail fans to swoon, but then don't actually do anything about it. Maaaaybe pick one or two fights over some egregious stuff. Aim for more certain competence over extremely uncertain chances at excellence.
This is exactly right. He would have to fight a lot against orgs with Democratic employee bases. Unfortunately, the Democratic party cares more about public sector employees than the actual output of the public sector, so it'd be a net loss for his party support.
It's a disaster. We need a strong politician who a) believes that government services are important, and is also b) willing to fight, hard, against the current providers of those government services. It's hard to imagine such a figure - they'v'e have to do a Trump-like takeover of the party.
What proportion of Dems are captive to public employees unions? What proportion are so captive they would avoid a candidate with strong approval ratings and appeal to moderates?
I'd guess there are way more public employees that would defect to more progressive candidates in a primary and/or republicans in the general than there are non-dem voters who would defect to a public-employee-fighting dem.
It's not just captured interest, it's also the broad based of progressives who like both labor issues and gov't services, but don't understand or acknowledge the tradeoffs and would choose labor issues even if they did.
I actually think on of the few exceptions is city governments, since the link between voting and quality of gov't services is so much more tangible. It's why you can get a Bloomberg or (pre-crazy) Guiluiani as mayor of NYC, but you'd never get NYC to vote for someone like that for a national office.
This is why I’m mildly anti-union. Unions rarely help the workers who are getting screwed the hardest. They create pools of privileged workers who make more than the median income who are happy to stick it to consumers for their parochial interests.
I would rather delegate redistribution to the IRS than the UAW.
I'm mildly pro-union. In an ideal world redistribution would be handled by IRS and labor rules via congress but once you gut worker power, Capital influences IRS to reduce redistribution and to capture Congress to write labor laws.
Jury's still out on this in my view. These projects unfold over the time scale of years, and the best technocrat in the world wouldn't be able to solve the transportation construction cost problem in the time he's had. As more projects start getting selected and executed with IIJA funding in the coming years, we'll get a better idea whether that portfolio looks efficient and effective or not.
I agree it might take a while to lower construction costs. However, it would take about five minutes to draft a press release saying “Construction costs are too high because there are too many regulations and too much fedtherbedding. I am undertaking a comprehensive review of all federal transportation regulations with an eye to cutting construction costs. I will put my full administrative authority behind this project. Where legislation is necessary, my Department will propose bipartisan, common sense reforms so that we can build shit as efficiently as we used to. The nation that built the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, and the Interstate highway system can do better.”
FWIW Pete's social media for the last few months includes a bunch of aspirational stuff about the IIJA, a statement about how American passenger rail needs to live up to the standards of our peer countries, and a summit on construction cost and schedule issues. He seems to at least take the challenge seriously and recognize that delivering good projects with the IIJA money is what he's got to do - and you may be right that he won't succeed but it would be good for America if he does!
There are some encouraging things happening with Amtrak and other agencies getting equipment from outfits like Siemens and Stadler based on standard European designs. I think that importing the know-how from places that do this stuff really well would help improve our outlier unit costs.
He could have sent a nastygram back to VTA saying "fuck the san Jose merchants if you want a cent of federal money: we only pay for cut and cover in tier III cities".
I agree. Has anything been coming out of DoT that is surprising in a good direction? None of the news stories I can think of reflect well on his leadership. But maybe I'm forgetting something?
What makes this so disappointing is that he was actually given a huge amount of resources to improve rail, and would presumably have had backing from Biden to help stand up to the entrenched interests who pushed for this map. It may well have been a unique opportunity to "fix" Amtrak.
I don't think people are arguing that it would be easy. But clearly if there is the possibility of new money, and the Secretary and President are on board, then there must be some way to exert pressure.
What I don't know is whether Pete has even tried. Has there been a push to make this a priority to the point where he is willing to spend political capital and make enemies of the people who benefit from the current version of Amtrak?
Another poster pointed out that if Pete has his eye on a presidential run, then he in fact has strong incentives to NOT rock the boat - don't run the risk of coming across as anti-union, as favoring the Acela corridor, etc. It is very frustrating to those of us who had hoped that this time, there actually was a chance to shake things up.
Right this is a good point. See it's totally within the power of a motivated President and SECDOT to do this. The Board members are appointed by the President and they can be unilaterally removed by the President.
But that creates a lot of anger (those people were appointed--principally from Obama--for a reason!). The replacements need to be confirmed by the Senate, which takes up floor time from the objectively more important judicial confirmations conveyor belt. So....why do it at all?
As Yglesias has written before, [1] the issue is Amtrak leadership.
> I sometimes like to tell the story of the time an Amtrak executive told me “to be honest, I don’t know that much about trains.”
> And I think this is emblematic of Amtrak. It is run by people who are not curious about trains.
A leadership shakeup is needed to address these issues. The suggestion in that earlier article is to bring in a foreign CEO who has experience in running a functional rail system. E.g., someone from the rail programs of France, Italy, Japan, Korean, etc.
But there just isn’t the political will to fix Amtrak leadership and there are existing constituencies that benefit from the current pork barrel approach.
This post is a lot of red meat for Matt's dedicated readers, but as with other accounts of regulatory failure (the series on advanced nuclear and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also comes to mind), I wish there was more reporting on the sources of the bottlenecks that keep these institutions from changing. And not generalities -- it would be amazing to read interviews with the people who work there and get their impressions on the work that they do and don't!
I had the same feeling reading this. Instead of Matt's 1000th article on the same subject of how Amtrak sucks, I'd rather see a steelmanned article with reporting and sources on why it isn't happening.
Matt's usual stance of politics being the art of the possible seems to often be absent when he talks about rail in the US.
It all feels very handwavy to me, which is a departure from his usual nitty gritty (c.f. the child tax credit article vs this one).
I recognize that this is a policy-focused newsletter and there is a big difference between policy reporting and reporting on people and organizations, but I really think that the latter would help clarify what is possible vis a vis the former. Clearly Matt has these conversations with people "on the inside" and we would benefit from understanding what those people think!
I understand where you're coming from I think it's pretty clear that reporting on institutions is possible. I would encourage you to check out "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" by Carol Leonnig as one example, which explores the public and not so public institutional failures of an organization with a deep-seated organizational culture of silence and "secret" in the name. I think it's hard, but it can be done!
Good point, Max. I think people are more willing to share their inside thoughts about the functioning of a bureaucracy when it’s for a book for posterity vs. for journalism to affect current trajectory of events.
I’ve been meaning to check out Leonning’s book, so it’s on my list for the holidays now!
You might have a point there. Time for “One Billion On-Time and High-Speed Trains?”
Hope you enjoy “Zero Fail” -- it’s a pretty grim picture but definitely helpful in illustrating that bureaucratic structures, like fish, rot from the head!
Having grown up in Toronto and taken both the train and bus to New York as a student, I can assure you that there would be a market for a 3:20 HSR line between the cities. The big issues that need to be fixed, however, are not just the rail itself but immigration – you would need preclearance at Toronto Union Station at the very least, and some sort of system for the Canadian side as well. But to do that you need to eliminate intermediate stops which starts to defeat the purpose...not sure how it could work unless one of the countries radically rethought its immigration procedures.
As for the other cities, it's not just sprawl, but how little infrastructure there is around the stations themselves. Getting into Penn Station is way more convenient than getting into JFK; arriving at most Amtrak station leaves you in a desolate wasteland surrounded by parking and no transit, and you're usually better off coming from the airport, so you lose out on the biggest benefit of rail, central arrival. America also needs to focus on cities, like the Northeast Corridor, where the rail station is actually connected to your ultimate destination.
Unlike the UK/France border, you don't have a globally-famous piece of infrastructure for anti-terrorism security theatre to develop around.
This means that immigration checks on-board the train are a plausible approach:
Stations close to the border (Buffalo, Rochester) have pre-clearance. At the last station before pre-clearance (Syracuse, probably), Canadian immigration officials board the train and start clearing people before they enter Canada. At Rochester, one coach is emptied entirely, and passengers not going to Canada have to transfer to that carriage (and passengers boarding for US destinations can skip pre-clearance but must board that carriage).
At the last station before the border (either Buffalo or a specific Niagara station), immigration officials can have anyone removed from the train if they don't want to let them into Canada.
On the other side of the border, all the stations (Toronto, Hamilton, probably a Niagara station) are close enough to the border to need pre-clearance, so you don't need the immigration officials on board, but you will need to have the separate coach(es) for domestic passengers.
One rule of thumb (not always reliable, but usually): if there are no commuter trains running to a station, there shouldn't be any high-speed trains running there either. If there aren't commuter services into a city, then either the city is too sprawling (or too small), or the station is badly located.
If you want to serve smaller/sprawling cities then the most sensible thing to do is to reroute the track a bit and locate the station at the airport. Rail passengers arriving at a city arrive without a car. So do air passengers, and the infrastructure to convert them from pedestrians to motorists (car hire, taxis, etc) already exists at airports.
If the city is walkable or has good transit, then the station is probably located in that area and there is already commuter rail running into that dense walkable core, and if there isn't, then setting up commuter rail would be a good idea - and if the current Amtrak station is so badly located that it doesn't make sense as a commuter rail destination, then build a new station in a sensible place.
Immigration officials on the trains seems like a great idea to serve intermediate stops.
If for some reason that's not feasible, there's another fairly simple option for non-express trains: We keep the train physically partitioned into precleared carriages in front of uncleared carriages, and stop at the border. The Canada-bound side of the tracks has a domestic US platform with a pedestrian walkway back to the US, then a CBSA pedestrian checkpoint, then a domestic Canada platform. The US-bound side has a domestic Canada platform with a walkway back to Canada, then a CBP pedestrian checkpoint, then a domestic US platform.
