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Question of the day

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Illinois

In an era of ever-rising gas prices, do you think the state should spend more money to subsidize Amtrak and create an extensive high-speed rail network? Explain.

posted by Rich Miller
Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 9:52 am

Comments

It’s a national dilemma, and rail service could be expanded and improved the way most highway projects are funded, with a 20% local share and 80% federal share.

Just for fun, see this Wikipedia article on high-speed rail by country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_by_country

Comment by Still an Idealist Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 10:09 am
i don’t know that you can ever change people’s affection for their cars the convenience and the driving - even road trips for families they would rather take their car, stop when they want, leave when they want and have a car when they get to where they re going - we are attached to our cars - what i don’t understand in in a world full of so many technological advances why withthe exception of hybrid cars cant we change the engines in cars to increase our MPG for gas - seems like we can -

Comment by annoyed all the time Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 10:44 am
I’m a big supporter of expanded passenger rail, including high speed - but I’m enough of a realist to know that it’s not going to make a significant dent until public transportation is improved at the cities served.

The Chicago - St. Louis corridor is better than most for this, since Chicago has the CTA/RTA/Pace network and St. Louis has MetroLink and MetroBus. It’s a start.

I think light and heavy rail improvements should be funded using gasoline tax monies. IMO gas tax = transportation tax, and should be used as needed - not just for roads.

Comment by Ken in Aurora Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 10:57 am
Illinois has always been a transportation nexus for the nation. A high-speed North-South corridor from Milwaukee, thru Chicago and Springfield on down to the Southern tip, and an East-West one make sense to me as a way to generate all kinds of new business and development in the state.

The main problem has been political, not technical, I feel. Something like 90 percent or more of the right-of-way for Illinois high speed rail has been acquired and held for a long time already, HSR needs it’s own dedicated track to be practical and safe. One problem is, every legislator with a district in the right of way wants the train to have a stop there. How high speed can you be if you have to stop every five miles? High speed starts to really work when you travel roughly as fast and far as a plane for half the price of a plane ticket. It is more fuel-efficient than flying.

This would not be daily commuter trips for most, some upper-level state workers and lobbyists, maybe, but it would be good for vacation tourist travel and business travel, like a day trip to shop and see shows in Chicago and be back home without 9 hours of driving… as well as for hauling express mail. Maybe what we need is a consortium run by FedEx to bankroll the passengers with exclusive high-speed cargo/mail. That may be the key to opening up the Western corridor, and to generating more tourism and business devbelopment in “forgottonia”…

The other thing a high speed rail network needs is…a reason to go someplace. Destinations. The Chicago-Springfield link makes sense as the first one to put into operation. The business case for the link further South or West is less clear right now. So much of traditional business travel has been made obsolete by the internet; while there are always going to be cases where you have to physically go someplace, those instances are getting more rare with time. So you need to consider planning and development at the ends of these tracks that leverages the fast travel component. Not to mention hook-ups to the other states.

Commercial rail has always despised passenger service: whenever the feds give the rairoads money to upgrade tracks, they put it into buying more boxcars instead. At the turn of the century, American express trains were doing 100 miles an hour and better with ease in this state and nation. With the steady degradation of the rail infrastructure by friehgt interests, you’re lucky to get a passenger train up to 50 MPH in open country today. I think it likely the ony way to fix this is to start a fresh passenger and mail rail network with all new tracks, routes, and technology. If done on a federal level, organized as a national enterprise, it would be a significant improvement of the country’s infrastructure.

Comment by Techboy Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 11:20 am
I think the state should spend more money to improve Metra and local rail. It would be nice to have a speed train from Chicago to St. Louis but in terms of every day use, more benefit would come from heavy rail or light rail in towns like Springfield and Peoria. In addition, it would really help the state if transportation in the Chicagoland area was not subject to the sunray system currently in place. If you want to get from Joliet to Barrington using public transportation, you have to take a train into Chicago and then take another train out of Chicago. If there was a train line that connected the ends of the Metra sunray system, I think that would help the economy and gas prices much more than building high speed train service around the state. You could take the train from Joliet to Barrington in about an hour: http://metrarail.com/System_map/index.html. I know there are multiple land issues involved, but if we talking about spending a good chunk of money, I think that would be the best way to spend it.

