TRAINING AMERICA: Plans to expand high-speed rail service are now underway in several U.S. regions. A recent report found that high-speed rail in the Midwest would reduce air travel by 1.3 million trips and car travel by 5.1 million trips per year by 2020, saving 188,000 tons of CO2 emissions, equivalent to taking 34,000 cars off the road yet still getting everyone to and from work. Pictured: High-speed trains at the Saint Pancras International station, London.
Image: Courtesy John Curnow, Flickr
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Dear EarthTalk: Vice President Joe Biden just announced a commitment by the Obama administration of $53 billion to high-speed rail. Isn’t it about time? Why is the U.S. so far behind other nations in developing environmentally friendly public transportation?—Diane A., Boston
There are many reasons why public transit hasn’t taken off in the U.S. as it has in parts of Asia, Europe and elsewhere. For one, ever since the Model T first rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line, Americans have had a love affair with cars. Also, a successful plot by General Motors and several partner companies in the 1930 and 1940s bought up and shut down rail transit lines across 45 American cities, replacing them with bus routes driven on GM buses. Meanwhile, the U.S. government embarked on a plan to link the nation’s metro areas via interstate highways, further encouraging car travel. The sexy new car designs of the 1950s then drove the final nail in the coffin, relegating public transportation to an afterthought.
But with rising oil prices and growing fears about global warming, public transit is looking sexier to many Americans. As part of 2009’s landmark American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the White House committed $8 billion to efforts to create and maintain high-speed intercity passenger rail service. And just weeks ago, after calling for giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years, Barack Obama pledged another $53 billion to increase the nation’s network of high-speed rail lines.
Plans to expand high-speed rail service are already underway in several U.S. regions. Illinois was the first of 31 states to receive a portion of the funding to begin building high-speed rail lines linking Chicago and St. Louis. A recent report found that high-speed rail in the Midwest would reduce air travel by 1.3 million trips and car travel by 5.1 million trips per year by 2020, saving 188,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions (equivalent to taking 34,000 cars off the road while still getting everyone to and from work).
Funding is also slated to go to California, where trains traveling up to 220 miles per hour will move people between San Diego and San Francisco in less than three hours. California’s high-speed rail system, which should in service by 2020, is expected to cost about half as much as would expanding highways and building new airport runways and gates to accommodate fast growing passenger transportation demand.
Not everyone is on board with high speed rail. Florida’s Republican governor Rick Scott recently rejected $2 billion in federal funding to build an 85-mile high speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando, arguing that cost overruns would likely leave Florida taxpayers making up billions of dollars for something they don’t need. Scott’s move in killing the Tampa-Orlando run calls into question whether or not Obama can push his plans through in other parts of the country that are also conservative strongholds.
No matter how quickly Americans get up to speed on high speed rail, the U.S. certainly has some catching up to do. According to statistics from the International Union of Railways and other sources, China leads the world with upwards of 2,800 miles of high speed rail lines in operation and another 5,500 miles planned. Spain, France and Japan each have around 1,200 miles in operation; Germany has 800 miles and Italy has 577. The U.S. has only 226 miles in operation currently. The Obama administration would like to see Americans riding on more than 16,000 miles of high speed rail lines by the middle of the century.
CONTACTS: ARRA, www.recovery.gov; International Union of Railways, www.uic.org.
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13 Comments
Add CommentWe should be deeply ashamed of an America, politically represented 99% by attorneys, that is too stupid to understand that spending hundreds of billions on public infrastructure is a really good investment. China, a country run by engineers sure does.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe should be deeply ashamed of the America that spends without question $700B a year on the biggest bestest military the world has ever seen that produces absolutely nothing, but can't build a high speed rail line from LA to SanFran without a business case while third world China builds thousands of kilometers.
Today American's rather than shame are proud of creating the most massively destructive military force in world history, sustained by expenditures greater than all the rest of the world militaries put together, balanced off with leading the world in the production of televisions shows like American Idol where today's "Idol" is a gifted Karaoke singer.