Everyone in an uncleared carriage gets off the train at the platform for their nation of origin, the uncleared carriage doors are closed, the gangway between the precleared and uncleared carriages is opened, the cleared carriage doors open to the domestic platform for the new country, and passengers (many of whom just went though customs) can get on.
If anyone is deemed inadmissible, they can walk to their nation of origin. During times of frequent service the trains wouldn't need to wait for people to go through customs, because each train would just board people who got off the train before. The stations could serve domestic traffic easily.
One of the reasons to do immigration on the train is so you don't have to try to fit pre-clearance into Penn Station. There might be room in Grand Central, but there certainly isn't in Penn.
Your walkway idea would be a bit tricky at the actual border area for trains to Toronto, as the border is the Niagara River, and the walkway would be across the bridge. Current rail services cross the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, though building a new bridge for high-speed rail (ie with pedestrian walkways) would be an option. Not sure I'd think that rejected admissions walking across a bridge would be a great idea, though.
There are a total of four border crossings that you might reasonably want high-speed rail across, the other three being alongside Lake Champlain (Montreal-New York trains), across the Detroit River (Chicago-Toronto trains) and alongside Semiahmoo Bay (Seattle-Vancouver trains). The walkway solution would work for Semiahmoo and Champlain, but not for the Niagara and Detroit Rivers.
Note that high-speed trains lose a lot of time every time they stop (between five and ten minutes), so minimising the number of stops is key to effective performance. This is one reason why they are best when combined with good fast regional services. If you live in Utica, and there's a 100mph train from Syracuse to Albany through Utica, then you're less bothered that the high-speed line to NYC/GTA bypasses Utica at 220mph - you can catch the regional train and interchange at either Syracuse or Albany.
For NYC-Toronto, you'd have a NYC central stop (Grand Central or Penn Station), a suburban stop somewhere in Westchester County with good road links and a massive parking garage, a stop in Albany, a stop in Syracuse, maybe a stop in Rochester, a stop in Buffalo, a stop in Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side), one in Hamilton and then Toronto central. That's six or seven intermediate stops, which means that a non-stop train would gain between half and a full hour - enough to possibly justify running a mix of the two (with timed overtakes at the intermediate stops).
If you are doing that, then the non-stops would want pre-clearance (doing immigration on the train means a scheduled stop at the border to remove people who are not cleared) and that probably means they leave from Grand Central while the stoppers leave from Penn.
I think that clearance on moving trains is the best possible way to do it, and I assume that all of the technology implemented at a border crossing (e.g. NEXUS, passport scanners) could be done on a commercial tablet with a dongle to read embedded chips. I just pessimistically assume there's some legal obstacle, such as a requirement by one or both countries that these checks take place at certain physical locations.
I'm not familiar with NYC train stations, but how much space does pre-clearance really take? I assume it can be done by just fencing off the first or last platform and putting in a couple NEXUS machines and turnstiles/kiosks for CBSA. I assume the platform could still serve domestic trains.
I assume that HSR will require a new bridge for engineering or decongestion purposes. The Rainbow Bridge over the Niagara River includes a pedestrian/bicycle crossing and the Gordie Howe Bridge being built over the Detroit River will too. My thought is that CBP/CBSA checkpoints at a HSR bridge could be located such that they also serve pedestrian traffic over the bridge unrelated to trains. A HSR+ped bridge with CBP/CBSA checkpints at the respective ends and train stations could be the Niagara Falls (Canadian side) stop on your NYC->Toronto train and also a useful stop for Americans, who could walk across the bridge, go through CBSA, then board right there in Canada.
WRT rejected admissions: Given that some people who get rejected at the border won't be detained by either country (for example, Canada will reject people with DUIs in the last decade) I don't know that anyone would stop them from walking back across the border if they wanted. I assume that people rejected for smuggling, active warrants, and so on would be detained and charged or detained and picked up by law enforcement from the country that wants them. Ideally ineligible people don't get on the train at all; it seems easy for the train operator to check passport numbers at time of purchase and verify that people have their passports when boarding the train, similar to international air travel.
> I'm not familiar with NYC train stations, but how much space does pre-clearance really take?
I recently did Eurostar preclearance in Amsterdam for a trip to London: you go up to a specific platform in the main station, then walk down to the end to a small-ish building (https://goo.gl/maps/p8z2PgGyjvwbvEEJ6) and go through EU passport exit-stamping, then UK entry clearance, and wait around in the building until the train arrives. Once the train's there, about half of the platform is cordoned off with movable barriers and a few security guards so that you can only access the pre-cleared cars and people going to Belgium and France on the same train can only access the non-cleared cars (they just go up to the platform and wait around normally without doing the formalities, since it's all in the Schengen zone).
The key point is that you need space for a waiting room and a sterile way to get from it to the dedicated cars on the train. That may be feasible in some places, maybe less so in others (e.g. Penn Station).
"The big issues that need to be fixed, however, are not just the rail itself but immigration – you would need preclearance at Toronto Union Station at the very least, and some sort of system for the Canadian side as well."
This seems achievable, the US already clears preclears passengers at many Canadian airports. I'm not aware of any Canadian pre-clearance for passengers coming from the US, but in a Toronto/NYC train line preclearance for the US is probably far more important because the vast majority of the distance is in the US; all the screening (both US and Canadian) could take place in Toronto. Alternately, the train could just stop at the US/Canada border; the most logical routes go across the Niagara River, where there are already several CBSA/CBP facilities.
Another thought: Trains are modular; it would be possible to have a train with two segments of passenger cars that don't have a gangway connection with one another. On a train departing Canada for the US, passengers precleared by US CBP board a "cleared" segment and other passengers board an "uncleared" segment. In Canada the doors to the "uncleared" segment open at every stop but the doors to the "cleared" segment only open at stops with US CBP pre-clearance. Once the train crosses into the US the situation is reversed, with the "cleared" section opening at every stop but the "uncleared" segment only opening at stations with CBP.
US to Canada could work similarly if Canada put CBSA officers in the US.
The "uncleared" section could also be used by passengers who are only riding the train between Canadian stops, and the "cleared" section could be used by passengers only riding between US stops.
Canada doesn't do preclearance for passengers coming from the US (though the agreements permit it) for straightforward logistical reasons: there are lots more US origins than Canadian destinations, so it's inefficient to send half a dozen CBSA agents to Sacramento to handle one flight a day than to just have them sitting in Vancouver or Toronto handling all the inbound flights.
For trains, this might be less problematic since you can arrange for them to board en route and catch the next US-bound train to reposition.
Part of the issue is that there are really no Canadian cities that are both (1) far from the US border that an international train would have many stops in Canada, and (2) large/close enough to US metro areas that international trains make sense.
Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal are all so close that any international trains would like just have 1-3 stops in Canada; so CBSA can easily just do entry control as people get off the train at their final destination. Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg are all probably better served with aircraft regardless of border controls.
Yeah --- the only plausible stop on the Vancouver route before hitting Pacific Central Station would be in Surrey (and maaaaybe right at the border for White Rock?), and there's approximately no demand for HSR from Surrey to PCS, so saying "no domestic passengers" for that segment is reasonable. You do a small CBSA/CBP office to handle the few dozen people a day who get on/off, and done.
For Ottawa, you might be looking at Brockville or Cornwall, but again, if you're laying tracks suitable for HSR you could just run entirely-domestic trains on them anyways, so there's no need to worry about mixing passengers. Worst case, same story with the small office, staffed by people from the nearby bridges. Same story for Montreal and St. Jean.
The hard problem is Toronto, since you've got somewhat-attractive stops from Niagara Falls to Missisauga (for the line to NYC) and from Windsor/Sarnia to Mississauga (for the Detroit line) that probably don't individually warrant preclearance southbound nor stationing CBSA there either, but where there is enough cumulative demand that it might make sense to stop. :/
"As for the other cities, it's not just sprawl, but how little infrastructure there is around the stations themselves... arriving at most Amtrak station leaves you in a desolate wasteland surrounded by parking and no transit"
This is true about many Amtrak stations, but not for most of the core NEC (DC to Boston).
None are surrounded by parking lot sprawl. All are also served by commuter rail. All are served by subway (DC, PHL, BOS, kind of Newark) and/or light rail (Baltimore, PHL, Trenton, Newark). All are served by buses (including BRT in some cases).
Even tho places like Wilmington, New Haven, and Providence lack subway and/or light rail, they are not in parking lot wasteland, and they still connect will bus transit (including BRT in the case of Providence). Things do get spottier outside of the core NEC, but to pick out a couple places MY mentioned, Raleigh Union Station and Pittsburgh Union Station are located downtown and are not surrounded by parking lots.
Yes, I may have phrased it poorly but this is exactly what I mean. The NEC has stations that make sense, but most of the rest of the US doesn't – let's focus on what makes sense!
> But to do that you need to eliminate intermediate stops which starts to defeat the purpose
On the Eurostar, passengers headed to the UK go through UK border control before boarding and are routed to different carriages than those traveling within Schengen. The UK carriages are restricted and the Schengen carriages are cleared out before entering the Chunnel.
Any analysis needs to account for the door-to-door time, not time on the primary mode of transit. The cost and time burden to get into Manhattan is substantial and train service would alleviate that.
I'm in the Chicago suburbs. A trip to Manhattan (via EWR, I'm a United person) is about 4:30 door to door. A 5:00 Chicago - NY train time is on the border of being viable. It would be 6:00 - 7 :00 door-to-door (I'm 40 minutes closer to O'Hare than downtown Chicago), but it would be a much better experience. Even if Chicago to NY isn't competitive, shorter routes definitely would be.
