Cool Concepts | High Speed Rail (Part II of II)

Posted by TM Brown on March 13, 2011 · 3 Comments 

Aviation is the most environmentally taxing mode of travel over any distance. Jet fuel combustion, by chemistry and volume, emits tons of carbon dioxide during short flights and dozens more during long-hauls. Typically cars and rail rank 2nd and 3rd, though those statistics are dependent on load factors; the amount of passengers alters emission rates significantly and per passenger emissions can be considered more important than absolute emissions because it’s a measure of human efficiency rather than mechanical efficiency.

The way we do things is a lot easier to change than is the way our machines do things for us. Squeezing asymptote-like efficiencies out of our Saabs and Boeings and railcars requires billions of dollars of research, development, and implementation while organizing a carpool is 3 phone calls and a calendar book away. Abandoning the pursuit of combustable efficiency shouldn’t be advocated though. More people need to admit the difficulties associated with improving the most important invention of the 20th century and more politicians needs to understand that R&D funding is not a sunk cost.*

Infrastructure construction, as opposed to research and development, also has immediately tangible results. Cranes are a visible product of investment while researchers in a laboratory, while equally hardworking, are counterintuitively more abstract products of investment. Construction projects are also environmentally taxing and the alchemy of laying where there once were none— many consider the completion of HSR a superficial task of remodeling existing rail infrastructure to suit HSR cars, the equivalent of renovating highways to be more amiable to horsemen— is complicated at best.

Too many rail advocates consider only the end product of HSR infrastructure rather than imagine its ugly and environmentally damaging beginnings. Extraction of raw materials for track, stations, and peripheral necessities needs to stop being considered in the abstract when it comes to HSR: it is not an environmentally benign venture outside of passenger efficiency rates.

Environmentally pragmatism hasn’t usurped idealism yet, but that doesn’t mean that environmentalism is catholically hamstrung. The competition to create cleaner, cheaper, and ultimately more efficient energy has produced dividends already. HSR, apparently, is not held to the same standards. None of these modes exist in a vacuum, and in an age where materials are as scarce as land and the state coffers are light, the whole picture surrounding HSR’s environmental impact needs to be considered. A track in the valley between Los Angeles and San Francisco, is still a track that was not there before.

*(A slight aside: When Claudius Caesar traveled from Rome to his fort of London on the newly conquered British Isle it took him near 3 weeks. 1800 years later, when Queen Victoria visited King Humbert in Rome, it took her 15 days. Reducing overland travel by 5 or so days in nearly 2000 years is a failure of mankind considering the pivotal advances we made in disciplines in the arts and sciences. Today, however, that trip takes 18 hours. In 2000 years of invention nothing, up until the invention of the internet, has transformed human society as much as the internal combustion engine.)

 

Filed under Cool Concepts, high speed rail, Transportation Planning · Tagged with california, california for high speed rail, high speed rail, HSR