Today, Explained - Why we can’t have nice trains

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

And how it got so dam expensive to build things in America. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. I was at the Hoover Dam at the top of yesterday's show, and I want to go back there for a minute, not physically, but through a movie from the late 1900s called Bugsy. The flamingo. A bird? Look, what do people always fantasize about? Sex, romance, money, adventure.

I'm building a monument to all of them. It's about an American gangster named Ben Bugsy Siegel who helped dream up the Las Vegas Strip. This is a scene where he's trying to convince his fellow mobsters Vegas is more than a desert pit stop. Do you know that when the Hoover Dam is finished, electrical power is gonna be available on a massive scale in Las Vegas? I don't follow. The mob is confused. His buddies are all like, I'm sorry,

how is the Hoover Dam connected to sex and money? By air conditioning. It's the wave of the future. Everything will be air cooled. Every room, 72 degrees at all times. The casino will put Monte Carlo to shame. We'll have wall-to-wall carpeting. We'll have Italian marble. We'll have badminton courts, stables. We'll have a lightning-fast train going from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in an hour. We'll have planes back and

forth. Meyer, we'll have our own airport. Just want to run down Bugsy's wish list really quickly here. Airport, check. Badminton courts, probably. Stables, surely. Wall-to-wall carpeting, unfortunately. Italian marble, too much. And of course, the air conditioning. Where do we begin with the air conditioning? But a lightning fast train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Somehow we never pulled that off. We're still just dreaming. Well, high-speed rail really is an amazing thing because it allows you to go from city center to city center. So I could just walk out of an apartment or an office and just go straight into the train station right downtown and know to the minute exactly how long it's going to take me

to get to where I'm trying to go and then basically walk to where I'm trying to go in the city. Even if I live in the suburbs, it's still a way more reliable and in some cases even faster way to get around, certainly than driving, but even than flying because you don't have the hassle of getting to the airport. You don't have the security issues. You don't have all of this stuff that you have to deal with flying. And I lived in New York for a long time. Every time there's a breeze, there's like a four-hour delay at Newark. And that's just not something that happens with high-speed rail, if done right. It also changes the way that you think about your relationship between cities.

You know, going from New York to Boston isn't like a weekend trip that, you know, you kind of have to plan way in advance. It's now something you could, you know, pop over to see your friends for dinner and get back home at a reasonable time. So it changes the psychology of the relationship between cities in the U.S. when they're connected by something that is both fast and really reliable and also really high capacity. High-speed rail could make America's urban regions feel much more united, feel much more combined, feel a lot more economic and social connection. Jonathan English, fellow at the NYU Marin Institute, all-around transit guy.

Why can't we have nice trains? Well, I think first and foremost, the biggest problem is the really high cost. We're looking at spending tens of billions of dollars on projects that, you know, in, say, southern European countries might cost single-digit billions of dollars or maybe a little bit more than that. So that's really critical. A second problem is obviously for both ideological and economic reasons, a lot of people are opposed and it's really hard to get a political consensus either at the national level or between states to actually push these projects over the line. You know, I think also there's a certain amount of hubris, you might even call it, in wanting to try completely new technologies, wanting to do things with a completely different regulatory approach from the one that most other places use. And the last one is experience. I mean, it's really hard to get the first project done because you are going to make mistakes as you do it. And that's something that has continuously caused problems in all kinds of high-speed rail

projects across the U.S. I mean, people might be surprised to hear you say that there have been high-speed rail projects across the U.S. What are we talking about here? Let's hit them up with the history lesson. So the U.S. was long a leader in high-speed trains, you know, in the sense of trains that went fast. But the first really big push for high-speed rail in the U.S. came in the 1960s. On regular runs between Tokyo and Osaka, nearly 500 miles, the bullet will keep the speed needle steady at 190 kilometers, about 120 miles an hour. Japan launched this brand new approach to rail. Rather than using existing tracks, they built a brand new, completely separate, high-speed railway

where trains traveled at unprecedented speeds. This is the gold standard of high-speed rail to this day, right? It really is. They've kept upgrading it, and trains run along that track now every couple of minutes and it's extremely busy. Yuki takes the high speed train to his hometown in Osaka every month. For him, late trains are unimaginable. It's never had an accident, never had anyone injured. It's incredibly reliable. Yeah, it's the gold standard. If the train were 30 minutes late, everyone would panic.

But that is unthinkable. So when the United States sees what Japan does with high-speed rail in the 1960s, does that in turn galvanize our competitive spirit? Yes, definitely. Out of the shock of the Japanese shinkansen and how it seemed like it was leaving the U.S. behind, and out of a desire to kind of remain on the technological forefront, this was the space age, the U.S. passed the High-Speed Ground Transportation Act in 1965. It was passed by Lyndon Johnson. I will ask for funds to study high-speed rail transportation between urban centers.