Enough psycho-babble and China envy, already.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe obvious fundamental difference between countries that have heavily invested in high speed rail and the U.S. is population density.
The U.S. urban population has certainly been increasing, now making high speed rail more economically viable in some areas, but we've brilliantly outsourced most manufacturing industry to Asia and greedily busted the investment banking business, so there's no capital left to invest in the U.S. right now!
My My, the publicly-indoctrinated, pointy-headed intellectuals practicing the religion of "Scientism" are thick at this magazine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf High Speed rail was a good investment, then our marginally free private sector would invest in it.
Instead, it is a government financed boondoggle designed to provide a few 1000 union jobs for a decade, and an army of unionized public employees after that.
I like trains as much as the next guy, and providing seed money for a viable project is a bad, but not the worst, application of government money.
HSR isn't viable. It's political, and in case you hadn't noticed, we are broke.
China isn't run by engineers, it's run by tyrants. Geez! Mussolini and Adolf got the trains to run on time. Maybe we should bring back fascism and do away with pesky things like elections and public will.
Then again, maybe not. You wanna engineer something? Come up with a Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security plan that doesn't turn into a 3rd world nation in a decade. Fix that and there'll be plenty of money for your train set!
As the previous commenters have demonstrated, transportation infrastructure is a topic that brings up great passion. If only there were a way of agreeing on a way forward.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe original article gives the basic outline of the standard response to the question. A few points need to be added. The United States was the world leader in both urban public transit and intercity passenger rail in the 1930s, a model for the world. The destruction that happened in the postwar years was hardly inevitable or normal. Americans were not predestined to be drivers more than western Europeans, but if you destroy the train services and put vast public resources over a period of half a century into free or cheap highways and cheap gasoline, it is not surprising that people have developed a "love affair with cars".
One commenter brings up the much-repeated density argument, which isn't very convincing. The mere fact that there are many medium-distance corridors and city clusters with only jammed highways and overcrowded airports to link them is an indication of an untapped rail market. Moreover, density by itself isn't a reliable indicator of travel demand. If there are big cities on the endpoints of a heavily travelled corridor, low density in the middle is a secondary issue.
Finally, the supposition that any major transportation system can be built without substantial collective effort is a fantasy. The highway and aviation systems (as well as the railways in the first place) were built with enormous amounts of public financing and assistance. For that matter, in the 1950s rail passengers were paying taxes that indirectly went to the federally highway program, while the private-sector railways received nothing. Currently, the gas tax funds much of the upkeep of highways – a choice collectively made to put public resources into that mode of transport, not a market outcome.
Building a transportation system is a collective undertaking, for which ideological fantasies can have no place in making intelligent choices.
Regarding population density: as I mentioned there are now many areas in the U.S. where high speed rail is now a viable option. The many medium sized cities outside the North Eastern Corridor and West Coast are not among them. I suspect the same holds true for most of Mexico, Western Canada, Eastern Russia, North Western China, etc. There are vast areas of sparsely populated geographical regions where the traffic simply wouldn't support the capital investment requirements of high speed rail infrastructure.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLets just presume offhand that the interstate highway network would have to be replicated to meet high speed travel requirements (this is not really true because highway traffic can easily transfer passengers between destination nodes at the vehicle unit level). The investment in rail miles to support destination requirements for travelers in most of the Unites States would not be economical for travelers.
Similar economic issues prevent airlines from serving all major airports in the U.S. with supersonic airliners or even jumbo-jets. Moreover, once a passenger arrives at his destination city some form of local transportation is required for the final leg of one's journey. Public transportation in most disperse suburban regions would require enormous additional investments to provide reasonable service.
I'm no expert in transportation network economics, but I have traveled around the U.S. and lived in Europe and Asia. If you still aren't convinced by the silly old population density 'argument' I suggest you do some further research of your own. I'm not at all convinced by your casual dismissal that high speed rail could be an economically viable investment for U.S. taxpayers or private investors.
