Yup, to me, Joe Taxpayer, they want to spend a whole lotta money for not a whole lot of paying riders – and NONE of them will be full-boat payers, either. With all of the rail projects around the nation, be it subway, light rail, or regular rail, they just refuse to see the fiscal problems of them – especially that of the the MBTA – the system they want NH attached to. Here’s the “Anti-Planner” with some stuff from California’s woe-in-progress for its “desperately needed” high speed rail. I generally don’t repost an entire post, but I just couldn’t figure out what parts that could be left out without “losing the story” (emphasis mine):
California Representative Nancy Pelosi famously told Congress it would have to pass the Obamacare bill to find out what it said. Now California officials are telling residents they will have to spend tens of billions of dollars building the San Francisco-Los Angeles high-speed rail line to find out how much a ticket will cost. As one official says, “We will not know until late in the game [meaning after the line is built] how everything will turn out.”
Can you say “man-made disaster”? Who the heck does that kind of thing without figuring out the costs?? No entrepreneur I know – but politicians, yes, those self-assured incompetents, certainly know “it’ll all work out in the end”. Question is, whose “end” is going to get reamed? Not theirs, I bet….
On one hand, all of the ticket prices quoted to date–which range from $50 to $105 a ticket–are based not on rail costs but on airline prices: the quoted fares are set to be below, and supposedly competitive with, airfares. On the other hand, the ballot measure approved by voters in 2008 requires that fares cover operating costs–and proponents claimed that the trains would earn such a large operating profit that private investors would willingly put up billions in exchange for being able to keep those profits.
More on those “private investors” later. Profits are defined by riders X price; not (taxpayers X (their money))/subsidy needed
The high-speed rail authority projects that the line will attract 18 million to 31 million riders a year and, at the currently projected ticket price of $86 from LA to San Francisco, would earn $700 million more per year than its operating costs. Yet even the low figure of 18 million is unrealistically high. In 2014, Amtrak attracted fewer than 12 million riders on its Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor, which has more people today than the California corridor will have in 2030. While Amtrak’s trains aren’t as fast as the California rail line might be (although it won’t reach its full promised speed until sometime after 2040), the Northeast Corridor is anchored by the New York urban area’s 19 million people. By comparison, the middle of the California route is Fresno with fewer than 700,000 people. That means most of the trips in the Northeast Corridor are less than 250 miles long, while most in the California corridor would have to be much longer for it to be a success.
The Los Angeles Times article quotes a lot of numbers as if they are fact when in reality they are pure speculation. “By 2040, 77% of bullet train riders will come from personal vehicles and 16% from buses or conventional rail,” while “only about 6% of train passengers are projected to be diverted from airlines.” Yet the article admits that no one knows how many people actually drive between San Francisco and L.A. each day, so no one can guess how many could be diverted to rail.
Entrepreneurs study their potential consumer universe; rail roaders just make it up, or so it seems. And they are disregarding the next disruptive technology that is already on the cusp of happening. After all, how many railroads will pick you up at your door:
The article observes that “the convenience of more efficient, possibly even self-driving, cars could entice people to use the road.” Rail advocate hopes that high fuel prices might drive people to take the train are unlikely to be fulfilled; as the Antiplanner observed a few weeks ago, the market price for gasoline is likely to hover around $3 a gallon for most of the 21st century. While war and other political actions could influence this price, it doesn’t make sense to spend tens of billions of dollars on a high-cost form of travel in the hopes that Mideast conflicts won’t ever be resolved.
In short, there are so many variables that no one can predict what the demand for high-speed rail will be in 13 years, when the line is expected to become operational, much less in 25 years, when the line will actually operate at the promised time of 4 hours 40 minutes between San Francisco and Los Angeles. This just shows the folly of planning a megaproject that requires such huge subsidies.
The Interstate Highway System was also a megaproject, but it was built strictly on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning it would be constructed no faster than user fees covered the cost. If people weren’t using it, it wouldn’t have been completed. Yet Californians have to spend $68 billion or more before a single wheel of the state’s high-speed rail system will turn, and even then the trains won’t go at the full rated speed so proponents will claim that the state will have to spend more before it can conclude the project is a failure.
I also point out that the Highway system allowed people to travel FROM multiple starting points TO multiple destinations on schedules THEY determine. Call it “freedom of travel”; that cannot happen with a railroad (or by coercion of the “walkable cities” being pushed by the Fed’s EPA / DOT / HUD Sustainable Communities Initiative). But that is what politicians
Yet there are clear indications that the project will fail. As the Antiplanner has noted previously, a 1994 study from economists at U.C. Berkeley found that high-speed rail would be the high-cost form of travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco, when compared with either driving or flying. At the time that study was made, planners projected that the rail line would cost just $15 billion (in today’s dollars) to build, whereas the current projected cost is at least five times greater. This means there is no way high-speed rail will be able to compete with airfares or the cost of driving.
Or I bet from NH to Boston – the short distance and small potential ridership will make it a luxury / vanity project/
Oh yeah – those “private investors”??
One more thing we know: So far, the mythical private investors who were supposed to fund 20 percent of the capital costs haven’t put up a single cent. They can see that the state’s numbers are ridiculously inflated, and the rail line, if it is ever built, could not possibly cover its costs. Since that was one of the requirements for its construction, the state should stop wasting money on this project now.
Gosh – inflated numbers – who on God’s Green Earth could have seen this coming…
