COURTESY : www.cato.org
High speed rail
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wants to make the United States the “global leader” in high‐speed rail.1 That’s like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives—all technologies that once seemed revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today.
High‐speed trains were rendered obsolete in 1958—six years before Japan began operating its first high‐speed “bullet” trains—when airlines started commercially operating the Boeing 707 jetliner, which cruised at 600 miles per hour (mph).2 In comparison, Japan’s first bullet trains had a top speed of 130 mph.3 Today, the world’s fastest intercity trains have top speeds of about 250 mph.4 Since trains typically make multiple stops, their average speeds are much lower.
What made Japan’s trains appear feasible when they were introduced in 1964 was the fact that air travel cost more than rail travel: in the United States, average airfares per passenger‐mile were more than twice average rail fares.5 In addition, three‐fourths of all passenger travel in Japan was by train, so there was a ready source of customers.6
The situation in the United States today is completely different. Airfares averaged 13.8 cents per passenger‐mile in 2019.7 By comparison, Amtrak (the only operator of intercity passenger trains in the United States) fares averaged 35 cents per passenger‐mile while fares on Amtrak’s high‐speed Acela were more than 90 cents per passenger‐mile.8 Amtrak carried only 0.1 percent of all passenger travel in the United States, so existing rail customers provide a minimal market for faster trains.9
In 2009, President Barack Obama proposed an 8,600-mile high‐speed rail system.10 With 22,000 miles of high‐speed rail routes, China is currently the global leader. If Buttigieg’s idea of becoming the world leader means building more than China, it would take a massive effort.
The International Union of Railways defines “high‐speed rail” as new rail lines capable of going 250 kilometers per hour (155 mph) or upgraded existing lines capable of going 200 kilometers per hour (125 mph). Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, between Boston and Washington, qualifies as “high speed” because it is an upgraded route whose trains can run as fast as 150 mph. Most other Amtrak trains are limited to 79 mph, but the company does have a few routes where trains can run 90–110 mph. A company called Brightline is building a route between West Palm Beach and Orlando that will be capable of running trains at 120 mph. This paper considers trains that go slower than 80 mph conventional and trains that go at least 80 mph but slower than high‐speed trains moderate‐speed.
This paper looks at the pros and cons of high‐speed rail in general and specific high‐speed rail plans for the United States in particular. It also reviews the results of the Obama administration’s high‐speed rail spending. Finally, it suggests what Congress or the Department of Transportation should do instead of funding high‐speed rail lines.
The Case against High‐Speed Rail
Several high‐speed rail plans for the United States have been introduced in the past two decades. Obama’s 8,600-mile plan consisted of routes in six disconnected networks in the Northeast, South, Florida, Midwest, California, and Pacific Northwest. In 2010, Obama presented a revised plan that included several additional routes, including Phoenix–Tucson, Cheyenne–El Paso, and Minneapolis–Duluth, for a total of about 12,000 miles. In 2020, the U.S. High Speed Rail Association (USHSR) released a plan consisting of 17,000 miles of true high‐speed rail (220 mph) in a single, fully connected network serving 43 states, supplemented by 11,000 miles of moderate‐speed rail (110 mph) reaching those 43 states plus five more.
At 22,000 miles of high‐speed rail routes, China has roughly twice as many miles as the rest of the world combined. For the United States to become the world leader, as Buttigieg proposes, it would have to build even more miles of high‐speed rail routes than the USHSR proposed. Here are 10 reasons all these plans are bad ideas.
1. High‐Speed Rail Is Too Expensive
California has spent an average of more than $100 million per route‐mile building 220 mph track on flat land.The latest estimates project that the entire 520‐mile route will cost $100 billion, of which $20 billion is for 120 miles of flat land and $80 billion is for 400 miles of hilly or mountainous territory. That works out to $200 million a mile for hilly areas.
At these costs, Obama’s original high‐speed rail plan would require well over $1 trillion, while the USHSR’s plan would need well over $3 trillion. Building a system longer than China’s would cost at least $4 trillion.
High‐speed rail proponents are likely to predict lower costs, but costs always end up being higher than originally projected. In 1999, the 520‐mile Los Angeles–San Francisco line was projected to cost $25 billion.19 The most recent projection is $100 billion. Even after adjusting for inflation, costs have nearly tripled. Cost overruns are typical in other countries as well. Britain’s 345‐mile London–Scotland HS2 high‐speed rail line was originally projected to cost £32.7 billion (about $123 million per mile) and is currently expected to cost £106 billion ($400 million per mile). Even Japan’s original bullet train had a nearly 100 percent cost overrun
This paper begins with a look at the history of federal transportation policies and continues with an evaluation of how they relate to each of the main forms of transportation in the United States.
