NEC Future: HSR "High Line", FRA, Amtrak Infrastructure Plan

In the "State and Local Government" course I recently took, we talked a fair bit about E.D. (in no small part because we were across the water from the property seized by New London CT that led to the SCOTUS case Kelo v. City of New London); of course, the kinds of E.D. used in said case are largely irrelevant to takings for railway use, which is basically one of the poster childs for what E.D. is for, but I digress.

Anyways, a couple things to note here:

• The requirements of eminent domain change from state to state. (That's the reason I mention the above anecdote; the Kelo decision reaffirmed that it's the state's job to legislate what is and isn't okay usage of eminent domain.) The California HSR project mentioned in the above post has this to its advantage, only dealing with one state's laws; it's a less thorny situation than dealing with 3 to 4 different rulebooks like is going to happen with the NEC northeast of NYC.
• Point two is that E.D. is the option of last resort. Governments only use it if they can't get a property owner to sell willingly. Sometimes, the offers before E.D. are a bit better than what the Fair Market Value is otherwise, as using E.D. isn't a favorable option for any party involved.
• And finally, yes, E.D. is based off of "just compensation" as per the Fifth Amendment; the exact definition of this in practice is dependent on what state you are in.

But at the end of the day, in Westchester and Fairfield counties, it doesn't matter how the property is bought or what standard of "just compensation" you use... it's just going to be really expensive. That expense just varies in degrees.

Since I was curious myself, I decided to do some research on it for different states; but since it's rather late that I'm writing this post, I found a pretty comprehensive breakdown of just compensation in Connecticut. There were a few broadly applicable things: universally, "In most cases, condemnees do not contest the taking of their property. Rather, they are concerned with achieving the most value for the property taken". Generally (at least CT and NY), "Irrespective of the appraiser’s testimony and opinion, it is, ultimately, the court’s function to determine value and just compensation".

For CT, this means “fair equivalent in money for the property taken from the condemnee as nearly as its nature will permit”. Legal precedence (in CT) further means "the fair measure of damages to the condemnee is the value in its hands at the time of the taking and not the value to the condemnor", and "The court has the right, as of the trier of fact, to ignore a method advocated by all of the appraisers. In other words, the court may ignore the testimony of any or all of the appraisers, evaluate the evidence and come to a conclusion of its own".

There's a significant amount more on that page than just that, but that's the general jist without getting really deeply into it. Maybe I'll follow up this post later with things from other relevant states, but that's generally the case in bordering states. Plus, CT is the epicenter of anything we're talking about, so CT's is the most relevent. (It's also about 1:15 AM now, so hell if I know what I'll actually do later!)

To at least point at, if not actually name, the elephant in the room, eminent domain is, to a fair extent, a tool for the government to take the property of the poor and the powerless. The rich and powerful, as noted, have the resources to fight any attempted taking in the courts, but they generally avoid such unpleasantness by exerting their influence to get the government to decide to take someone else's property instead. Follow the path of poorer neighborhoods and communities, and you'll find where a new ROW could be built (although the effected communities may be more willing to fight back than would have been the case a few years ago).

Station Aficionado wrote:To at least point at, if not actually name, the elephant in the room, eminent domain is, to a fair extent, a tool for the government to take the property of the poor and the powerless. The rich and powerful, as noted, have the resources to fight any attempted taking in the courts, but they generally avoid such unpleasantness by exerting their influence to get the government to decide to take someone else's property instead. Follow the path of poorer neighborhoods and communities, and you'll find where a new ROW could be built (although the effected communities may be more willing to fight back than would have been the case a few years ago).

It's an unfortunate side-effect of the "just compensation" thing; even when the planners don't actively want to relocate poorer-off citizens for ill purposes, the process still has a habit of choosing these areas because of capital constraints on projects.

One needs only to research the construction of our interstate highway system to see how the process of eminant domain tends to target poorer and less politically powerful communities.

At least this is an example of the original intent of the right of eminant domain, to be able to assemble rights of way for a project in the public's interests without individual landowners being able to hijack the process. Where things really get bad is when towns seize homes in order to build bigger homes for richer people as the higher tax revenue of a house for a rich person represents the best interests of the town.

Except that building an interstate would count as a project that would be in "the public's interest" as it can be used by anyone as long as they are licensed to drive an automobile or knows someone who can drive.


The major difference in using eminent domain to build an interstate vs. a railway is simple. Interstates require A LOT more width, create far more noise, and are by far more physically intrusive than railways. Take a look at I-95 through Fairfield County when it runs parallel to the New Haven Line. You could easily fit an 8-track mainline in the space occupied by the Turnpike while at the same time providing more capacity than the thruway ever could without the non-stop roaring sound of cars, trucks, buses, etc. Not to mention no need to build any interchanges/exits that would require taking even more land.


