If the nation is going to reduce its out-of-control spending, the first step is to stop spending money on things we do not need. Despite President Obama’s call in his State of the Union speech for linking 80 percent of the nation by high-speed rail, it is hard to imagine a more unnecessary program.
For example, people who travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco — along the route planned for one of the nation’s first high-speed-rail projects — already have choices. They can fly, drive, take the bus, or travel by train. True, some would prefer to tax their fellow citizens so that they can have another choice, high-speed rail. But indulging this desire would be as legitimate as funding government grocery stores for people who prefer not to shop at their local grocery chains.
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Among intercity transport modes, only Amtrak is materially subsidized. User fees pay virtually all the costs of airlines and airports, which (together with connecting ground transportation) link any two points in the nation within a day. The intercity highway system goes everywhere, and nearly all of it was built with user fees paid by drivers, truckers, and bus companies.
High-speed rail is a budget buster. Japan, with the world’s leading system, illustrates the financial devastation that high-speed rail can produce. For 25 years, Japan borrowed to build a system serving the ideal rail corridor, nestled along a single coast with a population of more than 75 million people. Ridership was artificially increased by high gasoline prices and one of the highest highway tolls in the world. Yet this modest system, only twice as long as proposed California system, played a major role in driving up a gargantuan rail debt that was transferred to Japanese taxpayers. The rail debt added more than 10 percent to the national debt. This is akin to adding $1.4 trillion to the U.S. national debt.
Virtually everywhere high-speed rail has been constructed, financial liability has fallen to the taxpayers. In Taiwan and the United Kingdom, taxpayers assumed billions of dollars in private debts for much more modest high-speed-rail systems than Japan’s.
All of this could have been avoided. Through the years, high-speed-rail cost overruns have been well documented. Most recently, research by Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, Nils Bruzelius of Stockholm University, and Werner Rothengatter of the University of Karlsruhe (a former president of the influential World Conference on Transportation Research) found that passenger-rail cost overruns above 40 percent were common and that overruns above 80 percent were not uncommon. Overruns can go even higher: On Korea’s high-speed-rail project, they were between 200 and 300 percent, the president of the country’s rail system said.
High-speed-rail cost escalation has reached these shores. Even before the first shovel has been turned, California’s high-speed-rail costs have risen at least 50 percent, inflation adjusted. The cost estimates for the first approved section of the Los Angeles–to–San Francisco line, a “train to nowhere” from Corcoran to Borden, indicate escalation beyond $45 billion.
In Florida, boosters tell taxpayers that their liability for the Tampa to Orlando high-speed-rail line would be only $280 million, and that, somehow, a private bidder will shower additional billions upon them to pay any cost overruns.
Boosters also claim that high-speed rail will provide substantial environmental benefits, reduce highway-traffic congestion, and ease air-traffic congestion. Yet, as Joseph Vranich and I showed in the Reason Foundation’s “Due Diligence” report on California’s high-speed-rail proposal, the cost per ton of greenhouse gas removed would be from $1,900 to $10,000. This is 40 to 250 times what the International Panel on Climate Change research indicates greenhouse-gas removal should cost ($50 per ton). Our estimate does not account for the revised (much lower) ridership projection. Even the rosy reports produced by boosters show that high-speed rail would remove only a small percentage of cars from the roads. The hope of reducing air congestion is just as elusive because travel origins and destinations are so dispersed in the United States and because the number of people forsaking air travel for high-speed rail will be small.
Voters gave the new Republican House of Representatives a mandate to cut spending. Zeroing high-speed rail out of the federal budget may be the litmus test. If Congress fails to stop this costly and unnecessary program, it would call into question the commitment to spending reduction.
— Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public-policy consultancy in St. Louis.
Cost overruns are bound to be astronomical if we're going to try to wedge high speed rail lines through the Atlantic Seaboard and New England states, just for right of way acquisition prices alone. Same will be true for the California coast, as well as across Florida.
Separate and apart from the monetary costs of purchasing the land or easement rights, or condemning it through protracted legal proceedings, think of the social costs to citizens being displaced, lost farmland (what's left of it!), and business relocations.