Another problem with Amtrak is that Amtrak doesn’t own the tracks it runs on. So when you talk about making it easier for high-speed rail, you have to pass it by the freight companies first. There is no point in having high speed rail if Amtrak is going to be delayed for 30 minutes every time a freight train is in the same area.

Last note, a friend of mine from St. Louis was in town recently and we went to catch the bus. It passed by as we were a half a block away and my friend said “Oh do we have to wait a half an hour now?”. The CTA is bad, but it’s not that bad. I guarantee people would take the bus more if it came every 7-10 minutes and they could pick it up a couple of blocks from their house and a couple of blocks from their work. With the price of gas and parking, I’m sure ridership would follow.

Comment by Tweed Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 11:23 am
Oh, this is the QOTD that I’ve been waiting for. Absolutely! Better Amtrak is not only a political winner (people love it) but a great policy solution to sending our money over to Saudi Arabia in the form of high oil prices. It’s relatively cheap to get faster and more reliable Amtrak service (compared to building or repaving highways). An annual revenue stream of $40 million or so for capital projects would get us service to Rockford, Galena, the Quad Cities and faster-than-driving service on all existing routes within a decade. It’s cheap.

Plus, we should really figure out how to connect the Midwest rail network with the East Coast network with improved Chicago-Philadelphia or Chicago-New York service. It just takes buying new trainsets (or leasing them) and some track investments along the way.

Finally, we should have more frequent service on existing routes. Chicago-Springfield-St. Louis should be running every two hours. Ridership just keeps growing. People want trains because the alternatives — driving and flying — are impractical, inconvenient and expensive.

Comment by Dan Johnson-Weinberger Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 11:44 am
Good points by everyone.

Comment by Ron Burgundy Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 11:52 am
We need to dramatically improve our train service. One issue is it is important to have redundancy built into our transportation system, as evidenced when planes were grounded after 9/11. A second issue is high speed trains can help reduce the dependency on O’Hare and other hub airports. From an economic development viewpoint, trains offer the ability to save travel time by eliminating the need to travel from city center to an airport. A high speed train could also sigificantly help the economic development of a handful of cities, such as Urbana, Springfield, and certainly Chicago. There are numerous enviromental arguments in favor of trains.

Comment by Objective Dem Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 12:08 pm
If Amtrak were a good solution to transportation problems, our political overlords in Springfield would use it on a regular basis to travel between Chicago and Springfield.

I look to our leaders as an example, and try to emulate them. Since over legislative overlords do not use it, I conclude Amtrak is not good solution, so I don’t think any of the rest of us should be expected to use it.

Comment by Leroy Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 12:18 pm
Is the proposal to pony up hundreds of millions of dollars for the studies, rights of way, infrastructure and staff, so that people can have their rail travel subsidised by others?

This is why the Illinois budget is a mess.

The train aficionados rally together to get someone else’s money to fund their toy trains.

If the riders of Amtrak, Metra or other commuter rail system would be able to fund the daily operations, it would be a different story, but the riders require a continuing subsidy for their use.

Has anyone examined the carbon footprint of moving a multi-hundred ton conveyance for a couple hundred riders? Its not very pretty.

Boondogle!

The riders of the systems meed to be able to pay for the day to day operations as well as put a little into the bank before expansion of rail travel makes any sense at all.

Comment by plutocrat03 Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 12:52 pm
The key thing is getting the rails to run Amtrak. Outside of the NE corridor, Amtrak doesn’t own the tracks so they do get screwed every time a freight train rolls by. Riding from Chicago to Ann Arbor Michigan is killed by that delay getting in and out of Chicago. We need Congressional level for right of ways, land, and rails. No one wants to pay for that kind of stuff though, especially when compared to the win-win of interstates. Amtrak is very unprofitable, but doing the blocking and tackling of showing up on schedule with a clean train would really help boost ridership.

Comment by Jacketpotato Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 12:54 pm
25 years to late, gridlock is fast approaching.

Comment by Tommy Boy Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 1:06 pm
Yes!

I recall a proposal a while back where they estimated a high spped train could commute between Springfield and Chicago in around 1 hr. With either no stops or one that includes Bloomington. The idea was to make it more effective for commuters to live in the spfld and possibly the bloomington areas and work in Chicago.

