I just wanted to vent to you regarding Gov. Rick Scott’s turning down the high speed rail funds. This decision is actually not the fiscally conservative one. Rather, it will guarantee that we remain on the treadmill of endless highway expansion (and financial hemorrhage) that has characterized the State’s transportation policy of the last fifty years. Also, because it will not reduce the federal deficit at all, but rather go to another state, we are in fact socializing another state’s infrastructure. It is on the backs of Floridians whether we build it or not. At least the acceptance of the funds would have allowed the money to be spent in Florida since it represents, proportionally, taxes already paid by Floridians returned to Florida by the Fed. Additionally, we know that the deal removed risk of overruns to the State.
And then we have fuel to think about. As gas shoots beyond 4 dollars/gallon and likely in the next few decades toward 10 dollars per gallon as we get deeper into the global oil depletion phase, those ridership studies done in 2010, 2011 will probably be deemed obsolete. Ridership numbers on all non-automobile transportation modes is likely to soar.
Finally, profitability is a non-issue. Though we believe that the final network system would be convenient and profitable (even if it were true that the first leg would not be), the profit motive does not apply to infrastructure. No essential service (highways, armed forces, court system, etc.) is expected to be profitable. How does it make sense to expect Tri-Rail, Metro-Rail, Sun-Rail, and High Speed Rail to generate profit? Somebody please explain this ideological inconsistency to me.
24 comments:
The problem is not the initial cost if construction. It is funding the ongoing deficits that these programs inevitably bring. Profitability isn't a goal. Breaking even is. Find a way to make ridership convenient, affordable, and cost efficient, and riders will come.
Above all the stations have to be safe.
While I totally agree with this post in principle, as a matter of practical reality I just don't see how a high speed rail link between Orlando and Tampa would be anything but a white elephant. Think about it for a minute: Both Tampa and Orlando are highly suburban "cities" with not a whole lot going on in their urban core. Furthermore, there are not significantly defined business districts nor are their clear business travel patterns that make people from these cities really want or need to travel back and forth. Who in Orlando wants to travel to the core of Tampa (or a stop or two on the periphery)? What would they do if they got there? Rent a car? Its less than a 2 hour drive!!!??
Typical residents of these MTAs live in a suburban area. The logic of rail supporters is that these people would drive to the or a train station, park their car, take a train to the other city, rent another car and drive to their destination?? Are you kidding me? People will just drive! It is less than a two hour drive and since you would need a car on the other end, of course most people will drive. At $5 a gallon and 30 MPG, we are talking about a $15-17 in gas expenditure. Even at $10 a gallon this as cost isn't a factor. I also don't see how intercity travelers have a material affect on highway congestion. The highways aren't congested between the cities, they are congested in the commuting patterns!
I am no Rick Scott supporter, but this isn't a bad move. We would be saddled with the maintenance of that white elephant for eternity.
http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/00378-obama’s-high-speed-rail-obsession
It's unfortunate that any choice about whether a project is feasible should be overturned because someone else is going to get the money anyway. That kind of thinking is what causes other important government services to go begging.
Well, the problem is that highways are not expected to break even. If we apply that standard to rail, we must apply it to highways as well, which would halt all construction/upkeep of highways, which in itself does not generate profit.
A high speed rail link between Orlando and Tampa is not a white elephant. It is the first leg of a network, not a project in itself. The fact that they are suburban is not a reason to not do the rail. The rail is meant to be a transformative moment. A way to move beyond the suburban, auto-dominant reality. That is why the high speed rail system needs to be regarded in context with proposed Sun-Rail, Hillsborough Co. Light Rail (yes, I know, the latter was defeated by referendum). The local transit infrastructure, will remove your objection of how a rider is to get around once he/she exits the train.
By the way, it is not less than a 2 hour drive during heavy traffic. A rail is not susceptible to rush hour.
We will never see cheap gas again. Then what? I disagree with you when you say that 10 dollars a gallon, cost of driving this distance is not a factor. 5-10 dollars per gallon has direct changes on driving behavior, as is observed in all parts of the world that currently experience this cost, whether they have transit or not. Where there is no transit, the country/region tends to be pushed down into mideival like conditions.