Once built, high‐speed rail systems are expensive to maintain. Long‐run capital renewal requirements include replacement of rails and trainsets as frequently as every 10 years. Transit agencies in the United States currently have a $176 billion maintenance backlog, mostly for rail infrastructure.23 A country that can’t keep its urban rail systems in shape is not likely to keep even more expensive high‐speed rail lines running.
Rail planners often ignore these capital replacement costs. The California High‐Speed Rail Authority is legally required to earn enough revenues to cover its operations and maintenance costs. The agency’s business plans estimate future capital replacement costs (which it calls “lifecycle costs”), but when it projects the future profitability of the project, it only counts operations and maintenance costs, not lifecycle costs, against the revenues. This means taxpayers will be on the hook to cover those costs even in the unlikely event that the system manages to cover its operations and maintenance costs.
Passenger revenues probably won’t even cover operating costs. Amtrak claims that the Acela, its high‐speed train between Boston and Washington, covers its operating costs, but it doesn’t count its second‐largest operating expense: depreciation. By ignoring depreciation, Amtrak has managed to build up a $52 billion maintenance backlog in the corridor.25 If Amtrak’s high‐speed rail corridor through the most heavily and densely populated region of the country can’t pay for its operating costs, then no other corridor will be able to do so either.
Where all this money will come from is even more problematic. In 2008, California voters agreed to allow the state’s high‐speed rail authority to sell $9 billion worth of bonds without identifying any source of revenues to repay those bonds. The authority’s original business plans anticipated that private investors would be willing to offset as much as $7.5 billion of the construction costs in exchange for being able to profitably operate the line, but no investors have been willing to risk their money based on the state’s projections that the line can operate at a profit. The state also hoped to sell carbon credits to help pay for the line, but revenues fell well short of expectations. Beyond this, California hopes for more federal funding, all of which would come from deficit spending.
Proponents often compare their high‐speed rail ambitions with the Interstate Highway System, yet that system cost far less to build and didn’t require any deficit spending. The 48,500 miles of interstate highways connect every state and every major urban area in the contiguous United States. Constructing the system cost about $530 billion in present‐day dollars, making the average cost of $11 million per mile well below that for high‐speed rail. If built today, it might cost a little more but would still be less than a fifth of the cost, per mile, of high‐speed rail lines.
Federal gas taxes and other highway user fees covered nine‐tenths of the cost of interstate highways; state highway fees paid for the rest. The interstate system was also built on a pay‐as‐you‐go basis, with no bond sales or other debt financing. Since high‐speed train ticket revenues are not likely to cover operating costs, much less capital costs, all of the construction cost would come from deficit spending.
While interstates make up only 1.2 percent of highway miles in the United States, they carry close to 20 percent of all passenger‐miles and at least 16 percent, and probably closer to 20 percent, of freight ton‐miles. In contrast, even the most extensive high‐speed rail networks would carry less than 2 percent of passenger‐miles and no freight. One projection by high‐speed rail proponents estimated that Obama’s 8,600-mile high‐speed rail plan would carry 25 billion passenger‐miles per year, which is less than 0.5 percent of all passenger travel in the country. Since the routes in the Obama plan were the ones most likely to succeed, doubling or tripling high‐speed rail miles would result in less than double or triple passenger‐miles. Thus, it is unlikely that high‐speed trains would ever carry as much as 2 percent of passenger travel. Because of the lightweight equipment required for high‐speed trains, such trains are incompatible with heavy freight trains for safety reasons, so such routes would carry zero freight.
2. Dedicated Infrastructure Is Wasted Infrastructure
Unlike high‐speed trains, motor vehicles and aircraft required only incremental expansion of the infrastructure they used. In 1900, when the United States had only 8,000 registered automobiles, the country already had 2.3 million miles of road, mostly unpaved, for them to drive on. As autos became more popular, gas taxes and other fees paid by auto users covered the costs of paving roads and expanding the highway network. Similarly, when the first planes went into commercial air service, they could land in any open field. As air travel became more popular, airlines used their profits and air ticket fees to improve airports and air terminals.
In contrast, high‐speed trains require that the high‐cost infrastructure be put in place first. Moreover, unlike highways and airports, which are shared by passenger, freight, and national defense vehicles, high‐speed trains can only be used for passengers, making them far less cost‐effective. The incremental nature of highways and air travel made it possible to build infrastructure as revenues were collected without a serious risk to taxpayers that the projects would fail.
The differences in infrastructure requirements explain why air travel costs so much less than rail travel. For most of the lengths of their journeys, the only infrastructure modern airliners require is air traffic control. High‐speed trains require extensive infrastructure that must be built and maintained to highly precise standards.