Home to Manhattan. 0:20 to O'Hare, 1:00 at airport, 2:10 flight time, 0:20 to get out of EWR, 0:40 to get to city (assuming a taxi or Uber; train is feasible but usually slower and limited to schedules).
A much more interesting post would be about the politics that led to this inane map. Who dropped the ball? (My guess would be Secretary Pete and Biden himself.) Why? Do they not care? Or did they attempt to do something better but were held back by stakeholders? How can you create a situation where decisions go in a better direction next time?
Biden is known for being a train guy and Buttigeg is at least more mass transit friendly than most government bureaucrats. If this is what we're getting right now there's literally no hope for Amtrak
How much can be attributed to priorities? Matt wrote a series of takes on the need to make some explicit tradeoffs, and while Biden has had broad agenda, he hasn't spent is political capital on everything. Could it be the case that transit just isn't (perceived to be) important enough relative other issues?
I am strongly suspicious that Matt's last take on Amtrak, namely, that isn't really run by train guys who want to make good trains, is probably to blame. Amtrak more than likely sees their role as being a long distance connection service for the country and has little interest in the more complicated questions of "are we actually providing a good train service where we can with the money we have".
I personally love the *idea* of the slow long distance trains and all things considered, we should probably spin that off as some sort of public amenity ala the national parks. Just have some luxurious trains with food and sleeper cars and advertise it as the correct way to do an American road trip. See the gorgeous mountains and valley's and deserts from the comfort of a mini hotel room.
The truth is that 80 mph max diesel locomotives sharing tracks with freight are just not competitive outside of a few unique corridors (like California's internal routes). Those corridors more than likely should be run by a dedicated division or agency that only does *good* high speed interstate lines, like the NEC and the line discussed in today's post. There's plenty of areas where having a federal agency be able to set up a big train would work, but it's just a completely different ballgame compared to the scenic and nice-in-theory idea of having a twice daily train that runs to a ton of middle of nowhere places.
My father (who is both a railfan and worked in the public transportation business for decades) has for many years attributed a large part of Amtrak's management problems to the facts that (1) most of the senior management at any given time is not actually from the rail industry in the first place and (2) the senior managers are often looking to move elsewhere in the private sector (rail or otherwise) relatively quickly. My father wouldn't phrase it this way, but my read of the situation is that Amtrak would benefit from a "J. Edgar Hoover figure of rail passenger transportation" (with less blackmailing of civil rights leaders!), i.e., someone who is going to effectively devote the entire remainder of their career to improving the organization rather than treating it as a stepping stone to something bigger and better.
Correct. Amtrak isn't connected to DOT in an administrative sense. It has language in its charter disclaiming governmental status altogether -- similar to other federally-chartered corporations like CPB.
The Secretary of Transportation has an ex officio seat on Amtrak's board, and holds all of its preferred stock. I think that's more a way of keeping the corporation tethered to the Executive Branch in the last instance than a real means of asserting operational control.
Yeah, reading this I found myself wondering what has led to this decision. The article seems to broadly attribute it to it being the easy thing to do, spreading federal money around, etc. However, what all was proposed, how hard did someone, if anyone, push for something like the Matt/Alon vision? What was the pushback? A part of me wants to assume the Mayor Pete technocrats tried to push high speed rail in NE, but maybe no one did..
I feel that the number of politicians and regulatory agencies involved is vastly underrated. Boston/Washington goes through eight states + DC, meaning many officials who can try to affect the process even if they don't have actual decision-making ability.
The politics of the map are that Amtrak has to provide new or "improved" service all across the country if they want Congress to give them any money. Creates very bad incentives.
But I guess the population is really more pentagonal from Paris - there’s a line north, a line east, a line southeast, a line southwest, and a line west. The southern point of the hexagon doesn’t have as much population as the others, and Montpellier would naturally be served via Marseille rather than on a separate line.
Matt's point doesn't depend on how many sides there are. The principle is the same for any regular polygon. The more closely the shape of the country (more precisely, its population distribution) resembles a square, octagon, dodecahedron, etc., the less added value you get from building a line along any particular axis.
I'm familiar with the appellation but the Gulf of Lion always makes the Southeast bit the odd part out -- like Matt I always find it tempting to think of the coast as better approximated by either a Pentagon with its bottom side spanning from roughly Hendaye to Menton (or Bayonne to Nice for bigger cities), or else a concave octagon or nonagon adding either two line segments from Cerbere to Montpellier and Montpellier to Nice / Mention, or else three going Cerbere->Montpellier->Cap Benat->Nice/Menton.
I agree completely. But if this is what the most train-friendly president in at least 100 years - you get back to Wilson (who else?) for aesthetic hatred of cars - comes up with, how will we ever get there? This ought to be the political moment when we get good mass transit policy people making good proposals, but it hasn't happened. Is it because we don't have such people in the US?
I'm still amazed that, even in the post-pork era, that representatives from here still want to revive a Portland to SLC Amtrak line. It just isn't going to happen.
I would, however, be very interested in touring a Boston to DC line that truly is high speed, and I never thought of the angle of opening up capacity in airports in that region as a benefit, but now that I have I'm even more in support. Just focus heavily on that one line, I don't care if it's thousands of miles away from where I live.
I'm a Californian. CAHSR is such an embarassment. California is as poorly governed, for different reasons, as the deep south. California just has significant natural advantages that keep it wealthy.
Maybe this is obvious, but I can see why Matt's proposals will likely never pass Congress. Even if the US overnight somehow magically had southern Europe's building costs, you're still spending a lot of money to benefit a small number of already wealthy coastal states. Like, there's really nothing here that would incentivize a Congressperson from the middle of the country to vote for any these. Maybe there's some kind of grand bargain to be struck, but you can see why spending large chunks of federal money on just a few coastal states isn't popular, right?
The grand bargain is basically what Amtrak has come up with lol. This map of new/resurrected routes across the country along with the Northeast Corridor 2035 plan to give much better service between DC and Boston.
We're not offering HSR to the heartland. We're offering them (more specifically their congresspeople) slow routes that give them a pinch of buy-in so that they help pay for improvements on the coasts.
No one at Amtrak (at least I hope no one) actually thinks that they can get gigantic rail ridership from residents of Montana and West Virginia.
If you think there's a better way to get Congress to pay for east coast rail improvements I'm all ears, but as it stands I think the big issue is that the money Congress and the states plan on giving is basically going to get wasted.
Just have the coastal states band together and fund it themselves?
With the buy-in, though...there is some marginal benefit for Senators to be able to say that they brought some funding to their state, but if it is being spent on trains no one wants to ride on, how powerful is that really?
Bribe us with funding for better things, at least.
It took WWII and the need to build vast quantities of stuff to break the depression-era mindset of “keep everyone clothed and fed through make-work if need be.”
I don't think coastal states creating their own coalition works. We have a federal govt. Rail fans hate this but just give the in-land states more funding for their car centric transit.
I don't think there is any hope for transforming these pseudo car-sprawl communities into real cities. So just give you the funds for your highways and road maintenance.
Money for improving the roads, airports, and river and seaports in states that aren't part of the west coast or northeast corridor would be the best deal.
There are a few routes that make sense; Houston-Dallas is one. Southwest Airlines has flights every 90 minutes on weekdays between Houston-Hobby and Dallas-Love, 6:00AM to 9:30PM. The terrain between Houston and DFW is flat and boring, which seems favorable to construction and allows long, straight sections. If the route went slightly west of a straight line, the population centers in Waco and College Station could be served too.
And I can imagine other states pointing out that they have useful, if disconnected, corridors. Portland to Vancouver could very easily work as a train line with some improvements (Cascades is already pretty good!) as could the less sexy Chicago - Springfield - St. Louis or Cincinnati - Columbus - Cleveland. There's no reason it has to be NEC or everywhere
The only big US city that has absolutely zero case for high-speed rail is Denver.
Some of the other cases are a bit flimsy or very "Phase 14" cases (Atlanta only makes sense if the NEC and a Florida system are already operational), but they do exist.
Just to lay out the list of cases for North American high-speed rail.
NEC is the best case.
Other standalone cases (not in order):
Houston-Dallas
Dallas-Austin-San Antonio
Los Angeles-San Francisco
Several individual lines from Chicago (Miluwakee-Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit-Toronto, Cleveland, possibly Indianapolis-Louisville)
Miami-Jacksonville
Portland-Vancouver
Toronto-Montreal
Connecting to other lines:
Charlotte-Richmond-Washington (requires NEC)
NY-Albany-Montreal (requires NEC)
Boston-Albany-Buffalo (requires NEC and NY-Albany)
Philadelphia-Pittsburgh-Cleveland (requires NEC and Chicago-Cleveland)
Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati (possibly extended to either Indianapolis or Louisville) (requires one of Cleveland, Louisville or Indianapolis to connect to Chicago, and Cleveland to the NEC, requires NEC)
Buffalo-Cleveland (requires Buffalo to connect to NY and Boston and Montreal via Albany and Cleveland to connect to Chicago and to Toronto via Detroit; does not require Montreal-Toronto)
Jacksonville-Atlanta-Charlotte (requires NEC, NEC connection to Charlotte and Miami-Jacksonville)
Houston-Austin (requires both Dallas-Houston and Dallas-Austin)
San Diego-Los Angeles (requires LA-SF)
Vegas-Los Angeles (requires LA-SF)
Phoenix-Los Angeles (requires LA-SF)
SF-Sacramento-Reno (requires LA-SF)
Montreal-Quebec City (requires Montreal-Toronto)
There are a few routes that might work if everything else was built out to connect things together; they would work by combining passengers taking lots of different journeys.