We will begin with test projects between Washington and Boston. Which eventually that grew into the Northeast Corridor Improvement Project of the 1970s and early 80s. And this project was the first big rail project in the U.S. since before the Second World War. Unfortunately, the project had a lot of challenges. For one thing, it was really hard to find people in the U.S. with experience working on big rail projects because there had been no big rail projects since the 1930s. The second problem is Congress and the White House kept fighting about who would control

what. It got to the point where if Amtrak wanted to buy some padlocks, the Federal Railroad Administration would have to approve it in advance. And that could take weeks. And sometimes the work was on hold while they waited. Between the lack of experience, the high degree of inflation in the 1970s, and then the political infighting, you could call it,

the project just kept getting higher and higher budget, and they kept stripping more and more and more elements out of the budget. The replacement of the tunnels in Baltimore, which Acela still uses today, these were built when Ulysses Grant was president. So as time went on, the project got more and more and more limited. It got less ambitious and eventually became mostly just a repair project. So the United States sees what Japan does with its Shinkansen high-speed rail, and we end up with Amtrak and bad Wi-Fi,

and we're still using Grant's post-Civil War tunnels. What about the rest of the world? Do other people see what Japan pulled off and actually pull off something remotely resembling it? Yeah, I think the most notable early one was in France. France also saw what the Japanese did and were shocked. The name's Landly, Lyle Landly. And I come before you good people tonight with an idea.

Probably the greatest. Oh, it's not for you. It's more of a Shelbyville idea. At first, when the French saw the Japanese, they thought, oh, we're going to build this hovercraft train with two jet engines on the back. That was actually the plan. Well, sir, there's nothing on Earth like a genuine, bona fide, electrified six car monorail. What I say? Monorail.

What's it called? Monorail. But then they decided, OK, we have to get a bit serious now. We're just going to go with a faster electric train. So they launched a project for, instead of renovating an existing line like they did in the U.S., which has a lot of challenges, they built a brand new line connecting the country's two biggest cities, Paris and Lyon. The trains were even faster than the Shinkansen. And they actually built it for a similar budget, a little less than the Northeast Corridor renovation.

But those trains run 270 kilometers an hour. The line was built at such a relatively reasonable cost, and the line proved so popular that it actually even made money. It paid back its cost of construction. And it helped that the French had been building rail projects all through the period of the 1950s and the 1960s. What's it called? Monorail.

That's right, monorail. Monorail. Monorail. Monorail. So when the United States sees France pull it off, does that re-energize this effort to pull off high-speed rail stateside? Yes, definitely. The French really inspired a lot of countries, including the U.S., to look

at building their own high-speed rail projects. So in the 90s, there were a lot of projects across the country, plus Amtrak revisited the Northeast Corridor to try and fix some of the limitations from the earlier Northeast Corridor Improvement Project. And then the biggest and most ambitious project was the launching of the California High-speed rail project in the early 2000s. How much longer do we need to go and travel the same speed as we did 100 years ago? I mean, that's embarrassing. I mean, I know that there's some trains that go a little faster now, but it's really Mickey Mouse. Let's admit it.

California makes so much sense for high-speed rail. It has cities with a lot of population. There's a huge amount of travel, obviously, between San Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego. And the points in between. And obviously, California has a considerable environmental consciousness, technology leadership, etc. Everything that should make it an ideal place for high-speed rail. But the problem that the project has had is that the costs have exploded. They keep going up. So whenever the project gets more funding, it gets swallowed up by cost

increases. New tonight, the federal government restoring nearly a billion dollars in funding for California's high-speed rail project. The $929 million was rescinded by the Trump administration back in 2019, which said California had failed to make progress on the project. The French actually, SNCF, the French railway actually came in and said, we'll build it for you for, I think they said, $38 billion, which is a lot less than what's being planned right now. And? Did we say way, way? No, we said no, no. Why? But why? I think that one of the big challenges with high-speed rail in the

U.S. is that the regulatory approach to rail is very different. If I use a very oversimplified analogy, in the 1950s, cars were built to be like tanks, basically. And that was how you kept people safe. And then as time went on, cars got lighter and lighter, but also safer and safer because they have all kinds of seatbelts, crumple zones, all this kind of stuff. New technology. Well, the same thing happened with high-speed rail.

