^A rather odd example. The usual model for value capture is for the developer to pay the transit agency for the right to build on top or next door.

With Block 37, the city first closed taxpaying businesses, then demolished taxpaying buildings, then de-landmarked a building so it could be torn down, then paid a developer to take the land, then waited 20 years, then paid the developer some more, then paid a new developer a bunch more, then agreed to pay for a new subway station, then agreed to pay some more for the subway station, then decided they didn't have enough to finish the subway station.

I'm not sure we can afford many more successes like that.

Yeah, but there'll be a DQ in the basement! Or something!

Yeah, B37 went through my mind, I was wondering if there is any successful implementation of this kind of plan in this country.

I hope it is successful in the long run and leads to more development. We'll see.

In my thinking, there is going to have to be this kind of partnership functioning well to get 2016. I hope the fiasco hasn't hurt our chances too much.

^WMATA had some modest successes with joint development, I think, in the 80s. That highrise with the Safeway in Bethesda comes to mind.

You are hitting on the problem and the root of my argument against this system. Having an Amtrak operated 110MPH system with average speeds probably only around 75-80MPH or less is only going to tarnish the "high speed" brand in the US. The shared freight trackage through may small towns will restrict speeds considerably despite the theoretical speed of the line.

European high speed rail, for someone who asked, runs at around 185-220MPH

I think there is a big difference between value capture and selling air rights. True value capture would involve incremental site value taxation to utilize the increases in land value created by the public investment - not private investment - in the transit system to fund transit.

Thought Experiment: What would the property values in the greater Loop be without the public transport infrastructure?

Just to point out - you're not making an apples-to-apples comparison. You are quoting the US HSR's average speed while quoting the European top speed. European high speed rail lines average 130-150mph. Is it still a big difference? Yes. Is it as big of a difference as your statistics make it out to be? Not nearly.

Mainland Europe started in earnest to rebuild their conventional rail lines in the 60s and 70s; it was not until the 80s that they got around to building true high speed rail. They had to walk before they could run. So must we. Besides, by and large, people in the US will probably know "This train's pretty fast, but it's not as fast as those t-g-whatchamacallit in France" so they'll understand that there are further improvements that could be made.

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune....ff--filli.html

Chicago as a high-speed rail hub: Has the time for this idea finally come?

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune....6de428a4-320wi

The conventional wisdom forming about Barack Obama's infrastructure investment is that it will take care of small stuff--filling potholes and fixing bridge decks, not building dams and bridges like those sponsored in the great public works of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

That view may well be true. But in the final round of negotiations over the stimulus bill, the White House put its political muscle behind a big increase in funding for mass transit--$8 billion, far beyond what either the House or Senate were advocating in their version of the stimulus plan. The idea, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told reporters, was to create an infrastructure program of national impact.

Now cities and regions around the country are vying for those rail funds. Among them: Groups pushing for a Midwest, high-speed rail network centered in Chicago, an idea that the Chicago Architectural Club explored last year with an ideas competition for a station for such a network (above left). It would be located just east of Union Station. Despite the practical hurdles in its way, like the two buildings now on the site, perhaps this is an idea whose time has finally come.

BVic, beating me to the punch. :cool:

Not through the towns. While new lines have been built to bypass small towns, they have to use existing approaches through cities where they stop. There's a limit on how much those lines can be improved, and limits on how fast trains can go without endangering people standing on adjacent platforms or working in the marshaling yards.

That all may be, but having ridden high speed trains in Europe I can tell you they are nothing like the "Amtrak experience". Their average speeds are vastly higher than any envisioned officially for the Midwest system, enabling game changing journey time reductions. And in many cases their accuracy is phenomenal. Spain is getting near-Japanese levels of reliability on their service.

Mark my words, the plans for 110MPH service, if implemented and through Amtrak to boot, will destroy the brand of high speed rail in the US. If you've got to walk before you can run, at least call it walking not running.

I agree with this. It would be fine and dandy to have 110mph trains in the US, but it shouldn’t cost us half a trillion dollars to do that, and would quite frankly be a waste of time. Getting people to consider rail instead of driving or flying between cities will take a much higher speed…as 12-16 hour trips between New York and LA. As it stands, the people that take Amtrak are the people that need to take Amtrak. Ridership won’t improve drastically if we’re still looking at multi-day trips across the US.

And Chicago would be an ideal location for a NATIONAL HSR hub. New York to LA logistally makes sense to stop here.

Hilkevitch asks a very good question: is the use of "doomsday" hyperbolic when talking about transit woes?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...,6612657.story

I may not always agree with him, but I think he's a heck of a reporter/columnist.

