THE VINE JANUARY 27, 2010
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So it looks like tomorrow, after the State of the Union, President Obama is planning to announce how the $8 billion in stimulus money for high-speed rail projects will get spent. As noted earlier, a line between Tampa Bay and Orlando will probably be the first lucky recipient, getting federal funds to supplant private investment. But what about the rest?
According to Bloomberg, the Obama administration may end up distributing the funds far and wide—hitting 13 projects across 31 states in total, mostly for incremental improvements to existing lines. But is that spreading the money too thinly? In a new paper from the Progressive Policy Institute, Mark Reutter argues that high-speed passenger rail has never taken off in the United States precisely because Congress has always sprinkled money across as many states as possible—ensuring that no single HSR project gets enough funding to become viable. It might make more sense to concentrate funds on just a few mid-sized HSR projects (like the Tampa-Orlando line), and prove that they can work, rather than hedging on dozens of smaller projects that never quite get off the ground.
And where are the optimal places for high-speed rail? Wired has a nice map looking at the five most promising networks—in Florida, California, Texas, the Northeast, and the Midwest. All of those regions have the population and geography to support viable HSR lines right now, though they all have challenges, too. A Midwest rail system, for instance, would have to be built atop an existing freight network that would limit top speeds; meanwhile, Texas's sprawling cities are less than ideal for rail. Still, if you wanted to bet on one or two successful projects to show that HSR really can work in the United States, those might be good picks. But we'll see what the administration decides on Thursday.
(Flickr photo credit: hiradong83)
3 comments
HSR is great. The best way to travel by far. I love it. The only problem is that there is almost no where on the planet where it is economical....especially in the U.S. The only successful corridor in the world is Tokyo Osaka which benefits from a very dense and very unusual bi-polar population distribution. The traffic on this corridor is 40 or 50 times the traffic on Boston-NYC-DC. The U.S. ought to focus on improving bus, car and air transport.
- dtohmatsu
January 27, 2010 at 12:48pm
But it depends what you mean by successful, no? If the HSR lines are expected to pay for themselves in a narrow sense, then I agree, none of these projects are likely to be a success. But that's not the only criteria. Spain, for instance, gets a lot of ancillary benefits from high-speed rail (particularly the way it drives development and reduces transportation emissions), even though none of its lines turn a profit. And they consider the system is a success. http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-vine/learning-spains-bullet-train-experiment
- Bradford Plumer
January 27, 2010 at 2:47pm
I do agree that the development argument is an important one, but then you need to compare rail against against road and air, and I think the argument breaks down because HSR generally does not have freight capability and there is almost always parallel road and air capacity on any HSR corridor. Thus you have to satisfy the criterion of the HSR generating enough additional passenger traffic so that the development benefit of that traffic outweighs the subsidy that is required to build and operate the HSR. Again, this is where geography trips you up. Selfishly, I would rather be able to travel by train at taxpayer expense, but I think when you look at inter-city transport from the macro level, dollars are better spent on improving public transportation links in and out of airports, automated freight and passenger services on roads etc.
- dtohmatsu
January 27, 2010 at 7:02pm