In the U.S., regulation has really, until recently, frozen technology more or less in the 1950s. So everything has to be built like a, you know, a 50s Chevy, as heavy as possible. So the French called the Acela le cochon, or the pig, because it weighs twice as much as a similar French train. The French call our trains the pig. Yes. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks, France. Yeah, they had a good time with that. Is this the hubris we're talking about? Like sticking to some old, heavy, crummy design,

even though the rest of the world is literally lapping us? Yeah, I would say that there's a bit of hubris there. There's a bit of a feeling that places over there are different. Yeah, they're different in that they have much better transit than we do. Well, you know, the laws of physics are very different in France. Okay, so for almost a century now, despite there being political will and initiative around high-speed rail. We've never really gotten it done. Instead, we're left with this crumbling, overweight, crash-prone, woefully outdated system. But there's a new president in town, and he loves a locomotive. A bipartisan group of lawmakers are pushing Biden to try and go for high-speed trains again. What are the odds? Well, I think the odds are better than they have been, certainly in a very, very long time.

Between the regulatory flexibility that we're starting to see, which is going to make a huge difference. I think that we are in a political moment where this maybe could happen, at least in some places. I think that if it's going to happen, there's going to have to be a lot of attention to keeping the budgets reasonable. As long as projects are coming in at, you know, a hundred plus billion dollars, they're probably never going to happen. But if you can come up with a project that's well-designed at a cost that vaguely resembles what they would pay in, say, Southern Europe, then there's absolutely no reason why it couldn't get funded. Did you sail across the sun? Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded? And that heaven is overrated. Tell me.

Jonathan English, he's a fellow at NYU's Marin Institute. They're all about improving life in cities. Jonathan's also a researcher at the Toronto Region Board of Trade. Toronto's a fine city, especially in the summertime. Quick break, then we'll talk about why it's so dang expensive to build big things in America these days. Thank you. help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month.

And now you can get $250 when you join RAMP. You can go to ramp.com slash explained. ramp.com slash explained. r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Jerusalem Dempsis, you're a policy reporter here at Vox.com who recently wrote about why it's so dang expensive to build stuff in America.

Let me ask you, why is it so expensive to build stuff in America? So there are two major things that experts have pointed to. One is kind of government bureaucracy. The ways that transit authorities are asked to build these major projects is really complicated. And there are a bunch of rules governing it that make it really inefficient. And the second thing is that lawsuits. In the United States, it's much easier to delay these major projects by suing. An individual can essentially delay a project for years, if not decades, if they want to.

We're talking theoretical here, but do you have like a good case study of how a project has been delayed for these two reasons? Bureaucracy and legal challenges? Yeah, so the Boston Green Line extension is a great case study. So what they were trying to do there is build this 4.3 mile light rail project. Entering Englewood Avenue. It's not something especially ambitious. We're not doing any big tunneling. We're not like blowing up underground or anything like that.

They're just building a light rail train to take people from Boston to the suburbs. Doors will open on the right. So above ground, right? Like a typical light rail above ground, no subway, that kind of thing. Exactly. Researchers at New York University basically ran this giant case study to figure out what exactly went wrong in Boston. There's just not one really obvious thing.

There's not like one simple fix here. But what they were able to identify is a few of these problems that I just mentioned. You have two different understaffed agencies that don't have a ton of experience managing these kinds of projects, and they end up having to contract out a lot of project management to consultants, which of course, we know is extremely expensive. They run up the cost. And then these agencies also don't have

the authority a lot of the time to just make a decision. There's no one decider. And anyone who's ever done a group project in school or at work knows that if there's not someone put in charge, that just leads to like massive dysfunction. And what ends up happening during this process is that a lot of expensive ideas are added. People know that federal money is coming in for this project. So they're like, let me make sure that my pet project or the thing that I really care about, which often is something really good. Things like bike lanes or widening the stations ends up adding a bunch of the project costs. And what ends up happening is that in 2012, this project was supposed to cost a little over a billion dollars. And by 2015, that number nearly triples and the project had to be put on hold. Thank you for writing the tea.

And this Green Line in Boston still hasn't been fully realized in... How long has it been in the works now? It's been in the works for over three decades now. Three decades? Yeah, 30 years, longer than I've been alive. 30 years? I mean, is it even still the system they want? It has changed a lot from the very beginning of what people wanted the Boston Green Line extension to look like. But just to put that three decades into context, in Istanbul, transit construction projects run basically 24 hours a day. In the span of seven years, Istanbul ends up building over 12 miles of subway. Remember, the Boston Green Line extension was only supposed to be a little over

four miles of subway. And they were able to build 12 miles of subway, even as we were completely delaying the ability for this project to go on. And the expected duration of the Green Line's 4.3 mile project was supposed to be seven years as well. I mean, that's sad for Boston, but this isn't just a Boston thing. I mean, I think about the Transcontinental Railroad was built by hand in six years. California's high-speed rail project, on the other hand, has been in the works for something like 12 and is scheduled to open in like 2033. Do these projects take so long because they're expensive or are they just wildly expensive because they take so long?

