THE AVENUE FEBRUARY 22, 2010
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Now that we’re a full week past the initial high-speed rail announcement, we’ve taken the time to resurvey some of the elements of this massive investment. Demand is one of those elements and it’s critical to projecting ridership.
One method we’ve designed to measure HSR demand is corridor air travel. By offering specific boarding information, federal air data provides a stellar source of passenger travel information between any two metropolitan areas.
Using the data we published back in October, here is how the corridors receiving at least $200 million stack up. Keep in mind, the passenger numbers are over the 12-month period from April 2008 through March 2009.
One of the first stand-out elements is that two of the major corridors--Florida and Wisconsin--don’t maintain air service between their target metropolitan areas. For these corridors, the states are going to need cars to come off the road instead of than planes off the tarmac. Wisconsin does have the potential to substitute flyers between Chicago and Madison, but this will largely depend on the speed, quality, and regularity of service.
For the other six corridors, the flashing-light is just how much California is an outlier compared to the other four. The California numbers express just how dynamic a California corridor could be--and why the federal government should continue, if not expand, focus on the state.
Of course, one of the biggest stories is what the table doesn’t say: many of the country’s major sub-400 mile air corridors received no construction funding at all. These range from two giants in the Intermountain West--LA-Las Vegas and LA-Phoenix--to the Texas ‘Triangle’---Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio--to a Southeast connection between Atlanta and Charlotte. Not coincidentally, all three of these regions’ didn’t offer the most finalized of state plans.
Without publication of what went into each of these final selections, we’ll never know the role played by each metric. Moving forward, we’re confident these aviation corridor statistics can help steer federal investors to the best locations.
1 comments
Adie, This is really an important area or research and analysis. It would be interesting to see how much air and road traffic could actually be replaced by rail looking at factors like point to point traffic (excluding connections for longer travel), routes where rail can provide comparable door to door travel time (<150% of air or car travel), feasibility and ease of connections at end points, etc. I suspect the actual amount of viable potential ridership is pretty low relative to cost. For reference, this is the annual traffic volume on the Tokyo Osaka corridor in Japan. Highway 151 million vehicles HSR 145 million pax Air ~30 million pax A couple of things that are useful practical lessons from Japan. Air is gaining market share on rail for Tokyo Osaka. Anything longer than 3 hours on the train and air tends to get most of the traffic. Rail seems to be more utilized when people are traveling in and out of inner cities and connecting by subway, taxi or bus. Air seems to be preferred when people are connecting by rental car or their own car. In my opinion really high speed speed rail (>250km/hr) construction is too expensive relative to population density (ridership) in the U.S. so 150kmh on existing infrastructure is probably the most efficient, which means the sweet spot for the U.S. is routes where you have population nodes that are 150 to 400km apart. (Anything less people will drive. Anything further they will fly). The city pairs you mention are good ones. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
- dtohmatsu
February 22, 2010 at 10:13pm