The requirement for dedicated, high‐cost infrastructure is a problem common to the pipe dreams of many mass transportation enthusiasts, whether they are promoting light rail, monorails, maglevs, hyperloops, or personal‐rapid transit. These systems are all far more expensive to build than highways and can’t do nearly as much.
3. It’s an Energy Hog
The USHSR has claimed that a single gallon of fuel can move an entire high‐speed train 6,600 miles, or all the way from New York to Los Angeles and back. This is nonsense unless the organization means “one gallon of lubricating oil plus 250 megawatts of electricity.” Most other claims about high‐speed rail’s energy efficiency are similarly misleading or wrong.
It takes a lot more energy to move a train at 220 mph than to move one at conventional speeds of 60–80 mph. “The power required increases with the cube of the train speed,” notes engineering professor Alan Vardy. To partially make up for this cube law, high‐speed trains are built especially light, but they still require more energy to move. The East Japan Railway Company, which operates both high‐speed and conventional trains in Japan, says that moving a high‐speed train car one kilometer requires 57 percent more energy than a conventional train car.
Most high‐speed trains are powered by electricity, which brings up another inherent inefficiency. Because of losses in generation and transmission, electrical generation plants must consume three units of energy (such as British thermal units, or BTUs) to deliver one unit to customers. Most estimates of high‐speed‐train energy consumption are based on the energy delivered to the train, not the energy required to generate that power.
Many comparisons of the energy efficiency of high‐speed trains with planes assume both are equally full. But, prior to the pandemic, airlines filled 85 percent of their seats while Amtrak filled only 51 percent of its seats. That’s because most airline flights are nonstop, so the airlines can base the size of the plane on the projected demand for each individual route. Most passenger trains, however, make many intermediate stops, and the trains must be sized to meet the maximum demand along the route. As a result, many trains tend to be relatively empty for much of their journeys, greatly reducing their energy efficiency.
Rail proponents also generally assume that competing modes will be no more energy efficient in the future than they are today. In fact, the Department of Energy says that airliner fuel economy has improved at the rate of 2.9 percent per year since 1970 while intercity passenger trains have improved at only 1.7 percent per year.Because airplanes are not tied to one type of infrastructure the way high‐speed trains are, they can make improvements much faster than railroads.
The biggest factor working against the energy efficiency of high‐speed rail is the huge amount of energy required to build it as well as to periodically replace infrastructure such as rails and power facilities. Airports are practically the only infrastructure required for airlines, but high‐speed rail lines need mile after mile of roadbed, ties, rails, power supplies, signals, and stations to operate. Even if high‐speed train operations used somewhat fewer BTUs per passenger‐mile than airlines, the high energy costs of building and replacing infrastructure would more than make up for that savings.
High‐speed rail construction also releases a huge amount of greenhouse gases, particularly for concrete ties, steel rails, and other construction materials. One study predicted that building California’s 520‐mile line would release 9.7 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, or 18,650 tons per mile. Assuming that California’s high‐speed trains would fill, on average, 50 percent of their seats, the study estimated that operating those trains would reduce greenhouse gases but that it would take 71 years to repay the construction cost. Since rails, concrete ties, and other infrastructure must be replaced or rebuilt every 30–40 years—and even more frequently on lines with frequent train service—and since such replacements would require the release of more greenhouse gases, the savings would never make up for the cost.
Even if we ignore construction emissions, high‐speed rail does not appear to offer any environmental benefits. Outside of the West Coast and a few other states, most of the electricity that would power U.S. high‐speed trains is generated by burning fossil fuels, so rail wouldn’t significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions at all. While green‐energy advocates hope to eventually replace fossil fuels, adding trains to electrical demands would simply increase the time and effort required to build a non‐fossil‐fuel electrical system.
4. It’s Slow
Jetliners typically cruise at 500–600 mph. Of course, takeoffs and landings are slower, resulting in slightly lower average speeds. But high‐speed train average speeds are also a lot lower than the 220 mph or so top speeds that proponents like to trumpet. Part of the reason for the slower train speeds is that they need to slow down in places for safety reasons and for intermediate stops. Amtrak’s Acela may have a top speed of 150 mph, but between New York and Washington, its average speed with stops is barely half that, and even the one nonstop train averages only 90 mph.In other countries, average speeds are typically about 70–80 percent of top speeds, so trains with top speeds of 220 mph may have average speeds of around 150–175 mph, which is well below the average speed of airliners.
