February 16, 2010--Tampa to Orlando In 4 Years
On the day after his State of the Union address Barack Obama came down to Florida to deliver a $1.25 billion job stimulus check to fund the construction of a high speed rail line that would connect Tampa and Orlando. Spare no expense, it seemed, to get folks to Disney World as fast as possible.
Governor Charlie Crist was nowhere to be seen--God forbid he should be caught in the same photo with Obama when he faces a tough primary battle with an ultra-conservative Tea Bag candidate.
Everyone else was excited. At long last the U.S. was getting into the bullet train business decades after Japan and much of Western Europe. And we were finally doing so after China began making a huge investment in trains of this kind. Little noticed was the fact that the $1.25 billion was only a small portion of the $8.0 billion needed to lay the tracks and purchase the trains themselves (probably from an overseas manufacturer) and not pointed out was the fact the eventual line was to be only 84 miles in length, and that "eventual" in this case was to be at least four years in the coming.
84 miles divided by 4 years equals about 21 miles of track a year. At this rate, if we were to rebuild just half of our current 21,000 mile Amtrak system it would take 500 years to get the job done and would cost at least $4-5 trillion. So it's good to see us getting started on this half-a-millennium-long project.
China, on the other hand, is rampaging along. They already have one line completed. The 664 mile long high-speed rail line between Guangzhou and Wuhan. According to the New York Times (article linked below), it takes about three hours at over 200 MPH to get from one city to the other. About how long it takes the Acela to lumber and rattle the 210 miles from Boston to New York City.
664 miles already completed compared to just the 84 planned in Florida is to an American humbling enough. But then when we learn that China has 41 other high-speed lines either operating or scheduled for completion in just two years (as compared to four years in Florida), it is more than humbling--it feels both shortsighted on our part and humiliating to our national pride.
To get the job done the Chinese have made it a national priority and deployed enough government funds to enable them to work on all of these projects at the same time. It is also a terrific public works program that is creating many hundreds of thousands of jobs. For example, they mobilized 110,000 laborers to build the 820 mile rail link from Beijjing to Shanghai, which is set to open next year. It will take passengers only five hours to make that trip. Of course in China to get something like this underway they do not have to cajole and pay off a 60 senator super majority to vote for the enabling legislation.
They are also building the trains themselves in China. That is a bit of a sordid story. The prototype for their version of a bullet train was manufactured in Europe and the Chinese bought the trains they needed from them. But rather than putting them onto the tracks and into use they had engineers and technicians swarm all over them to dissect the locomotives into their component parts. They did this so that they could make their own bootleg copies and not have to pay any license fees. They nearly got away with that act of industrial piracy but since it was exposed and created an international outcry they backed off and agreed to pay a modest fee.
Again, this is an advantage that the Chinese have over the rest of us who more or less choose to play by the rules. Bottom line though--they will have thousands of miles of high speed rail lines and we'll have ours between Tampa and Orlando. Theirs will be for commerce; ours for entertainment. They'll use theirs to get to work; we'll use ours to get to see Mickey.
This makes me think that we should impose an Empire State Building Rule. During the early years of the Depression a plan was announced to build a 102-story building--to be the tallest in the world. Plans for it were ready in two weeks (the architects cleverly based them upon drawings for another structure, the Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem) and 3,400 men were quickly put to work. It took them just 16 months to get the job done--from ground breaking to ribbon cutting.
So how about imposing this rule in Florida--let's get the 84-mile line built in, OK, 18 months. Then it would take us only 200 years to rebuild half of Amtrak.
Governor Charlie Crist was nowhere to be seen--God forbid he should be caught in the same photo with Obama when he faces a tough primary battle with an ultra-conservative Tea Bag candidate.
Everyone else was excited. At long last the U.S. was getting into the bullet train business decades after Japan and much of Western Europe. And we were finally doing so after China began making a huge investment in trains of this kind. Little noticed was the fact that the $1.25 billion was only a small portion of the $8.0 billion needed to lay the tracks and purchase the trains themselves (probably from an overseas manufacturer) and not pointed out was the fact the eventual line was to be only 84 miles in length, and that "eventual" in this case was to be at least four years in the coming.
84 miles divided by 4 years equals about 21 miles of track a year. At this rate, if we were to rebuild just half of our current 21,000 mile Amtrak system it would take 500 years to get the job done and would cost at least $4-5 trillion. So it's good to see us getting started on this half-a-millennium-long project.
China, on the other hand, is rampaging along. They already have one line completed. The 664 mile long high-speed rail line between Guangzhou and Wuhan. According to the New York Times (article linked below), it takes about three hours at over 200 MPH to get from one city to the other. About how long it takes the Acela to lumber and rattle the 210 miles from Boston to New York City.
664 miles already completed compared to just the 84 planned in Florida is to an American humbling enough. But then when we learn that China has 41 other high-speed lines either operating or scheduled for completion in just two years (as compared to four years in Florida), it is more than humbling--it feels both shortsighted on our part and humiliating to our national pride.
To get the job done the Chinese have made it a national priority and deployed enough government funds to enable them to work on all of these projects at the same time. It is also a terrific public works program that is creating many hundreds of thousands of jobs. For example, they mobilized 110,000 laborers to build the 820 mile rail link from Beijjing to Shanghai, which is set to open next year. It will take passengers only five hours to make that trip. Of course in China to get something like this underway they do not have to cajole and pay off a 60 senator super majority to vote for the enabling legislation.
They are also building the trains themselves in China. That is a bit of a sordid story. The prototype for their version of a bullet train was manufactured in Europe and the Chinese bought the trains they needed from them. But rather than putting them onto the tracks and into use they had engineers and technicians swarm all over them to dissect the locomotives into their component parts. They did this so that they could make their own bootleg copies and not have to pay any license fees. They nearly got away with that act of industrial piracy but since it was exposed and created an international outcry they backed off and agreed to pay a modest fee.
Again, this is an advantage that the Chinese have over the rest of us who more or less choose to play by the rules. Bottom line though--they will have thousands of miles of high speed rail lines and we'll have ours between Tampa and Orlando. Theirs will be for commerce; ours for entertainment. They'll use theirs to get to work; we'll use ours to get to see Mickey.
This makes me think that we should impose an Empire State Building Rule. During the early years of the Depression a plan was announced to build a 102-story building--to be the tallest in the world. Plans for it were ready in two weeks (the architects cleverly based them upon drawings for another structure, the Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem) and 3,400 men were quickly put to work. It took them just 16 months to get the job done--from ground breaking to ribbon cutting.
So how about imposing this rule in Florida--let's get the 84-mile line built in, OK, 18 months. Then it would take us only 200 years to rebuild half of Amtrak.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
2:19 AM
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