Atlanta-Nashville-Louisville is one, if the Midwest and southeast networks were fully built out.
Another is St Louis-Kansas City, once there's a connection from St Louis at least to New York
The upshot is four isolated systems, one covering the Atlantic coast, the Midwest and Ontario/Quebec in Canada, one in Texas, one in California (and Arizona/Nevada) and one in the PNW (Oregon, Washington and British Columbia).
There is no reasonable case for new infrastructure connecting any of them together; the distances are just too great and the intermediate populations too thin. I'm sure that Amtrak would run slow long-distance trains connecting them together for those who really want to.
While the technical analysis is OK, passenger rail (and airports as well) is intensely political. The Acela Corridor is already a political badge (good or bad depending upon your politics). These ideas are nice, but progress has to be a politically palatable package.
I do see a somewhat different market perspective. Fear of flying is not the only motivation for trains. Productive use of time is another. Pre-COVID I did Boston->DC-> Bostin 5-10 times per year for multi-day meetings.
It makes productive sense once you have electricity, wireless Internet, and laptops. Instead of 4 hours chopped up into useless chunks of driving, parking, TSA, waiting, loading, flying, unloading, etc. you have one 6 hour chunk of sitting and getting work done. Small things like the quiet car made it more productive.
Some of those slower passenger segments may make sense when you incorporate all the ancillary time costs. Chicago to Detroit on a regular schedule might be time effective when compared with O'hare or Midway considering all the flight and traffic issues. I know people who think hard about St Louis to Chicago where driving, train, and flying are all options. Cost, productive time, schedule and other convenience factors drive their decisions. Modest things like parking and car rental at market driven locations can make quite a difference.
Also also, trains can compete on comfort and cabin experience because they are less space-constrained than airplanes. I would usually take 6 hours in a spacious train seat over 4 crammed into an airplane seat.
This is where infrequent fliers go wrong in their assumptions. I take approximately 80 flights a year. TSA takes 30 seconds (Clear, Precheck). If I have a little time before my flight I work in the lounge and have a snack. On the plane I have legroom, Wi-Fi and space for my laptop. Business travelers aren’t going to switch to trains.
Maybe business travelers who fly 80 times per year won't, but there are a lot of infrequent-to-semi-frequent business travelers. Such people - I'm one of them - are:
-Highly unlikely to have bothered with Clear or Precheck.
-Almost certainly unable to accumulate enough miles or status to upgrade to business class seats or access airport lounges.
Note that most companies will not allow employees to buy business class tickets for flights anywhere close to the length where a train would be a viable alternative. If you're flying business class DC-Boston or New York-Atlanta, you are either rich or have miles.
Station location seems very, very critical to making trains a superior time/convenience choice relative to flying. If it's easy/cheap to get to or from the train station, trains can really win. If they're just competing on lack of security lines and more passenger room, it's tough.
Difficulty comes because good train station locations mean building train tracks through heavily populated areas.
Most cities already have train tracks and a central station built in the nineteenth century.
In the vast majority of cases, the train can run at a lower speed on the old track and then switch to a new high-speed line once it gets out of the city.
Amtrak is proposing a new tunnel in New York for HSR, but that's because the existing one is at capacity, not because they need it for speed.
This sounds like the start of a West Wing episode, so I asked openai to write it. It wasn't as good as I hoped it would be though. :D
It's a crisp fall day in Washington, D.C. Ron Klain, the newly-appointed Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, sits in his office reading a post on a political blog by Matt Yglesias. The post is about the potential benefits and challenges of implementing a high-speed rail system in the country.
As he reads, Ron's phone rings. It's the President, who is on his way back from a campaign rally in Ohio. The President sounds excited, and tells Ron that he wants to make high-speed rail a priority for his administration.
Ron listens attentively, and then tells the President that he will put together a team to explore the feasibility of implementing high-speed rail. The President is pleased, and tells Ron that he will be closely following the progress of the team.
Meanwhile, in the West Wing, White House Press Secretary C.J. Cregg is briefing the press corps on the President's latest policy initiatives. She fields a question about high-speed rail, and tells the reporters that the President is committed to exploring the possibility of implementing such a system.
Later that day, Ron convenes a meeting of his team to discuss the high-speed rail project. The team includes transportation experts, economists, and engineers. They discuss the potential economic benefits of a high-speed rail system, as well as the challenges of implementing such a project.
At the end of the meeting, Ron tells the team that they will need to develop a comprehensive plan for how to move forward with the project. He also tells them that the President is eager for updates on their progress.
The team goes to work, and over the next few weeks they conduct research, hold meetings with stakeholders, and develop a plan for implementing a high-speed rail system.
As the plan takes shape, Ron briefs the President on their progress. The President is impressed with the team's work, and decides to make high-speed rail a key part of his infrastructure plan.
The episode ends with Ron and the President discussing the potential political benefits of the high-speed rail project, and the President expressing confidence that it will be a success.
I would have gone more with a Slow News Day (S05E12) + Let Biden be Biden (S01E19) + Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (S01E21):
- The President includes a throwaway line about high speed rail in SOTU.
- The WH senior staffer notices a Republican Senator clapping for that line, approaches in secret for buy-in on orchestrating the replacement of Amtrak board with directors strongly in favor of high speed rail, which is leaked to the WSJ.
- The President admonishes the senior staffer, does some lines about how high speed rail is the third rail of politics.
- The CoS shows sass, gives a wake-up call to the President, and after that gives a Let Biden be Biden speech with mediocre sports metaphors.
- The WH senior staff orchestrates the Amtrak board overhaul, including a Barry Haskell scene or two.
- The board is overhauled, but nothing happens. Victory!
- Everybody hates The West Wing for its feel-good vibes that don't result in fast trains.
Farts don't get much older than me. I've nearly dissipated altogether, into a lingering hint of a foul odor. I avoid Fabreeze now, because the smallest spritz could obliterate me.
It's still great, I rode it to Ann Arbor with some friends about a year ago. It was much easier than driving (especially since we had to work on the train).
Interesting to contrast this wishing-for-utopia with yesterday's “managing people is really hard, actually”. I've popped around Alon's Pedestrian Observations and man, IDK ... high-speed rail might just be really hard. Germany's system seems generally a mess (i.e., construction of the "4-hour" Munich to Berlin line took >25 years, city politics force too many stops, mixed freight lines seem to constrain everything, packed ridership compounds reliability issues). France's doesn't seem much better with maybe even higher reliability issues and complex network transfers. Say what you want about all the causes of California's HSR incompetence -- we have one example here and it's a disaster. As a longtime huge rail fan ... I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to the argument that with EV's coming -- point to point auto is hard to beat and HSR here probably missed the window.
There are three main forms of passenger transport in the United States - planes, cars and trains. Essentially all the roads in the US are government owned and run. Essentially all the passenger airports are government owned and run. Trains are the outlier in that almost all of the track is privately owned. But some folks here seem to be arguing that trains are the one with the unfair advantage and are wrong to be asking for a handout.
I would argue trains at least need to be on the same level playing field with roads and airports/ATC.
Rail passenger fans would note that post-9/11 the US government gave airlines more money in just the very first bailout package than the US government has ever spent *total* on supporting passenger rail service in the entire history of American railroading.
Pete Buttigieg has been a disappointment as Secretary of Transportation. If smart, young technocrats we’re good for anything, it would be lowering construction costs. He seems to have done zero on that front. He hasn’t even done a symbolic house cleaning at Amtrak. Google him and you’ll see he recently visited a UPS facility and has been active talking about LGBT rights.
This is very sad because his incentives are almost perfect. He will never win a statewide election in Indiana. His only viable paths are moving to a different state or running for President or Vice President. Cutting through red tape and bashing entitled bureaucrats to build eco-friendly rail and mass transit would be a great strategy for capturing the vital center. And yet this extremely disciplined, smart dude hasn’t made any changes that matter.
Is it accurate that his incentives are perfect? The way I see it, Secretary Mayor Pete would need to (1) pick a bunch of fights with entrenched interests; (2) win those fights; (3) build the infrastructure and systems to implement "his" plans; (4) wait to see if it actually works.
Picking a giant fight with all the players necessary to achieve 1-3 in favor of train riding coastal élites? With hugely uncertain payoffs and a planning horizon many years in the future even under the best of circumstances?
Although it's not the outcome *I want to see,* I can understand why Secretary Mayor Pete would say no thanks to all that, let's just talk about amazing unions, dole out money, and not rock the boat too much. Have Amtrak put out these maps, get the rail fans to swoon, but then don't actually do anything about it. Maaaaybe pick one or two fights over some egregious stuff. Aim for more certain competence over extremely uncertain chances at excellence.
This is exactly right. He would have to fight a lot against orgs with Democratic employee bases. Unfortunately, the Democratic party cares more about public sector employees than the actual output of the public sector, so it'd be a net loss for his party support.
It's a disaster. We need a strong politician who a) believes that government services are important, and is also b) willing to fight, hard, against the current providers of those government services. It's hard to imagine such a figure - they'v'e have to do a Trump-like takeover of the party.
What proportion of Dems are captive to public employees unions? What proportion are so captive they would avoid a candidate with strong approval ratings and appeal to moderates?
I'd guess there are way more public employees that would defect to more progressive candidates in a primary and/or republicans in the general than there are non-dem voters who would defect to a public-employee-fighting dem.
It's not just captured interest, it's also the broad based of progressives who like both labor issues and gov't services, but don't understand or acknowledge the tradeoffs and would choose labor issues even if they did.
