The Mineta Institute — named after a San Jose congressman who was Secretary of Transportation in 2001 through 2006 — has a new report claiming that high-speed rail will produce huge economic and environmental benefits. Rather than being based on any careful analyses, it basically repeats old claims that are even less valid today than when they were first made.
Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this report.
For example, the report cites the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s claim that rail construction “has generated an estimated 74,000 to 80,000 job years, $5.6 to $6.0 billion in labor income, and $15 billion to $16 billion in economic output between 2006 and 2022.” That’s like saying that buying a $100,000 car generates $100,000 in income. It might be income for someone, but for the person buying, the $100,000 is a cost, not a revenue.
This is a particularly vital point today when the nation is suffering from what looks like will be an indefinite labor shortage. Every person who is put to work building money-losing high-speed rail lines takes away someone who could be building homes to reduce the housing crisis or doing lots of other work for for-profit enterprises. By exacerbating the labor shortage, high-speed rail is increasing consumer costs as well as taxes.
The report also claims that “Multiple studies show that HSR in the U.S. could connect megaregions, forming the corridors of housing, employment, and recreation in more densely populated areas of the country.” Notice the word “could.” We heard the same claims about light rail only to find that the only economic development generated by light rail was development that was subsidized. The reality is that people no longer want to live in “densely populated areas” if they ever did, so building high-speed rail between those areas superfluous.
The Mineta report also cites a study that claimed “that it would cost an estimated $122-199 billion to provide the equivalent highway and airport capacity that the San Francisco to Los Angeles high-speed rail network would provide.” This was an absurd study done for the California high-speed rail project that assumed that the only alternative to high-speed rail was to add new freeway lanes in the entire corridor, even in areas that weren’t congested, and to greatly expand airport capacity when the airlines could carry more passengers without expanded airports simply by flying larger planes.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: high-speed rail was made obsolete before Japan laid the first Shinkansen rail, back in 1958 when Boeing introduced the 707 and Douglas the DC-8. These planes could cruise four times as fast as the Shinkansen’s top speed and twice as fast as the fastest trains today. While today’s airports are pretty elaborate affairs paid for by passenger fees, the only infrastructure jet airlines really need is a paved landing field with stairways that can be rolled up to the planes.
In particular, airliner don’t need hundreds of miles of high-cost roadbeds that must be built and maintained to high-precision standards. This is why 2022 airline fares averaged 20¢ per passenger-mile while fares on Amtrak’s Acela averaged 81¢ per mile — and the airlines came closer to making a profit than the Acela.
The Mineta report also cites a study that claimed that high-speed rail would “save up to 800 million tons of CO2 emissions over a 40-year period, or approximately 2 trillion miles traveled in a typical 22 MPG gas-based car.” First, this study failed to account for the huge greenhouse gas emissions from constructing high-speed rail. Second, it assumed that airliner and automobiles would be no more fuel-efficient or greenhouse gas friendly in the future than they were when the study was done, which is clearly untrue. Third, the authors admitted that the emissions savings would be realized only if there was a large shift in people from driving and flying to rail, including a 34 percent reduction in interstate air travel, which is highly dubious.
Finally, 20 million tons per year is less than 0.4 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve this puny savings, the report calls for building at least 7,000 miles of high-speed rail lines (based on a map on page 25), which at the $90 million a mile that California is spending on construction on flat land would cost $630 billion. Since many of the maps routes are not flat, the actual cost will be higher.
On one hand, the fact that the total calculated savings is so tiny suggests that a small error in the paper’s calculations could result in a large shift in results. On the other hand, we can find far less expensive ways to reduce emissions by 0.4 percent than to spend $630 billion or more needed for the high-speed rail network presumed in the study.
In short, the Mineta report is more of a puff piece for the taxpayer-dependent high-speed rail industry than a genuine analysis of the pros and cons of high-speed rail. Such a report should be an embarrassment for any transportation institute that prides itself on doing quality research.
Slightly related … I tried to find information on how much profit was generated by busy airports. It may be available but all the sources I found with a brief search confused “revenue” with “profit,” Lots of revenue numbers but no cost numbers. That said the numbers for busy airports were HUGE.
JFK’s operating income in 2015 was more than $452 million! Newark $433 million.
https://yourmileagemayvary.com/2021/10/30/how-do-airports-make-money-and-how-much-money-do-they-make/
In any case, any reasonable business would have (and largely has) exited passenger rail.
