Recently, someone asked the Antiplanner why Amtrak’s high-speed rail plan is so expensive. They were referring to a proposal published in late October to increase speeds in Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor to 220 mph.
The plan calls for spending $117 billion in the 427-mile corridor, for an average cost of nearly $275 million per mile. That’s almost ten times Florida’s projected cost of $30 million per mile and close to three times California’s projected cost of about $95 million per mile. Wikipedia reports that France kept the cost of one line down to $25 million per mile, but only by making compromises with grades and curvature.
The main thing that drives costs up is tunneling, but some Japanese lines are up to half in tunnels, and costs there mostly range from $25 to $70 million per mile. (One report indicates that the line to Nagano cost more than $1 billion per mile, but I’ve always wondered if that was some sort of translation error.)
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At first, I suspected Amtrak was including a lot more than just the Boston-to-Washington line in its $117 billion estimate. But this estimate includes only that route; page 20 of the Amtrak proposal divides costs into hard construction: $67 billion; soft construction costs: $21 billion; right of way: $13 billion; contingencies: $13 billion; and vehicles: $3 billion. These are all costs that should be included in the Florida and California estimates, if not the French and Japanese reports. Even counting only the hard construction costs, $67 billion is $157 million per mile, which is way too high considering that the terrain between Boston and Washington is much easier to build on that in California.
I suspect the real story is that Amtrak simply wrote a plan for a gold-plated high-speed rail line with the expectation that Congress was ready to spend a few hundred billion on rail and it wanted in on the action. In other words, it forgot to low-ball the costs and actually produced a realistic estimate. But it had the bad luck to publish its proposal just a few weeks before the election that put the Tea Party Republican Party in control of the House of Representatives.
Update: One interesting point is that Amtrak’s report admits that rail has only a 6 percent share of passenger travel in the Boston-to-Washington corridor. Amtrak frequently brags that it carries more passengers in this corridor than the airlines, but it rarely mentions highway travel. But a chart on page 4 says airlines have a 5 percent share and highways an 89 percent share. That 89 percent includes buses. If only common carriers were counted, airlines would have about a 28 percent share, Amtrak 33 percent, and buses 39 percent.
The only reason anyone would ride it is to escape from the TSA privacy invasions. When calculating future ridership you must include a Probability number for TSA interfence with the passengers.
Antiplanner:
“If only common carriers were counted, airlines would have about a 28 percent share, Amtrak 33 percent, and buses 39 percent.”
Amtrak carries about 11 million per year on the Northeast Corridor.
If buses are 120% of that number, then there are 13 million bus patrons. Divide that by 40 occupied seats per bus (a very high projected occupancy) and 365 days per year, and you are claiming there are a minimum of 900 buses per day 7 days per week between various points on the Northeast Corridor.
Given that the schedules of the major carriers like Megabus and BoltBus, and Peter Pan schedule service of no more than 10-20 trips per day each way between the major city pairs (DC-NY, Philly-NY, NY-Boston), where, pray tell, are these other 700+ bus trips per day being scheduled from and who is operating them?
Also, do the commuter railroads not count as common carriers? MARC, Septa, NJT, Metro North, Shore Line East, and MBTA all “compete” in various shorter market segments against Amtrak. Surely they carry some number of patrons.
The highway numbers also seem somewhat suspect. 89% of 161 million annual trips is 144,000,000 trips, or about 4 trips per year per man, woman, and child. Divide by 365 and you get 392,000 daily intercity auto trips in the northeast corridor. Given the small size of states in this area, almost all of the trips would be inter-state, and most of those trips would be on the major turnpikes and interstates. I live in the area. My family of seven has accounted for six intercity person trips this year by car (3 round trips by me Philly-Morristown-NYC and return). Are these trip totals being inflated by non-comparable trips to those covered by common carriers like New York City to Toms River, or Baltimore to Ocean City? One has to wonder. Metro NYC + Metro Philly accounts for around 26 million of the 40 million people in the area. Does it pass the smell test that that there are 265,000 trips by car per day between those areas? Not to me.
Andrew, and his buddy Jardinero1 are some of the most stupid trolls on this blog. Support rail no matter what blah blah blah, trucking industry is subsidized blah blah blah. And like most idiot liberals, they tenaciously cling to their ideas in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
metrosucks:
I’m not a liberal, and I’ve never voted for a Democrat in 18 years of religiously voting in every election.
You actually expect anyone to believe that?
metrosucks:
“You actually expect anyone to believe that?”
People can believe whatever they want. I’m personally attesting on my honor to have never voted for a Democrat in my life in a general election. I have strayed a few times from the Republican Party to vote for a Libertarian or Constitution Party candidate.
If that is too confusing for you to wrap your mind around that you accuse me of lying, well, that is your problem, not mine.
Andrew,
First of all, if your arithmetic is correct, there are 392,000 daily intercity trips in the NE Corridor. As the post clearly states, this total includes bus trips. Also, I’m pretty sure the measure used is person-trips, not vehicle trips. If your interpretation was that one particular link was carrying 392,000 vehicle trips, that would be incorrect. Not only are the trips distributed across modes and across time (throughout the day), but they are also distributed across locations within the corridor. Not all trips have origins in Washington and destinations in Boston. In other words, not all trips flow through a single point.
There is probably also a lot of commuting between large cities that is captured in these data. New York and Philadelphia are close enough that many of their residents make regular commutes into the other’s region. Same for Baltimore and Washington. For organizations like Amtrak and BoltBus, it matters little what the purpose of the trip is, just that it adds to the total. It would be nice to see some control totals for the data that organizations like Amtrak and the bus providers make public, but usually you have to piece together the information on market shares from disparate sources. Still, given what we know, these figures do not sound too implausible.
This situation strikes me as a bit different from the other HSR proposals mentioned above because it’s taking a heavily (relatively) traveled rail corridor and upgrading it while trying to remain in service. While I am no expert, I have to believe that some of these costs have to do with the phasing that would keep the NEC running while it is being turned into a HSR service. The fact that it is existing already could feasibly make it drastically more expensive than starting from scratch.
Tunnels aside, I think bridges are a bigger cost in this case. I would have to believe that this kind of project would involve track expansion. I actually took the Acela from NYC to Boston the day after Thanksgiving and the number of bridges that cross the NEC is staggering. If this track was brand new there would be no bridges to start with and they could simply go down the line: close a road, construct a bridge, open the bridge and move on to the next one. Every bridge on an existing line actually means building a temporary bridge, removing the old bridge, building a new one, removing the temporary one. There are also a number of larger bridges over water. And through all of this, the trains have to keep running. As an architect, I can say that building a new building is always easier than renovating an existing one.
I wonder too if the cost to redo Penn Station is lumped into this–an extra $11 billion last time they asked–or Moynihan Station in NYC.
OFP2003,
Do you REALLY think that the TSA won’t be involved once a $117,000,000,000 high-profile infrastructure investment is made?