I actually think on of the few exceptions is city governments, since the link between voting and quality of gov't services is so much more tangible. It's why you can get a Bloomberg or (pre-crazy) Guiluiani as mayor of NYC, but you'd never get NYC to vote for someone like that for a national office.
This is why I’m mildly anti-union. Unions rarely help the workers who are getting screwed the hardest. They create pools of privileged workers who make more than the median income who are happy to stick it to consumers for their parochial interests.
I would rather delegate redistribution to the IRS than the UAW.
I'm mildly pro-union. In an ideal world redistribution would be handled by IRS and labor rules via congress but once you gut worker power, Capital influences IRS to reduce redistribution and to capture Congress to write labor laws.
You need some countervailing power to Capital.
Terry McAuliffe spent the last few days of his campaign holding rallies with teachers' unions. The capture is real.
Sorry but the "Trump-like takeover of the party" is not going to come from the neoliberal anti-public-sector-union direction.
agreed - it's why we're not going to fix this stuff no matter how hard Matt Y and Aron Levy try.
I think our only hope is for the Republican party to get more Mitt Romney-ish, but that seems pretty unlikely too.
Jury's still out on this in my view. These projects unfold over the time scale of years, and the best technocrat in the world wouldn't be able to solve the transportation construction cost problem in the time he's had. As more projects start getting selected and executed with IIJA funding in the coming years, we'll get a better idea whether that portfolio looks efficient and effective or not.
I agree it might take a while to lower construction costs. However, it would take about five minutes to draft a press release saying “Construction costs are too high because there are too many regulations and too much fedtherbedding. I am undertaking a comprehensive review of all federal transportation regulations with an eye to cutting construction costs. I will put my full administrative authority behind this project. Where legislation is necessary, my Department will propose bipartisan, common sense reforms so that we can build shit as efficiently as we used to. The nation that built the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, and the Interstate highway system can do better.”
Has that happened yet?
FWIW Pete's social media for the last few months includes a bunch of aspirational stuff about the IIJA, a statement about how American passenger rail needs to live up to the standards of our peer countries, and a summit on construction cost and schedule issues. He seems to at least take the challenge seriously and recognize that delivering good projects with the IIJA money is what he's got to do - and you may be right that he won't succeed but it would be good for America if he does!
There are some encouraging things happening with Amtrak and other agencies getting equipment from outfits like Siemens and Stadler based on standard European designs. I think that importing the know-how from places that do this stuff really well would help improve our outlier unit costs.
He could have sent a nastygram back to VTA saying "fuck the san Jose merchants if you want a cent of federal money: we only pay for cut and cover in tier III cities".
They bought a place in Traverse City, Michigan, do the "move to a different state" part is covered.
I agree. Has anything been coming out of DoT that is surprising in a good direction? None of the news stories I can think of reflect well on his leadership. But maybe I'm forgetting something?
What makes this so disappointing is that he was actually given a huge amount of resources to improve rail, and would presumably have had backing from Biden to help stand up to the entrenched interests who pushed for this map. It may well have been a unique opportunity to "fix" Amtrak.
I don't think people are arguing that it would be easy. But clearly if there is the possibility of new money, and the Secretary and President are on board, then there must be some way to exert pressure.
What I don't know is whether Pete has even tried. Has there been a push to make this a priority to the point where he is willing to spend political capital and make enemies of the people who benefit from the current version of Amtrak?
Another poster pointed out that if Pete has his eye on a presidential run, then he in fact has strong incentives to NOT rock the boat - don't run the risk of coming across as anti-union, as favoring the Acela corridor, etc. It is very frustrating to those of us who had hoped that this time, there actually was a chance to shake things up.
Right this is a good point. See it's totally within the power of a motivated President and SECDOT to do this. The Board members are appointed by the President and they can be unilaterally removed by the President.
But that creates a lot of anger (those people were appointed--principally from Obama--for a reason!). The replacements need to be confirmed by the Senate, which takes up floor time from the objectively more important judicial confirmations conveyor belt. So....why do it at all?
As Yglesias has written before, [1] the issue is Amtrak leadership.
> I sometimes like to tell the story of the time an Amtrak executive told me “to be honest, I don’t know that much about trains.”
> And I think this is emblematic of Amtrak. It is run by people who are not curious about trains.
A leadership shakeup is needed to address these issues. The suggestion in that earlier article is to bring in a foreign CEO who has experience in running a functional rail system. E.g., someone from the rail programs of France, Italy, Japan, Korean, etc.
But there just isn’t the political will to fix Amtrak leadership and there are existing constituencies that benefit from the current pork barrel approach.
[1] “Amtrak should bring in foreign experts to make trains great again”, https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-should-bring-in-foreign-experts
*Edited to fix typo
An old military aphorism: there are no bad armies just bad generals...
This post is a lot of red meat for Matt's dedicated readers, but as with other accounts of regulatory failure (the series on advanced nuclear and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also comes to mind), I wish there was more reporting on the sources of the bottlenecks that keep these institutions from changing. And not generalities -- it would be amazing to read interviews with the people who work there and get their impressions on the work that they do and don't!
I had the same feeling reading this. Instead of Matt's 1000th article on the same subject of how Amtrak sucks, I'd rather see a steelmanned article with reporting and sources on why it isn't happening.
Matt's usual stance of politics being the art of the possible seems to often be absent when he talks about rail in the US.
It all feels very handwavy to me, which is a departure from his usual nitty gritty (c.f. the child tax credit article vs this one).
Good point. Everyone knows we aren't even going to get the boondoggle of building this _bad_ plan. Nothing will probably be built at all.
I recognize that this is a policy-focused newsletter and there is a big difference between policy reporting and reporting on people and organizations, but I really think that the latter would help clarify what is possible vis a vis the former. Clearly Matt has these conversations with people "on the inside" and we would benefit from understanding what those people think!
I understand where you're coming from I think it's pretty clear that reporting on institutions is possible. I would encourage you to check out "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" by Carol Leonnig as one example, which explores the public and not so public institutional failures of an organization with a deep-seated organizational culture of silence and "secret" in the name. I think it's hard, but it can be done!
Good point, Max. I think people are more willing to share their inside thoughts about the functioning of a bureaucracy when it’s for a book for posterity vs. for journalism to affect current trajectory of events.
I’ve been meaning to check out Leonning’s book, so it’s on my list for the holidays now!
You might have a point there. Time for “One Billion On-Time and High-Speed Trains?”
Hope you enjoy “Zero Fail” -- it’s a pretty grim picture but definitely helpful in illustrating that bureaucratic structures, like fish, rot from the head!
Having grown up in Toronto and taken both the train and bus to New York as a student, I can assure you that there would be a market for a 3:20 HSR line between the cities. The big issues that need to be fixed, however, are not just the rail itself but immigration – you would need preclearance at Toronto Union Station at the very least, and some sort of system for the Canadian side as well. But to do that you need to eliminate intermediate stops which starts to defeat the purpose...not sure how it could work unless one of the countries radically rethought its immigration procedures.
As for the other cities, it's not just sprawl, but how little infrastructure there is around the stations themselves. Getting into Penn Station is way more convenient than getting into JFK; arriving at most Amtrak station leaves you in a desolate wasteland surrounded by parking and no transit, and you're usually better off coming from the airport, so you lose out on the biggest benefit of rail, central arrival. America also needs to focus on cities, like the Northeast Corridor, where the rail station is actually connected to your ultimate destination.
Unlike the UK/France border, you don't have a globally-famous piece of infrastructure for anti-terrorism security theatre to develop around.
This means that immigration checks on-board the train are a plausible approach:
Stations close to the border (Buffalo, Rochester) have pre-clearance. At the last station before pre-clearance (Syracuse, probably), Canadian immigration officials board the train and start clearing people before they enter Canada. At Rochester, one coach is emptied entirely, and passengers not going to Canada have to transfer to that carriage (and passengers boarding for US destinations can skip pre-clearance but must board that carriage).
At the last station before the border (either Buffalo or a specific Niagara station), immigration officials can have anyone removed from the train if they don't want to let them into Canada.
On the other side of the border, all the stations (Toronto, Hamilton, probably a Niagara station) are close enough to the border to need pre-clearance, so you don't need the immigration officials on board, but you will need to have the separate coach(es) for domestic passengers.
One rule of thumb (not always reliable, but usually): if there are no commuter trains running to a station, there shouldn't be any high-speed trains running there either. If there aren't commuter services into a city, then either the city is too sprawling (or too small), or the station is badly located.
If you want to serve smaller/sprawling cities then the most sensible thing to do is to reroute the track a bit and locate the station at the airport. Rail passengers arriving at a city arrive without a car. So do air passengers, and the infrastructure to convert them from pedestrians to motorists (car hire, taxis, etc) already exists at airports.
If the city is walkable or has good transit, then the station is probably located in that area and there is already commuter rail running into that dense walkable core, and if there isn't, then setting up commuter rail would be a good idea - and if the current Amtrak station is so badly located that it doesn't make sense as a commuter rail destination, then build a new station in a sensible place.
Immigration officials on the trains seems like a great idea to serve intermediate stops.
If for some reason that's not feasible, there's another fairly simple option for non-express trains: We keep the train physically partitioned into precleared carriages in front of uncleared carriages, and stop at the border. The Canada-bound side of the tracks has a domestic US platform with a pedestrian walkway back to the US, then a CBSA pedestrian checkpoint, then a domestic Canada platform. The US-bound side has a domestic Canada platform with a walkway back to Canada, then a CBP pedestrian checkpoint, then a domestic US platform.
Everyone in an uncleared carriage gets off the train at the platform for their nation of origin, the uncleared carriage doors are closed, the gangway between the precleared and uncleared carriages is opened, the cleared carriage doors open to the domestic platform for the new country, and passengers (many of whom just went though customs) can get on.