Comment by Ghost Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 1:19 pm
I’m a car guy, not a train guy, but I would certainly spare myself the time spent on 55 between Springfield and Chicago if the time and convenience factors got just a little better. Rail travel makes a lot of sense if you’re commuting for a day or two to a place with plenty of transportation options once you get there (much less true with St. Louis, but in Chicago my car is just an expensive nuisance once I get there). Not that I’m likely to get on a train for entertainment value any time soon - I’ve got cars for that.

It would be great to have the federal government give up on trying to strangle Amtrak - not that it would have to give Amtrak as much welfare as it does air travel.

I haven’t, by the way, investigated the carbon footprint of train travel, but I’ve gotta think its not nearly so ugly as those few hundred people piling into a couple hundred conveyances averaging just over a couple tons each, each of which needs to punch it’s own hole in the air, and has 4 rubber tires (resulting in a whole lot more frictional loss than, say, steel on steel once the conveyance is rolling).

BTW, Annoyed, there are a couple reasons. First, cars keep getting heavier because of more safety hardware and demand for more gadgets - note that it’s almost impossible to find a new car with roll up windows, no A/C, no power steering, etc. Second, advances in efficiency can be taken out either as horsepower or in increased economy. Auto manufacturers find, for the most part, that it’s a lot easier to sell cars where they have done the former. The Prius would be the excpetion to that rule. Even hybrids, especially the more expensive ones (think Lexus), are becoming more oriented to increased performance than economy. So you have a six with the perfomance of an eight and slightly better fuel economy instead of a four that has average power but gets super high mpg.

Comment by Speedie Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 1:27 pm
No, this is a nation of cars. We Americans want the freedom of driving on the open road. I don’t think High speed rail would work here. First, it would cost to much to get it up and running, and second, people don’t take full advantage of transit we have in place now, why would they expand it.

Comment by pickles!! Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 1:36 pm
Plutocrat03,

I assume that you are against air travel and any extension of air travel in this country too. I love the people who quote Amtrak subsidies but don’t think about the billions in subsidies the airlines, automobile companies, and the highway lobby receive. I have never heard the carbon footprint argument before, but that is pretty funny. Which causes the least desirable ‘carbon footprint’ or leads to a lesser desirable neighborhood? An elevated train, a 4+ lane highway, or best of all, an airport? Why don’t you go down to Springfield and ask the people that live on different sides of Veterans Parkway how close they feel to each other. Why don’t you ask the Italian and Greek families that remain on the near west side of Chicago if they would have wanted an expressway or more elevated trains built in their neighborhood in the 60’s? If you have a study on carbon footprints for each kind of transportation, I would enjoy reading it.

That’s not to say that trains are always best and any other kind of transportation is always inferior. Robert Moses, the legendary New York urban planner, designed the transportation system almost entirely around the car. In fact, he even built bridges on parkways so low that buses could never operate on them. That is just bad planning and it would be bad planning to build only trains or let only buses use roads. We need a balanced approach that takes the pros and cons of all transportation into account. Not just the pros of cars and the cons of trains as you have proposed.

Comment by Tweed Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 1:52 pm
YES, YES and YES!

Rich Whitney, Green Party candidate for gov, was running on expanding and funding high speed and light rail.

1. It’ll create thousands of jobs to build the infrastructure and operate the system.
2. It will alleviate congestion. Shorter travel times!
3. It’s good for our environment and the public’s health (less cars on the road, less gas consumed).
4. It can be an affordable alternative to the high price of maintaining a car and spending 50 bucks on gas.
5. We could see more revenue coming into the state.

Local communities should also consider expanding separated bikes lanes. It’s a hit in Colorado, Europe, and many other places.

Comment by GreenGuy Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 2:45 pm
YES!!! I was on a train recently and heard the grown of a rider who waited for a train that was over three hours late and the ride would have been a 1 hour ride from two towns in downstate Illinois. It’s probably more critical now since Greyhound doesn’t go into every single little town anymore.

Comment by Levois Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 2:50 pm
I haven’t ridden Amtrak in years because of the repeated reliability problems, but I am going to give it a shot tomorrow night. I’m headed to Springfield from St. Louis on what would be an easy two hour drive. We’ll see how long it takes on the train. But….if I’m even close on time, you can’t beat the cost - $16 one way, and I get to sit back and read rather than face the troopers every 10 miles this weekend. I’ll let you know how it goes. But to answer the question, the money would be much better spent in upgrades to improve reliability than in expanding chronically late service.