Think, too, of the costs of potential infrastructure relocations in the path of the new rail lines -- electrical transmission, telecommunications, natural gas and even water/sewer lines. All must be accounted for, and if not, the inconveniences and safety hazards of damaging these lines during rail line construction will have to be reckoned with.
Lest I forget, there may be an environmental impact lawsuit or two brought by green activists. I'll betcha a number have already been filed in California.
Are the abstract thinkers thinking of such things?
Why do we need this. What pent up demand is not being met? I'm not even sure that this is something we need if the country were on stable financial footing. It also seems that this proposal overlooks the fact that our country is quite large. High speed rail has worked well in countries like Japan and France which are much smaller geographically than the US. It doesn't seem financially feasible for the US.
--"It is hard to imagine a more unnecessary program than high-speed rail."
The entire "Green" industry comes to mind. All of it. Every last bit.
Our financial contributions to assuage this bizarre guilt and self-loathing are rather repugnant when considered in perspective of an emerging industrialized China and India; who neither recognize nor adhere to any "world-imposed" pollution standards.
I call FALSE! on "User fees pay virtually all the costs of airlines and airports". Airports, roads and highways, and seaports ALL receive subsidies. It is estimated that user fees only cover 60% of the US highway budget. There are elements of Amtrak that are antiquated and/or obsolete. But a balanced transportation makes a hell of a lot more sense that building more and more lanes of highway, NOT paid for by their user fees. Please stop this pro-highway propoganda - it's nauseating.
One of the big ideas being pushed to justify the FL rail route is "You'll be able to travel from Orlando to Tampa in one hour."
Presently, you can do the same in 1.5 hours in a car. Assuming I-4 isn't clogged up, which is a big assumption. Considerably less, closing on the one hour, if you break the speed limit.
Spending such immense amounts of money to (theoretically) save 30 minutes doesn't seem like such a good idea.
Mr. Cox is a long-time and well-known anti-rail ideologue. He has to be taken with a huge helping of salt, beacause his zealotry often overwhelms objectivity. E.g., the idea that roadways and airway systems aren't subsidized out of general tax revenues is hilariously false.
But Mr. Cox reaches the right result on HSR, for entirely wrong reasons.
The HSR schemes being booted about are foolish ideas, but for very different reasons that the weird ideology of Mr. Cox. These are bad ideas simply because they offer a very poor return on incremental invested capital.
High SPEED rail is high COST rail. Speed costs, exponentially. A 90 mph line is not "slightly" more expensive than a 79 mph line, it's maybe half again as costly, to build and to maintain. A 110 mph line is more than twice a 90 mph line. And real 200-mph HSR costs more than $100 million per mile just to build. To justify these costs, promoters have to use "imaginative" forecasts of usage. But the numbers never really pan out, unless a national government sees social value in underwriting the project, as has been the case in Spain, France, Russia, Taiwan and China, among others.
In the US, no one seems willing to put up the many tens of billions that a single HSR project would consume, whether we can afford it or not. By contrast, in states where a conservative and incremental program of phased development of faster and more reliable, but essentially "conventional," 79 mph rail services has been pursued (e.g., California, Washington, Illinois, North Carolina and New York) we see robust, affordable and heavily-used rail systems. The only thing missing from these is interconnection into even more robust regional networks allowing for much greater usage by an even bigger cross-section of the traveling public.
These rail projects have provided positive returns on investment. HSR schemes cannot.
It drives Mr. Cox apoplectic to consider that the U.S. rail services that have the highest load factors and the greatest outputs of passenger miles (i.e., real transportation output), hence the greatest returns on invested capital, by very large margins, are the western transcontinental long distance trains. But that's a whole 'nother story.
I'm writing this from Germany. Western Europe supposedly is a model for rail.
I can take a train from my home in Kaiserslautern, to Mannheim, 75 minutes away, for around 40 to 50 euros. One way.
Meanwhile, a small private airline, Ryan Air, operating out of Frankfurt Hahn can get me to the Greek Islands, for under 20 euro, round trip.
And the Germans acquired much of the land for their trains, when land could be seized without compensation. When there were no environmental studies or snail darters about, to block construction.
Finally, there was a horrific train wreck in Berlin the other day. All I need to know about this addled plan I learned in Germany.