If anyone is deemed inadmissible, they can walk to their nation of origin. During times of frequent service the trains wouldn't need to wait for people to go through customs, because each train would just board people who got off the train before. The stations could serve domestic traffic easily.
One of the reasons to do immigration on the train is so you don't have to try to fit pre-clearance into Penn Station. There might be room in Grand Central, but there certainly isn't in Penn.
Your walkway idea would be a bit tricky at the actual border area for trains to Toronto, as the border is the Niagara River, and the walkway would be across the bridge. Current rail services cross the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, though building a new bridge for high-speed rail (ie with pedestrian walkways) would be an option. Not sure I'd think that rejected admissions walking across a bridge would be a great idea, though.
There are a total of four border crossings that you might reasonably want high-speed rail across, the other three being alongside Lake Champlain (Montreal-New York trains), across the Detroit River (Chicago-Toronto trains) and alongside Semiahmoo Bay (Seattle-Vancouver trains). The walkway solution would work for Semiahmoo and Champlain, but not for the Niagara and Detroit Rivers.
Note that high-speed trains lose a lot of time every time they stop (between five and ten minutes), so minimising the number of stops is key to effective performance. This is one reason why they are best when combined with good fast regional services. If you live in Utica, and there's a 100mph train from Syracuse to Albany through Utica, then you're less bothered that the high-speed line to NYC/GTA bypasses Utica at 220mph - you can catch the regional train and interchange at either Syracuse or Albany.
For NYC-Toronto, you'd have a NYC central stop (Grand Central or Penn Station), a suburban stop somewhere in Westchester County with good road links and a massive parking garage, a stop in Albany, a stop in Syracuse, maybe a stop in Rochester, a stop in Buffalo, a stop in Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side), one in Hamilton and then Toronto central. That's six or seven intermediate stops, which means that a non-stop train would gain between half and a full hour - enough to possibly justify running a mix of the two (with timed overtakes at the intermediate stops).
If you are doing that, then the non-stops would want pre-clearance (doing immigration on the train means a scheduled stop at the border to remove people who are not cleared) and that probably means they leave from Grand Central while the stoppers leave from Penn.
I think that clearance on moving trains is the best possible way to do it, and I assume that all of the technology implemented at a border crossing (e.g. NEXUS, passport scanners) could be done on a commercial tablet with a dongle to read embedded chips. I just pessimistically assume there's some legal obstacle, such as a requirement by one or both countries that these checks take place at certain physical locations.
I'm not familiar with NYC train stations, but how much space does pre-clearance really take? I assume it can be done by just fencing off the first or last platform and putting in a couple NEXUS machines and turnstiles/kiosks for CBSA. I assume the platform could still serve domestic trains.
I assume that HSR will require a new bridge for engineering or decongestion purposes. The Rainbow Bridge over the Niagara River includes a pedestrian/bicycle crossing and the Gordie Howe Bridge being built over the Detroit River will too. My thought is that CBP/CBSA checkpoints at a HSR bridge could be located such that they also serve pedestrian traffic over the bridge unrelated to trains. A HSR+ped bridge with CBP/CBSA checkpints at the respective ends and train stations could be the Niagara Falls (Canadian side) stop on your NYC->Toronto train and also a useful stop for Americans, who could walk across the bridge, go through CBSA, then board right there in Canada.
WRT rejected admissions: Given that some people who get rejected at the border won't be detained by either country (for example, Canada will reject people with DUIs in the last decade) I don't know that anyone would stop them from walking back across the border if they wanted. I assume that people rejected for smuggling, active warrants, and so on would be detained and charged or detained and picked up by law enforcement from the country that wants them. Ideally ineligible people don't get on the train at all; it seems easy for the train operator to check passport numbers at time of purchase and verify that people have their passports when boarding the train, similar to international air travel.
> I'm not familiar with NYC train stations, but how much space does pre-clearance really take?
I recently did Eurostar preclearance in Amsterdam for a trip to London: you go up to a specific platform in the main station, then walk down to the end to a small-ish building (https://goo.gl/maps/p8z2PgGyjvwbvEEJ6) and go through EU passport exit-stamping, then UK entry clearance, and wait around in the building until the train arrives. Once the train's there, about half of the platform is cordoned off with movable barriers and a few security guards so that you can only access the pre-cleared cars and people going to Belgium and France on the same train can only access the non-cleared cars (they just go up to the platform and wait around normally without doing the formalities, since it's all in the Schengen zone).
The key point is that you need space for a waiting room and a sterile way to get from it to the dedicated cars on the train. That may be feasible in some places, maybe less so in others (e.g. Penn Station).
"The big issues that need to be fixed, however, are not just the rail itself but immigration – you would need preclearance at Toronto Union Station at the very least, and some sort of system for the Canadian side as well."
This seems achievable, the US already clears preclears passengers at many Canadian airports. I'm not aware of any Canadian pre-clearance for passengers coming from the US, but in a Toronto/NYC train line preclearance for the US is probably far more important because the vast majority of the distance is in the US; all the screening (both US and Canadian) could take place in Toronto. Alternately, the train could just stop at the US/Canada border; the most logical routes go across the Niagara River, where there are already several CBSA/CBP facilities.
Another thought: Trains are modular; it would be possible to have a train with two segments of passenger cars that don't have a gangway connection with one another. On a train departing Canada for the US, passengers precleared by US CBP board a "cleared" segment and other passengers board an "uncleared" segment. In Canada the doors to the "uncleared" segment open at every stop but the doors to the "cleared" segment only open at stops with US CBP pre-clearance. Once the train crosses into the US the situation is reversed, with the "cleared" section opening at every stop but the "uncleared" segment only opening at stations with CBP.
US to Canada could work similarly if Canada put CBSA officers in the US.
The "uncleared" section could also be used by passengers who are only riding the train between Canadian stops, and the "cleared" section could be used by passengers only riding between US stops.
Canada doesn't do preclearance for passengers coming from the US (though the agreements permit it) for straightforward logistical reasons: there are lots more US origins than Canadian destinations, so it's inefficient to send half a dozen CBSA agents to Sacramento to handle one flight a day than to just have them sitting in Vancouver or Toronto handling all the inbound flights.
For trains, this might be less problematic since you can arrange for them to board en route and catch the next US-bound train to reposition.
Part of the issue is that there are really no Canadian cities that are both (1) far from the US border that an international train would have many stops in Canada, and (2) large/close enough to US metro areas that international trains make sense.
Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal are all so close that any international trains would like just have 1-3 stops in Canada; so CBSA can easily just do entry control as people get off the train at their final destination. Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg are all probably better served with aircraft regardless of border controls.
Yeah --- the only plausible stop on the Vancouver route before hitting Pacific Central Station would be in Surrey (and maaaaybe right at the border for White Rock?), and there's approximately no demand for HSR from Surrey to PCS, so saying "no domestic passengers" for that segment is reasonable. You do a small CBSA/CBP office to handle the few dozen people a day who get on/off, and done.
For Ottawa, you might be looking at Brockville or Cornwall, but again, if you're laying tracks suitable for HSR you could just run entirely-domestic trains on them anyways, so there's no need to worry about mixing passengers. Worst case, same story with the small office, staffed by people from the nearby bridges. Same story for Montreal and St. Jean.
The hard problem is Toronto, since you've got somewhat-attractive stops from Niagara Falls to Missisauga (for the line to NYC) and from Windsor/Sarnia to Mississauga (for the Detroit line) that probably don't individually warrant preclearance southbound nor stationing CBSA there either, but where there is enough cumulative demand that it might make sense to stop. :/
"As for the other cities, it's not just sprawl, but how little infrastructure there is around the stations themselves... arriving at most Amtrak station leaves you in a desolate wasteland surrounded by parking and no transit"
This is true about many Amtrak stations, but not for most of the core NEC (DC to Boston).
Show me the parking lot sprawl and no transit:
DC: https://goo.gl/maps/NnFoaQQErt8WPtRbA
Baltimore: https://goo.gl/maps/c7eNsN9q8aUEjRzh9
PHL 30th street: https://goo.gl/maps/vFaBtbxuswaHMwLn6
Trenton: https://goo.gl/maps/7UcCamoU8XdmHkWE6
Newark, NJ: https://goo.gl/maps/GWMza1HjngkcXWdX8
Boston: https://goo.gl/maps/S7fF3FoTnmA6uvS76
None are surrounded by parking lot sprawl. All are also served by commuter rail. All are served by subway (DC, PHL, BOS, kind of Newark) and/or light rail (Baltimore, PHL, Trenton, Newark). All are served by buses (including BRT in some cases).
Even tho places like Wilmington, New Haven, and Providence lack subway and/or light rail, they are not in parking lot wasteland, and they still connect will bus transit (including BRT in the case of Providence). Things do get spottier outside of the core NEC, but to pick out a couple places MY mentioned, Raleigh Union Station and Pittsburgh Union Station are located downtown and are not surrounded by parking lots.
Yes, I may have phrased it poorly but this is exactly what I mean. The NEC has stations that make sense, but most of the rest of the US doesn't – let's focus on what makes sense!
> But to do that you need to eliminate intermediate stops which starts to defeat the purpose
On the Eurostar, passengers headed to the UK go through UK border control before boarding and are routed to different carriages than those traveling within Schengen. The UK carriages are restricted and the Schengen carriages are cleared out before entering the Chunnel.
Any analysis needs to account for the door-to-door time, not time on the primary mode of transit. The cost and time burden to get into Manhattan is substantial and train service would alleviate that.