If we want modern society to continue and still preserve any semblance of a quality of life, transit at all levels must be integrated into the regional, metropolitan, and neighborhood scale.
The facts are that I-4 is most certainly congested between the cities. Even opposers of the rail acknowledge this.
We are saddled with a highway system for eternity that will likely be less useful in the coming oil depletion. Do you truly understand what that means? The hundreds of billions poured into highways will be the wasted money, never to be recovered, and any electrified rail will be the only thing that will allow us to have any sort of healthy economy larger than our own Metropolitan Region. Miami, Tampa, and Orlando would whither if they could not carry on economic activity beyond their respective county borders.
To Steve in Miami: our local mass transit is a maze - buses and transit that include stops at metrorail and nearby peoplemover stations - it's more or less linked. This is what I imagine the Orlando-Tampa 1st leg link would have so that you could take a bus to the train in Orlando and once you arrive in Tampa take a bus from the station to wherever you're going and vice versa. The urgent issue is vision and Rick Scott can't see past his past. He's not a CEO and he can't run the state like he is. We need friggin vision for the future and we need people working and here we have an opportunity for both that was turned away.
Highway construction and maintenance is 70% covered by user fees:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Financing
So, Miami Urbanist, let's use that as the metric rather that building the link will be a "transformative moment" as you suggest. Using SE Florida Tri-Rail as an example, the fares cover 19% of the OPERATING costs. No contribution toward building or updating infrastructure or rolling stock.
Your suggestion of how interconnect infrastructure will pop up is equivalent to saying "lets build the spoke and maybe we will build the hubs later"--Let's build an intercity interconnect with no capability to distribute people to and from the endpoints to where they actually live because it will be a "transformative moment"? Looks to me like disaster spending.
Has anyone even looked at the amount of daily intercity traffic between Orlando and Tampa that might actually be the market for this train? Is so, I can't find it on Google.
Do you really believe we should build this NOW because we will have a future of oil depletion with no substitute (electric cars, bio-diesel or otherwise)? Are you really suggesting that we should be building a technology for replacement decades before we even understand this let alone need it? Are you really saying that you are concerned that our highways are a waste of their investment due to this future vision of fuel-less world but blowing billions on a train system that by your own analysis won't be used for decades (until the infrastructure catches up and the economics become palatable) is ok?
We can't move beyond our "suburban, auto-dominant reality" unless we move our people to higher density housing to make public transportation, in general, more efficient. That simply isn't a reality in our lifetime. Building a train system that will be a bigger disaster than AMTRAK and Tri-Rail isn't the answer. We don't live in the same configuration that the Japanese and the Europeans do, we need solutions for our world, not re-purposed solutions from their world that have a promise of one day, possibly, maybe, making sense if we blow a few trillion on it.
Very annoying Steve go suck up on a governor Scott blog where you belong.
You make eminent sense Steve. Some EOMers understand what you're talking about.
This project will benefit a tiny but powerful minority of central florida business interests.
Think Marlins stadium giveaway on steroids.
Wake up people. This boondoggle of a train is all about opening the middle of the state for development. The legislature wants wall to wall houses and commercial stris as far as the eye can see, Tampa/Orlando ah la Miami/Ft. Lauderdale. I am no Scott supporter but on this we agree but for different reasons.
Steve, I'm at work so I promise to respond to your points in the future. I will take on one of them, however. Highways do NOT cover their cost through user fees. There are many external costs that gas taxes simply do not address: sickness, lost productivity due to pollution, disembowelment of urban fabric, loss of real estate tax, and inefficiencies of land use due to highways, increased greenhouse gas emissions leading us to climate change and sea level rise, obesity and other chronic diseases that plague our "drive only" rather than "transit and walk" culture, highway deaths and injuries, and I could go on forever. If you attached a dollar amount to these things, and some economists have attached one, the cost of our roadway culture is not nearly covered by user fees.
Regarding alternative fuels and energy, no, I don't believe we are prepared to scale up those things to bring the entire automobile fleet in line. That would represent a greater cost per household than simply giving people the choice to drive less and walk more with better urban fabric and transit.
And explain why we can't move beyond a suburban automobile oriented planning in our lifetime? We already have done so in countless walkable revitalized places in america, and in Florida. We cannot avoid doing so, and I believe the free market will handsomely reward cities that strive for it.