BrunoBehrend
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour micro-economic analysis is just that, micro.
At the macro level, I feel you are forgetting that the US rail network was funded by the government by giving the rail road companies title to vast tracts of the states/territories they transited.
Likewise the InterState system was federally funded.
If we must talk population density, Florida and Ohio have almost the same population density as France. But they certainly don't have the same quality transportation links.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo one is proposing high-speed transcontinental rail, or high-speed rail linking the small towns of the Great Plains. There's plenty of work to do just to bring decent rail service to the corridors where the travel demand is clearly present. As I said, travel demand is not a function of population density alone. Paris-Lyon and Barcelona-Madrid are not exactly high-density corridors like New York-Washington, though they are successful high-speed rail lines because of high travel demand.
Nor is all "high-speed rail" proposed for the United States high-speed by international standards. In many cases we're talking about the sort of service that would be considered ordinary in other parts of the world. It's still valuable, and it's substantially less capital-intensive.
High-speed rail is not implemented in a vacuum. There is no need or intention to "replicate" the Interstate highway network. It is vital that integration with other modes of public transportation (both intercity and local) be carefully implemented. Airport rail stations are going to become commonplace, if the planning is done well.
Resources allocated to high-speed rail mean fewer resources needed to provide other means of transport – in particular, attempts at increasing highway capacity, which is increasingly destructive and costly. There are large savings to be made in public-sector transport spending as a whole by redirecting resources into the rail system. There are also important environmental benefits, not least from reduced fuel consumption.
But here's perhaps the biggest sticking point: fewer resources for the highway and air systems mean a smaller pie for the vast administrations and industries that support, build and maintain these systems. And therefore huge resistance against the perceived threat of high-speed rail.
It must also be remembered when discussing France that 80% of the electricity is from nuclear power and also some comes from hydro. France is a large exporter of electrical power and as you know there is an inter-connector from France to England under the English channel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou might be interested in this article.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html
Basically if you want 'real' high-speed rail you need overhead electricity transmission. That's currently quite expensive.
If funding is to be provided by U.S. taxpayers, I would hope that the benefits could be shared by a majority of U.S. taxpayers, not a few routes cherry-picked from airlines' most profitable services. Airlines certainly loose money on many of their routes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have no problem for the residents of Ohio, Florida, the N.E. corridor, West Coast and other areas funding their own services for daily commutes and regional transports, but I don't think that regional systems would benefit the residents of unserved regions enough to warrant investments by the national government.
I've ridden the bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka & never exceeded 100 mph because of the 'short' distance. Rail systems providing regional services with many local stops do not benefit from high speed capabilities.
IMO, only a national system that could benefit most taxpayers - like the interstate highway system, would justify U.S. government investments.
Ah, but the benefits would indeed be shared by a majority of U.S. taxpayers. Maybe not a majority of U.S. states - but when you add up all the viable regional intercity rail corridors proposed for high-speed development, you reach a substantial majority of the population.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe impact on the airlines is an important question. Experience shows that HSR will take at least 50% of the market in its corridors. But it's not as simple as rail stealing passengers from a few cherry-picked routes; airlines can benefit from integrating rail links into their network. Lufthansa, Swiss, and Air France/KLM have been codesharing with rail routes, sometimes even running their own trains, for years now. And here is a quote from Robert L. Crandall, former American Airlines president, from a 2008 speech (on aviationweek.com):
"Given the high level of congestion at our major airports and our desire to operate a more energy-efficient transportation complex, I am similarly mystified as to why we have heard little or nothing about the development of alternative surface transportation systems for short-haul journeys. At our major airports, a significant percentage of flights are to destinations less than 300 miles distant, which could readily be replaced by the modern high-speed rail systems found in many countries around the world."
In 1956, when the Interstate Highways Act was passed, passenger rail still dominated the transportation system. The railroads were immensely powerful corporations. I think the Eisenhower administration was quite happy to diminish that power, which had been a source of conflict for over a century. However, what happened next was almost certainly unexpected. Within 15 years the passenger rail system was utterly destroyed and several rail corporations were in bankruptcy. (There were other factors involved besides Interstate highways, including the railroads' own arrogance and rigidity, as well as crippling and obsolete regulations.)
