Chinese High-Speed Trains Demonstrate Power of New Paradigms in Transportation

Several recent articles present strong support for the concepts I have been describing of using new modes of transportation to improve efficiency, productivity and pollution. As the articles note, the situation in the US is different from China, but that’s why my proposals are different, moving on to the next generation of transportation technology beyond the “conventional” high-speed trains and subways.

Improved transit speed provides access to a greater labor pool, larger markets, and enhances competition.

The World Bank report describes why improving transportation speed improves productivity, with impacts equal to the conventional benefits of reduced travel time, etc. The report also describes differences between developed and developing economies, with a focus on China’s new High-Speed Rail installations.

The World Finance article provides a history and compares the size of high-speed rail networks in major countries.

The NY Times article expands on the World Bank description of specifics on the China high-speed rail impacts.

I will include sample results from each article, but they are worth reading in their entirety.

High-Speed Rail, Regional Economics, and Urban Development in China, Andrew Salzberg, Richard Bullock, Ying Jin, and Wanli Fang, World Bank Office, Beijing, China Transport Topics No.08, January 2013, 74736:

“Traditional economic evaluations of major transport infrastructure investments focus on the direct costs and benefits arising from travel, including user time savings, operator cost savings, and reductions in externalities including air pollution, noise, and accidents. There is an emerging consensus that major transport investments may have significant impacts that are not well captured by this type of conventional cost-benefit analysis. In China, the World Bank Transport team has supported both econometric studies and on-the-ground surveys that begin to identify and quantify these impacts in the context of China’s emerging high speed rail (HSR) program. Based on this and other research, the Bank team has begun to pilot a methodology to evaluate wider economic development benefits for several HSR projects, and has found them to be significant - of the same order as, but additional to the direct transport benefits that are traditionally measured. Crucially, these benefits of larger and better connected markets accrue to businesses and individuals even when they themselves do not travel. This paper highlights this research and methodology and the policy implications related to maximizing these benefits in practice.

”All else being equal, a new business located within daily reach of such hubs will be more accessible to a larger pool of labor and other businesses, raising productivity. [UK Department for Transport (2006). Transport, Wider Economic Benefits, and Impacts on GDP.] This link is an important element of what are broadly referred to as agglomeration economies, the benefits that accrue to firms and individuals from the clustering of economic activity.

– This is significant support for my proposals, both for transportation and for the Sustainable Communities that will grow with them.

“The concept and measurement of economic mass is relatively straightforward; where research has progressed in recent years has been in identifying the relationship between the economic mass of a region and its overall level of productivity. This link is based on four propositions:

a)    economic mass rises with transport improvements;

b)  the average output of employees, and hence their wages, varies directly with economic mass, even after controlling for other variables;

c)    there are positive externalities from transport improvements which increase output for some firms independently of their use of the transport network; and

d)    this increase in output is not included in the standard evaluation of transport projects.

“A major UK study that attempted to quantify this relationship estimated that, other things being equal, a doubling of economic mass would give rise to an increase in per worker productivity of 3.5% [ Rice, P.G., A.J. Venables and E Patacchini (2006). Spatial determinants of productivity: Analysis for the regions of Great Britain.  Regional Science and Urban Economics, Vol 36, pp727-752.]. Crucially, these productivity benefits accrue to businesses and individuals even where they do not themselves travel.

– These results are for developed economies, so this study examined the results for China, a developing economy.

“Overall, the best estimates of the elasticity of productivity with respect to economic mass are over double the economy-wide results obtained in comparable studies in developed countries. The best models in our estimation so far imply that doubling economic mass would give rise to an increase of per worker productivity of 9-15%. This is higher than the consensus view from a comprehensive review of such evidence in the developed economies that such a doubling would increase productivity by an amount that ranges from 5-8% [Rosenthal, S and WC Strange (2004).  Evidence on the nature and sources of agglomeration.  Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol 85, pp377-393.].

