Newsweek hunts for a new audience

It has become very, very clear that Newsweek is hunting up a younger audience. A couple of issues ago they came out with a new format. A bit lighter on content, another trend in print media these days, but more attractively laid out.

And in last week's issue, they had a guest editor. Their first that I can remember. Steven Colbert. The comedian/anchor.

Nothing says young and hip like snarky.

Happily, the Colbert bits were easy to ignore. Also, I'm not the audience they're trying to attract. I've been reading this news magazine since at least the 1980's, and haven't dropped it in this era of news aggregators. When it comes to news consumption, I'm about 10 years older than my age would suggest. I haven't watched network news in years, but I still get a fair amount of news from dead trees. I'm the audience they're trying to keep not the one they're trying to attract.

Personally, I find the weekly news-magazine convenient. I suffer from short-attention span when in front of a computer, so long articles don't get read. Put a magazine in my hand, and I'll read whole articles in a sitting. Part of this is conditioning, but it features in how I consume news. If I'm going for in-depth reportage, I'm far more likely to read it closer in dead-tree format.

I realize that some change needs to happen to keep these magazines afloat. I can live with the new format, with its slightly larger line-spacing and colorful article headers. Even the occasional 'guest editor' since they're easy to ignore. This is change.

High speed rail dreams

The Obama administration recently announced $8 billion for the development of High Speed Rail. The Federal Railroad Administration has some facts about that. High Speed Rail as a goal has been around for ages, and many people feel a sense of shame that the Japanese and French can have trains that go over 150MPH when we have exactly one train line, the Acela on the Northeast Corridor, that maxes out at that speed. So finally, the government is doing something about that!

Sort of. Last year former Amtrak CEO Alex Kummant presented before congress what it would take to improve speeds on the Northeast Corridor (NEC). The total cost to improve speeds on the only existing high-speed rail line we have was $7 billion. One of the biggest cost items was land acquisition needed to straighten out tracks in heavily populated areas.

Even so, $8bn will not bring bullet trains to Chicago. Or New York. This particular high speed rail program is designed to upgrade infrastructure first. This is needed because new infrastructure is needed if any kind of train is to travel over 79MPH.

The existing freight railroads have no interest in this particular infrastructure upgrade for two reasons. One, their traffic would never go faster than 79 MPH anyway, and two, their opinion is that these upgrades would not improve freight safety enough to warrant the expense. As passenger traffic is a very, very small part of their rail traffic the needs of passengers take a back seat. It is for this reason that public financing is the only way high-speed rail will come about.

Here is another thing. The first set of upgrades will allow speeds of 89 MPH. The next set will allow 110MPH. These are not bullet trains, merely fast ones.

One of the problems the freight railroads upon which nearly all passenger train traffic takes place outside of the NEC have, is that passenger train service already runs at a different speed. Freight traffic has a speed limit of 69 MPH, where passenger traffic has a max of 79 MPH. This may not sound like much, but this does have a significant effect on rail traffic management. Only one train can be on a given rail segment at a time, and each train has an exclusion zone ahead and behind it. When all trains travel at the same speeds it is much easier to pack the railroad full to capacity.

If you throw faster moving passenger trains into the mix, you now have trains that take up more rail than their much more profitable bretheren. Faster passenger trains mean fewer freight trains can be on a given piece of track, and that means less money being made hauling. BNSF makes far more money with a single coal train coming out of the Powder River basin than it does on a single Empire Builder train.

The host railroads still need to be convinced to let faster traffic on their rails. In Washington State, BNSF has said they'll allow faster Cascades service if WS-DOT will pay for the track upgrades and compensate for lost business. This may be the model that gets adopted nation-wide, if Congress doesn't pass a must-carry law.

True bullet trains require an order of magnitude more money. For true bullet trains you need a dedicated right-of-way for them and it can not be shared with freights. Second, you need long stretches of straight track for top speeds to be accomplished. The Amtrak Acela spends most of its time well below it's top speed due to twisty tracks, and it was fixing this that Kummant quoted $7bn for. Third, there have to be no at-grade road crossings so the rails will have to go over or under things like interstates or county highways. Bullet trains will require obtaining 400 mile long, 100yd wide mostly straight brand new right-of-way with no at-grade crossings, something that isn't cheap even in the American West.

'But France and Japan did it!' goes the cry. Both the French and Japanese systems were under developement at a time when US passenger traffic was plummeting, the 1960's. The 1970's and 1980's saw a lot of existing US track abandoned or moved to single-track, which greatly reduced the overall flexibility of our rail system. Japan and France were both expanding theirs at this time. Furthermore, Japan did it by throwing a lot of money at it for decades, and flying the track over everything or running it in tunnels.

Both the Japanese and French systems were put in place largely through government finance over a period of decades. Congruently, the US is probably 15-20 years away from another sizeable high-speed (150MPH) line outside of the NEC, and that's if we keep funding levels high enough to get there. Some times, high speed rail looks to cost as much as putting a man on Mars.

As the Obama proposal states, this is merely a down-payment on high speed rail. We are years away from seeing bullet trains. We may see 89MPH service inside of five years some places, but that's probably the soonest we'll see anything.