Well, for a menagerie of lies, it actually isn't very good. The full take down is rather too long to put in a comment box, ending up at seven pages and 2,700 words, so let's try this instead:
Rail in a country as spread out as the US is even more ludicrous than the more congested Japan or Europe. The recently installed metro rail in Houston, TX costs taxpayers an average of $20 per ride to only go an average of 3.5 miles. Tickets are only $1.25, making the system 95% taxpayer funded. Rail is nothing more than an excuse for the government to spend money with the illusion of providing needed transportation. However, its an outrageously expensive and antiquated form of passenger transport.
Other countries are building high speed rail and electrifying their existing railways and here in the UK reopening closed railway lines because the oil supplies that are needed to power autos, trucks and planes are declining and will not meet future demand or affordability. In the coming decades while China and Europe whizz around on fast trains - Americans will be walking!
Monorails are a great idea ... but a rail system obviously needs to mesh with the existing infrastructure. You need to target specific cities as candidates. For example, the monorail in Seattle was built 50 years ago for the world's fair but it only runs a short distance - it's a tourist trinket. No one had the foresight to expand it - to the airport for example - when it would have been cheaper and easier to do so.
This article is just plain nonsense. Unless the US wants to continue to fall behind its competitors, investment in its infrastructure is a necessity. Any new infrastructure surely has to look forward to a world where all major countries have high speed rail and can do business much more efficiently than by today's means. And it also has to look to a future with much lower carbon emissions. That's why HSR is so important to the US. And those who argue against it are just short-sighted and building a future of high rates of unemployment and poverty.
Amazing how Mr. Cox ignores the subsidies that the airlines get (FAA air traffic controllers, airport maintenance and construction, and 9/11 Funds) as well as the massive highway spending. Living here in California, our Amtrak California corridor routes have been a huge success. Even Amtrak's long distance network, meagre as it is, serves a real purpose to many small towns. It's easy to bash on Amtrak--but the truth is that it costs $2 billion annually--a trifle compared to the billions spent on other forms of transportation. What we need in this country is a balanced transportation plan that includes rail. While HSR is great, I'd rather see more train frequency and that can be done for a mere fraction of HSR construction.
There are plenty of arguments to be had on the merits and efficiency of high speed rail, but I can't see how anyone can say with a straight face that air and auto travel aren't subsidized, on a day where congress is working on multi billion dollar airline bills.
Rather than high speed rail, I have a far cheaper policy which could be implemented immediately: high speed roads. Wouldn't it be nice to able to get on the highway, crank the car up to 100 mph, set the cruise control and not have to worry about the cops. To some this doubtless sounds like a recipe for carnage, but the Germans seem to manage it. About a third of their highway network has no mandatory speed limit; drivers are free to drive as fast as they wish. And they do, with speeds over 130 mph not uncommon. Despite this, the accident rate is lower than on America's highways. Rather than target speeders, police enforcement there concentrates on lane discipline and tailgating.
Even here in the US there has been progress. The 55 mph national speed limit is, mercifully, long gone, with limits now as high as 80mph in some places. Despite this, road casualties are at their lowest since 1950. (And in the period 1996-99, when it too had no mandatory highway speed limit, Montana saw its number of road casualties reach its lowest ever level.)
Limit free highways could be implemented almost immediately and at little cost; all that would be necessary would be to tear down some speed limit signs! It would also make car travel a viable alternative to air travel - with its check-in and security hassles and other delays - up to a range of about 500 miles, or about the same distance as between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
@Ron H
California is about the size of France -- nobody mentioned a panAmerican HSR network (that would be absurd).
More generally, I would question any American "exceptionalism" when it comes to transportation: transportation is one of the most globalized industry (think Toyota, Boeing, Airbus, GM...) and attitudes towards travel are equally rational among countries.
Baring some major immigration shifts, the U.S. will hit 400 million later this century. For its citizens to enjoy the same mobility they have experienced in the last century a new revolution in technology will be necessary if we are to avoid 10-15 lane Interstates and mega-airports across the landscape.
1) Automobile convoying (robotic control)
2) Expanded commuter airlines (STOL or tiltrotot)
3) High speed rail
That's the future. We may not need HSR today, but we will need it someday. In the long run there is no avoiding these choices.
