American High Speed Rail advocates should be cost advocates.
In a country where transit is expensive, advocating less expensive transit is just as important as advocating for the transit itself.
Recently, Ray of CityNerd released a video entitled “Why North Atlantic High Speed Rail Is Still a Pipe Dream” where he discussed some of the details around a better high speed route between New York City and Boston, advocated for by a group called North Atlantic Rail. The video is really good on a macro level for making the case for such a service, but as you see in the title and as Ray discusses — it’s pretty unlikely it’s happening, and that’s too bad. (Alon Levy wrote a good blog post about one component of such a project here).
I wanted to write this post to highlight one of the huge problems with such a project, which is mentioned to be on the order of $100 billion. I think a lot of American high speed rail advocates aren’t given nearly enough attention to the fact that with a price like that. The bigger political lift is getting funding together, not building fast trains (especially in 2023), because fast trains are being built in other parts of the US, including Florida — not know for being progressive!
I talked about this issue to some extent in a previous video about the high cost of US mass transit projects:
The reality is, almost no major project currently happening in the US is being built for reasonable prices, and so even projects that are happening today would benefit from a more serious look at costs and best practice. But high speed rail projects in particular — major in scope and costs — would “benefit” even more, because perhaps if costs started coming down they would have a nonzero chance of actually being built.
When I look at a project like North Atlantic Rail, I can’t understand why the primary focus of advocacy isn’t on getting the cost of it down. To be clear, the project goes through dense urban areas, and would have a tunnel under Long Island Sound — things that would be expensive anywhere you build, but still far less expensive. Assuming the costs could be cut in half — which feels very doable to me given there are projects being built for far less than that in other developed countries — you will have dramatically increased the chance of such a project being built from basically every conceivable angle, especially if you try and build some of the components separately and get more high speed service running sooner than later.
This is basically the antithesis of California High Speed rail, where the expensive high-speed portions are being built away from population centres and aren’t going to be all that useful for existing high ridership rail services. In fact, I don’t think there are any plans for existing Amtrak California trains to use any of the infrastructure, even if it would speed them up. Of course, California’s project is also set to be at least $100 billion, and it won’t be done for decades if it’s ever done at all — this is what Paige Saunders refers to as a “slowspensive” project in his series on Montreal’s transit expansion.
Now, Ray mentions in his video that Secretary Pete at USDOT has said something to the tone of “I want America to be the global leader in high speed rail”, but that’s clearly ridiculous: Any country that a reasonable person would agree should qualify to be that has either 1) a LOT of high speed rail and ridership or 2) low costs for building new high speed rail, which tends to lead to #1. The US has neither of these and on #2 it’s getting worse seemingly every year. The fact that Pete isn’t going to the folks from the Transit Costs Project and asking them why California High Speed Rail costs more than the entire French TGV network built so far (at least as far as I know) tells you everything you need to know.
The long and short of it is that advocates should pay attention to the way the winds are blowing. High speed rail projects have been proposed all over the US, and they often have pretty solid public support, at least when they aren’t slamming into cars on a regular basis or costing $100 billion. Advocates need to tack in the other direction and realize that those costs and infrastructure decisions (driven by costs) are the main things stopping high speed rail from being built these days.
If politicians could deliver something good for a price that seems acceptable (the new “Gateway” tunnels into New York or East Side Access were both >$10 billion dollar projects, which should buy a lot of high speed rail at reasonable prices!), the public becomes more and more aware China’s huge network, and how comprehensive and convenient service is in places like Europe, Japan, and Korea. But they don’t believe it’s something the US can realistically have because $100 billion is a more or less unacceptable number — even if it still might pencil out at those prices. And of course, it’s a virtuous cycle: The less high speed rail the US builds, the more it will cost, and the harder it will be for everyday folk to understand why it’s such a good idea.
If you could get the costs down to something reasonable, you'd start to see individual states (not just California) building HSR on their own. It wouldn't require help from the federal government. Thus wouldn't be nearly as subject to elections going the wrong way and killing projects every 2 years. For that matter, I don't understand why the people building CHSR (or seemingly any transit anywhere in the US) don't go to the Transit Costs project themselves, regardless of what the federal government does.
All transit project leaders need to at minimum, read Bent Flyvbjerg's book