“Benefits were calculated for the 30-year period following project completion. Direct benefits including time savings for passengers and freight, reductions in operator cost, and generated traffic, yielded net present benefits of approximately 50 billion RMB in 2009 RMB. Using the elasticity of productivity with respect to economic mass adopted above, the agglomeration benefits were estimated at 49 billion RMB (both weighed against the 2009 present value of project costs of 47.9 billion RMB, all discounted at 12%). In our analysis, then, agglomeration benefits were found on the order of (and in this case only slightly lower than) traditional project benefits."

A World Finance article The Need for high-speed rail, July 3, 2013 gives a wider, and historical  context.

 The NY Times article today, High-Speed Trains Transform China, expands on the World Bank analysis for China.

“Just five years after China’s high-speed rail system opened, it is carrying nearly twice as many passengers each month as the country’s domestic airline industry. With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States.

“China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering.

“For example, Chinese workers are now more productive. Chinese cities connected to the high-speed rail network, as more than 100 are already, are likely to experience broad growth in worker productivity. The productivity gains occur when companies find themselves within a couple of hours’ train ride of tens of millions of potential customers, employees and rivals.

“Productivity gains to the economy appear to be of the same order as the combined economic gains from the usual arguments given for high-speed trains, including time savings for travelers, reduced noise, less air pollution and fuel savings, the World Bank consultants calculated.

“Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young, highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and Changsha. Businesses are also customizing their products more through frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move up the ladder toward higher value-added products.

“'More frequent access to my client base has allowed me to more quickly pick up on fashion changes in color and style. My orders have increased by 50 percent,...'”

“Statistics suggest that China's high-speed trains have actually proved to be one of the world's safest transportation systems so far.

“Nearly every train from Changsha station, leaving minutes apart for cities across China, is sold out, and a big expansion is already planned.

“China relocated large numbers of families whose homes lay in the path of the tracks and quickly built new residential and commercial districts around high-speed train stations.

“The new districts, typically located in inner suburbs, not downtown areas, have rapidly attracted large numbers of residents, partly because of China’s rapid urbanization. Enough farm families become city dwellers each year to fill New York City.

 “China’s success may not be easily reproduced in the West, and not just because few places can match China’s pace of urbanization. China has four times the population of the United States, and the great bulk of its people live in the eastern third of the country, an area similar in size to the United States east of the Mississippi.

“'Except for Boston to Washington, D.C., we don’t have the corridors of high population density that China has,'" said C. William Ibbs, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

“China’s high-speed rail program has been married to the world’s most ambitious subway construction program, as more than half the world’s large tunneling machines chisel away underneath big Chinese cities. That has meant easy access to high-speed rail stations for huge numbers of people.

Continuous Convoys & En Route Sequencing

One of the major tradeoffs in high speed mass transportation systems is the speed of an express vs. the convenience of the local with many intermediate stops.

My innovation of Continuous Convoys & En Route Sequencing give us both: each person receives non-stop service from where they get on to where they get off.

The basic idea of a Continuous Convoy is simple: a Convoy goes racing along at full speed. As the Convoy approaches a station, the passengers and items boarding at that station are already aboard a Convoy Vehicle, which accelerates and let’s the Convoy catch up, so it is at the front of the Convoy. As the Convoy approaches a station, the Convoy Vehicle at the end of the Convoy has all the passengers and items for the next station, detaches prior to the next station, decelerates and stops at the station. Passengers and items leave the vehicle, and the cycle continues.

The basic idea of En Route Sorting is also simple: after your Convoy Vehicle attaches at the front of the Convoy, you need to move to the Convoy Vehicle which will stop at your destination station.

Things get a little complicated if the Convoy Vehicle that will stop at your station hasn’t joined the Convoy yet; then you will need to move while the Convoy is in motion to get to your desired Convoy Vehicle.

