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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (857764)	5/17/2015 11:11:34 AM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574098

would you have to build that, I thought the drought was gonna kill you all

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (857764)	5/17/2015 11:34:46 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1574098

high speed rail Which means considerably more $. The alternative to providing the same capacity as high-speed rail is to add 2,300 highway lane miles, four new airport runways and 115 airport gates Don't confuse capacity with actual usage. Not only do you have less (often a lot less) than 100% utilization of the trains, but the tracks are unlikely to carry the highest possible number of trains That having been said LA to SF could be one of the few places in the US (another being the northeastern corridor) where high speed rail could theoretically make sense. Probably not though considering the inflated costs of building things in CA, and the inflated cost of high speed rail even outside of CA ------ California’s system won’t even be very high-speed for a long time. While the state is building a short (25-mile) stretch of high-speed rail tracks from Fresno to Madera, for the rest of the distance trains will share tracks with Amtrak and freight, which means speeds will be limited to 79 or, at most, 90 mph. Moreover, so long as high-speed trains share tracks with conventional trains even for only short distances, they will have to meet federal safety standards to deal with crashes, which means they will be very heavy relative to, say, the Japanese trains that exclusively use their own tracks. Heavy trains mean energy-intensive trains, thus eliminating any of the supposed environmental benefits. The low end of the latest (meaning three-years-old) estimated cost of building exclusive high-speed rail tracks from Anaheim to San Francisco is $98.5 billion, which works out to about $3,000 per inch. By 2040, when the system might be completed if funds were available, which they aren’t, this cost is certain to rise even more. To architecture critics, it may seem perfectly appropriate to spend $2,764 per square foot on stations designed to serve $3,000-per-inch rail lines. To the taxpayers who will have to foot the bill–most of whom will never ride the trains–neither expense makes any sense at all. ti.org Also it seems even the capacity claims are exaggerated ---- At the rail-signing ceremony, Federal Railroad Administration director Joseph Szabo brought up the hoary old claim that one two-track rail line can carry as many people as a sixteen-lane freeway. Let’s check his arithmetic. One freeway lane can move 2,000 cars an hour. Each car can hold an average of 5 people, for 160,000 people an hour. One subway line can move about 30 trains an hour. If the trains are ten cars long and each car is stuffed with 150 passengers, each track moves about 45,000 people, or 90,000 for two tracks. But high-speed trains aren’t subways. They typically have 80 seats per car and no standing room. Nor can they safely operate every two minutes at 200 miles per hour; the highest frequency high-speed rail line I know of can run fourteen trains per hour. Assuming ten-car trains, two tracks can move 22,400 people an hour, slightly more than two freeway lanes. Thus, Szabo’s claim isn’t true for any rail line, and it is no where near the truth for high-speed trains. (Of course, the cars in freeway lanes aren’t all full, but neither are trains.) ti.org True the average car won't have 5 people (but then buses on the same highway typically have more and can carry a lot more), but CA HSR is unlikely to run anywhere close to 14 trains per hour, and probably won't average anywhere close to 80 people per car per trip.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (857764)	5/17/2015 11:38:06 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574098

High-Speed Rail Part 8: Alternatives to California’s HSR The 2005 environmental impact statement for California’s high-speed rail includes two alternatives to building rail: a no-action alternative and a “highway-air” alternative that proposes major expansions of both freeways and airports in the rail corridor. The highway component alone of this alternative was projected to cost twice as much as high-speed rail, allowing rail proponents to claim that rail is cheaper than roads (page 4-1). But this alternative was a “straw man” designed to make high-speed rail look good. One reason for the high cost is that the alternative proposed to expand every freeway along the rail route, even highways that are not expected to be congested in the rail project’s time horizon. For example, the alternative adds one-third more capacity to freeways in the Central Valley that are expected to operate at only 92 percent of capacity in the no-action alternative (page 3.1-12). On top of that, the highway-air alternative is more than five times as effective at relieving congestion than the rail project. Where high-speed rail is expected to take 3.8 percent of cars off the road, the highway-air alternative reduces congestion by more than 20 percent (page 3.1-12). This suggests that an alternative that costs only one-fifth as much as the highway-air alternative, or about half as much as the rail alternative, would be more comparable to rail. The Authority likes to say that the rail alternative has the same capacity as the highway-air alternative it designed (page S-3). But this assumes that the Authority would run far more daily trains than it actually plans to run and that it could fill every seat on those trains. Meanwhile, it assumes that cars on the highway only had average occupancies. If you really want to compare capacities, you would assume that every seat in the cars was full as well — or, for maximum capacity, that the freeways were filled with buses full of people. But the main point is that capacity isn’t really relevant; actual use is. A relatively new alternative to simply building new roads is congestion pricing, which smoothes the peaks and troughs in travel demand and thus reduces the need for as much new capacity. California pioneered congestion-pricing in the U.S. even before the Authority was created in 1997. State Route 91, whose express lanes were opened in December 1996 to people willing to pay a variable toll, proved that congestion pricing not only relieves congestion, it can pay for new highway capacity on congested roads. But this is never mentioned in the EIS. The Authority’s analyses also fail to distinguish between systems that are paid for largely out of user fees and systems that are paid for largely out of tax dollars. Currently, user fees (gas taxes, tolls, motor vehicle fees, etc.) cover about 76 percent of the cost of building, maintaining, and operating highways in California (based on tables FE9, SDF, LDF, SF21, and LGF21 of the 2006 Highway Statistics). The resulting annual subsidy to roads of some $3.8 billion per year is nothing to sniff at, but those roads move more than 500 billion passenger miles (not to mention roughly 100 billion ton-miles of freight) each year. That’s less than three-fourths of a penny of subsidy per passenger mile. By comparison, if taxpayers manage to get away with spending “only” $40 billion building California’s high-speed rail line, that amortizes out to about $2.6 billion per year over 30 years. If the rail line carries the high ridership estimate of 58 million riders per year, and they go an average of 400 miles each (probably also high), that works out to 11 cents of subsidy per passenger mile, or 15 times the subsidies to driving. (And you won’t see the high-speed rail line carrying many ton-miles of freight.) Instead of using existing highway subsidies to justify even large subsidies to rail, it is time to end all subsidies and let the transport chips fall where they may. The Antiplanner makes the following modest proposal as an alternative to building high-speed rail in California. 1. The California legislature should create regional or county toll road authorities, similar to the ones in Texas. The toll road authorities could sell bonds (backed solely by tolls), build roads, collect tolls, and/or contract out the construction and/or operation of toll roads to private companies. 2. Such toll road authorities would build all future limited-access roads and additions to existing limited-access roads. New local and collector roads and streets would be built by developers. Non-limited access arterial roads would be built by counties using a combination of tolls or gas taxes at the discretion of each county road office working with the county or regional toll road authority. (Toll road authorities have been known to build arterial feeders into their toll roads and not charge people who use those arterials.) 3. The California Department of Transportation should accelerate research into intelligent vehicle/highway systems (such as the Berkeley bus that can steer itself), settle on a standard system, begin installing necessary road sensors, and certify vehicles capable of using such systems. 4. Airport expansions should be made on an on-demand basis and funded out of user fees, not tax dollars. In short, the Antiplanner alternative calls for funding California surface and air transportation out of user fees, not tax dollars. If, after highway subsidies are eliminated, anyone thinks they can build and operate a rail line out of user fees, more power to them. Until then, taxpayers should not have to throw good money after bad. http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=514