there's private money in this deal. because if i don't have to sit in an airport for an hour and a half, the total travel time is less than flying when you're talking about connecting texas cities. for business travel, in particular, that's much more appealing to me...particularly if it's cheaper, too. it also doesn't burn an assload of jet fuel.
If you use that argument, Houston to Dallas is perfect because the amount of auto travel is massive because the cities are relatively close together. Yes, there are a lot flights too but that's besides the point.
That link is from 1996 - when the airlines were against it because they were making a killing on short-distance air travel. It seems the airlines are more on board now because air travel is far less profitable at short distances these days.
i'm in 100% agreement. this is the point, exactly. and i'm saying that the houston/dallas/austin trips are the shorter trips a report like that is talking about. from what i posted earlier, you even have airlines suggesting that it would be better to run rail from austin to dallas than air travel. "The reason airlines are at least wiling to consider it now, according to industry sources, is that high fuel costs have made short-hop flights less profitable, and the airlines might want to link DFW to Austin passengers by train rather than by an airplane."
Dallas to Houston used to be Southwest's personal cash cow. Contrary to popular belief, Continental never made that much money from it (to those in the know, I saw the "blue pages"). We flew lots of frequencies as a competitive reaction to keep up. Southwest was dominant.
Major infrastructure projects that will serve the people for many, many decades tend to cost a hell of a lot of money. Like those interstate highways we drive all over the country? Cost a bloody fortune. Try to add up what that system would cost to build in today's dollars and I'm sure the total would be staggering. Having been on high speed passenger rail systems around the world, including those in Europe and Japan, has driven home to me just how much we need it here. And the longer you wait to build them, the more they are going to cost. Far past time to build those systems here. Texas, being huge, with a big population getting bigger by the day, is a terrific place to have such a system. Let's grab some of those tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure money in the stimulus bill and bring the future to Texas.
Yay! Maybe we can finally catch up with the euro and asian countries that already have bullet trains. When I was in Korea I traveled on the KTX which travels at about 300 km/hr. At this speed, you can get from Dallas to Houston in about 2 hours It'll be nice to go to Houston from Austin in about an hour and have enough energy/time to come back on the same day. Oh yea, and competition from airlines? KTX opened in 2004... From wiki:
none of what you said explains why all the "estimates" are vastly lowballed. 12 billion will never build it.
I don't know if $12 billion will build it because these estimates always seem to undershoot with most infrastructure projects (though assuming 600 miles, that's nearly $4,000 per foot which seems high, but who knows). But I think a better way to gauge it is looking at other countries and how much they cost there and how beneficial they have been. That's probably a more useful analysis than whatever number people who want to get the thing built propose since they have a vested interest in getting it approved.
It would be great to see this bailout money go towards something like this. There are several cluster cities that could really use this.