The result has been that the U.S. (and Canada, which shares a common transport network) is alone among industrialized nations in having largely abandoned the rail mode for passenger transportation. Yet this mode is the most efficient way of quickly transporting large numbers of people ever developed (for good or for evil). The consequences of abandoning rail have been costly, wasteful, inconvenient. It's time to reestablish some balance.
(jtdwyer: if you want to continue this discussion by email, I have the same username on gmail.)
"...the benefits would indeed be shared by a majority of U.S. taxpayers." This is possible, but certainly not definitively established by your assertion. I'd need a more convincing analysis before I'd approve the investment of my tax funds (as if I have a say) in high speed rail for even the NE corridor. As these things usually go, it would probably draw its funding from maintenance of the deteriorating urban infrastructure...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBack to my original point, there's precious little investment capital available for new transportation technology in the U.S., now that we've turned manufacturing production over to, primarily, China. Meanwhile, there is so much capital available in China the are essentially constructing hundreds of new cities including the installation of brand new infrastructure. We are not now in any position to compare our opportunities for investment.
I'm not sure what Robert L. Crandall's saying about "...the development of alternative surface transportation systems for short-haul journeys" in relation to high-speed rail systems. Short haul doesn't correspond to true high speed rail. How's American Airlines doing these days?
Personally, my Dad and his Dad spent their lives working for railroads in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Personally, I don't understand why more of the trucking business isn't being picked up by railroads. Standard rail is much more economical than trucking, which produces most of the highway systems' maintenance requirements. This could be accomplished without investments in new technological infrastructure.
Thanks for the discussion!
No high speed rail passenger system has ever turned a profit. The main problem is that you invet incredible anounts of cash into a project that is very susceptible to generational shifts in commuter patterns. The bustling destinations where work may be found today could become ghost towns by the time the financing is paid off.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe should be concentrating on boosting the rail capacity of shipping cargo, not people, and get those tractor trailers off the road. A good start would be to double the width of the standard rail gauge. Big and slow is always more profitable than small and fast in the transportation industry.
Hi justinbb - I'm no expert on USA transportation, but can observe that HSR ( high speed rail ) is mainly a competitor to air travel and other rapid passenger modes.The existing rail track system can accommodate both passenger and freight, provided the passengers are not in too much of a hurry. How much of a hurry they are in depends on the nature of the journey and it's length. Roughly speaking the longer that is the faster they wish to go, unless they see it as some form of recreation. Enabling the rail network to handle larger volumes would probably mean building more looplines, so that the faster trains can overtake the slower ones safely.Some types of freight( such as foodstuffs ) are more time sensitive than others, and would be better on fast freight trains.Unfortunately as speeds rise, demands on track both on specification and maintenance rise as well. On really large transport densities of liquids and gases, pipelines are the best option. It could be that high speed freight could be cheaper( in the long run ) handled in standardised containers going without human drivers along a tube system using maglev and linear induction drives. Most consumer goods could be packed into containers ( say) 5 foot in diameter and the tunneling and construction of these tubes would be competitive with ordinary road and rail new build, and have much less environmental impact. Out sized loads would still have to make their usual arrangements, but on road and railways less clogged with long distance trucks.Smaller trucks and vans might still be need to make the local deliveries, but they would then be suitable for electric or hybrid propulsion.You will probably know that there is a shift from seeing air transport as mainly hub and spoke to more point to point, with all that involves in aircraft sizes and airport arrangements. HSR does not seem to assist in this, except where there are particularly heavy traffic volumes of quite limited length.Coast to coast in the USA, it would be hard to make the case that HSR was better than the new wide bodied jets becoming available.So which corridors look set to be better long term? - not that many I suspect. Experience in other countries is no reliable guide, as the political and social conditions have had a big influence on what has been installed.
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