And as for using lower income neighborhoods to build new infrastructure... look, one way or another if you build a 6-8 lane highway anywhere it'll do more harm than good whether it's in a rich neighborhood, poor neighborhood, wetland, etc. And if the value of the property purchased is worth a certain amount of $$$ the landowners, tenants, etc. should be fairly and justly compensated for the property and for the cost of relocating. Nothing less, nothing more. Heck I'm sure any number of folks living in certain neighborhoods would gladly take the money/relocation offer by the gov't and move out in a heartbeat. And if it's a new railway or rapid transit line it could only potentially benefit those neighborhoods in the long run. But a limited access highway? Not a chance. Pretty sure property values have never risen due to easy access to an interstate..

The rich and powerful, as noted, have the resources to fight any attempted taking in the courts, but they generally avoid such unpleasantness by exerting their influence to get the government to decide to take someone else's property instead.

That didn't work for Donald Trump. I think what everyone needs to understand is just how great an undertaking this is. The country needs a NEW high-speed rail corridor that will stand for possibly hundreds of years. This is not a military base that can be DE-commissioned. This is not to build a corporate office super-plex. This is the birth of practical and sustainable American Infrastructure.

You still haven't identified which of Donald Trump's properties were taken by eminent domain. The only reference I know you made was to the Empire connection and that was all from 35th street to NYP and none of that is Trump property.

Just for reference, the official name for the Interstate Highway System is:

Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways

In addition to commercial and private travel, the highway was built for
Defense purposes. I have not done any research, but it seems like that
Interstate Highway System is the greatest public works project of all time
in the USA. Thank You Ike..

Has any consideration been given to using the Interstate Highway corridors for High Speed Rail? I know that often transit lines have been built into freeway corridors. French HSR lines are built with relatively heavy grades since there is no freight traffic on them. While I don't know what the curves and grades are on the interstates across Conn. and Mass, I would think a lot of these highway corridors could at least be partly used, with tracks on elevated structures in some tighter spots. This would bring down the cost of right of way acquisition down substantially.

Greg Moore wrote: You still haven't identified which of Donald Trump's properties were taken by eminent domain. The only reference I know you made was to the Empire connection and that was all from 35th street to NYP and none of that is Trump property.

Live a little.Try Google.

rhallock wrote:Has any consideration been given to using the Interstate Highway corridors for High Speed Rail? I know that often transit lines have been built into freeway corridors. French HSR lines are built with relatively heavy grades since there is no freight traffic on them. While I don't know what the curves and grades are on the interstates across Conn. and Mass, I would think a lot of these highway corridors could at least be partly used, with tracks on elevated structures in some tighter spots. This would bring down the cost of right of way acquisition down substantially.

No. It actually does the exact opposite because of all the overpasses/underpasses and ramps that chop up unblocked paths for easily bolting on a rail ROW. That's a great myth that gets trotted out as a cost-saver, and there's always the same 2 or 3 examples with pretty pictures trotted out of rapid transit or realigned RR lines that were built with on an expressway carriageway. Elon Musk was bleating on about I-5 when he was doing his media blitz for Hyperloop. It doesn't hold water because when you actually start analyzing highway corridors there's so few that fit the bill for long enough length to be usable.

-- Median access is chopped up by overpass footings, residual rock formations when the highway had to be busted through a cut, artificial wetlands built to counterbalance wetlands taken for the highway, and wildly non-uniform width that may pinch. Drive a candidate corridor and count how many mileposts you can cover where the median truly is "uniform". Then count up the irregularities that would require major construction and realignment to square for a uniform-width rail ROW. Starts to make some sense why it's slim pickings for routes longer than a segment of somebody's light rail line.

-- The higher the density, the narrower the median. Until you hit the point where most highways inside big city limits are jersey-barriered, or maxed out to a viaduct or sunken cut.

-- Unless land is abundantly available, highways are rarely constructed with 1960's-spec wide center medians anymore. Eminent domain and EIS'ing are just too pricey, so state DOT's--especially on the Coasts--tend to build new or wholly cleanroom-rebuilt highways as narrow as possible. i.e. Start with the jersey barrier and zero median, leave side room for expansion. Not the other way around.

-- Ramps. A side-mounted rail ROW either has to have extremely expensive sets of overpasses/underpasses at every exit ramp, or pull away from the highway once every mile-and-a-half to sidestep the next set of interchange ramps. Not conducive to land availability, since there's usually a built-up pocket of land immediately abutting your average exit ramp. Not conducive to rail geometry because you're forever S-curving. Not conducive to cost, because those exit ramps get very complicated if every single one has to overpass/underpass a rail line. And not easy to plot for miles around on older highways because interchanges are rarely consistent-design one exit to another (cycled rebuilds, add-an-exit, compromises over land acquisition). And have been built/renewed in all different eras. You could have an overbuilt cloverleaf at one, a compact up/down diamond with traffic light pair at another, staggered ramps, trumpets...and some stuff that defies explanation (craptacular Connecticut left exits!). Each and every one requires its own design to get a rail line around, so design costs alone are going to be a lot higher than on a solo ROW.