This is where it helps if you are already riding an Autonomous Vehicle which is riding Nested in the Convoy Vehicle, because then your Autonomous Vehicle can take care of moving you to the proper Convoy Vehicle without your having to move or even think about it. Thing get even better if you need to change from one Convoy to another, because your Autonomous Vehicle an take care of that transfer for you too.

Sorting things en route is an old idea, for example, from 1864-1977, the Railway Mail Service used clerks on board moving trains to sort and process mail, speeding delivery.

You get the full benefit of the speed of the Convoy, with only one acceleration and deceleration at the beginning and end. This also saves a lot of energy, because only the Convoy Vehicle with the people and items destined for a station stops there. Because the kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity (E=Mv²), this energy becomes important the higher the speed of the Convoy. Another benefit is that the energy regained with regenerative braking from the Convoy Vehicle as it approaches a station can be transmitted through the electric feed to power the acceleration of the nearby Convoy Vehicle just leaving the station.

This approach can be used with existing trains if the cars are individually powered. So the ideas can have immediate benefits. For existing trains, Intercity rail travel is 27% more efficient than Commuter rail travel (2,271 vs. 2,897 BTU/passenger mile, http://cta.ornl.gov/data/chapter2.shtml table 2.12).

Note the “station” does not have to be stationary – it might be another Autonomous Vehicle connecting to another route or to another mode of transportation (including faster or slower). This allows moving from one Convoy to another without stopping, and thus presages a network of Autonomous-Ways for Autonomous Vehicles, as described under A-Ways.

For a detailed example, including graphics of passengers and Convoy Vehicles, see Continuous Convoys and EnRoute Sequencing, How Many Vehicles in a Continuous Convoy?. Another analysis is in Continuous Convoys for NYC Subways.

The example shown there is for travel by the existing railroad from Long Branch, NJ to New York City. 

Here are some further results of the time savings possible with Continuous Convoys and En Route Sequencing for that route. The calculations show it is faster to drive than to take even the Express  train (10 stops). But even at only 60 mph, the Convoy trip is 13 minutes faster that a car (and that’s assuming no traffic congestion, lots of luck), and 25 minutes faster than the Express.

Ironically, making the train go faster doesn’t help that much because it spends so much time loading, unloading, accelerating and decelerating that it doesn’t gain much advantage from the theoretical maximum speed. The Continuous Convoy does take full advantage of the speed, so an Acela-like speed of 120 mph gets your there in 30 minutes, and with a bullet train speed of 240 mph, you are there in 16 minutes, vs. 55 minutes for the Express.

Thus I believe Continuous Convoys and En Route Sequencing can have near-term results in getting people out of inefficient cars and into mass transit.

The train trip distance from Long Branch to New York City is 55 miles, with 10 or 18 intermediate stops for the Train, and no intermediate stops for the Convoy. Driving time is per Google Maps, and traffic conditions will add to the time.  I’ve included different maximum speeds for the Train and the Convoy: note in the 240 mph case, the Train can only accelerate to 200 mph before it has to slow for the next stop, assuming the stops are evenly spaced; including all 18 intermediate stops, the Train reaches a maximum speed of only 155 mph. For those interested in the assumptions:  0.1 g acceleration and 120 second stop at each station to load and unload.

Another analysis is in Continuous Convoys for NYC Subways.

I spent many days trying to think of how to use existing tracks and stations, that is the existing infrastructure, to achieve a much faster commute. Finally I came up with Continuous Convoys and En Route Sequencing.

Later I’ll present additional ideas to deal with the realities of the Long Branch-to-NYC train: the tracks aren’t up to the higher speeds, there are a lot of at-grade crossings, and other trains use the same tracks.

But you can apply the same ideas to Amtrak trains to achieve similar gains. For example, I wanted to take the Acela from Metro Park, NJ station to the New Carrolton, MD station, but none made both stops. Of course we need new vehicles: each Vehicle needs to operate autonomously, with its own power, so we still have some work to do. More on that later.

Next we'll talk about Autonomous-Ways or A-Ways.