“Amtrak spent 11 years and $450 million to save Acela riders 100 seconds,” reads a headline from Vice. Amtrak began a project in 2011 to upgrade a 24-mile stretch of the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey to accommodate speeds of 160 miles per hour, instead of the 135 miles per hour it was operating under.
That project was supposed to take six years, which is appalling on its own, but actually was completed this year, five years late. Well, not actually completed, either: The article says only 16 of the 24 miles are ready for faster service. “The other eight miles are expected to be ready in 2024, a mere seven years late on a project expected to take six,” it says.
The math works out to this:
A stretch of track that used to take 10 minutes and 30 seconds to travel will now take about nine minutes. The Acela takes 75 minutes to get from Philadelphia to New York, so this time savings amounts to approximately two percent shorter travel times between those two cities.
Except it won’t actually save time between those two cities, at least for travelers who will transfer to the New York City subway. That’s because Amtrak’s $1.6 billion project to build the Moynihan Train Hall extension to Penn Station leaves passengers farther away from the subway than the old layout, requiring them to walk one or two minutes longer to reach the subway. “In other words, the $1.6 billion Amtrak station project negated the time savings of the $450 million Amtrak high speed rail project,” the article says.
We’re getting schooled by France:
It also took Amtrak longer to do these 16 miles than it takes other countries to build entirely new high speed rail lines stretching hundreds of miles. To pick just one example, in 2011, the same year the New Jersey project was awarded, France began construction on the Sud Europe Atlantique, a 210-mile high speed line with 188 miles of new construction between Tours and Bordeaux and a travel speed of 200 mph. It started running trains in 2017.
But fear not: This government corporation, which has proven time and again that it’s incapable of spending taxpayer money wisely or effectively, was rewarded with $66 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure spending package. As an example of what that funding might be used for, Amtrak is considering adding service between New Orleans and Mobile, Ala., which would take over an hour longer than driving between those two cities, carry 26 passengers per trip according to Amtrak’s own 2015 ridership estimate, and interrupt freight rail at the increasingly important Port of Mobile. Or consider the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel on the Northeast Corridor, which was built in two years in the 1870s, that Amtrak predicts will take twelve years and $2.7 billion to replace. Imagine how long it will take and how much it will cost once the project actually gets going.
If we doused the $66 billion in gasoline and lit it on fire, at least it would look cool for a few minutes.