Rail advocates argue that rail downtown‐to‐downtown times are competitive with planes, but this is only important where there are lots of downtown jobs. New York has 1.9 million jobs near Penn Station, and Washington, DC, has more than 400,000 jobs near Union Station, so this argument may be valid in this corridor. But the jobs in most other American cities are far more dispersed, with an average of 8 percent of urban jobs located in central city downtowns, where many train stations would be located. Many major cities are also served by multiple airports, and when all the jobs and residences near those airports are counted, they can greatly outnumber those located in or near downtown. The areas around the Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Burbank airports, for example, have twice as many jobs as downtown Los Angeles.
The biggest factor slowing down air travel is the time required to get through airport security. Yet, security systems can be streamlined for a lot less than it would cost to build high‐speed rail. For a modest fee, for example, the Transportation Security Administration’s PreCheck program allows frequent travelers to swiftly bypass many security steps.
If high‐speed rail ever became a significant mode of travel, it also would require security systems. Wait times to pass through security to ride the Eurostar from London to Paris, for example, can sometimes be 30 minutes or more.
5. It Doesn’t Go Where You Want to Go
The Obama administration’s 8,600-mile high‐speed rail network was really designed as six different and disconnected systems. Even within each system, the routes were incomplete: travelers could get from Chicago to St. Louis and from St. Louis to Kansas City, but there was no planned direct route from Chicago to Kansas City.
USHSR’s proposed high‐speed rail system would correct only a few of these problems. It still doesn’t include, for example, a 220 mph route from Chicago to Kansas City. The 220 mph network misses several urban areas with more than 500,000 people, and even the 110 mph system skips many urban areas with more than 100,000 people.
People driving on an interstate freeway can get off the freeway at any exit and access the nation’s other 4.1 million miles of roads. Once rail passengers arrive at a station, they must find some other mode of travel to reach their final destinations, greatly reducing the convenience of the system.
6. It Won’t Get Many People Out of Cars or Planes
The most heavily used high‐speed rail lines in the world, including those in China, Europe, and Japan, gained their riders from conventional trains, not from autos or airplanes. The United States doesn’t have enough conventional train riders for high‐speed rail lines to succeed.
When Japan opened its first high‐speed rail line in 1964, nearly 70 percent of passenger travel was by rail and only 12 percent by automobile. Although Japan’s lines are considered highly successful, today only 25 percent of passenger travel is by rail and nearly 70 percent by auto.
The three European countries with the most high‐speed rail lines are France, which opened its first high‐speed rail line in 1981; Germany, which opened its first in 1991; and Spain, which opened its first in 1992. Since then, all three have built many lines, with Spain’s system extending the most miles. Yet, as shown in Figure 1, none have seen rail reduce automobile or airline travel. At most, money‐losing high‐speed rail lines reduced the market share of profitable bus lines.https://e.infogram.com/e1ae6934-468d-47f4-b397-eabcff309b6f?src=embed&wmode=transparent
Rail advocates sometimes claim that the opening of high‐speed rail lines has led to a reduction of air service in those corridors, as if the replacement of profitable airlines with unprofitable trains is to be applauded. But the reality is that air travel in Europe has massively increased thanks to the introduction and expansion of low‐cost air carriers. While data sources are inconsistent for earlier years, between 2010 and 2019, air travel grew 260 percent faster than rail travel in France, 63 percent faster in Germany, and 56 percent faster in Spain.
Information available about China is not as detailed as about Japan or Europe, but automobile ownership in China is growing much more rapidly than rail ridership. In 2005, China had 21.3 million passenger cars. By 2019, this had increased by more than 10 times to 340 million, a growth rate of 19.2 percent per year. By comparison, rail ridership has been growing at only a third of that rate, or 6.4 percent per year. While China still has fewer cars per capita than the United States, it has more total motor vehicles. The rapid growth in auto ownership is likely mirrored by a similar growth in driving, showing that high‐speed trains are not reducing auto driving. To enable these motor vehicles to travel around the country, China has built 40 percent more miles of freeways than the United States.
In both Asia and Europe, aggressive construction of new high‐speed rail lines has failed to make a dent in driving or flying. At best, it has slowed the decline of the importance of rail travel in those regions. But if the goal is to save energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or achieve other social goals, building cars that are more energy efficient would do more than building high‐speed rail.
7. There Is No “Sweet Spot”
A fundamental precept behind high‐speed rail is that there is a “sweet spot” of distances between cities in which high‐speed rail will thrive as the distance is supposedly too long for auto travel and too short for air travel. The Federal Railroad Administration, for example, claims that this sweet spot is between 100 and 600 miles. This claim is entirely speculative, and there is no evidence that it is true. On one hand, many short‐distance routes are served by numerous airliners each day. On the other hand, the distances people are willing to routinely drive continue to grow.