Maybe if they just called it "system shutdown" the point would come across in a more sober way.

To anyone who hasn't already, it's worth checking out Carole Brown's testimony to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last month regarding the stimulus packagae. Links with video at http://ctachair.blogspot.com/ . She basically said the CTA needs $6 billion to get to a state of good repair and would be ready to spend $500 million, like, tomorrow. (Also testifying was Gov. Doyle of Wisconsin, who gave lots of information about rail upgrades on the Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison line.) The CTA didn't get anywhere near what they said they could have used in the stimulus package, and that was before they found the big hole in revenues. Now, in addition to the money they and other transit agencies could be spending immediately if they got aid, there's the giant problem of revenue shortfalls among transit agencies throughout the country. So should we expect to see another spending package soon with more aid to local government agencies?

You're missing the point about rail travel. Who has ever talked about riding trains across the US?

The train as a practical means of transportation to travel between New York and LA met its end the day the first Boeing 707 rolled off the assembly line. Even in Europe, there are no HSR lines that can carry you 3,000 miles period, let alone without changing trains a bunch of times. Nor are there any plans to build one.

Therefore, I posit that while Chicago makes wonderful sense as a regional HSR hub for the upper midwest, there is no point of having a national HSR hub at all. If HSR ever extends west from Chicago across the plains, it will be well after both you and I are dead and gone - and even then, it will be for regional travel, rather than cross-country jaunts. HSR really doesn't make sense for travel over 1000 miles; the time difference between flying at 550mph and riding a train at 200mph is just too great.

110mph trains are absolutely NOT a waste of time or money. Yes, some might be jealous that France has trains that are faster and better than ours, but go ahead - just try gather up the $20 or $30 billion that would be needed for a brand new 200mph right-of-way from Chicago to Minneapolis. Might happen some day, but we're not there yet. Sure, we could probably scrape up enough money to get one or two such lines built nationwide in the next 20 years, but in order to start building a "train culture" in the US there needs to be a NETWORK - not a couple high speed lines in special corridors and once-a-day service throughout the rest of the country.

Next, much of the money that is being spent to do this is focused on speeding up train lines within urban areas. News flash, that's as fast as trains will ever go on approach to cities. The French slow down their trains as they approach major cities because the impact and expense of having them go faster aren't worth it. These improvements made on approach to cities could be leveraged further in the future by building new dedicated HSR lines between them.

Anyway, I'm fine with not calling it High Speed Rail; I'd rather call the program "Rapid Rail" or even just "Improvements to intercity rail", but then again I don't see why calling it High Speed Rail will cause the sky to fall. As long as it's reliable, frequent, and comfortable, 110mph will be plenty fast enough for people to love it. Once we have people hooked on rail travel, THEN those $20 billion investments will be an easier sell.

I get your point about west coast to east coast connections. But I'm really struggling to find the significance of 110mph regional rail. Going from Chicago to Milwaukee at 110mph is great…it’s just unfortunate that I can easily average 2/3 that speed in my car, and God forbid I need to get around in Milwaukee.... The point here is that you want to be able to change people’s habits. And 110mph between regional cities isn’t going to do that.

step one isn't getting chicago people to milwaukee, its getting milwaukee people to chicago fast and cheap, which 110mph does very cost-effectively. that's how you change mindsets and development patterns and when milwaukee builds a nice little BRT/Streetcar system, that reverse commute suddenly becomes much easier and enjoyable and you can have a nice little symbiosis culturally and economically where suddenly higher speed rail between the two cities makes even more economic sense. let's start with step one.

There's quite a bit of non-stop sprawl between Chicago and Milwaukee. In France, they have the advantage that once you leave the city, it's rural, and there's NOTHING there: nobody's back yard to run through, no subdivisions to avoid, no houses to take by eminent domain. The curse of suburban spral comes to bite us yet again.

Besides, in that corridor, the difference between 110mph and 220mph trains - given that the approach to Chicago and the approach to Milwaukee would be limited to 110 or 125 anyway - would be perhaps 20 minutes. That's not enough difference to justify billions of dollars. Nor is it enough to make folks like you from Chicago who need to get all around Milwaukee and its suburbs take the train instead of drive. Besides, you might not really even be the initial target for this corridor. Travelers from Milwaukee to Chicago have plenty of ways to get around once they roll in to Union Station, but again, 90 miles isn't really the sweet spot for true HSR, so 220mph and 20 minutes won't make a big difference to them at all. It would be an incremental improvement - about as big of an increment as 110mph trains will make now - and is that worth billions?