I'm in the Chicago suburbs. A trip to Manhattan (via EWR, I'm a United person) is about 4:30 door to door. A 5:00 Chicago - NY train time is on the border of being viable. It would be 6:00 - 7 :00 door-to-door (I'm 40 minutes closer to O'Hare than downtown Chicago), but it would be a much better experience. Even if Chicago to NY isn't competitive, shorter routes definitely would be.
Home to Manhattan. 0:20 to O'Hare, 1:00 at airport, 2:10 flight time, 0:20 to get out of EWR, 0:40 to get to city (assuming a taxi or Uber; train is feasible but usually slower and limited to schedules).
The technical analysis is obviously correct.
But everybody knows this, right?
A much more interesting post would be about the politics that led to this inane map. Who dropped the ball? (My guess would be Secretary Pete and Biden himself.) Why? Do they not care? Or did they attempt to do something better but were held back by stakeholders? How can you create a situation where decisions go in a better direction next time?
Biden is known for being a train guy and Buttigeg is at least more mass transit friendly than most government bureaucrats. If this is what we're getting right now there's literally no hope for Amtrak
How much can be attributed to priorities? Matt wrote a series of takes on the need to make some explicit tradeoffs, and while Biden has had broad agenda, he hasn't spent is political capital on everything. Could it be the case that transit just isn't (perceived to be) important enough relative other issues?
I am strongly suspicious that Matt's last take on Amtrak, namely, that isn't really run by train guys who want to make good trains, is probably to blame. Amtrak more than likely sees their role as being a long distance connection service for the country and has little interest in the more complicated questions of "are we actually providing a good train service where we can with the money we have".
I personally love the *idea* of the slow long distance trains and all things considered, we should probably spin that off as some sort of public amenity ala the national parks. Just have some luxurious trains with food and sleeper cars and advertise it as the correct way to do an American road trip. See the gorgeous mountains and valley's and deserts from the comfort of a mini hotel room.
The truth is that 80 mph max diesel locomotives sharing tracks with freight are just not competitive outside of a few unique corridors (like California's internal routes). Those corridors more than likely should be run by a dedicated division or agency that only does *good* high speed interstate lines, like the NEC and the line discussed in today's post. There's plenty of areas where having a federal agency be able to set up a big train would work, but it's just a completely different ballgame compared to the scenic and nice-in-theory idea of having a twice daily train that runs to a ton of middle of nowhere places.
My father (who is both a railfan and worked in the public transportation business for decades) has for many years attributed a large part of Amtrak's management problems to the facts that (1) most of the senior management at any given time is not actually from the rail industry in the first place and (2) the senior managers are often looking to move elsewhere in the private sector (rail or otherwise) relatively quickly. My father wouldn't phrase it this way, but my read of the situation is that Amtrak would benefit from a "J. Edgar Hoover figure of rail passenger transportation" (with less blackmailing of civil rights leaders!), i.e., someone who is going to effectively devote the entire remainder of their career to improving the organization rather than treating it as a stepping stone to something bigger and better.
It's unclear to me what DOT"s levers over Amtrak are exactly. I don't think Amtrak reports to it in a direct sense.
Correct. Amtrak isn't connected to DOT in an administrative sense. It has language in its charter disclaiming governmental status altogether -- similar to other federally-chartered corporations like CPB.
The Secretary of Transportation has an ex officio seat on Amtrak's board, and holds all of its preferred stock. I think that's more a way of keeping the corporation tethered to the Executive Branch in the last instance than a real means of asserting operational control.
Yeah, reading this I found myself wondering what has led to this decision. The article seems to broadly attribute it to it being the easy thing to do, spreading federal money around, etc. However, what all was proposed, how hard did someone, if anyone, push for something like the Matt/Alon vision? What was the pushback? A part of me wants to assume the Mayor Pete technocrats tried to push high speed rail in NE, but maybe no one did..
I feel that the number of politicians and regulatory agencies involved is vastly underrated. Boston/Washington goes through eight states + DC, meaning many officials who can try to affect the process even if they don't have actual decision-making ability.
The politics of the map are that Amtrak has to provide new or "improved" service all across the country if they want Congress to give them any money. Creates very bad incentives.
Matt’s next book - Damntrak: Hell on Rails, A story of liars, bastards and betrayal. Foreword by Lewis Black.
France is a hexagon, not a pentagon! They even famously refer to their shape as "l'Hexagone."
But I guess the population is really more pentagonal from Paris - there’s a line north, a line east, a line southeast, a line southwest, and a line west. The southern point of the hexagon doesn’t have as much population as the others, and Montpellier would naturally be served via Marseille rather than on a separate line.
And Toulouse via Bordeaux.
There really is a lot of nothing between Toulouse and Montpellier
Matt's point doesn't depend on how many sides there are. The principle is the same for any regular polygon. The more closely the shape of the country (more precisely, its population distribution) resembles a square, octagon, dodecahedron, etc., the less added value you get from building a line along any particular axis.
I was pretty obviously making a snide joke.
I'm familiar with the appellation but the Gulf of Lion always makes the Southeast bit the odd part out -- like Matt I always find it tempting to think of the coast as better approximated by either a Pentagon with its bottom side spanning from roughly Hendaye to Menton (or Bayonne to Nice for bigger cities), or else a concave octagon or nonagon adding either two line segments from Cerbere to Montpellier and Montpellier to Nice / Mention, or else three going Cerbere->Montpellier->Cap Benat->Nice/Menton.
I agree completely. But if this is what the most train-friendly president in at least 100 years - you get back to Wilson (who else?) for aesthetic hatred of cars - comes up with, how will we ever get there? This ought to be the political moment when we get good mass transit policy people making good proposals, but it hasn't happened. Is it because we don't have such people in the US?
I'm still amazed that, even in the post-pork era, that representatives from here still want to revive a Portland to SLC Amtrak line. It just isn't going to happen.
I would, however, be very interested in touring a Boston to DC line that truly is high speed, and I never thought of the angle of opening up capacity in airports in that region as a benefit, but now that I have I'm even more in support. Just focus heavily on that one line, I don't care if it's thousands of miles away from where I live.
The biggest benefit would be showing Americans that HSR can actually be done right in the US. California bungled things so badly.
I'm a Californian. CAHSR is such an embarassment. California is as poorly governed, for different reasons, as the deep south. California just has significant natural advantages that keep it wealthy.
Maybe this is obvious, but I can see why Matt's proposals will likely never pass Congress. Even if the US overnight somehow magically had southern Europe's building costs, you're still spending a lot of money to benefit a small number of already wealthy coastal states. Like, there's really nothing here that would incentivize a Congressperson from the middle of the country to vote for any these. Maybe there's some kind of grand bargain to be struck, but you can see why spending large chunks of federal money on just a few coastal states isn't popular, right?
The grand bargain is basically what Amtrak has come up with lol. This map of new/resurrected routes across the country along with the Northeast Corridor 2035 plan to give much better service between DC and Boston.
https://nec-commission.com/connect-nec-2035/
Now the problem is that the costs in the NEC 2035 plan are ridiculous but that's just the nature of American procurement.
"We want hsr for the coasts, but we have to offer it to the heartland to win them over."
Except most of the middle of the country largely doesn't care about or want high speed rail.
I live here and I can't imagine why I would ever take a train trip over riding in my car.
I'd get somewhere and then have to go through the hassle of renting a car or dealing with Uber or what have you.
It just isnt something that seems to resonate with most of us.
We're not offering HSR to the heartland. We're offering them (more specifically their congresspeople) slow routes that give them a pinch of buy-in so that they help pay for improvements on the coasts.
No one at Amtrak (at least I hope no one) actually thinks that they can get gigantic rail ridership from residents of Montana and West Virginia.
If you think there's a better way to get Congress to pay for east coast rail improvements I'm all ears, but as it stands I think the big issue is that the money Congress and the states plan on giving is basically going to get wasted.
Just have the coastal states band together and fund it themselves?
With the buy-in, though...there is some marginal benefit for Senators to be able to say that they brought some funding to their state, but if it is being spent on trains no one wants to ride on, how powerful is that really?
Bribe us with funding for better things, at least.
Jerbs!
Lol, it’s still 2011 in most people’s heads.
It took WWII and the need to build vast quantities of stuff to break the depression-era mindset of “keep everyone clothed and fed through make-work if need be.”
We have no such challenge today.
I don't think coastal states creating their own coalition works. We have a federal govt. Rail fans hate this but just give the in-land states more funding for their car centric transit.
I don't think there is any hope for transforming these pseudo car-sprawl communities into real cities. So just give you the funds for your highways and road maintenance.
Money for improving the roads, airports, and river and seaports in states that aren't part of the west coast or northeast corridor would be the best deal.
There are a few routes that make sense; Houston-Dallas is one. Southwest Airlines has flights every 90 minutes on weekdays between Houston-Hobby and Dallas-Love, 6:00AM to 9:30PM. The terrain between Houston and DFW is flat and boring, which seems favorable to construction and allows long, straight sections. If the route went slightly west of a straight line, the population centers in Waco and College Station could be served too.
This is more or less what Texas Central's doing: https://www.texascentral.com/alignment-maps/
And I can imagine other states pointing out that they have useful, if disconnected, corridors. Portland to Vancouver could very easily work as a train line with some improvements (Cascades is already pretty good!) as could the less sexy Chicago - Springfield - St. Louis or Cincinnati - Columbus - Cleveland. There's no reason it has to be NEC or everywhere
The only big US city that has absolutely zero case for high-speed rail is Denver.
Some of the other cases are a bit flimsy or very "Phase 14" cases (Atlanta only makes sense if the NEC and a Florida system are already operational), but they do exist.
Just to lay out the list of cases for North American high-speed rail.
