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What's in the way of U.S. rail transit?
David Lazarus
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TEXT OF INTERVIEW
BILL RADKE: The Obama stimulus package includes $8 billion for high-speed rail. But is money enough? Will Americans ever embrace rail transit no matter how much we build? Los Angeles Times business columnist David Lazarus is just back from Japan and he is asking himself that question. Welcome, David.
DAVID LAZARUS: Thank you.
Radke:You went to Japan. You rode the rails. What did you see?
Lazarus:Not just the rails. I rode everything that they could throw at me -- bullet trains, express trains, commuter trains, subways, monorails. It's remarkable because you think of Japan as being a very expensive place, it's all affordable, it's all very smooth, and it's all very on time.
Radke:So how could we ever get something like that over here?
Lazarus:Well that's a really good question. And that's what I put to the experts when I said, 'look, why can't we have something like what the Europeans have or the Asians have right here in the United States?' And they said, 'uh, uh, uh, it's more complicated than if you build it, they will come.' It turns out there's many moving parts to making public transportation a big success. Not least of which, the real trick, is getting people out of their cars. And in Europe and Asia, well that's a slightly different thing, they've got a different culture.
Here we look at cars as our God-given birthright. And any sort of policy that's going to do that is probably going to fail politically.
Not least of which -- parking. Big factor in this. If you don't make parking prohibitively expensive, like say, in New York, people will take their car everywhere for any purpose. That's one of the first things you have to do. Toll roads, another thing. High gas taxes, another thing. Well these are all very politically-challenging things to do in the United States.
Radke:So you didn't find a single flaw in your Japanese rail adventure?
Lazarus:Well there was one flaw. There was a day when I was going through the mountains of Kyusho and there was a major thunderstorm. There was delays. These guys in uniform from the railway company came out, and they bowed and apologized, and they waived the fee for the rest of the trip! Well, that may be an inconvenience, but I wish we had something like that here.
Radke:I will never treat you that well.
Lazarus:I appreciate that.
Radke:David Lazarus, business columnist at the L.A. Times,
Lazarus:My pleasure.
A simple solution to rapidly accelerate rail? Easy, make it illegal to drive a big rig more than 100 miles. See how fast those trailers get piggy-baked. This is a no-brainer. Sure, make exceptions for geographic oddities. Anyone who has pondered the endless line of big rigs in the vast Mojave Desert along I-15 or I-40 parallel to the SPRR tracks will understand. Time to change.
One word why trains are such a difficult nut to crack in the US: Suburbia. As a result of years of artificially cheap gas prices in the US, there was no disincentive for people to spread further and further from the city centers. In Europe and Japan, high gas prices have tended to keep people concentrated around the town or city centers. Because we are now spread over so much territory, it makes it nearly impossible to build a transit system that will connect everyone and still be A) cost efficient, and B) fast enough to compete with simply getting in your car and driving.
One benefit of the recent high gas prices and the poor economy is that people are downsizing their homes and moving back to the city centers. If this trend were to continue, I think it is just a matter of time that the pressure will be there for politicians to make a committed effort to make rail work. I think the story has it exactly right and $4 gas proved it, make it more expensive to drive and people will clamor for alternatives.
Rail is scheduled transport,
and inherently less convenient than a car for almost any purpose.
That's why people don't use it.
Build something like Unimodal,
a 150-mph maglev personal rapid transit
(PRT) system, and people will leave their cars at home. Standard simulations show it. The organization ATRA has been pushing PRT for years;
It's -old- '60s technology that nobody can build for political reasons.
There's got to be a story in there somewhere.
I would appreciate a more depth review including costs of subsidies on rail in US and Japan; further, including the cost of subsidies on road and air, make a comparison of all the major modes of transit. Next, include Europe as well.
Once we can see the true costs of the subsidies we've already got, all those who want to nix Amtrak because "it never makes any money!" may be forced to review that thought a little: no nation in the world expects transit to make money overall without being subsidized, it's just a question of which aspects of that transit we give money to to keep them solvent. (Why else is everyone worried about federal highway funds?)
On a related note: holy cow we put a lot of money into airlines! Have you ever read the daily/weekly output of information the FAA puts out? Other parts of the DOT? So much effort put into making sure we know which airports are too busy and which airlines are running late. If we put half that effort into rail, jus tthink where we'd be!
I too have ridden the system in Japan. It is fantastic. I rode from Yokosuka just to watch the Bullet train go by.
Two challenges to be aware of.
1) The Japanese system is not one homogenious nationalized system. It is a large collection of private, public owned and public systems. Some of the lines are very short, some the length of each island.
2) The system didn't happen overnight. Part of the ethos that encourage the growth of rail was that there was a time that cars weren't a practical way to travel in Japan. To a much smaller extent that is still true today.
To make rail transportion more feasible elements of a solution needs to include three aspects:
Quit subsidsing air and car transportion from federal coffers.
Consider moving that money to subsidise rail travel.
Rewrite the arachiac laws that make rail transportation cost prohibative to CSX, UP, SFP, BN and all the others. Bring those companies to the state and interstate table to help rewrite the laws to encourage rail use.
I think your article on railways in America is way over due for a second "go over" from the government. We are spoiled here in America; examples such as this one proves that this can work. If America worked as a team like Japan, we could have decreased our oil consumption years ago, and also have had a great railway (since) we have such a vast amount of land.
MH
