What We Know About High-Speed Rail

In early 2016, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) published a 187-page report on interregional travel, which it defined as trips between 100 and 500 miles. To help publicize the report, the federally funded TRB placed a five-page summary in the May-June, 2016 TR News.

In response, rail advocate Vukan Vuchic, who is an emeritus professor of urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a lengthy diatribe, published as a letter to the editor in the September-October 2018 TR News, complaining that the TRB report had a “negative tone” about high-speed rail. Vuchic’s case is weakened by the fact that he appears to have only read the five-page summary, not the entire 187-page report. Yet even that summary had plenty to say about high-speed rail, and much of it in the Antiplanner’s opinion was far too optimistic.

Vuchic charges that the report makes an “incorrect claim that HSR might only be feasible for the Boston-Washington.D.C., corridor.” In fact, neither the summary nor the full report made that claim, but the report did conclude, after many pages of lengthy analysis, that “In the United States, the NEC is unique in having many of the geographic, demographic, and demand conditions that European and Japanese experience suggests are favorable to public investments in intercity rail” and thus “presents far less uncertainty [than other corridors] with regard to the potential for passenger rail investments, including investments in high-speed service.” “Uncertainty” and “feasibility” are two completely different things.

Contrary to Vuchic’s heated letter, the Antiplanner would argue that the interregional transportation report spends far more pages on high-speed rail than makes sense for the United States. By the modern definition of high-speed rail — trains with top speeds faster than 150 mph — high-speed rail has zero market share in this country. Based on what we know about high-speed rail in other countries, it is fair to say that it will never be relevant here outside of the Boston-Washington corridor, and even there it is only “feasible” if we ignore capital and maintenance costs.

1. High-Speed Rail Is Very Expensive

Unlike air travel, high-speed rail requires an enormous amount of infrastructure. Unlike highway travel, high-speed rail infrastructure must be built and maintained to very precise standards. That makes it much more expensive than other forms of travel: California is spending $89 million per mile building it across flat farmland; the costs in hilly terrain, which requires lengthy tunnels, are much higher. In addition, high-speed rail infrastructure can only be used for passenger service, while both airports and highways are used for freight as well as passenger travel, which means freight can share some of the costs.

This makes high-speed rail the high-cost alternative in any market. While Vuchic claims that high-speed rail has diverted “travel from airlines to HSR for distances up to 800 miles,” that’s only because the tickets on the high-speed trains are heavily subsidized. It is hardly a victory when a heavily subsidized form of travel gets people to stop using a relatively unsubsidized mode.

2. High-Speed Rail Has Not Reduced Air’s or Auto’s Shares of Travel

While page 129 of the TRB interregional travel report shows that high-speed trains carry more passengers than airlines in a few markets, these are the exceptions. Because high-speed rail is so expensive to start up while the cost of starting new air routes is relatively small, air travel has a larger market share in Europe and is growing faster. The European Union’s 2009 Panorama of Transport calculated that the average European rode trains less than 500 miles per year –about a quarter of which was on high-speed trains — and traveled by air nearly 700 miles a year in 2006. The EU’s latest transportation statistics shows that air travel (page 127) is growing more than twice as fast as rail travel (page 126), and is growing faster than rail travel both within individual European nations and between European nations.

The European Union publishes data showing the modal split between buses, cars, and trains going back to 1990. The numbers show that high-speed trains often cut into buses’ share of travel, but not cars. In Spain, which after 1990 built Europe’s largest high-speed rail network, rail’s share declined from 6.9 percent in 1990 to 4.9 percent in 1996, but then grew to 6.6 percent in 2016. All of the growth since 1996 came at the expense of buses, whose share declined from 13.8 to 11.8 percent in those years.

For the EU as a whole, rail’s share grew from 7.2 percent in 2000 (the earliest year for which data are available) to 7.7 percent in 2016, while auto’s share grew from 82.4 to 82.9 percent and buses ate the difference, dropping from 10.4 to 9.4 percent. If we generously assume that high-speed rail’s share of total rail travel has grown from 25 percent in 2006 to 33 percent in 2016, that means high-speed trains only account for about 2.6 percent of surface travel in Europe, or less than 2.4 percent when air travel is included.

In short, European high-speed trains get most of their riders from low-speed trains and buses. This is also true in Asia. Yet America has virtually no low-speed train riders and few bus riders for high-speed trains to capture.

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3. High-Speed Rail Puts Countries Deeply In Debt

Japanese National Railways was a profitable, if state-owned, company when it build the first high-speed rail line in 1964. Political pressure to build more high-speed rail lines forced it to borrow 27 trillion yen ($285 billion in today’s dollars) to finance the construction of those lines and subsidize rail operations. The company effectively went bankrupt in 1987 and the government was forced to absorb most of the debt, which was a major factor in that country’s economic doldrums since that time.

China, Spain, France, Italy, and other countries have also gone heavily into debt building high-speed rail. The 45 billion euro debt of France’s rail system is forcing the country to consider cutting some high-speed rail services. Italy and France may cancel a proposed high-speed rail line between the two countries for lack of funds.

4. High-Speed Rail’s Economic Development Benefits Are a Zero-Sum Game

There is no doubt that some cities in Japan, China, and Europe have benefitted from being on a high-speed rail line. At the same time, however, other cities not on the lines have grown slower than they might otherwise have. The effects balance out so that the nation as a whole receives no net benefits.

No nation has ever gotten wealthier by building high-speed rail. After all, attracting people from a low-cost method of travel to a high-cost mode is not a formula for creating wealth. In fact, the huge debts incurred from building and operating politically driven high-speed rail routes have clearly suppressed economic growth in Japan and Spain.

5. The Northeast Corridor Is Marginal for High-Speed Rail

According to the European Union, a high-speed rail line can only pay for itself if it carries 10 million riders a year. By “pay for itself,” it counts environmental, congestion, and other supposed benefits of high-speed rail.

If you believe that, the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak currently carries around 12 million trips per year, could be a candidate for high-speed rail. But Amtrak itself estimates that it would cost $151 billion (in 2012 dollars) to build high-speed rail in the Boston-to-Washington corridor. A more recent report from the Federal Railroad Administration nearly doubles that cost to $287 billion.

Amtrak can’t even maintain the Northeast Corridor today, as the corridor has a $51 billion infrastructure backlog. While Amtrak brags that it carries more passengers between New York and Washington than the airlines, it only accounts for 5 percent of total intercity travel in the corridor. Speeding up the trains might increase that, but not by much. If we really had $151 billion (or $287 billion) to spare, we could probably do far more to relieve congestion and reduce pollution by spending it in other ways than on a form of travel that hardly anyone uses.

If high-speed rail is only marginal in the Northeast Corridor, it makes no sense at all elsewhere in the country where populations are lower, densities are lower, and auto usage is higher. In saying that the uncertainties are greater outside the Northeast Corridor, the interregional travel report does Americans a disservice. In fact, high-speed rail is questionable in the Northeast Corridor and almost certainly a complete waste anywhere else in America.