We’re Here. Now What?
- Posted by ryan on July 8th, 2009 filed in Transit
Tyler Cowen responds to my take on Ed Glaeser’s recent HSR column:
My question is simple: how could you take rail from Dallas to Houston and cope once you got there? San Antonio I can see, at least provided you will camp out in city center (a mistake, but that’s a question for a different day). I am willing to be converted, but what are the odds of such a line attracting significant patronage, with or without ongoing subsidy to the fares and not just to line construction? Or is the vision that everyone takes the train and then rents a car on arrival? According to Matt Yglesias, the plan won’t even directly link Houston to Dallas. By the way, here are some of the other planned links from Texas. Will people really take trains from Houston to Meridien, Mississippi?
I don’t really understand why Tyler thinks this is a problem. People fly between cities all the time, and airports, unlike rail hubs, are miles from central business districts. So what will people do once they’ve taken a train from one city to the next? Well, in some cases they’ll find themselves within walking distance of their destination. In other cases, they’ll find themselves within an easy transit ride of their destination; Dallas and Houston have serious plans to add to their rail networks. For other visitors cabs or carsharing will be an option. And for some subset of travelers, renting a car will be the best option. If you’re staying for the week and visiting your auntie in Galveston, then you’ll need to rent a car. If you have a midday meeting downtown and are then heading back home, well, rail is a perfect option.
And others will ask themselves this question and get no satisfactory answer and decide to drive. But if you have a rail option that’s not much more expensive than driving, and is faster than driving, and allows you to work or sleep while traveling, and delivers you within easy reach of your destination, then I don’t see how that option fails to generate plenty of traffic.
A final point: infrastructure construction influences land use patterns. Just look at the Washington metropolitan area. Jobs cluster around Metro stations on lines extending outward from the central business district. Job clusters follow major interstates, including I-66, I-270, and I-495. And jobs bunch around the region’s airports; look out from the front of the terminal at Dulles, and you see office building after office building.
If you build an effective rail system (and especially if you build complementary systems like transit and car-sharing services around that system), then employment and population patterns will respond to the shift in transportation costs. Infrastructure provides its own demand.
I’m also kind of amused at Tyler’s question, “Will people really take trains from Houston to Meridien, Mississippi?” For the right price, yes, people will take trains from Houston to just about anywhere. But Tyler, trains move in the other direction, too! It’s easy to sit around and say, “What’s the market for folks taking a train from Houston to Lake Charles or Dallas to Midland?” But for those traveling into the major metropolitan areas, trains could be tremendously advantageous. I’m sure there were a lot of people back in the day wondering who would take a Metro train from downtown Washington to Rockville, Maryland.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:25 am
The real mistake is not connecting Houston to the Texas corridor, thus linking the Gulf Coast line and the Texas line. New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin should all be linked by HSR.
July 8th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Can we connect the large Texas cities to each other by high speed rail and disconnect them from America?
July 8th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
From where I stand, pardner, detonating explosives along the San Andreas fault is a better option.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Yeah, the “what will they do when they arrive” question seems largely beside the point. I was in France in May, and we took the train from Paris to Caen, which I think is about the same distance as Houston to Austin.
But the train station in Caen wasn’t adjacent to the D-Day museum, so we took a cab. Coming back, we had more time, so we took the bus (including a transfer). Both of these would have been options in either Houston or Austin.
Anyway, to me the problem with the plan as proposed is that it didn’t start with Houston-Dallas: those are the two biggest cities, which to me seems to be the most important characteristic for HSR (economies of scale being what they are).
July 8th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
He’s pointing to a lack of infrastructure.
The number of American cities I wasn’t actually living in at the time I’ve flown into and not rented a car I can count on the fingers of one hand: Portland, Montreal, San Francisco and Chicago. Every other time I’ve visited a city by air, I’ve rented a car.
Airports are set up to rent cars. It’s not just that there are desks in the terminal, there’s parking, often right by the terminal, where cars to be rented are stored. If not, there are shuttles to and from the car rental lots along roads set up by the airport.
Train stations, not so much. There aren’t desks in the station. There’s little parking near it, certainly no cheap parking. There aren’t roads set up for easy shuttle movement to and from the station.
If I have to travel on business to a sprawly city — any sunbelt city, for example — and I have the choice between flying and high speed rail, this difference might tip the balance. The airlines fall over themselves to compete for business travelers. I assume that high speed rail will want them, too.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Cactus Pete, I think maybe we can agree on a better America through Attrition.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
My experience is quite different–I’ve traveled on business (Atlanta, Dallas, Boston, Austin, DC, etc.) and pleasure (Chicago, Detroit, LA, Albuquerque/Santa Fe, NYC, DC, etc.) to lots of places where I didn’t rent a car. Provided you’re staying relatively close by and not making a bunch of intra-day trips, cab fares are generally competitive with rental cars, and a lot more convenient.
And a lot of business travel is internal–I have lots of colleagues come to Houston, and they don’t rent cars either. If they’re going somewhere, it’s almost always with someone local, and they ride with us.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Doug, A competition for $13 billion in federal grant money is never amiable. I don’t have much interest in So. California to Las Vegas.
July 8th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
On the surface, Cowen is just acting like a ten-year-old- “How can I cope?”, as though ending up in the center of a large city were something like being dropped in the African bush or the delta of the Amazon.
But there’s a deeper confusion, a belief on Cowen’s part that somehow all those skyscrapers downtown don’t mean anything.
You see, Tyler, we don’t care how you ‘cope’. It’s a free country! HSR corridors are built to serve markets, which are numbers of people. They go from one city center to another because that’s where the people are. Whether or not the market will sustain the enterprise is not a question of how Tyler copes or whether he ever goes to Meredien.
The airport is always going to be away from where the people are. Not only do you have the danger of crashes, you have the noise factor, and the requirement for lots of real estate for runways.
If something had happened in the last 50 years to alter the fundamental math of the city center, presumably our cities would now look like doughnuts with a high ring skyline and a depressed park-like center. But this hasn’t happened. Cities have shot upwards at the very centers, reinforcing earlier impressions that being close to the action is best. In spite of all the double-talk, there isn’t going to be a time when the airport is closer to all the businesses you want to visit- unless you’re in the aviation business.
At the bottom line, even today you have a much better chance of finding decent transit or a way to walk to your destination if you arrive in the center of town. Like athlete’s foot, Tyler’s quibbling ignorance is turning into full-fledged stupidity on him.
July 8th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
A car rental parking lot at rail terminals isn’t a show stopper, just adds to construction cost.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
The big advantage of rail, over airports, aside from the access to city centers, is the in-between.
There are lots of small to medium-sized cities in flyover territory, or out of reach of large airports, which could reap huge benefits from being a stop. People may not go from Houston to Meridien, but people may go from Houston to Dallas.
New England and upstate New York are chock full of places, whose value is untouched by planes flying from LaGuardia and Newark to Boston or Buffalo or Toronto or Montreal.
Ditto for Central California — untouched by planes flying the dense air corridor from SFO or Oakland to LAX. For Fresno or Bakersfield, high-speed rail is a potential boon, for all the usual reasons that transportation improvements enhance land values.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Oops. I meant to make the point that people in Meridien might want access to Houston, even if people in Houston are not that eager to go to Meridien. Don’t know how Dallas got in there.