-- Older, congested highways...particularly the ones that are best candidates for a rail augmentation...often have no expansion room left to give. The median's been eaten by add-a-lane projects, HOV's, and all the geometry improvements needed to get 1950's monstrosities up to code for 21st century Interstate standards. Look at the Jersey Turnpike now. Or Route 128 around Boston. Or any number of California freeways. There used to be median and/or side space. It's long been cannibalized for more lane capacity, new exits, frontage roads, HOV's. Hell...in some places even bike paths.

-- The geometry on 1950's East Coast (and some West Coast) interstates is terrible in a lot of places and not at all conducive to well-performing passenger rail. Sharp curves, excessive grades, low-clearance overpasses, throw-@#$%-at-the-walls interchange design. A lot of them are jury-rigged old turnpikes with all sorts of substandard grandfatherings in the Interstate regs. And they've been tarted up all they can be tarted up within the confines of their ROW's; some of the substandard grandfatherings will never be able to be stamped out in entirety. That is what the East Coast has to work with. There's almost no expressway NEC FUTURE can evaluate that isn't some surgery-scarred 1950's turnpike full of substandard anachronisms. Even the best rebuilds can't stamp them all out. They will find this out bitterly when the field surveyors for that CT Shoreline relocation 2 miles inland take one look at the terrain along I-95.

-- Where rail w/highway exists, it is far more often because the highway was built bolted to the rail line and not the other way around. The rail lines came first at carving out the idealized paths. Then the Interstates gravitated to rail mainlines because they already carved out the geometry required for high-speed roadways and developed the demand along those corridors. Vast majority of those co-mingles are already spoken for. The existence of those shared-use corridors in this country and others isn't a leading indicator of an abundant natural resource. It's an indication that all the good shared-use ROW's have been claimed and there just aren't any more left spanning cities. We can prove this because the highway network is as built out as it's going to get, and any well-designed rail ROW's left with generous side space that link two high-demand destinations would've had a highway built next to it long ago. There's a finite pool of such paths, and it's pretty tapped-out. The rail lines stampeded to them in the 19th century, the highways in the 20th century. Very few new interstate highways are under consideration now aside from re-badged upgrade jobs of existing state roads with just a couple small connecting segments of new construction (see the NY 17 to I-86 upgrade in New York State and any number of 3-digit interstate additions in the South as an example of "new" not being new at all).

-- Europe is no different. Their highway network is as built-out as it's ever going to be, and to the extent they co-mingle highways with rail it's usually due to similar Postwar evolution as our Interstate network. They have more options for new HSR lines because they're a lot less sprawled-out between cities and have less suburban density, but the best shared-use corridors over there and in the most-developed SE Asian countries are similarly spoken-for.



So there's just nothing for NEC FUTURE to sink its teeth into. Or CAHSR, for that matter. The only place where the Interstate Highway System could give one of these alt spines a viable path to being built is on the Interstate that was never built: I-84 between Bolton and Plainfield, CT. CDOT still owns most of the land for the grading, and each subsequent attempt at trying to get segments of it built has been prelim-designed to up-to-spec grading. But that's literally the only one. And it just serendipitously happens to cross on either end two mostly tangent segments of active and landbanked ROW that can be upgraded/rebuilt to perform way better than the Shoreline. That's the only one. And it's pure dumb luck more than a leading indicator.

You really have to look to big-honkin', flat-as-a-board, mile-wide ROW, arrow-straight, Texas interstates or XpressWest out in the Vegas desert to find ROW's where co-builds are a high-value proposition. And that's 100% a function of land being abundantly cheap and too diffusely-sprawled for abutting density to sit right on top of the corridor and complicate land acquisition. The Coasts have nothing left to give. And Elon Musk and those D.C.-NY Maglev clowns are pulling numbers out their arses every time they invoke hundreds of miles in Els along I-5 and I-95.

BlendedBreak wrote:

Greg Moore wrote: You still haven't identified which of Donald Trump's properties were taken by eminent domain. The only reference I know you made was to the Empire connection and that was all from 35th street to NYP and none of that is Trump property.

Live a little.Try Google.

Umm, no, live a little and back up your claims.

You made the claim, back it up. The only Trump properties I'm aware of were built OVER an existing ROW.

BlendedBreak wrote:The only way to make this work is an aggressive eminent domain program with 100% cooperation from the affected states to create an elevated ROW that has minimal curves and access to connections with commuter railroads.

That is the only way we can fix this problem.

The Chinese get it but Americans dont?
https://youtu.be/T7hdo9tL6u0

The Chinese are also notably shorter on the concept of citizen buy-in than we are; and notably more likely to shoot people who disagree with the government.

Maybe if you like Chinese law you should try it, their benefits are great too.

On the highway geometry point, even totally modern Interstate compliant ROWs will have curve radii that limit non-tilting trains to 90 mph (so maybe 105-110 with tilt). On the straights, sure, 150-plus is possible, but more than one curve per ten miles or so and you're looking at average speeds while moving of about two-thirds of whatever the peak speed is).

On Trump, the vast majority, if not all, of his dealings with eminent domain have been as a direct beneficiary, which is why he supports eminent domain.