Divide a nations GDP by it’s tons of CO2 per year, that’s the threshold.
ANY supposed climate scheme no matter how intrinsic or sophisticated is destined to fail, because “X” dollars per ton cost of eliminating a nations CO2 emissions exceeds any nations GDP. That’s why all pet projects fail; when they take down the economy; soon abandoned. At four dollars a gallon, a gallon of gasoline produces 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 that’ll just be emitted by a nation that doesn’t care (COUGH, China) is a ponzi scheme and a waste of money. So what schemes don’t waste money…
– reduced driving: costs negative dollars per ton.
– biking: saves 55 grams CO2 per passenger mile average, but daily cycling trips can save as much as 2-3 gallons fuel that’s 20-40 kg CO2.
– carpooling: even added miles, it cuts fuel consumption for every car taken off the road. Even a F150 if it gets 20 mpg on highway, it achieves maximum efficiency filling 5 seats, with 5 people is 100 passenger miles per gallon
What drugs were this study’s authors taking that lead them to propose linking Sauk Center MN with Mobridge SD?
That’s what their ( very sloppy ) map shows.
https://www.ece.iastate.edu/files/2013/02/Netplan-Energy_Transportation-Paper_Feb052013_Working-paper.pdf
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Take, for example, Brightline West’s high-speed rail corridor from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga.
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Reminder, private investors have baulked at putting money into Brightline West. What problems do they see that governments don’t care about? Could it be Brightline West’s claim that they’ll get 11 million trips / year, more trips than occur in total on the corridor?
HSR infrastructure costs more than the imaginary airport that the AP made up in his head, which is just a strip of asphalt and some rolling stairs, not actual airports with massive parking garages, miles of multilane highways between the airport and the city they connect to, elaborate security checkpoints, etc.
“Second, it assumed that airliner and automobiles would be no more fuel-efficient or greenhouse gas friendly in the future than they were when the study was done, which is clearly untrue. ”
What does it matter? Does AP believe that greenhouse gas emissions are bad now? What changed from 2009 when ” Climate is a complex if not a chaotic system that is not amenable to modeling.”
https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=1433
@Janehavisham
In 1970 US used 14.7 million barrels of oil per day, by 2019 US used 19.4 million barrels. Daily oil consumption rose only 30% in 49 years but automotive passenger miles in the US nearly quadupled but oil consumption did not. Driver fuel economy tripled.
kx1781,
I used Minneapolis and Pierre and the endpoints for the South Dakota line, just as I used Eugene and Seattle for the Northwest line instead of Burns and Yakima as the map appears to show and other major cities as endpoints for other routes shown on their map.
Of course, even Pierre seems a stretch, but they have to propose something to justify their claims that their route map could somehow attract more than a third of interstate air travelers to take rail instead. Their route map is only slightly smaller than Obama’s original proposal (which was about 8,000 miles), and almost every other HSR proposal is even bigger, so the cost issue is even more magnified.
janehavisham,
The difference between airports and high-speed rail is that airports grew as air travel grew and paid for that growth along the way mostly out of ticket fees. Originally, airports were just landing fields with moving stairways. As air travel became popular, airports became more sophisticated. In contrast, HSR advocates want taxpayers to spend hundreds of billions of dollars with no expectation that ridership will ever be sufficient to repay capital costs and only the faintest hope that it will be sufficient to cover operating costs.
As far as greenhouse gas emissions go, it matters because the HSR advocates say it matters. If you believe them, then you have to ask, what is the most cost-effective way of reducing emissions? It sure isn’t HSR. If you don’t believe them, then you can ignore their arguments on this issue.
“As far as greenhouse gas emissions go, it matters because the HSR advocates say it matters.”
In other words, somewhere between 2009 and now, you’ve given up on attempting to cast doubt on something generally accepted – that human-generated greenhouse gasses are warming the earth (you won’t admit it, of course). So now you’re retreating to a new standpoint that you hope is more defensible.
janehavisham–I sure seems like you are purposely misunderstanding the Antiplanner. His point is that even if you believe that greenhouse gasses are a huge priority high speed rail is not cost effective way to address it. There is no point debating global warming as part of the high speed rail debate because it just doesn’t matter.