Comment by S. Illinois Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 3:57 pm
It seems that you are missing the point I was trying to make. The arguement for paying the the startup or infrastructure costs would be different if the users would then bear the costs of the operation. In the examples of long distance or commuter rail they do not.

Our Chicagoland commuter system is overjoyed if the farebox collections approach 50% of the operating costs.

While the airlines do receive support in infrastructure, they buy their own aircraft, run their own staffs and they do that out of their farebox.

The taxpayers cannot afford to pay the operating costs as well as the the infrastructure.

The insistence of applying solutions which need continuous support is one of the myriad reasons the budget is a disaster.

Comment by plutocrat03 Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 4:13 pm
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Pingback by Are Amtrack subsidies worthwhile? » Peoria Pundits Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 4:24 pm
Yes. Then you need simple car hire at either end so people can get where they are going locally without incredible hassle and waste of time. Take the train in. Swipe your credit card to open the key box, grab the car keys and go. Come back a few hours, a day or whatever later and park, drop your keys in the box, swipe your card and get on the train. You need a system where you can set up all the car rental details ahead of time and have a cheap hourly rental rate.

BTW - I am STILL getting the “slow down cowboy” message frequently when posting single messages.

Comment by Way Northsider Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 4:39 pm
How about a high-speed Vactrain running between Chicago and St. Louis? According to my calculations, this would allow travel between the two cities with total travel time of about 5 minutes! This would be faster, cleaner, and more convient than flying.

Comment by Squideshi Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 4:44 pm
No. The French have far more favorable population density and distribution. Total rail passenger market share is stuck in the 10-15% range. That’s with very high toll rates and motor fuel taxes.

Conservation, conservation and more conservation. Start squeezing more out of our current energy use. Especially vehicles and buildings.

Comment by HappyToaster Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 4:53 pm
I am in favor of greatly enhanced rail service. I would really like to see a classier set of cars along the lines of European services and equipment. The high speed routes should be enhanced by more interurban style local service that could take riders to the nodal points for connecting with the high speed system. Also, it would be nice/nostalgic to see some streetcar/trolley systems resurrected. The atmosphere this lends itself to would be more relaxed and still efficient. The inner city systems could easily be electric and not fossil fuel driven. At any rate it wwould be good to see a renewed serious pursuit of these ideas.

Comment by A Citizen Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 4:54 pm
I doubt taxpayers seeking relief from high gas prices will find any help from the added billions it would take to design, build and subsidize true high speed rail. The state and feds can’t manage their infrastructure obligations now, much less with an added burden. It would definitely benefit the fraction of the traveling public who happen to be traveling between the end-points that would be served, which is probably a fraction of a percent. On a purely selfish note, it would be good for the engineering and construction industries. And I have a certain nostalgia for the “way pre-Amtrak” days of passenger rail, when colorful, individualized trains were the pride of the rail companies. If it is done right, there will be no freight train interference, which is Amtrak’s Achilles’ heel now.

Comment by Six Degrees of Separation Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 5:27 pm
There are several issues with high speed rail:
1. Amtrak does not own the tracks it uses.
2. Any improvements would be subject to the heavy rail traffic that owns the track.
3. What happens when you to your stop at the end of the line?
4. Money.

#1 has been dealt with by others above.
#2 is problematic. The upgrades to the track for the smooth ride necessary will be pounded to bits similar to the way roads are pounded by heavy truck traffic.
#3 - How do you get to where ever you are going when you get off the train? Public transportation will have to be upgraded.
#4 Who is going to pay for these upgraded track and rolling stock? Amtrak? Congress is having second thoughts about continued funding this quasi-public company.

Comment by Huh? Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 6:30 pm
I second Green Guy - yes, yes and yes! And let’s not wait until some crisis before we wake up and look at the advantages of HSR.

Comment by Still Anon Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 6:33 pm
(the slow down cowboy problem has returned).
No. A regular train could go 100 mph and we can’t accomplish this. High speed rail cannot be constructed on the cheap. Crossings should be grade separated and the infrastructure must be maintained. I don’t see the great state of Illinois having the attention span to maintain it, and , unlike potholes on the roadways and crumbling bridges, this could send a very expensive piece of equipment and load of passengers careening off the tracks at 200 mph.

Comment by NoGiftsPlease Thursday, May 24, 07 @ 7:07 pm