NEC is the best case.
Other standalone cases (not in order):
Houston-Dallas
Dallas-Austin-San Antonio
Los Angeles-San Francisco
Several individual lines from Chicago (Miluwakee-Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit-Toronto, Cleveland, possibly Indianapolis-Louisville)
Miami-Jacksonville
Portland-Vancouver
Toronto-Montreal
Connecting to other lines:
Charlotte-Richmond-Washington (requires NEC)
NY-Albany-Montreal (requires NEC)
Boston-Albany-Buffalo (requires NEC and NY-Albany)
Philadelphia-Pittsburgh-Cleveland (requires NEC and Chicago-Cleveland)
Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati (possibly extended to either Indianapolis or Louisville) (requires one of Cleveland, Louisville or Indianapolis to connect to Chicago, and Cleveland to the NEC, requires NEC)
Buffalo-Cleveland (requires Buffalo to connect to NY and Boston and Montreal via Albany and Cleveland to connect to Chicago and to Toronto via Detroit; does not require Montreal-Toronto)
Tampa-Orlando-Space Coast (requires Miami-Jacksonville)
Jacksonville-Atlanta-Charlotte (requires NEC, NEC connection to Charlotte and Miami-Jacksonville)
Houston-Austin (requires both Dallas-Houston and Dallas-Austin)
San Diego-Los Angeles (requires LA-SF)
Vegas-Los Angeles (requires LA-SF)
Phoenix-Los Angeles (requires LA-SF)
SF-Sacramento-Reno (requires LA-SF)
Montreal-Quebec City (requires Montreal-Toronto)
There are a few routes that might work if everything else was built out to connect things together; they would work by combining passengers taking lots of different journeys.
Atlanta-Nashville-Louisville is one, if the Midwest and southeast networks were fully built out.
Another is St Louis-Kansas City, once there's a connection from St Louis at least to New York
The upshot is four isolated systems, one covering the Atlantic coast, the Midwest and Ontario/Quebec in Canada, one in Texas, one in California (and Arizona/Nevada) and one in the PNW (Oregon, Washington and British Columbia).
There is no reasonable case for new infrastructure connecting any of them together; the distances are just too great and the intermediate populations too thin. I'm sure that Amtrak would run slow long-distance trains connecting them together for those who really want to.
While the technical analysis is OK, passenger rail (and airports as well) is intensely political. The Acela Corridor is already a political badge (good or bad depending upon your politics). These ideas are nice, but progress has to be a politically palatable package.
I do see a somewhat different market perspective. Fear of flying is not the only motivation for trains. Productive use of time is another. Pre-COVID I did Boston->DC-> Bostin 5-10 times per year for multi-day meetings.
It makes productive sense once you have electricity, wireless Internet, and laptops. Instead of 4 hours chopped up into useless chunks of driving, parking, TSA, waiting, loading, flying, unloading, etc. you have one 6 hour chunk of sitting and getting work done. Small things like the quiet car made it more productive.
Some of those slower passenger segments may make sense when you incorporate all the ancillary time costs. Chicago to Detroit on a regular schedule might be time effective when compared with O'hare or Midway considering all the flight and traffic issues. I know people who think hard about St Louis to Chicago where driving, train, and flying are all options. Cost, productive time, schedule and other convenience factors drive their decisions. Modest things like parking and car rental at market driven locations can make quite a difference.
Also also, trains can compete on comfort and cabin experience because they are less space-constrained than airplanes. I would usually take 6 hours in a spacious train seat over 4 crammed into an airplane seat.
This is where infrequent fliers go wrong in their assumptions. I take approximately 80 flights a year. TSA takes 30 seconds (Clear, Precheck). If I have a little time before my flight I work in the lounge and have a snack. On the plane I have legroom, Wi-Fi and space for my laptop. Business travelers aren’t going to switch to trains.
Maybe business travelers who fly 80 times per year won't, but there are a lot of infrequent-to-semi-frequent business travelers. Such people - I'm one of them - are:
-Highly unlikely to have bothered with Clear or Precheck.
-Almost certainly unable to accumulate enough miles or status to upgrade to business class seats or access airport lounges.
Note that most companies will not allow employees to buy business class tickets for flights anywhere close to the length where a train would be a viable alternative. If you're flying business class DC-Boston or New York-Atlanta, you are either rich or have miles.
Station location seems very, very critical to making trains a superior time/convenience choice relative to flying. If it's easy/cheap to get to or from the train station, trains can really win. If they're just competing on lack of security lines and more passenger room, it's tough.
Difficulty comes because good train station locations mean building train tracks through heavily populated areas.
Most cities already have train tracks and a central station built in the nineteenth century.
In the vast majority of cases, the train can run at a lower speed on the old track and then switch to a new high-speed line once it gets out of the city.
Amtrak is proposing a new tunnel in New York for HSR, but that's because the existing one is at capacity, not because they need it for speed.
Great piece. Can you do a follow up on political strategies to make it happen?
Have Ron Klain do his morning SB reading and smack his forehead then go running into the Oval Office.
This sounds like the start of a West Wing episode, so I asked openai to write it. It wasn't as good as I hoped it would be though. :D
It's a crisp fall day in Washington, D.C. Ron Klain, the newly-appointed Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, sits in his office reading a post on a political blog by Matt Yglesias. The post is about the potential benefits and challenges of implementing a high-speed rail system in the country.
As he reads, Ron's phone rings. It's the President, who is on his way back from a campaign rally in Ohio. The President sounds excited, and tells Ron that he wants to make high-speed rail a priority for his administration.
Ron listens attentively, and then tells the President that he will put together a team to explore the feasibility of implementing high-speed rail. The President is pleased, and tells Ron that he will be closely following the progress of the team.
Meanwhile, in the West Wing, White House Press Secretary C.J. Cregg is briefing the press corps on the President's latest policy initiatives. She fields a question about high-speed rail, and tells the reporters that the President is committed to exploring the possibility of implementing such a system.
Later that day, Ron convenes a meeting of his team to discuss the high-speed rail project. The team includes transportation experts, economists, and engineers. They discuss the potential economic benefits of a high-speed rail system, as well as the challenges of implementing such a project.
At the end of the meeting, Ron tells the team that they will need to develop a comprehensive plan for how to move forward with the project. He also tells them that the President is eager for updates on their progress.
The team goes to work, and over the next few weeks they conduct research, hold meetings with stakeholders, and develop a plan for implementing a high-speed rail system.
As the plan takes shape, Ron briefs the President on their progress. The President is impressed with the team's work, and decides to make high-speed rail a key part of his infrastructure plan.
The episode ends with Ron and the President discussing the potential political benefits of the high-speed rail project, and the President expressing confidence that it will be a success.
I would have gone more with a Slow News Day (S05E12) + Let Biden be Biden (S01E19) + Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (S01E21):
- The President includes a throwaway line about high speed rail in SOTU.
- The WH senior staffer notices a Republican Senator clapping for that line, approaches in secret for buy-in on orchestrating the replacement of Amtrak board with directors strongly in favor of high speed rail, which is leaked to the WSJ.
- The President admonishes the senior staffer, does some lines about how high speed rail is the third rail of politics.
- The CoS shows sass, gives a wake-up call to the President, and after that gives a Let Biden be Biden speech with mediocre sports metaphors.
- The WH senior staff orchestrates the Amtrak board overhaul, including a Barry Haskell scene or two.
- The board is overhauled, but nothing happens. Victory!
- Everybody hates The West Wing for its feel-good vibes that don't result in fast trains.
This is pretty bad, openai! Meaning it's still better than half the stuff on TV.
Train-gry Matt gives this post a fun vibe.
Can "train-gry" be a thing, please? Let's make it a thing!
Circa ~2007-2013 I found the Detroit-Ann Arbor-Chicago Amtrak trips to be pretty reasonable for a student without a great car.
Ah yes, the Wolverine!
I thought the Wolverine went up to Annandale?
Are you an old fart too or should I demand that you find your own damn music and leave ours alone?
Farts don't get much older than me. I've nearly dissipated altogether, into a lingering hint of a foul odor. I avoid Fabreeze now, because the smallest spritz could obliterate me.
It's still great, I rode it to Ann Arbor with some friends about a year ago. It was much easier than driving (especially since we had to work on the train).
Interesting to contrast this wishing-for-utopia with yesterday's “managing people is really hard, actually”. I've popped around Alon's Pedestrian Observations and man, IDK ... high-speed rail might just be really hard. Germany's system seems generally a mess (i.e., construction of the "4-hour" Munich to Berlin line took >25 years, city politics force too many stops, mixed freight lines seem to constrain everything, packed ridership compounds reliability issues). France's doesn't seem much better with maybe even higher reliability issues and complex network transfers. Say what you want about all the causes of California's HSR incompetence -- we have one example here and it's a disaster. As a longtime huge rail fan ... I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to the argument that with EV's coming -- point to point auto is hard to beat and HSR here probably missed the window.
I’ve ridden HSR all over the world. It’s great in Japan. Prefer flying anywhere else. Two hour trips in Germany are fine.
I’ve noticed an odd fact about this discussion.
There are three main forms of passenger transport in the United States - planes, cars and trains. Essentially all the roads in the US are government owned and run. Essentially all the passenger airports are government owned and run. Trains are the outlier in that almost all of the track is privately owned. But some folks here seem to be arguing that trains are the one with the unfair advantage and are wrong to be asking for a handout.
I would argue trains at least need to be on the same level playing field with roads and airports/ATC.
Rail passenger fans would note that post-9/11 the US government gave airlines more money in just the very first bailout package than the US government has ever spent *total* on supporting passenger rail service in the entire history of American railroading.