Reinventing the Jet Airliner

Suppose I told you that I have reinvented the jet airliners that carried Americans more than 750 billion passenger miles–about 10 percent of all passenger travel–in 2019. My reinvented jet will go less than half as fast as existing jets. It will cost six times as much to operate, per passenger mile, as existing jets. Unlike existing jets, which can go anywhere there is air, the reinvented jet will only be able to go on a limited number of fixed routes.

The reinvented jet airliner: less than half the speed, more than six times the cost, and doesn’t go where you want to go. Photo by Cobaltum.

This wondrous invention will become a reality if the federal government spends a mere one, two, or possibly three or four trillion dollars. Does that sound like a good deal? No? Yet that is exactly what high-speed rail advocates are proposing. Some proposals, such as the Green New Deal, even call for almost completely replacing low-cost, fast jet airliners with high-cost, relatively slow trains.

High-speed rail advocates get very emotional when you point these facts out to them. Case in point: a young urban planner named Sam Sklar totally freaked out when he read a 975-word blog post I wrote about high-speed rail a few weeks ago. His 5,750-word response called my post “the single dumbest article” he ever read. Yet all his response proves is that he doesn’t understand such basic concepts as the difference between taxes and user fees, long division, large numbers, and obsolete technologies.

I pointed out that, unlike high-speed rail, toll roads pay for themselves, which almost everyone except Sklar understands is shorthand meaning the users pay for the roads. “The roads don’t ‘pay for themselves,'” exclaims Sklar. “Someone has to pay for them. . . . Drivers pay tolls and tolls are regressive.”

Excuse me? Since when is paying for what you use, and not having to pay for what someone else uses, regressive? Tolls are not regressive provided the revenues actually pay for the roads people drive on and are not diverted to some transit megaproject.

Regressive is using taxes that are disproportionately paid by low-income people to build a transportation system that will disproportionately be used by high-income people. That’s regressive. That’s high-speed rail.

My blog post pointed out that average airfares in 2019 were under 14 cents per passenger mile while average fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela were more than 90 cents per passenger mile. To support the latter number, I included a link to an Amtrak annual report that listed fare revenues and passenger miles by train, including the Acela. Sklar confessed that he was “baffled” by this because he looked up the report I cited and wasn’t able to perform this simple arithmetic.

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Sklar also appears to be baffled by large numbers such as trillions, as he pretty much ignored my estimates that building the skeletal, 8,600-mile high-speed rail system proposed by President Obama in 2009 would cost well over a trillion dollars. Considering that California is spending $100 million per mile to build high-speed rail on flat ground and estimates it will cost $200 million per mile to build in hilly territory, the more elaborate high-speed rail system featured in Sklar’s response, which is nearly 20,000 miles long, would cost well over $3 trillion.

I suspect that high-speed rail advocates such as Sklar simply breeze past these numbers because they don’t understand how much a trillion dollars really is. As engineer Randall Monroe points out, humans understand small numbers like 1, 10, and maybe 100, but they don’t understand big numbers like million, billion, and trillion. So when we hear numbers like $500 billion vs. $3 trillion, $3 trillion sounds smaller.

How much is a trillion dollars? It is enough money to buy every major transportation company in this country, including BNSF, CSX, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific railroads; Alaska, American, Delta, Southwest, and United airlines; General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler; and still leave more than $250 billion left over for UPS, Fedex, and various other transport companies.

But that same trillion dollars won’t be enough to build Obama’s high-speed rail system that completely misses such major cities as Denver, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Phoenix and doesn’t connect Houston with San Antonio, Jacksonville with Orlando, Buffalo with Cleveland, Pittsburgh with Columbus, or many other city pairs. And that high cost doesn’t seem to bother Sklar and other high-speed rail supporters at all.

Finally, the heart of my article was that high-speed rail was an obsolete technology because it is slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and more expensive than both. Sklar’s response is that “almost every developed country” in the world except the U.S. has it, so it must not be obsolete. In fact, only about a dozen countries have true high-speed rail; among the many that don’t are Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, and Switzerland, to name a few.

What the dozen high-speed rail countries have in common is that large numbers of people were riding low-speed trains before they built high-speed rail, and that is where they got their high-speed train riders. Nowhere have high-speed trains put a dent in the overall growth of either driving or flying. The most they have done have been to replace profitable intercity bus service with unprofitable trains.

The United States doesn’t have a huge base of low-speed train riders who will jump on the high-speed trains. In 2019, Americans traveled an average of more than 15,000 miles by automobile, 2,200 miles by airplane, and 19 miles by Amtrak. Passenger trains, no matter how fast they go, are functionally obsolete in the United States, and will eventually be seen as obsolete in other countries as well.

