Obama's High-Speed Rail Initiative

Even in the face of a massive and exploding federal deficit, and a Republican-controlled House that wants to to cut billions from the Federal budget, President Obama is proposing a six-year, $53 billion plan to expand high-speed rail in the US.

We have indeed neglected infrastructure projects in the US, so in general, even in this budget-cutting era, I am in favor of trying to find ways to bring our infrastructure up to date. But is high-speed rail really one of the essential infrastructure components?

Let's be clear - high speed rail is for passengers, not freight. Only passengers care that much about getting somewhere in a hurry - freight can travel at modest speeds and still get where it needs to go on time. But in fact trains are not very efficient for passengers. Train transportation is most efficient for dense bulk products, like coal or iron ore or densely-packed containers. People, in contrast, take up a lot of room for very little weight.

Or put another way, one has to haul many tons of passenger car along just to carry a few people, and that isn't actually very cost-effective, which is why in the end passenger service declined in the US -- it really isn't economically competitive. Today's Amtrak passenger train weights work out to around 1.75 tons per seat (train watchers figure these things out), which is a lot of weight to haul across the country just to carry one person. And of course fuel usage climbs non-linearly as speed increases, and track maintenance costs increase sharply the higher the operating speed.

So in fact high-speed rail travel is a little like supersonic passenger planes - very sexy, good for the national image, great for the jet-set elite, but economically just a big drain that needs heavy subsidies to even survive. I am disappointed that the Obama administration is so easily sold on such a questionable venture. Even old, slow Amtrak needs hefty subsidies to survive (About $32 per passenger as of 2010), even with ticket prices that approach air travel, so one can imagine the level of subsidies that will be needed to keep a high-speed rail line operating.

We would do far better to invest in better low-tech rail freight improvements than in this pie-in-the-sky high-speed passenger service. It would pay far better dividends in the end.