25 Countries Have Bullet Trains. Why Don't We?

Photo: MaedaAkihiko Creative Commons 4.0

Alright. We've put men on the moon and land rovers on Mars. It's obvious we have the technical know-how. So what's the problem? 

First, most countries have national rail ownership, centralized planning and eminent domain authority, which our citizens especially despise. The U.S., on the other hand, has Federal, state and local layers, and lawyers bringing decades of litigation. Key transport corridors are served by privately owned railroads.  

A. second reason is that in the U.S., highways and airports are our primary investment, both of which are subsidized. Passenger rail's decline leads to ever fewer passengers, so the trains are unprofitable except between key locations. Europe and Japan treat rail as core infrastructure, not an alternative.

Land acquisition and lawsuits make it hard for railroads to calculate costs. Project delays increase the costs exponentially with long environmental reviews, property challenges and political opposition the whole way. As a result, U.S. infrastructure projects are slower, more legally complex and far more expensive per mile than peers.

It's ironic that the U.S. invented much of the rail technology that is used around the world today. What's lacking may simply be political will. When you look at the numbers--most Amtrak routes are losing money--it's probably easier for leaders to say, "This is not my fight. I've got too many other irons in the fire." 

Without a visionary, projects perish.

Related Link: That Used To Be Us

Tech Tuesday: Seven Stories from This Week's EV News

Photo courtesy J Dean via Unsplash

My comments in italics

TESLA VEHICLES GET A RECALL
Tesla is recalling almost all of its electric vehicles in the U.S. for a software fix as it faces heightened scrutiny from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). 

When you read the details regarding this recall, it seems the recall involves something incredibly petty, though it will require Tesla to notify every car owner and schedule time to make the adjustment for each car. Is the government trying to disincentivize Elon Musk from selling cars to Americans? Did Ford or GM put a bug in the ear of the NHTSA? 

EVs Are Too Heavy to Be Stopped by Guardrails 
Results from crash testing in the US have raised concerns that electric vehicles may be too heavy to be stopped safely by guardrails on roads.

EVs must be heavier than we realized.... or guardrails flimsier. Is replacing guardrails part of the infrastructure plan?

Building EVs Impacts the Environment, Too
"As the world embraces electric vehicles as a solution to carbon dioxide emissions, there is too little discussion of the environmental harm associated with the metals needed to build them, says one of Japan's foremost researchers in the field."

This story from Tokyo draws attention to another side of the EV coin. In theory they are better for climate impact considerations, but there are other problems that the mining of rare metals exacerbates.

GM Went All In on EVs. Dealers Say Buyers Want Hybrids.
Some auto retailers worry GM is missing an opportunity to nab buyers who aren’t ready for EVs

This is what happens when there is a government-generated mismatch between supply and demand. Will GM need another bailout in a few years? 

More automakers are being forced to rethink their EV plans

EVs have been the shiny new toy in the auto industry, albeit an expensive toy, but the demand has not yet been generated for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest is the hassle of re-charging the batteries.

77% of Americans have homes, but only two-thirds of these have a garage. Finding re-charging stations can become massively annoying, and even moreso when travelling. One recent study found that 40% of all charging stations in California were broken. (or maybe it was in L.A.)

Why Americans Don’t Want Electric Vehicles

Not long ago, pundits were telling us that gasoline-powered cars would soon vanish from the streets, replaced by sleek, space-age vessels powered by electricity. But consumer demand for electric cars never matched the hype.

Why? Again, charging stations are a hassle. And in cold weather, it takes even longer.

Keep Politics out of the EV Debate and Listen to the People

People in Connecticut want to know the details of a plan: where will we get the extra electricity to power the thousands of new EVs, how will the transmission line infrastructure be built, who will pay for it all (your electric bill is already too high), where will people charge them throughout the state, will there be enough operational charging stations where people live and work, and will EVs be affordable? 

This last was a letter to the editor of the CT Examiner. Many questions. I drive by our university paking lots and see a thousand cars, but only a half dozen charging stations, if any. At UMD Saturday I only saw one Golf utilizing a charger. Will we one day have a totally electric transportation fleet? Maybe, but probably not in my lifetime.

Serious Labor Shortages Are Threat to Economic Recovery

Help Wanted. Now Hiring. It seems like everywhere I go I see signs announcing the need for workers to fill vacancies.

As it turns out this appears to be a national problem, not just a Northland issue. Nearly every restaurant is short of help here. A friend who owns 11 fast food restaurants between Duluth and the Twin Cities normally employs 350, but has to keep things running with 250 employees. Panera Bread has put up a sign that says they're limiting hours because of the shortage of help.

The government's good intentions in providing financial help above and beyond regular unemployment has, for many, become a disincentive for returning to the workplace.

In addition to labor shortages we have materials shortages, partially caused by labor shortages in this arena. According to a Bloomberg article, Biden's infrastructure plan could be hamstrung by the lack of qualified workers to execute this ambitious dream. Currently the U.S. manufacturing industry has 500,000 positions unfilled.

The great irony here is that this massive infrastructure push has as one of its aims to provide Americans with more jobs. But with the shortages in materials, we may end up outsourcing to other countries, benefiting others rather than those we're supposed to be helping. Lumber (now up five-fold) aluminum, copper and cement prices are high due to tariffs, so building homes has become exceedingly expensive. (EdNote: We have lots of copper inside the U.S. borders, but have made it near impossible to mine it.)

