Asymmetrical Information

This is somewhat tangential to your post but illustrates a bit of the mentality of the public transportation supporters.

I live in a fairly affluent suburban community about 25 miles from downtown Boston. There is a publicly funded private bus service that takes commuters from my town and the one next door (also fairly affluent) to and from downtown Boston, Monday through Friday.

This service was in danger of being shut down, due to cost reasons. A few of the regular commuters made a stink and contacted our local State rep. He leapt into action and succeded in getting $1.5m in new State funding to prop up this bus service.

So, here is the fun part: guess how many people use this service? Six hundred, or, if you prefer, 600. That's a $2,500 annual State subsidy per commuter.

The best part was this quote:

"North Shore resident Barbara Weinberg, who has regularly traveled to her job in Boston on the commuter bus from the Tri-Town as well as Peabody, circulated a petition among other commuters with the help of various bus drivers on the routes to save the bus service.

"There's no way for me to get to my job without that commuter bus service," said Weinberg. "If it's slashed, then I would absolutely be forced to drive. No more public transportation for me."

When fossil fuels become sufficiently expensive, the economic pain of commuting via inefficient cars will create demand for cheaper alternatives in the form of mass transit. Responding to that demand, private companies will start to offer that efficiency, making a profit in the process.

In the end, staunch "progressives" will be schitzoid in their reaction, glorying in the rise of mass transit, but weeping and wailing that it was the private sector that saved the day (yet again).

Ciggy- The superior fuel efficiency of commuter trains and buses is largely mythical (one of many cites I have on this):

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002197.html

The problem here is essentially one of mass manufacturing. So long as you produce a highly standardized product (e.g. a seat from Penn Station to Boston South Station) you can be somewhat efficient. But when you try to move people from Peabody, Mass. to White Plains, N.Y., you have a problem. The result in mass transit is to produce either too much or too little.

Modern "lean" manufacturing techniques are allowing companies to produce highly-customized products in small batches with efficiency approaching that of the traditional assembly line. The efficient car is an analog of this.

Mass transit works on occasion where other factors (namely density) play in. My father rode the train to NYC because it preserved his sanity. I ride the subways in Boston because you can never find parking anywhere. I shudder to think what road traffic in Tokyo would look like if not for mass transit.

As someone who travels the BosWash corridor very frequently, I despise Amtrak because of how badly they screwed this up. A good European train would make the BOS-NYC trip in about 1-1/2 hours. Before WWII you had steam locomotives breaking 100mph on the route and making the whole trip in about 3 hours with no stops. The Acela takes just shy of 4 hours when it's on time and makes at least three stops. It's just plain asinine and they deserve to be hung out to dry for this.

The Snob is right about the environmental benefits of rail not being all they are cracked up to be. New York to D.C. is probably efficient.
The rest of Amtrak only contributes to road pollution. How? Well, the average long distance
train replaces maybe five Greyhounds. Actually,
less, because - according to Business Week - each Hound operates only half full now. Yet the same
Amtrak train takes the time slot of at least one
more freight that can move 100 trailers. So, if
Amtrak shut down, the Interstates would get three
or so new buses, and a hundred less trucks.
I'll take that deal (not to mention bus service
is far more flexible.)

Well, the average long distance
train replaces maybe five Greyhounds.




Many of the people on Amtrak are NOT in the same demographic that Greyhound draws upon. I'd say a long-distance train replaces a few Greyhounds, a Delta Shuttle flight, and several dozen individual car trips. Scale up or down as needed.

Sorry, by "long distance" you probably meant "long distance" and not, say, the other half of the northeast corridor.

The Snob: Do you have any date for that 3 hour BOS->NYC running time? The fastest time I can find for the New York, New Haven & Hartford is four hours, from June 1947. And it's doubtful the trip was ever nonstop, because a switch was made between steam/diesel and electric at New Haven.

Having said that, it is very disappointing that Amtrak spent billions of dollars on an electrification (New Haven to Boston), and apparently wasn't able to decrease the historic running times at all. It certainly seems like it should have been possible, but it didn't happen.

On the other hand, I don't think it's fair to compare the situations in Europe and the US. The Europeans are much more willing to spend big money on passenger rail than we are, and construction of a true high speed line BOS->NYC would basically require an entirely new line because of the curviness of the historic route.

I'm not holding my breath for the private sector to provide the capital either, though it's pleasant to imagine. The New Haven itself was financially weak from the onset of the Depression until it disappeared into Penn Central in 1968. The electrification it built in 1910 would have been financially impossible after 1929.

So, Amtrak may suck, but I'm afraid the best we can hope for (for the Northeast Corridor, anyway, I'm not even going to bring up the national Amtrak system) is a better run government railroad. Maybe someday they'll buy some off the shelf hardware that actually works and get the BOS->NYC running times down to 3 hours.

hey,

I just wanted you to know that it's "quelle surprise" because surprise in French is feminine, thus the double l and e at the end.

Ziptang is quite correct in his/her analysis: except that to be accurate, the phrase "The Europeans spend....." should really be "European Governments spend....."; since, AFAICT, with the exception of the UK, which went through a big rail privatization plan (or "scheme", as the Brits say, which in that case was an appropriate term), rail transport is looked upon not as an "industry" per se, but more as a public utility: and one deserving of significant government funding, as rail is a far more useful means of getting around Over There than it is in the US. Unfortunately, even for those of us who still live in places (like NYC) where inter-city trains MIGHT be a useful alternative to the car or air shuttle, the seemingly unassailable notion that every and any enterprise in the land MUST "run at a profit" has made Amtrak the perennial laughingstock it is.
Funny, given that sneers and snarks that so many "economic conservatives direct at Euro-style "Socialism", they never seem to have any complaints about the government-run and hugely subsidized train service. One would think that it would be high-tech, big-money, capitalist-efficent America that would have the best in sleek, fast, clean train service, while the inefficient,over-bureaucratized, dirigiste Euros had to rattle along for endless hours in unkempt rustbuckets........ Funny world, ain't it? .....

Short of building a lot of brand new high-speed trackage, speeding up any of the Northeast Corridor services is going to be difficult. On the Boston-New York portion, the newly electrified lines north of New Haven are good for 150 mph on short stretches of track in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but there is the equivalent of several complete circles of track from the Connecticut line to New Haven. About the best one can do is speed up the trains on curves (if a 40 mph curve becomes an 80 mph curve, one buys as more time per mile than one does by boosting speeds on straightaways from 120 mph to 150 mph. The European fast services maintain those 150-180 mph speeds over long straights.) From New Haven to New Rochelle, the line is property of Metro-North, a New York commuter operator that will give precedence to its own trains.

The situation south of New York has a set of difficulties of its own.

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