I apologize to Sam Sklar for my failure to communicate these basic concepts to him in my short article. I have written a much more detailed paper on high-speed rail that will soon be published by the Cato Institute. I hope that will settle any misunderstandings that remain between us.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

8 Responses to Reinventing the Jet Airliner

  1. LazyReader says:

    Spending hundreds of billions to chase away a few million tons of co2, (Allegedly so) works out to tens of thousands of dollars per ton, which makes NO sense whatsoever. Even At four dollars a gallon, a gallon of gas has 20 lbs of CO2 Therefore a ton of co2 costs 400 dollars to emit, spending 10,000 dollars to deter 400 dollars worth of Carbon dioxide. In other words ANY supposed climate scheme no matter how intrinsic or sophisticated is destined to fail, because at 10,000 dollars per ton the cost of eliminating a nations CO2 emissions exceeds any nations GDP. Another reason is High speed rail doesn’t take you out of cars. Inter-city transportation is a minority of the overall travel market. Germany’s S-Bahn commuter rail moves 1.5 million per day; Out of a nation of 83 million, that’s 1.8% of the travel market. Countries may compete with one another to see who can have fast trains, but high-speed rail is yesterday’s technology. It’s expensive, requiring large amounts of infrastructure which must be precisely maintained at great expense and significant emissions Just to build. It’s inflexible, so if travel patterns change it is left in the dust. It takes years to plan and build, by which new technologies may emerge. Since the 1970’s energy consumption of the average Automobile has been cut in half and plane energy usage has been slashed by 70%.

    UC professor Charles Lave insisted on observing the “Law of Large Proportions.” Investing “X” amount of resources on something used by the majority is vastly more beneficial than dealing with a minority. Investing $1 Billion on the option used by 90% of the people (Drive Alone and Carpool, bus, van, motorcycle) will produce far more benefits than investing the same $1 Billion on the option used by no more than 1.0% of the people (Rail). Investing money in making automobiles more energy efficient and less polluting is vastly more practical (given how many people use them) then trying to outspend practicality to get people out of their cars which hasn’t worked. In 1960, when construction began on the Shinkansen, automobiles accounted for less than 5 percent of Japanese passenger travel, while rails carried 77 percent. But a nation that is rich enough to build high-speed trains is rich enough for its residents to buy and drive autos. By 2000’s 12% is by rail and 77% is by Car. Even where gas is more than 2-3x expensive than in the US. Japanese instead turned to motorcycles and what they call “light motor vehicles.” These are three- or four-wheeled vehicles with engines smaller than liter displacement or below 700 cc. Japanese and Europeans aren’t giving up their mobility. The US has the highest GDP per ton emitted is 3,700 dollars per ton, almost 3.4 times that of China (1,100). GDP per ton threshold is how you quantify something suitable. China has spent hundreds of billions, going 850 BILLION in debt building 22,000 miles of high speed rail…….co2 emissions. Still going up.

  2. prk166 says:

    The “detour” that Mr. Sklar invokes in taking the train for NYC to Chicago is called “going around some mountains that make regular railroading very difficult and expensive”.

  3. prk166 says:


    How much is a trillion dollars? It is enough money to buy every major transportation company in this country, including BNSF, CSX, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific railroads; Alaska, American, Delta, Southwest, and United airlines; General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler; and still leave more than $250 billion left over for UPS, Fedex, and various other transport companies.
    ” ~anti-planner

    Let’s read this one again and let it marinate.

  4. Builder says:

    The Antiplanner should be very proud. He must be making his arguments very well to throw a true believer into such a dither.

  5. CapitalistRoader says:

    Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
    — John Adams

  6. prk166 says:


    We can’t say high-speed rail is obsolete, because we don’t have any high-speed rail to compare.
    ” ~sklar

    Someone’s been drinking paint again.

  7. Limey Train Fan says:

    As someone who likes rail but only knows the USA from a few holidays and the pages of Trains, I don’t understand the antipathy of some to better passenger trains in the USA. High Speed is not the answer for the USA, a TGV style train will never be right to travel from Chicago to LA, but better service on the NEC and 125 mph service say New York to Buffalo and radiating from Chicago to Cleveland, the Twin Cities, St Louis and Detroit seems sensible. A big city linked to other large cities with intermediate sized cities on route with a 4 hour journey time should mean well utilized trains. I use trains when going to London or Edinburgh or if I want to go some where in the centre of a city as it’s just easier to get to my local station and take a train to the centre of a city I don’t know well, than try and find a parking space and navigate a strange road network. I’ve frequently travelled on the British ECML from London Kings Cross to Edinburgh. the journey takes 4 hours 20 min depending on stops and the train will be well loaded all the way but not always with London to Scotland passengers. I’m a Conservative, (soft right one nation Conservative, Harold Macmillan type) and feel with mainline services and urban commuting the price is worth the cost. For more local journeys and rural destinations I drive and there is no way public transport could take my family on a day out to the countryside as conveniently and flexibly as my car. Public support for that I couldn’t support.
    The Generation Z blogger however has misplaced faith in HSR. A TGV from New York to Chicago is still going to be slow compared to a plane. I do look forward to taking my family on holiday to the USA and we will hopefully be doing the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago in a sleeper because I want to see what’s on the way, Hudson Valley etc and it’s the nearest thing to North by Northwest. If I just wanted to get to Chicago we’d fly. Trains can do some things very well, but not everything. One size does not fit all.
    The ideological purity of the Generation Z’ers is distasteful and I hope I wasn’t that zealous when I was in my 20’s.

    “The fault is not in ours stars dear Brutus, it is in ourselves.”

  8. greenVan says:

    The hub and spoke maps look pretty but are deceiving. They are useless for almost everything except getting to the city in the middle. Anyone can try it for themselves by going to any major city and taking transit from any two points where neither is downtown. It’s hard to appreciate the scale when you look at a map. Minneapolis to Des Moines doesn’t look unreasonable, unless you know how big of an addition needlessly traveling through Wisconsin and Illinois would be.

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