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Full Throttle Ahead
Aware of your imminent arrival, a mainframe computer at the magport summons the nearest magnetic levitation plane down the elevated aluminum guideway. Meanwhile, the computer's software prepares the digital commands needed to transport you non-stop at 300 mph to whatever destination along the line you have chosen.
In a few moments, mounting g-forces push you into your seat as the vehicle accelerates down the median of Interstate 95, flying at an elevation of six inches off its track. In less than an hour you rip past Orlando airport and Disney World and in another 20 minutes glide into Tampa -- and all for a fraction of the cost of driving.
Just another transportation planner's pipe dream? Perhaps. But even if this particular technology now being evaluated by the Florida Department of Transportation isn't the one the state decides to build, there is no question that a bold new age of high speed transportation is dawning in the sunshine state.
By February 28, Florida Transportation Secretary Ben Watts will award an exclusive franchise to build a high speed rail or magnetic levitation system between Tampa Bay, Orlando and Miami. Unlike previous failed attempts to bring high speed land transportation to Florida, which date back to the early 1970s, this time state government is bringing serious amounts of taxpayer money to the table. And for just that reason, this has the potential to become one of the biggest business deals in Florida since Walt Disney flew over a cowtown named Orlando.
"It's a whole different ballpark than the last time Florida tried high speed rail," says Gary L. Brosch, director of the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida. "Seventy million dollars a year for 30 years will buy you a whole lot of reality."
That's the minimum amount the FDOT is promising to invest in an unprecedented new public/private high-speed transportation partnership. The prospect of that much money, which could well wind up being leveraged into a $12 billion project, has set off a frenzied competition among railroad and mag-lev builders both within Florida and around the world.
* At a test track in the backwoods of Volusia County, a team headed by an intense former engineering professor from Georgia Tech is working frantically to prove that its magnetic levitation vehicle can actually levitate, despite strident claims to the contrary from a rival mag-lev company based in Lakeland.
* In Paris, suave French bureaucrats invite over groups of Florida politicians and journalists (including this reporter) and escort them through rail yards (and also a few vineyards) hoping to impress them with the virtues of importing French rail technology.
* In Rome, railway engineers pore over contour maps of Auburndale and other obscure Florida junctions, hoping to find a route for their beloved "Pendolino," while their counterparts in Stockholm try making a case for Amtrak's bringing the Swedish X-2000 to Florida. Meanwhile, in public meetings throughout the state, representatives from all these groups lambast each other as crackpots or carpetbaggers or worse, as the tension builds toward the state's day of decision.
Building Steam
Will this deal actually go down? In times past, a government commitment of this magnitude to public transportation would have provoked overwhelming opposition from the highway lobby. But so far, says Don Crane, head of Floridians for Better Transportation, which lobbies for increased highway spending: "There is no opposition at the state level from any transportation builder types." One reason: the project could easily employ every civil and structural engineering firm in Florida for well into the next century.
Certainly this project has the potential to turn into an expensive, embarrassing turkey, but support for it can even be found among well-known critics of government boondoggles. Reassured by the participation of the private sector, Florida TaxWatch's President Dominic Calabro, for example, is a supporter. Having been invited by the French government on one of its tours, Calabro is particularly impressed by the idea of importing a French high speed train known as the "train a grande vitesse," or TGV, which can cruise at 200 mph. Says Calabro: "TGVs have a tremendous track record of success both technologically and financially in France."
The only political resistance so far has come from some mass transit operators, such as South Florida's Tri-Rail, which have expressed concern about having to compete for funding. But opposition is hardly universal among transit operators, according to Wes Watson, executive director of the Florida Transit Association. "To this point, the FTA has supported high speed rail," says Watson, "because it will require feeder systems to make it successful." Perhaps sensing the inevitable, Watson has recently signed up as a consultant to one of the bidders on the high speed transportation project.
Where is the momentum for the project coming from and is it justified? Much of the energy emanates from the FDOT itself, which under the leadership of Ben Watts has gained a national reputation for progressive thinking about transportation issues. "Under Ben Watts it's really not roads versus rails anymore," says Malcolm R. Kirschenbaum, chairman of the Florida Transportation Commission. "It's the need for an intermodal system to avoid gridlock."
Watts isn't about to take FDOT out of the highway building business. "Highways are the backbone of our transportation system and will be for our lifetimes," he acknowledges. "But highways alone can't solve our transportation problems." A straight-shooting West Pointer, Watts learned of the potential for high speed rail while serving as an army officer in West Germany and South Korea. Now he wants Florida to have a land transportation system that is at least as fast and efficient.
