Last year’s Moving Forward Act, which was passed by the House but not the Senate, would have included $29 billion for Amtrak over six years, about triple what Amtrak has been getting. As the Moving Forward Act proposed to spend about $1.5 trillion and Biden’s vague infrastructure plan is supposed to cost $3.0 trillion, some people assume that plan will include about $60 billion for Amtrak and high-speed rail.
That wouldn’t be enough to complete the California high-speed rail project, must less build a real national high-speed rail network. As I’ve noted before, the cost of such a network would be in the trillions. High-speed rail supporters hope to get projects going in a couple of states that will make members of Congress from other states demand high-speed rail money for their states or districts.
What will travelers get out of all this spending? The 328 million Americans in 2019 traveled almost 15,000 miles by automobile, 2,300 miles by commercial airliner, 164 miles by public transit (of which 50 miles is by bus), and 19 miles by Amtrak. The official number for all bus, including transit, intercity, charter, school, and so forth, is 1,100 miles per capita, but I suspect the real number is 400 (350 for non-transit buses). Walking and cycling are officially 100 and 26 miles, but this only includes trips that have destination such as work or shops; when recreation and exercise trips are included, they are probably at least double that. That brings total per capita travel to about 18,000 miles.
It is unlikely that tripling Amtrak’s budget would triple Amtrak’s ridership, but let’s say that it does. That would increase Amtrak’s per capita miles to 57, about 0.3 percent of all passenger-miles in the country.
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Spain has the biggest high-speed rail network in Europe, yet the average resident of that country traveled only about 380 miles by rail. France does better at 935 miles. The only country whose per capita rail passenger-miles are greater than France is Switzerland, whose railways carried almost 1,500 miles per capita even though it doesn’t have any high-speed trains. Of course, many of those were tourist miles.
I’ve been corresponding with a transportation expert in China who says that China’s rail system carried residents an average of 650 miles in 2019, compared with 1,500 miles for automobiles. What all of these countries had that the United States does not was a large base of rail riders before they built high-speed rail.
Because this country lacks that base of riders, even if the United States were to spend trillions building high-speed rail, it would be wildly optimistic to think that Americans would end up riding trains as many miles as people in Spain, even more so as much as people in China or France. But let’s say we can get as high as France, 935 miles per capita per year. That’s still only about 5 percent of all passenger travel in the U.S. That’s simply not worth it.
