Without getting political, I’m all for subsidies in highway and rail. Personally I find it deplorable that tax priorities favor fuel inefficiency and old technology without a non-automobile alternative for travel. Generally the Houston (and Texas) mentality for travel is backward. People complain about traffic, but live thirty miles from where they work (sometimes by choice) and believe no one would ride a commuter rail. Houston freeways with five lanes in each direction are still congested. Working people have to mostly rely on unreliable automobiles, or nice automobiles they can’t fully afford.

I’ve lived in Houston my whole life and only found out about the Sunset Limited a few years ago, and just recently considered taking it to New Orleans for a mini-vacation. The fact that most people (I would assume) aren’t even aware of an alternative to flying and driving to certain cities must have SOME effect on ridership.

I have seen the SNCF proposal, but I haven’t read it in detail. I’m not surprised that they are focused on the I-35 corridor and are somewhat leaving Houston “out in the cold”, there are so many more good stops in between Dallas and San Antonio than any other corridor in Texas.

I’ll take a look at this stuff in more detail and try and write an analysis of it in the days ahead.

Quickly, though, here’s a counter-thought on the train system and traveling with a family of 6. Skip ahead twenty years and let’s imagine that some form of rail travel has been successfully implemented between all the major Texas cities, and that a decent percentage of each city is also covered by reliable mass transit.

If that family of six chooses to live in a central-city neighborhood where Mom works from home, the kids can walk to school, and Dad chooses to commute sans-auto (walking or taking light rail or whatever), the family might be able to save a lot of money by choosing not to own a six-passenger vehicle, but simply to own one or two smaller cars for certain types of trips and get around other ways the rest of the time.

In that situation the family might find that it was much cheaper to take trains and transit most of the time when they were going somewhere as a family, and rent a van when absolutely necessary.

Of course as the city is today nobody would live without a permanent six-passenger vehicle if that’s the family size. However, we don’t know what kind of lifestyle choices people might make in another generation if there are many new options available to them. We also can’t predict what kind of alternate businesses will spring up to help fill those niche demands – like new forms of car-rental or car share around stations.

That’s exactly the kind of discussion that I’m going to try and factor in as I write about this topic over the next week or two. There is no crystal ball, but by thinking of as many possibilities as we can imagine, we can come up with a much more reasonable picture of what the future could hold.

I’ll go ahead a proffer a potential solution in allowing riders to bring their cars along in an attached freight car (there are those designed to move vehicles) like the Amtrak Auto Train service. Doing that, though, will cost more money and travel time (you have to arrive early so they can load your car).

Something else to consider is the number of people traveling in a single vehicle. I visit Austin every other month or so and, just because of my personal interests, I’d love to be able to take a train rather than drive. However, when I travel I’m also traveling with my wife and four children. So, the cost savings would also have to justify the purchase of 6 tickets. It may well happen that the cost savings will have a break even point for number of travelers where taking a train won’t make sense.

I enjoy your blog and I’m sure you’ve seen the recent french effort at high-speed rail:

http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/sncf/Texas.pdf

The intersting thing about it is that they believe they can build it, have an 8.5% return on investment and give it to txdot by 2050. I’d like to hear your thoughts about it.

Kyle