After the Age of Asphalt
It's not difficult to see why Watts and other transportation planners have become skeptical about just building more and more highways. On Florida's roads, the number of vehicle miles traveled continues to grow geometrically faster than the population. The Florida Transportation Commission estimates that over the next 20 years, while Florida's population will increase by 40%, the number of vehicle miles traveled will increase by 84%.
Building enough highways lanes to accommodate that kind of growth just isn't feasible, according to FDOT. "How wide can Interstate 95 get before Miami disappears?" Watts asks rhetorically. Since 1991, FDOT has adopted the policy that it will build no highways wider than 10 lanes. Given that constraint, high speed rail or mag-levs are the only possible means of accommodating the huge projected future growth in trip miles within Florida.
The arrival of Southwest Airlines in the state should help reduce exorbitant air fares in Florida, but capacity constraints at the state's major airports limit the potential for a significant growth in short-haul airline passenger trips. Already, aircraft traffic delays cost Floridians over $125 million per year. Congestion at our major airports, 60% of which are near capacity, already hampers the growth of air cargo service and just-in-time delivery systems critical to international trade -- a problem that is particularly acute in Miami. Meanwhile, airlines, unlike trains, cannot efficiently serve medium-size, intermediate cities such as Lakeland.
Though Americans who have not traveled widely abroad may think that automobiles are the inevitable dominant transportation mode of the future, virtually every developed country outside of North America has committed itself to faster, more efficient and technologically more advanced forms of high speed land transportation. For example:
Italy is in the midst of a $25 billion high speed rail program, using a public/private corporate structure that is similar to the one envisioned in Florida. On the Rome-Florence "Direttissima" line, trains cruise at 150 mph. Plans call for selected lines to be upgraded for electric trains with cruising speeds of 186 mph.
France, already the world's leader in high speed rail, is expanding its TGV lines, on which it earns an operating profit, with new lines to Spain, Belgium, Germany, and, through the new English channel tunnel, to the U.K. It is now possible to leave Paris by train at 7 a.m. and (with the benefit of an hour's time difference) reach downtown London in time to make a 9 a.m. business meeting, and faster speeds yet are in the works.
Germany plans to spend over $60 billion on railroad infrastructure by the decade's end. This includes not only high speed steel-wheels-on-rail systems, but a 177-mile-long magnetic levitation train line that will operate at speeds reaching 250 mph between Germany's two largest cities, Hamburg and Berlin.
Uniting Florida's City States
Can such systems work in Florida? Doubters point to the comparatively low cost of gasoline in the U.S., the massive investments already made in the highway system and the American "auto culture" as reason why "it can't happen here." But such thinking misses several key points about the future. The first is that, as the above traffic projections show, driving between the major cities of Florida in the years ahead will become a whole lot more expensive and more time-consuming than it already is. Florida cannot build roads fast enough to meet demand.
Moreover, even if it could, the cost would be prohibitive. Consider that the cost of constructing Interstate 595 across Broward County exceeded $100 million a mile. By comparison, the cost of high speed rail or even the more expensive mag-lev system looks like a bargain.
It doesn't take much vision either to see that the comparatively low cost of gasoline in this country will not last indefinitely. Huge structural deficits at all levels of government in the U.S. virtually insure dramatically higher gasoline taxes in the future. Florida, with its constitutionally guaranteed prohibition against income taxes, is particularly likely to use higher gas taxes as a means of defraying its huge unfunded liabilities for entitlements and infrastructure. Gas taxes in other industrial countries range from $3.58 a gallon in Italy to just over $2.50 in France and Germany, to $1.69 in Japan. Even in Canada, gas taxes add up to roughly double what Floridians currently pay.
Another consideration is that of all the states, Florida has a topography and an economy that are particularly suited to supporting high speed land transportation. A flat terrain holds down construction costs and makes possible much higher operating speeds than in hilly regions. Meanwhile, the presence of 40 million tourist visitors each year, many of them foreigners well-accustomed to high speed rail, provides a much larger market than in other states with similar population density. International visitors to Miami who want to take in the Orlando theme parks without driving eight hours up and down the Florida Turnpike are a particularly promising market.
A final, more subjective reason why high speed trains are suited to Florida is the intense rivalry between the different regions of the state. As many observers have noted over the years, Florida is one of the few states with no dominant single city. It is instead a collection of warring city-states, whose ignorance and distrust of each other often hinder efforts to promote the Florida economy as a whole. Uniting to build a high speed land transportation system would not only literally strengthen travel connections between the different power centers of Florida, it also might help foster a stronger, more coherent sense of state identity, both within and without Florida.