So it's actually sort of both. It's expensive because it takes so long and it takes so long because the United States has basically empowered citizens to slow down transit and other big projects through lawsuits. And what ends up happening is that usually people who can afford to hire lawyers and can take the time to engage in these meetings, which are often wealthier Americans, are suing to stop projects that often are actually beneficial for the larger population. Do you have an example of that phenomenon? Yes. So I actually grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I think one of the quintessential examples of this phenomenon occurred. Officials had been trying to build the Purple Line for more than 20 years at this point. This type of fast, efficient, and reliable service is needed in this area as the Washington region consistently ranks among the worst in the country for traffic congestion.

Right now it's only about 40% built and it's run hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. And a local pro-transit organization has been documenting a lot of the reasons why there have been so many delays, and they point to these residents of a local wealthy DC suburb in Chevy Chase who have basically led a decades-long crusade against the project. Now, the lawsuit alleges that proposed Purple Line currently in place would harm areas along the trail, including Rock Creek and Coakland Run, where two species of shrimp-like creatures called amphipods live. They alleged for a while that there was some, you know, transparent invertebrate that was at risk. A transparent invertebrate? Yes, some sort of animal,

but I don't know if you can call it an animal if it's an invertebrate, but it was some sort of being. They say that specific area is where those tiny freshwater invertebrates have been found, and they believe that they've been found nowhere else in the U.S., but right there in that area. It has become, you know, pretty clear from a lot of the public comments that a lot of the animus against these projects is coming from a place of people in more affluent communities not interested in having transit run through their communities. There are repeated references that the train line might be too near to the Columbia Country Club, and that might hurt people's views while they're playing golf.

I'm going to give you a little advice. There's a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it. Stop thinking. Let things happen and be the ball. It's pretty clear that a lot of the time these environmental regulations are not being used for the benefit of the environment. I mean, all transparent invertebrates aside, there are legitimate reasons to let the public speak on major infrastructure projects, especially considering our history of, you know, driving highways through minority communities and forcing people out of said communities. How should we be thinking about that balance there between making sure people have a say and not letting some invisible animals get in the way of progress?

Sure. I think one thing we need to remember here is that the United States is not the only place that cares about the environment. European countries are known for their regulatory burdens. They place on companies and on state projects all the time, but somehow they're able to pass these environmental regulations without having the sorts of delays and cost overruns we are. Usually these types of environmental regulations are not enforced with expensive lawsuits. They're enforced through the administrative state. So like in Italy, for instance, it's not that an individual has to sue

in order for the U.S. government to make sure that they're not harming a local transparent invertebrate or potentially actual people's lives. In Italy and other countries, there's a government apparatus that exists to do that regulation and hold the government accountable. And they are able to do so while completing these projects. So, I mean, where does that leave us? It sounds like if we can get past the hubris and the political divides that Jonathan mentioned in the first half of the show, we still have to deal with all sorts of bureaucracy and

all sorts of legal challenges that you're talking about that drive up costs. How do we make forward progress here when it seems like we need mass transit now more than ever with congested cities and climate change bringing heat waves and floods and wildfires? I mean, is there a way forward for for rail projects in America? There is a lot that can be done. I think first things first is that policymakers need to be taking this a lot more seriously as a problem that they're engaging with. One big issue is that often local transit agencies

don't even try to come up with really ambitious, great projects that would solve a lot of our climate change concerns because they're already aware of all the barriers in place to actually building them. And the second is just data collection. The Federal Highway Administration right now does not know how much it costs to build any individual section of the highway. Yes, they have no idea. They don't know because they don't collect that data and they don't force these agencies

to itemize and give them a sense of where this money is really going towards so we can figure out really where to cut costs. When we're serious about projects, when we're serious about building things in this country, we can do it. But for a long time, we haven't really been serious about building public transit. So it sounds like we could,

but it's pretty darn unlikely. It's going to be really hard. It's going to be really hard. But there's always Istanbul. Yeah, there's always Istanbul and there's Spain and there's Finland and Portugal and South Korea and Turkey and Switzerland and Greece and Italy and Japan and Norway and China and India and Kuwait and Brazil and Mexico and Ukraine and Poland and Egypt and Vietnam and Netherlands. Thank you.