Now, if you're talking about going to Madison or Minneapolis, then the difference between 110mph and 220mph starts to grow, and that corridor is more rural and thus probably less expensive to build to boot. But the money's not there for it; not yet, anyway. Think incrementally: learn to walk before you run. That's the way to achieve REAL progress.

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-b...gobusiness.com

Chicago's high-speed rail dream is arriving
Posted by Greg H. at 2/25/2009 11:42 AM CST

All aboard!

After a decade of quiet tinkering around the margins, the dream of making Chicago the center of a high-speed rail network finally is taking real shape, thanks to a massive infusion of cash tucked into President Barack Obama's stimulus bill.

Big clout -- by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Sen. Dick Durbin, D, and other well-placed Illinoisans -- likely guarantees that the Chicago-based network soon will get as much as $2 billion for new track, rolling stock, high-tech signals, bridges and other fixes.

If so, in as soon as three or four years, reliable train travel to St. Louis in under four hours, and Madison, Wis., in under three, will be on line, with other routes to the Twin Cities and Detroit on the way.

"The stars have started to align," says Tom Carper, the one-time mayor of Downstate Macomb who just took over as chairman of the Amtrak Board of Directors. "We'll really be able to show what we can do."

Central to what's about to happen here is the $8 billion for high-speed rail included in Mr. Obama's stimulus bill -- $6 billion literally at the last moment, when most other programs were being cut to bring the overall stimulus tab to under $800 billion.

When I first wrote about this three weeks ago, the buzz was that the money had been inserted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and that the bulk of the $$$ would go to a proposed magnetic levitation (mag lev) from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.

But folks like Howard Learner, a long-time high-speed-rail fan who heads Chicago's Environmental Law and Policy Center, told me otherwise. And in an under-noticed interview last week with Politico, a web-based political site, Mr. Emanuel claimed paternity of the money.

"I put it in there for the president," Mr. Emanuel said. "The president wanted to have a signature issue in the bill, his commitment for the future."

Chicago still will have to compete for funding, not only with Nevada but Florida, the Northeast Amtrak corridor and other areas.

But with a Chicagoan in the White House, his chief of staff from the same town, and the Amtrak chairman, number two Senate Democrat (Durbin) and U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood all from Illinois, you can bet your bippy this region will get its share. Earmarks or not, all those local folk aren't going to let Mr. Reid run off with the cookie jar.

Mr. Learner is hopeful of getting $2 billion to $2.5 billion of that money. Chicago also will get a share of $1.3 billion for capital improvements that will go directly to Amtrak -- $30 million tentatively is slated for a renovated Chicago maintenance facility that will renovate and repair oft-broken cars and engines -- and Mr. Emanuel said the president will ask for an additional $1 billion in each of the next five years.

So what actually is coming?

According to George Weber, who heads the railroad unit of the Illinois Department of Transportation, 4-hour service to St. Louis and 2:45 service to Springfield can be established for a cost of $300 million to $500 million. The higher figure reflects the cost of bridges over freight line on Chicago's Southwest Side that often delay Amtrak service.

The bridges, known as flyovers, wouldn't change schedules much but would make those schedules much more reliable.

While most work on the St. Louis line can be done fairly quickly, thanks to improvements already made in recent years, it could take some years to design, win environmental approval for, and build the flyovers, Mr. Weber says.

The next best bet, according to Mr. Weber and others, is the Madison line, which eventually could be extended to Minneapolis/St. Paul. From Chicago, trains would travel the same route as existing 87-minute service to downtown Milwaukee, then travel at 110 miles per hour west to Madison on tracks Wisconsin wants to upgrade.

To the east, Amtrak already owns and has begun work upgrading track in Michigan that ends up in Detroit. But officials in Indiana have not made a priority of upgrading tracks on their portion of the proposed Chicago/Detroit link, at least so far.

To those who might question whether this all is boon or boondoggle, Mr. Weber notes that ridership has soared on the Chicago/St. Louis line the last few years "despite mediocre equipment and performance." Ridership is projected to more than double again, to 1.2 million, with new equipment and faster service the stimulus money should provide, he says.

Now, we're not exactly talking bullet trains here. At best, the service envisioned under the stimulus bill will fund trains travelling at no more than 110 miles per hour.

But local train fans will take that, at least as a first step. And at a time when getting out of O'Hare seems to take at least two hours a trip, any step is helpful.

Bigger plans, for true high-speed, not higher-speed rail, could come later, Mr. Learner says. "The federal funding is a real breakthrough."

Damn, I"m so glad McCain wasn't elected..