#1 -- Passenger miles. "Passengers" or "trips" is not as useful a metric as "Passenger miles." Passenger miles is the "work" done by a transportation system. If you want to normalize transportation subsidies, it is useful to look at passenger miles in addition to trips. Taxpayers may spend $2.00 to move someone from home to the gocery store on a city bus, and they may spend $15 to move someone 100 miles on Amtrak. These two "trips" are not comparable, so comparing the subsidy in this way is useless.

#2 -- Long Distance train economics are often not as bad as short-distance economics. Even when passenger rail systems were private in the USA, commuter trains lost money faster and sooner than the long-distance trains (you can refer to historical material and economics articles from the 1950s for a discussion of that). Government stepped in far sooner to subsidize commuter rail than it did to rescue the intercity passenger train. The key factors in passenger train economics are costs (e.g. variable costs like labor, as well as fixed costs) and revenue.

On the revenue side, you earn more money with higher fares per mile and a higher load factor (percentage of seats occupied for each mile of service). Long Distance trains offer amenities and serve a market that can command a reasonable fare. Long Distance trains often have a higher load factor than short distance trains for reasons of geography -- it isn't serving a "tide" of commuters who only fill certain segments or certain times of day. Also, the long distance train runs at night, so equipment is "earning" revenue more hours of the day. Short distance trains get parked every night.

On the "costs" side of the ledger sheet, the long distance trains share most of the capital costs (the infrastructure) with freight railroads. Since Amtrak pays an access charge as opposed to having to deploy capital to actually build and maintain the rail infrastructure, they are, in fact, converting capital costs to marginal operating cost, which can be advantageous to Amtrak. In contrast, when you actually own the railroad, and when your railroad is a very old but very fast line (and thus has high maintenance costs) in an urban area, the costs of ownership can be very significant. The Northeast Corridor only works because it reaches New York City, and the level of infrastructure necessary to reach Manhattan is staggering. Even now, as digging under the rivers and the island continues for improved rail access, massive sums are being deployed to improve train travel into New York. If those capital sums were charged against passenger service, the subsidy would be plain.

To conclude: intercity passenger rail makes sense on the merits of the intercity travel market. Too often we compare apples to organges-- comparing commuter trains with intercity trains -- when each has a role to play in effective transportation.

Glaeser picked a lousy example to trash HSR--the Texas cities are among the best potential nodes for regional HSR if and when it's ever economically competitive with airlines or highway travel (294 daily one-way non-stops between these 4 cities on just 3 airlines)--but if you're comparing apples to oranges the apples win out.

I'd agree with his premise that priority funding for local mass transit to relieve congestion (and coincidentally increase development and population dnsity along the routes) is the way to go for now--whether you're in Boston or Austin.

Secondly, it's not easy to assess the load factor of a train. Do you do it with a snapshot at some moment in time, or do you measure it over the whole run? In the latter case, numerous routes are running over 100% capacity because seats turn over more than once. Again, citing the Empire Builder as an example, only 5% of the train's passengers are going between the endpoints of Chicago and Portland/Seattle (the train splits in Spokane). That's some major turnover. Even something simple like initial load is actually rather difficult to assess. Just about every Amtrak long-distance train makes a suburban stop right after it originates and right before it terminates. This is a great convenience to certain passengers who don't want to travel all the way downtown only to have to come back out to the suburbs, but it means that the train is going to have more empty seats for part of its journey than it otherwise would.

It's also Amtrak's policy to not overbook reserved trains. I'm sure if they wanted to deal with the fallout of having overbooking policy, they could sell more tickets than seats and push up those numbers somewhat. As a frequent rail passenger, I'm glad they don't. Sold out trains are not uncommon during the summer months, believe it or not.

Finally, I disagree with the assessment that the energy costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure are higher for railroads than they are for aircraft. A single airport will have thousands of lights, hundreds of acres of paved surfaces that need to be patched or plowed, and several high-frequency navigation radios that operate all hours of the day and night. It requires a lot of electricity and diesel to tend to that.

