Today President Obama unveiled his $13 billion plan to enhance passenger rail service. Last month I wrote about why rail transit doesn’t work. The nation is in desperate need for infrastructure funding, but high speed rail is just a waste of money. It’s not really surprising that Obama would be in favor of rail, but he should know better.
Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110- to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take fewcars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future.
Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by amere 0.7 to1.5 percent–but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions.
The Randal O’Toole study has a lot more information about the fallacies of high speed rail. Richard Nadler over at The Corner has a couple of points on this topic as well.
1) Genuine high-speed rail — 150-to-200 miles-per-hour, as found in Japan and parts of Europe — requires separate rights of way: broad curves, very shallow grades, and no 60-mile-per-hour freight sharing the track. It is VERY expensive to engineer and maintain.
2) If you cut corners, as Obama implied, by using existing infrastructure, you come out with a system that will do 90-mph max, and will gum up existing freight traffic, which is much slower.
As I’ve mentioned before I’ve come a long way on this topic. Until I did the research I thought high speed rail was a great idea. The facts tell a different story. I think part of the problem on this topic is that it’s a very populist idea. People go to Europe and fall in love with the system there but never really look at the problems. It’s kind of like those old communist press junkets. From the right perspective Soviet Russia looked like a successful experiment. The devil was in the details. Spending on rail is a waste. There’s a reason why Amtrak isn’t successful. We need to concentrate on roads.
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