California's High Speed Rail Project Runs Out of Money

Tampa is not a good city for HSR and airport connections. The airport is on the west side of the city, and it would have been better if it was on the east side, where the tracks could terminate without snaking through the city or tearing up buildings and densely crowded neighborhoods. Miami is almost as bad, unless they want to build HSR at the edge of the swamp (which they probably don't).

 

The northeast corridor (especially New York to D.C.) is where HSR belongs. Northern cities have subways or elevated city trains to get from the train station to the city center and suburbs. And the cities (New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C.) have high populations, are in nearly a direct line, and within a relatively short distance (less than 240 miles total). The train stations should be in or near the airports to allow easy transit from flights to rail and vice versa (and to take advantage of common services, like parking, rental cars, security, etc.). Once this section of track is up and running, consider extending the east side of the line to Boston, and extending the west side to Chicago and Detroit (through Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo). Those sections of track would be less able to pay for themselves, and less able to compete with airplanes, so you would want to verify that N.Y. - D.C. was successful before considering the extensions. An extension from D.C. to Atlanta would be a lower priority.

What people don't realize is that HSR needs to primarily compete with air traffic, and, to a lesser extent, cars. A trip from D.C. to N.Y. would need to have a ticket price of at least $100 to have any chance of paying back the tens of billions of dollars spent on the system (it wouldn't be $20). This would be less than what you would spend on a typical airline ticket. It would take 100 flights a day (last time I checked, a few years ago) out of the skies, and put a base load of at least 3 million passengers a year into the trains. You would get about the same number from retiring the slower and more dangerous Acela trains (which share the track with freight rail and have road crossings). And at least a million a year could be taken off of I-95. Maybe a million people a year would use the train to fly into one city and out of another (like flying from Jax to D.C., and then N.Y. to London, for example). There would also be an increase in travel between cities if HSR were more convenient than flying or driving: New York would seem like a distant suburb of D.C. at 95 minutes away, and vice versa. And trains would leave every 15 minutes or so, so you shouldn't have to wait too long before you are moving toward your destination. There is also no worry about traffic on the interstate or taxi runway, or bad weather.

 

High speed rail actually "works" most everywhere it's been installed, but most trains run much less than half full (closer to empty than half full, in fact). So they require heavy government subsidies to continue operating, and have no chance of paying back the capital required to build the track and stations, and buy the train sets. Only two HSR lines in the world "turn a profit": Tokyo to Osaka, and Paris to Lyon. You can see why when you analyze the populations of the cities and the distance between them. Tokyo - Osaka has about 190,000 people per mile (including metro population), and Paris - Lyon has over 50,000 people per mile, I believe.

 

When you're using the new transportation system to operate parallel to an existing system, like air travel, then yes, it makes sense to decide whether it turns a profit. The U.S. has demonstrated that HSR is not a necessity. It is something that would be good to have, if enough people used it. You could allow for some federal subsidy to gain the flexibility of having two transportation systems for medium-distance travel, or to convert fossil fuel use to electricity, but the bulk of the cost of the system should be borne by the users of the system, not the taxpayers or the federal debt. Obviously, the federal government has to supply the initial funding to get the project started, and get the first sections of track going, but the expectation should be that there would be enough income to pay for operation of the system and construction of future segments.

Roads and highways are pretty much a necessity in modern society. You would not get your groceries or get to work without them. They should be paid for through taxes on gasoline and diesel (and electricity, as electric cars become more popular).

If you have no way of judging if enough users are using high speed rail to make it worth the investment, how do you make an effective decision on whether to expand the service to other cities? Do you just let powerful Senators and Congressmen re-route the system to their hometown with no regard for the cost? Because that's a good way to spend trillions for a bunch of empty trains cruising around the country, which is a massive waste of money.

 

Actually, we do have the density in the northeast corridor. The combined metro populations of New York, Philadelphia, and D.C. (plus the city populations of Baltimore and Newark) are 33.5 million. Divide this by 237 miles, you get 140,000 people per mile, which is better than Paris to Lyon, but not quite as good as Tokyo to Osaka. It should easily be feasible in this corridor, especially if there is light rail to take people from the train station to other parts of these cities.

 

After riding some of the world's high speed trains, I would not call Acela high quality rail service. I'm sure it usually gets where its going on time. But it is poor competition for air travel with speeds averaging 77 mph. And it shares the rails with freight trains and has road crossings, making it inherently dangerous. High speed rail is on elevated track, so no chance of collision with cars and freight trains. As such, it can easily average close to its full speed, typically around 225 mph (three times faster). It's like comparing a Tesla to a Model T.

Tampa-Orlando-Miami is a no-go (a failure waiting to happen), in my opinion. The HSR system is not supported by light rail, and the airports are in the wrong place in two of the cities. (The Deep South is also not the right place for high speed rail in general, because it is too hot to walk a few blocks to your final destination for most of the year because of the extreme heat and thunderstorms.)

California can't make up its mind on the details of the system (stops everywhere, or no stops, etc.), and cannot control costs at all. Add in the potential for earthquake damage, and the project fits all the definitions for a boondoggle.

 

Yes, but would the external benefits actually be realized if the trains drove down the tracks mostly empty? Because many of the HSR trains around the world do exactly that. The last time I was on Taiwan's HSR train between Taipei and Kaohsiung, I would estimate it was 15-20% full. The external benefits are only benefits if (lots of) people actually get on the train. I don't have a problem with a partial subsidy for the benefits you mention, but the expectation should be that passengers pay the bulk of the costs. And from what I've seen, the companies that are paid to estimate ridership on HSR train routes are almost as far off on their estimates as the capital project cost estimators that estimate the total project cost.