I'm so tired of hearing "we're not like europe, we're not like japan" as if they were a different species. Those people simply have made choices to live in a walkable compact format, as we Americans did very well until WWII. We simply must rescue the know-how that we Americans used to have regarding how to make great cities. Many of us are ready to do that.
Well said, Miami Urbanist. And, by the way, which company that designs and manufactures railway and mass transit vehicles are you lobbying for? Would it be the Italian one? Remember the humongous flop they had in Los Angeles!
Miami Urbanist is not a lobbyist for any company. Don't rag on my friends.
go to Europe ....it's all about trains.. city to city, country to country; Stop holding this country back ...nothing is ever going to be perfect... no perfect time, environment nor economic condition. Just, like Nike, just do it! Let's make our stater (or our country) the best that it can be!
Cities in Europe are more denser and concentrated. They are linked by the rail system. We missed that train (no pun intended). Our urban planning happened to rely more on highway and freeway systems when it was being developed.
In their fetish for all things Europe, the Feds in Washington are now trying to shape the cities to their vision.
Miami Urbanist, please read what you have just written. You are implicitly suggesting that this rail project is the first part in a multi-trillion dollar manifesto to re-engineer how America lives. In your view, it is inevitable and the first step is building a rail link between Orlando and Tampa! In my view, that transformation might be a century away if it comes at all.
I am so sorry that you are tired of people like me pointing out the reality of the differences between the population densities and urban layouts between the US (particularly the parts of the US that were essentially settled after the inauguration of the US Highway system like Florida, Arizona and California) and Europe and Japan. Like it or not, and too bad you are tired of hearing the truth, but it is the truth nonetheless. Much of the US was built around the highway system in the post war period where car was king. We have inherited an infrastructure that we have to live with, it isn't going to be converted over to someone's ideal of Europe. You are tired of my criticism? Guess what, tough shit! I am tired of Utopian ramblings like yours.
You talk about "so in countless walkable revitalized places in america" as the solution to re-urbanize America. Wanna give an example or two of a way a suburban place is going to give up their backyards, tear down their homes and go build new ones more densely (and greater cost because land is so cheap here) or someone build higher density in their back yards. If there are countless places like this, let me know particularly in a post war developed area (as opposed to an 19th century city revitalization--guess what, Florida doesn't have 19th century cities to revitalize). Look what wonders the new train lines have done for low density cities like LA and Phonix! Nobody rides them and those aren't even intercity interconnects. If you want to start a revolution, how is a white elephant 85 mile railroad between two random cities in Florida even a solution to be considered. These are two of our LEAST densely built cities in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density
Orlando and Tampa do not make the list of top 125 greatest urban density cities in the US.
If you want to create a more urbanized environment, how about starting with light or medium rail within a city that might actually do something.
Wanna do a train project that people might use in Florida? Look at the Metrorail, Metromover and Tri-Rail mess in SE Florida. You can't even go from downtown Miami to FtL without a cockamamie connection in the middle of nowhere that takes longer than your estimate of the drive from Orlando to Tampa. Another idea: extend the People Mover into Little Haiti, Liberty City and down to Coconut Grove. Sorry, they aren't part of a revolution and they are decidedly low tech but people might actually use them, not drive and reduce pollution. This is the conversation we should be having IMHO instead of a "build it and they will come" conversation about high speed intercity rail.
Our urban planning was just as dense and concentrated as the best European cities until about 1950. Most of America's history is defined by walkable compact communities. We had the world's most highly developed, intricate rail network both intercity and commuter, in the entire world, surpassing even Europe's, until it was unraveled by big oil and the highway lobby to create a demand for their products.
Only relatively recently has our country pursued suburban sprawl to disastrous ends. The Fed has no fetish for all things Europe. Most of the world has dense compact walkable communities. We are the only ones on the planet that fetishize wasteful and joyless sprawl.
And what is wrong with shaping our cities toward a certain vision? Isn't that what planning is all about? I'd like to remind you that there already are growing pockets of highly walkable, dense urban fabric in all of Florida's major cities. Miami: Miami Beach, Brickell, parts of Downtown, Downtown Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Downtown Kendall, Downtown South Miami. Orlando: Winter Park, Downtown Orlando, Little Saigon, Baldwin Park. Tampa: Ybor City, Hyde Park, Downtown... and the list goes on and on.
