An article in the Wall Street Journal this week uses the Chicago-St. Louis corridor to explain why high-speed rail “remains elusive” in the United States: it’s expensive; it takes a long time to plan and build; and it gets few people out of their cars or off of airplanes. Yet the article misses a lot of important points and could leave readers feeling that “if only we made a few changes, high-speed rail would work here.”
The article says that the planned top speed of the Illinois project is just 110 miles per hour, but it fails to note that the average speed will be just 63 miles per hour, if that. I say “if that” because (as the article also fails to mention but as the Antiplanner observed in January) the project was supposed to be done five years ago, yet today all the state is promising is that it hopes to get trains running at top speeds of 90 miles per hour this year.
In any case, according to Google, the drive time from Chicago Union Station to the St. Louis Amtrak station is 4 hours and 41 minutes, just eleven minutes longer than the train will be if and when it ever reaches its planned top speeds. Since most people have origins and destinations that differ from train stations, and since cars can leave at anytime of the day instead of the eight times a day a train happens to operate, the trains won’t pose much competition for highway travel. Continue reading