An article at CNN.com begins with this telling Q & A: "Chicken, lumber, microchips, gas, steel, metals, chlorine and ketchup packets: What do they all have in common? They're all (nearly) impossible to find."

A New York Times article this past week is titled "How the World Ran Out of Everything." It explains how the evolution of "Just In Time" manufacturing and sales systems resulted in businesses minimizing inventories. The concept of J-I-T is fine when all is good. It reduces waste, and reduces the amount of space you need to store things, which also reduces costs. It's efficient. 

But when the entire system experiences a major hiccup -- like our unplanned year-long pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, these efficient systems can be disrupted in ways many businesses could never have imagined. That appears to be what we are now experiencing, at a time when we believed everything was opening up with clear sailing ahead.

Once again, Andy Grove has been proven right. His book Only the Paranoid Survive details all the forces that businesses must juggle and manage. He then asks, "What happens when one of these forces -- government regulations, consumer demand, raw materials, labor, financial impacts, legal matters, etc. -- hits us with an unexpected 10X tsunami?"  

For businesses that survive this will be remembered as the year of the wake up call. 

The weird thing is that politicians and think tanks will undoubtedly spend gobs of money and time piecing together a strategy designed to ensure that it never happens again. Alas, these things can never be so easily predicted. It will surely come in a manner that was unforeseen. Like Pearl Harbor. Like 9-11. Like the Housing Crisis. Like the Pandemic. It will be original. It will be different next time.

Something to think about. 

It's Electric

I have a pet peeve and it's this. I find it annoying how some people, with a brassy personality and a measure of high-powered PR, can get a whole batch of publicity and dollars for ideas that are so full of holes they can't possibly float. No, that isn't quite the wording. It annoys me when people get publicity for very tentative things way off in the pipe dream realm while very real solutions, albeit incremental, are within our grasp.

Here's an example. Last fall the September 2008 issue of Wired magazine featured a cover story called The Future of the Electric Car, subtitled One man's audacious plan to change the way the world drives. The feature story was about an Israeli fellow named Shai Agassi whose idea is essentially an all-inclusive system of battery powered cars, re-charge systems and infrastructure that integrates computers, cars and GPS. It's a total system.

Here are a few clues to how things would work in a Better Place world.
1. Key fob tells how charged the battery is...
2. Driver unplugs and drives off...
3. During commute car locates three open parking spots to plug into during work day...
4. The car and energy control center connect and communicate...
5. While on the road, if re-charge needed, car OS locates best place for battery swap site...

Evidently it's this last item which is a central piece of Agassi's brainchild, I think. He envisions all these buildings around the country which operate like our car washes, where you drive in at one end and the equipment swaps the batteries so you can hit the road again quickly, efficiently, re-juiced.

But to be honest, I just can't picture it. First off, people hate waiting in lines. When I was growing up in New Jersey you had to go through annual vehicle inspections and if you weren't there a half hour before it opened, you could be in line for more than an hour, a line which sometimes stretched a block or more. Can you imagine having to wait in line to re-charge or swap out your battery every couple hundred miles?

The infrastructure issue alone for this system would be a nightmare. Converting enough parking meters and parking slots in cities like New York to accommodate a gazillion electric cars in need of re-charging would not be cheap or fast to implement. But this is not, as I see it, the biggest hurdle.

When I was at the New York Auto Show last year I saw a whole range of ideas for dealing with this issue, from hybrids to electric transmissions to hydrogen cells and the like. Before we see a technology become truly dominant, won't we have to see buy-in across the board to establish the infrastructure to implement it? Right now we have gas stations everywhere. There are so many gas stations that I almost never have to wait in line to fill 'er up. When we start a ramp up to one of these alternative technologies, how long will it take to put this infrastructure in place? Or more importantly, which infrastructure? Who is going to pay that kind of money to set up a system that may not become the dominant system of the future?

Video movies are a good example. VHS and Beta went head to head. Beta was better, I've been told, but VHS won out. In the automobile power game, a car wash costs about a million dollars. It takes time to recoup that investment. How much will these electric battery swapping stations cost to build or buy and own? Who is going to spend a million dollars on a technology that has a high possibility of not becoming the adopted system for tomorrow? The total rollout can be hundreds of billions... with no certainty of success either in implementation or adoption.

Well, Shai Agassi, on the force of his personal charisma alone, appears to have garnered $300 million seed money for the company he's called Better Place. But will Better Place become the better place he aims it to be? Some are already suggesting that the bloom is off the rose.

My prediction is that this guy Shai will be just another Mary Tolan.

In 2003, the mag Business 2.0 produced a laudatory article by Ralph King about a woman exec from Accenture named Mary Tolan who was pushing the notion that the U.S. could wean itself from big oil by 2015 by switching to hydrogen cell power. The article boldly stated, “Her ideas could help catalyze needed change.” (Mary Tolan’s Modest Proposal, Business 2.0, June 2003.)

Six years later, and where is Mary Tolan? Yes, she is still a connected exec with Accenture, but a zealous advocate for hydrogen cell batteries? Do your own research and you’ll see an impressive 2003 campaign that is just another blip in the history of the automobile.

This is not to suggest that I am opposed to electric cars or efforts to move toward green. If we're serious about being greener, there are certainly things we can be doing now if we wished. I just think there are too many unanswered questions with regard to going electric, straight up. How long will it take to get the power grid up to a level where it can juice all these cars? And when the power grid goes down, is it a paid vacation day or are we simply stuck?

Well, enough of that. Tomorrow's another day.