Did you notice that these places that tend to feature walkability, density, and often transit service also hold their real estate values better than suburban sprawl nearby? Did you notice that sustainable urban neighborhoods are also a joy to live in and are magnets for international tourism and investment?
One other thing Steve, you thing I'm against rail in the city serving our poorest residents? I'm not! I'm all for it! But just because it doesn't exist yet doesn't mean it is wise to turn down federal money to build the first leg of the national network. What would make you think so? I'm for transit at all scales!
As evidenced by many decaying outer ring suburban sprawl experiments across the country, some of these may simply disappear, get salvaged, turn into slums (think of parts of Homestead etc.) If you think that we are going to live in a suburban format because we happened to inherit that infrastructure, maybe it is because you really like suburban sprawl and want it to remain the paradigm of development?
If you think I'm Utopian, I'd like to tell you that the firm where I work are busy transforming suburbs all across the nation in the exact way that you say is impossible. There is so much demand for suburban retrofit that we have to turn away clients/cities who are yearning to correct the previous generation's unsustainable planning mistakes.
I'm not imposing any manifesto on re-engineering America, as you claim. Rather, an era of constrained resources and social/environmental/economic crisis is going to do that whether we like it or not. The only question is, do we resist the very infrastructure that will allow us to adapt? Or do we continue to pursue the auto-dominated sprawl scape even though we know it is doomed?
I'm not Utopian. I'm a realist.
p.s. I have ridden LA's and Phoenix's system. They seemed packed to me. I couldn't even find a seat on a street car riding from Pasadena to downtown LA, and it wasn't even at rush hour. Are you sure you want to use those as examples of transit that doesn't work because the city is too suburban? They seem like successes to me...
One other thing, Steve, Florida has many villages, towns, cities that were established in the 19th century. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but Florida does have historic walkable places and was building walkable transit oriented development well into the first half of the twentieth century. Short memory.
I've read this discussion here and the legislation. Miami Urbanist, I respect your opinion but disagree with it.
In the most simple terms, this high speed rail, in my opinion, is a boondogle.
"Steve in Miami" has written a good chunk of what I would have.
The bottom line, at least for me, is that this is going to negatively impact the taxpayers of this State to benefit a very small section of the population/business interests.
In an even more simple view, as I've written before, look at Amtrak! How much do our Federal dollars go to subsidize them?
I appreciate the time and thought process in regard to the issue and the comments. But, Miami Urbanist, Florida is not NY or Chicago, in either it's intellect (no offense to anyone personally)in regard to public policy or urban planning!
Define "boondoggle" please. If you define it as expensive infrastructure that does not generate profit, then we must call for immediate halt to maintenance/construction of any roadways and highways. We also must end subsidies at state and federal levels to air and sea ports, courts, schools, and all of those other institutions that don't generate profit. Infrastructure's main reason for existence is not a business. It is to accomplish work and to serve a function that makes modern life/commerce possible.
Level of intellect does not mean that transit is not important to Florida. There are places all over the world that have a much less-educated populous for which transit is weaved into the very fabric of life. Our level of intellect as a State is only a problem if we let it hinder us from making good planning decisions that will move us in the direction of walkable sustainable vibrant city planning.
Also, "boondoggle" is a cliche, better avoided in writing.
I feel that anything that has to do with our beautiful city's growth will be critized to death....anything!!! There are always people, special interest groups, etc.
Let's just think of "Miami" and all 'unite'. Nothing is perfect...no plans, etc.
Let's do our best to make Miami a place where the world will take notice, and want to come & visit.
I live in Europe now and save 700 Euros a month not owning a car. More disposable income = a better off me =)
When I lived in Miami I hated driving, often working more hours to avoid the rush hour (and in the process making my life miserable).
Since moving to Madrid I pay 55 euros a month for unlimited Train and Bus use. Do I think this covers the cost individually? Hell no. I know the City govt losses money on the Metro but to not have it would mean spending 700+ Euros a month on a car. No thanks.
One last note, the incredible rail system gets me to travel more thus spending that extra 700 Euros of disposable cash all around the country and home the same day or weekend. Thanks Madrid.
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