Contrast this with a rail line which has signals that are illuminated only when a train is near, radios that activate only when they're being used, and a narrow strip of land that rarely even needs to be plowed for a train to make it through. Recent advances in regenerative breaking will only help to lessen the energy usage of trains, but there's never going to be a way around the fact that you need to convert gobs of petro energy to kinetic energy to potential energy just to get a plane off the ground. And that energy doesn't really convert back.

Ed Glaeser is a fantastic economist.

Maybe, but Paul Krugman is a fantastic economist who gets urbanism. And he rides the train.

Sure, efficiency is different with load. That's why inner city buses at peak times are more energy efficient than trains, but off peak buses are some of the least efficient transportation there is.

However, there are several points you're ignoring.

1) It is impossible to avoid partially empty trains. United Airlines just announced that their load factor across all planes was 85.9% in June 2009; such a level is nearly impossible for a train system. Planes fly point-to-point; a train must pass by each station. Anyone who has ridden or attempted to buy tickets for Amtrak's Carolinan knows that it is much more full on the portion on the Northeast Corridor. When it sells out between two points, say Richmond and DC, it is impossible to buy tickets from Raleigh to DC. The same is true of any Amtrak long distance train. Increasing their load factor is *the* story about increasing airline energy efficiency over the last 20 years. Amtrak's overall load factor is 50%, even in the last two years with higher ridership (see section A2, Summary Metrics, of any of the recent reports), and the Acela total load factor, weighted by miles traveled, is not much better at around 60% (63% last year, 57% this year.) (Look at section C of any of Amtrak's recent monthly reports, and divide contribution per seat mile by contribution per passenger mile to get passenger miles per seat miles, or load factor.)

These numbers are typical for trains worldwide. Amtrak's load factor for its peak legs are higher, but any train route with multiple stations is going to have peak busier legs, and thus more empty inefficient legs to compensate. (Unless the train sheds cars at one stop, of course, but this happens much less efficiently than the ability of an airline to upgauge or downgauge aircraft size on various point-to-point routes.)

Yes, hypothetically if trains could achieve the load factor that sophisticated advances in route scheduling have allowed airlines to reach recently, they would look better. But it's not possible. Feel free to search for information on other successful high speed rail systems, like the shinkansen, or Taiwan's high speed rail. Load factor for an entire system does not exceed 50-65% anywhere, though again obviously on peak routes it's better.

2) While train stations can be located in central cities, there is environmental and energy costs in laying and maintaining track. Rail has to be maintained in order to stay at the level necessary to maintain high speed service. That cost is not counted in these numbers presented, and I would strongly suspect that the energy cost of rail maintenance and construction exceeds that of airport maintenance and construction. The energy numbers presented are thus biased in favor of rail.

let's take just one case:

Of course, Texas has four of the nation's fastest growing metropolitan areas, all within a few hundred miles of each other -- an ideal distance for high-speed rail.

what does this have to do with Glaeser's argument? nothing. it's totally irrelevant. we might as well talk about the weather.

in fact, a couple of paragraphs later, you make Glaeser's case for him when you write:

Moreover, Texan metropolitan areas are working to accommodate future growth in a denser fashion by building miles of metropolitan transit systems.

Glaeser just spent an entire article telling us to 'put transit where the people are,' and presumably you have a problem with this, but then back up Glaeser's point by telling us that Texan metro areas are, indeed, 'putting transit where people are.' just bizarre.

it's not like Glaeser is the first to call high-speed rail a joke--pretty much anyone with any common sense has been saying it, including Kunstler and Chomsky.

http://www.wholecommunitydesign.com/newsLinks/newsLinks_article.php?id=79

I was astonished to find such a one-sided viewpoint. The role of mass transit should be to alleviate the problems of sustainability and inequity across the U.S., not just in a particular region.

The larger point is that the Obama Administration has exactly the wrong approach. They have invested massively in cars, car companies, biofuels, and roads. Then when they address Rail, they go to the last place first: HSR. From a political standpoint, this is also a mistake. For it opens them to exactly the kind of criticism coming from Glaeser--even if it too is infused with wrong-headed analysis.

G

One interesting datum to find: San Diego has a fairly small and dense commercial area while LA deserves it's notoriety as an automotive city. I wonder how many of the LA-SD train trips originate in Los Angeles and how many San Diego. I imagine it is much more attractive to train south than north.