Investment or Subsidy?
But can significant numbers of travelers actually be lured off highways and airplanes by high speed rail or mag-levs? According to a 1991 study by the FDOT of the transportation corridors between Tampa Bay, Orlando and Miami, even a TGV-like system, which is hardly the fastest or most advanced that might be built, could take as many as 2.7 million cars a year off the road by 2006 and eliminate 21,000 airline flights annually across the state. Such a system would also reduce gasoline consumption by 45.9 million gallons by 2006, and lead to more than 800 fewer auto accidents annually. A similar 1993 KPMG Peat Marwick study estimated that a high speed line between Tampa Bay, Orlando and Miami would generate annual ridership of between 5.9 million and 7.7 million, depending on its route, frequency and speed.
If there is such high demand for high speed rail or magnetic levitation trains, why can't they be built without subsidies? The sophisticated answer is that all modes of transportation receive huge subsidies, so that asking high speed rail or mag-levs to compete without them is asking the impossible. In the U.S., auto travel is particularly dependent on public money. The highway lobby sometimes argues that because highway projects are financed by gas and other auto-related taxes, they aren't subsidized. But just because these particular revenue sources are earmarked for highways doesn't mean highways pay for themselves. There are specially earmarked taxes on alcohol as well. If government used that money to build bars and liquor stores, most people would call that a subsidy to the liquor industry.
Moreover, the revenues dedicated to highway construction from gas taxes and other auto-related sources is nowhere near sufficient to cover the actual expense of even maintaining the highway system, let alone amortizing its capital costs. Consider that just to maintain Florida's highways and auto-traffic bridges in their current condition for the next 20 years will require public expenditure of over $114 billion, according to an estimate by the Center for Urban Transportation Research. And, yet, given the current rate of taxation on gasoline and other auto-related expenditures, available revenue to pay for that maintenance over the period will come to less than $87 billion, creating a deficit of $27 billion. When placed against these kinds of numbers, the $70 million in annual subsidies the state wants to commit to high speed rail or mag-levs hardly seems extravagant.
The Devil in the Details
But of course, even if investing in some new form of high speed land transportation makes sense in the abstract, that's no guarantee Florida won't waste billions if it picks the wrong partners. The choice of which technology and which routes to use involves particularly difficult trade-offs. For example, constructing a new, state-of-the-art high speed rail line between Orlando and Miami could reduce travel time between the two cities to just one hour and 45 minutes, compared to two hours and 30 minutes if existing rail lines are used to run conventional electric locomotives. But the difference in cost is staggering.
The cost of electrifying existing lines is $3 million to $5 million per mile, versus $20 million to $30 million per mile for a new line dedicated to high speed rail technology such as France's TGV or Italy's ETR-500. This means that to save 45 minutes of travel time on the run between Orlando and Miami, one must spend an extra $4.3 billion to $6.3 billion. That comes to between $94 million and $138 million for every minute saved on the schedule.
Florida must also make difficult choices about how far out to go on the technology curve. Mag-levs, for example, offer huge potential payoffs if they can be made to work, but the risks involved and the time required to develop the technology are considerable. "Mag-levs are the technology of the future, and always will be," sneers one TGV promoter. Meanwhile, there are many who believe that by the time Florida can complete a brand new TGV rail line, that technology, which was largely developed in the 1970s, will have become hopelessly obsolete. "We don't want to build the last choo-choo," says Donald Kaplan, vice president and CFO with Florida Magplane, which is promoting a mag-lev technology that has never actually been built except as a 1/25th scale model.
Meanwhile, TGVs, while far faster than conventional trains, are far more expensive. Moreover, under the route being proposed for Florida, TGVs won't reach many of the state's major population centers because of the difficulty in acquiring new right-of-way in urban areas. Finally, Amtrak passenger service on existing lines could be vastly improved for a comparatively small cost, which could buy time until mag-levs are ready. But would such a modest approach excite the public's imagination enough to sustain necessary political support for the project?
There is also no question that any high speed land transportation system will fail if it does not provide for easy intermodal connections to airports and local ground transportation, a "detail" that could be all too easily lost amidst all the competition for a big system franchise. In the following pages, Florida Trend examines the proposals submitted by each of the five bidders for the Florida high speed transportation project and weighs their pros and cons.
