Illinois Megafollies

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.

Nor do moderate-speed trains pose much of a threat to air travel. Between them, American, Southwest, and United airlines offer 23 non-stop flights a day between Chicago and St. Louis that take 65 to 84 minutes. Even with TSA, that’s considerably faster than the planned 270 minutes (four-and-one-half hours) for passenger trains. The lowest airfare I see is $143, while Amtrak’s lowest fare is $31, but Amtrak ticket revenues cover less than half of operating costs and none of the capital costs. Besides, if you want cheap, Megabus fares start at around $7.50 (including a reservations fee).

If Illinois ever gets its Chicago-St. Louis trains running, it will get a ridership bump, but that will mainly be from increasing frequencies from five to eight trains a day. That could have been done for far less than the $2 billion the state is spending on the line.
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Meanwhile, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to raise state gas taxes from the current 19 cents a gallon to as much as 49 cents a gallon. That would make it roughly tied with Washington state for having the highest gas tax in the country (Washington’s is 49.4 cents; the next-highest is California’s 42 cents; the national average is 27.6 cents). While the Antiplanner supports user fees, currently 30 percent of Illinois gas taxes go to subsidize mass transit, and Emanuel’s goal is clearly to increase those subsidies. Considering that Chicago’s transit ridership has declined by 24 percent in the last decade despite a 5 percent increase in service, a massive increase in subsidies seems particularly inappropriate.

A paper from the Illinois Economic Policy Institute estimates that brings the state’s transport systems to a state of good repair will require $10 billion for roads and $41 billion for transit. Since transit only carries about 3.5 percent of passenger travel in the Chicago area, and around 2 percent in the state as a whole, it makes sense to ask whether such expensive transit infrastructure is worth maintaining.

Illinois should learn a lesson from Ralph Budd, who as president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad conceived the first Diesel-powered high-speed passenger train in 1934. Yet — as described in Romance of the Rails — when he was made chairman of the board of the Chicago Transit Authority, he realized that most urban rail was obsolete and he replaced all of Chicago’s streetcars and even some elevated lines with buses. He also was a catalyst for the formation of both Greyhound and Trailways bus systems.

Budd’s lesson is to use the most efficient and up-to-date technology available. That’s not 110-mph trains, whose technology dates back to the 1930s. Nor is it elevated rail lines, a technology that dates back to the 1890s. Chicago and Illinois need twenty-first century technologies, and they won’t cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to implement and maintain.