On April 7, our loyal opponents at the American Public Transportation Association are holding a virtual conference on high-speed rail. The conference is sponsored by several companies that expect to profit enormously if the United States builds high-speed rail, including:
- Alstom, a French manufacturer of rail cars for French and Italian high-speed trains, as well as conventional and transit rail cars for, among others, Honolulu, Ottawa, and many other cities;
- Systra, a government-owned French engineering firm that does the engineering for new TGV routes as well as for French transit lines;
- HDR, an American engineering company that talked many cities into building streetcar lines by falsely claiming that the streetcars would lead to economic development; and
- HNTB, another American engineering firm that has help build or rebuild rail transit lines in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and other cities.
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The environmental impacts of high-speed rail: An 80-foot right-of-way times 8,600 miles is 130 square miles of land disrupted by rail construction; times 20,000 miles is 300 square miles of disrupted land. Photo from the California High-Speed Rail Authority.
Speakers on the conference agenda include representatives of Amtrak, BART, Cascadia Rail (which supports high-speed rail in Washington), Texas Central (which is fast running out of money promoting a Dallas-Houston high-speed rail line that it can’t afford to privately build), and other transit agencies and state departments of transportation.
When I got out of college 47 years ago, I went to work for environmental groups helping them fight large corporations that were seeking subsidies to do things harming the environment. Today, many of those same environmental groups have become supporters of large corporations that are seeking government subsidies to do things harming the environment. I suspect that these self-proclaimed environmentalists consider themselves grateful that companies like Alstom, HDR, and Systra would go out of their way to support their promotions of high-speed rail. In fact, they (the environmentalists) are just a bunch of patsies.
Don’t think high-speed rail will be harmful to the environment? Even if we ignore the estimated 19,000 tons of greenhouse gases emitted per mile of high-speed rail construction, high-speed rail will do enormous disruption to the land. California specifies a minimum of 80 feet for the right-of-way in order to allow for the tracks, electrical facilities, and maintenance access.
When multiplied by the 8,600 miles in Obama’s 2009 high-speed rail plan, that means an area of land roughly the size of Atlanta will be cleared of vegetation and trenched, tunneled, or bridged, leaving behind disgruntled former property owners. If we go to the plan supposedly endorsed by zoomers, which is almost 20,000 miles, then we’re talking about clearing and/or disrupting an area roughly the size of New York City.
Yet all of these disruptions are completely unnecessary because we already have a transportation system, known as the airlines, that can move more people to more places at higher speeds for less money with almost no land-use impacts. Of course, railcar manufacturers and engineering and design firms don’t care about that. They just want to profit from government subsidies.
I was curious what they are building in the photo above. It’s the “Wasco Viaduct”, which brings to mind something from Europe, or perhaps a California Coast highway bridge, but is instead a Brutalist-style monstrosity:
https://youtu.be/nzvIowHK4bs
“But in the long run it’s worth it” they will say.
“But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.”
John Maynard Keynes
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3689/john_maynard_keynes_in_the_long_run
“An 80-foot right-of-way times 8,600 miles is 130 square miles of land disrupted by rail construction; times 20,000 miles is 300 square miles of disrupted land. ”
In the United States, the Interstate Highway standards for the Interstate Highway System use a 12 ft .
12 ft x 4.1 million miles of road, that’d be 9300 square miles. Add The United States having as many as two billion parking spots, that’s another 7,000 square miles……….Never mind garages both private and public, gutters, medians, etc. 30,000 square miles devoted to automotive infrastructure. In sunbelt cities 1/3 of all land is dedicated to cars.
Yes, interstates take up a lot of land too. But they carry 20 percent of all passenger-miles and 20 percent of all ton-miles shipped in the U.S. High-speed rail is not likely to ever carry more than 2 percent of passenger miles and 0 percent of ton-miles.
But I was trying to show the hypocrisy of environmentalists who oppose roads because of the damage they do to the landscape but support high-speed rail despite the damage it does to the landscape.
Maintenance costs. Not mentioned anywhere, because the big bucks is in building these things, not keeping them operating correctly.
High speed needs a lot more maintenance than regular railroads. Just think of those bumps and grinds you hear and feel at 50 mph. At 120-150 mph, the tracks have to be maintained a lot better or those bumps and grinds are unlivable and the train gets bumped off the tracks and we have a disaster. This is bound to happen within a few years because we all know how well railroad tracks are maintained.
But the guys who built these things will be long gone with the government money and the politicians who enabled them will never be held accountable.
“But I was trying to show the hypocrisy of environmentalists who oppose roads because of the damage they do to the landscape but support high-speed rail despite the damage it does to the landscape.”
And this thing is turning out to be an enormous eyesore. Really, the most ridiculous thing in the world. A 175 mile (or whatever precise length it is) segment of bullshit obsolete rail, built at an obscene cost, plopped down in the middle of what might as well be Nebraska.
Readers may be interested in this commentary/analysis of bonds used to pay for maintenance and upgrades to the Ohio Turnpike — which is financed entirely by tolls.
Fitch Rates Ohio Turnpike’s 2021 Ser A Sr Rev Bonds ‘AA’
https://www.fitchratings.com/research/infrastructure-project-finance/fitch-rates-ohio-turnpike-2021-ser-a-sr-rev-bonds-aa-12-01-2021
Compare this to many projects that have been moved up to stimulate the recovery …
A portion of expenditures that can be delayed without affecting the condition of the turnpike have been pushed out by one-year in response to coronavirus-related revenue declines.
I think your estimate of land consumption for high speed rail is way low, based on data in the Texas Central final environmental impact statement. The Texas Central FEIS says ”the LOD of Build Alternative A in the Final EIS is approximately 9,173 acres, a reduction of approximately 9 percent from the Draft EIS.”
LOD is limit of disturbance, which includes other land consumption like power distribution, maintenance facilities, access roads and stations. (It’s possible some of that land is for temporary construction staging.) That works out to 38 acres per mile.
Your number for an 80 foot-wide strip, 130 square miles for 8600 miles, is 9.7 acres per mile.
So the LOD of Texas Central is 3.9 times higher than your estimate.
At a time when people are learning to love the bunny slipper commute, does anyone really expect travel demand to recover to a point where this even pretends to make sense?