Where should Obama look for his high-speed rail revival? No further than the Acela rail services along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor-that is, according to Christian Wolmar of the NYTimes. Connecting Washington DC and Boston, the tracks offer the best “test case” for Obama to demonstrate high speed rail efficiency. Here are some highlights of the article:
The 450-mile trip from Boston to Washington takes almost seven hours and averages just 71 miles per hour, hardly faster than by car and uncompetitive with air.
How can Acela be improved without building an entirely new system? Money is needed to improve the overhead electric wires, straighten out curves and upgrade the track. And more trains are needed to increase trip frequency, reduce overcrowding and offer flexibility.
Basically, trains require money to run, not people and certainly not demand. Who’s money? Ours-the people not riding the train but paying for it.
At least that’s how the headline for this story about federal stimulus funds coming to North Carolina for high-speed rail projects should have read.
As this Heartland Institute article points out, high-speed rail lines are nothing to celebrate:
Nowhere in the world does high-speed rail make a profit. The director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris last year told The New York Times [NYT] only two high-speed rail lines – in France and Japan – manage to break even.
…
Even if high-speed rail projects could be built on time and within budget, a March 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office report concluded high-speed passenger rail would have little impact on the congestion, environmental, energy and other issues that face U.S. transportation.
Draining billions of dollars from private businesses and individuals to subsidize projects that almost never come close to paying for themselves and will have little impact on the nation’s transportation system will not speed the engine of economic growth. It will help grind the engine to a halt.
The fact that high-speed rail lines need subsidies in the first place indicates they are massive money pits. Subsidies mean that more resources are required to produce fewer goods – how is that good for economic growth? And now even the U.S. government admits high speed rail doesn’t mitigate traffic congestion or offer any tangible “environmental benefits.” But these projects do line the pockets of politically-connected construction companies and developers – what a boondoggle.
Once these projects are completed and begin bleeding money, who will be forced to continue to subsidize their operations?
If you wanted to increase travel efficiency between Raleigh and Charlotte, what is the better use of $520 million?
1. Upgrade a rail line (but not fully) that serves a few hundred people per day that could possibly grow to a couple of thousand people per day.
2. Replace the Yadkin River Bridge ($300M) and have $220 million left over to widen I-85 in Cabarrus, Rowan and Davidson Counties from 2 lanes to 4 which in some sections has a daily traffic count of 110,000 cars per day and is consistently the cause of traffic jams and accidents. (And as all you greenies out there know, traffic congestion leads to global warming global cooling climate change.)
Yep, trains win.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The N&O reveals (yet again) that it failed Economics 101. Taking cues from a new study put out by the Brookings Institution, the editorial praises the Southeast High-Speed Rail Corridor as the obvious choice to lighten air travel. The study concluded that 1.1 million people flew last year between RDU airport and either Charlotte or Washington D.C.
The solution to this “large” amount of air traffic—the Southeast High-Speed Rail.
But, the editorial fails to consider how many North Carolina travels will actually jump on this high-speed train (which actually isn’t high-speed, by the way). Ridership numbers consistently show that the average North Carolinian will take a round trip train only once every 27 years.
So, why does the high-speed rail “make sense to lighten the load on airports” when no one is actually riding the train? It doesn’t. Nor does it make sense to spend more than $1.3 billion of taxpayer money to upgrade the 400 miles of North Carolina tracks needed to implement the high-speed rail. Before the N&O publishes nonsense like this, please consider actual ridership numbers. Let’s pay attention to what the market signals as the best transportation alternative for the traveler, like say, better roads for our Fords and Chevys.