Even as President Obama wants to build an American high-speed rail network to match the one in France, the French have begun to question the wisdom of their own high-speed rail system. French trains are operated by a government-owned corporation known as SNCF (short for the French translation of National Railway Company of France).

By 1997, building high-speed rail lines had put SNCF €28 billion — about $38 billion in today’s dollars — in debt. Although this debt was backed by the full faith and credit of the French government, it was pretty clear that rail fares would never repay it. Since the European Union requires that member countries not subsidize transport or other things that would give companies in those countries an unfair advantage over those in other members of the EU, in 1997 France separated SNCF into two companies: SNCF would continue to operate trains, while a new company named Réseau Ferré de France (RFF, which translates to French Rail Network) builds and maintains the tracks.

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Wisconsin was the fourth-highest (after California, Florida, and Illinois) recipient of federal high-speed rail money, receiving $823 million to initiate Milwaukee-to-Madison service. The state’s application proposes to use this money to operate six trains a day between the two cities as a continuation of service from Chicago to Milwaukee.

The proposal does not call for high-speed (faster than 125 mph) or even moderate-speed (faster than 80 mph) rail. Instead, the top speeds will only be 79 mph until even more money is spent improving signaling to allow for “positive train control” (which insures trains will automatically stop when necessary even if the engineer fails to stop the train).

With three stops between Madison and Milwaukee, the average speed will be just 58 mph. That’s a bit higher than the current Badger Bus, which averages 42 to 52 mph depending on which bus you take. But the rail route is longer than the bus route, which means the train will take longer (1 hour 40 minutes) than the fastest bus (1 hour 30 minutes).

In addition, the bus stops in the middle of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, while current plans call for the train to terminate at Dane County Airport on the edge of town, with transit connections to downtown and the university. This gives even the slower (1 hour 50 minute) buses a huge competitive advantage.

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At last, a new reason why high-speed rail won’t work: bad architecture. According to this Chicago Tribune architecture critic, Chicago’s Union Station once had a beautiful, skylit concourse between the waiting room and trains, but it was replaced by a couple of skyscrapers. Now travelers have to walk through low-ceilinged tunnels that are confusing, apparently because you can’t see the sun. This means high-speed rail is doomed to failure — unless, of course, we spend a few more billions on beautiful new stations.

Actually, I’ve been to Union Station many times and never got confused in the tunnels (there are really only two directions to go). But leave it to an architect (or architecture critic) to say that we can make high-speed rail work by spending more money on building design.
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Chicago used to have six trains stations — Central, Grand Central, LaSalle, Northwestern, Dearborn, and Union — and now it is down to one (though remnants of some of the others still exist). But I suspect that, even if we spend a trillion or so on high-speed rail, that one will still be adequate to handle the traffic.