Before the pandemic, at least 35 to 45 flights per day (depending on the day of the week) flew the 240 miles between Dallas and Houston, and nearly that many are going today. Most of these flights are provided by Southwest Airlines, which doesn’t use a hub‐and‐spoke model, so many if not most of the people on those flights were only going between Dallas and Houston. Similarly, Alaska Airlines had about two dozen flights a day each way between Seattle and Portland, whose airports are less than 170 miles apart. Both Portland and Seattle are hub cities for Alaska Air, so many if not most travelers on these planes were not connecting with other planes.
Amtrak often brags that it carries more people than the airlines carry between New York and Washington, which are 230 miles apart. But it admits that it really has only 6 percent of the intercity travel market in the Northeast Corridor, with airlines carrying about 5 percent and the other 89 percent going by highway.
The coronavirus has increased people’s willingness to take long auto trips as an alternative to mass transportation. At the same time, driver‐assist systems such as adaptive cruise control are making driving less stressful and increasing people’s tolerance for such long trips. With the livery service Waymo having self‐driving cars for hire in the Phoenix area and Ford, GM, and Tesla working hard to catch up, the time‐cost of auto travel is likely to sharply decline before the United States can build much of a high‐speed rail network.
8. It Won’t Help and May Hurt the Economy
Studies have found that high‐speed trains can generate new economic development near the stations where the trains stop. However, the same studies show that economic development slows in communities not served by such trains. On a nationwide basis, high‐speed rail is thus a zero‐sum gain: as a study of the proposed California high‐speed rail line concluded, “The economic development impacts of the California HSR project are likely to be more redistributive than generative.”
The paper adds that if higher‐density development is more productive than low‐density development, then the high densities encouraged by high‐speed rail might result in a net gain. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led people to question claims that high‐density development is needed for economic productivity and whether they want to live and work in such densities.
Realistically, to produce actual economic growth, new transportation infrastructure must generate new travel or shipping that wouldn’t have taken place without the infrastructure. The Interstate Highway System, for example, stimulated billions of passenger‐miles of new travel and billions of ton‐miles of new shipping that weren’t taking place before the highways were built.
To generate new travel, a new transportation system must be faster, more convenient, and less expensive than existing systems. High‐speed rail fails all these tests, being slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and more expensive than both. On that last point, airfares average less than 14 cents per passenger‐mile, and Americans spend an average of 25 cents a passenger‐mile on driving, while Amtrak fares for its high‐speed Acela average nearly $1 per passenger‐mile.
Far from boosting the economy, most countries that have built high‐speed rail systems have gone heavily into debt to do so. Even if the first lines make economic sense, political pressures demand that the countries build more and more lines that are less and less sensible. Financing these lines requires huge amounts of debt that can significantly harm the national economies.
China has built more miles of high‐speed rail than any other country and has gone more into debt doing it. At the end of 2019, China’s state railway had nearly $850 billion worth of debt, and most of its high‐speed rail lines aren’t covering their operating costs, much less their capital costs. As a result, China is slowing the rate at which it is constructing new lines.
France’s state‐owned railroad has piled up debts of more than $50 billion and has been repeatedly bailed out by the government. About half the debt is due to operating losses, and half is due to the expense of building new high‐speed rail lines.
Spain has built its high‐speed rail system with an availability‐payment public‐private partnership. Officially, the private partner has gone into debt by $18.5 billion. While the country is obligated to pay the private partner enough money to repay its debt, the debt isn’t on Spain’s books, which allows it to evade eurozone debt limits.If the EU changes its rules, however, Spain would be in serious trouble.
Japan provides an object lesson for what happens when a country has a rail debt crisis. In 1987, state‐owned Japanese National Railways had a debt of $550 billion (in today’s dollars), much of it due to political demands to build money‐losing high‐speed rail lines. The government privatized rail lines that were profitable, continued to subsidize those that weren’t, and hoped to recover some of the debt by selling railway property. But Japan was in the midst of a property bubble—at its peak, the few hundred acres making up the Tokyo Imperial Palace was estimated to be worth more than all the land in California. Government plans to sell former railway land contributed to the bubble’s collapse, and the government ended up absorbing more than $400 billion in railway debt. Together, these led to at least two decades of economic stagnation.
Despite having to absorb the losses from lines built before 1987, the Japanese government has continued to build more high‐speed rail lines. Typically, the national government pays two‐thirds of the cost while local governments pay a third, and the lines are then leased to private railroads for a fraction of what it would take to repay those costs.
9. It Takes Decades to Plan and Build
The California legislature created a high‐speed rail commission to study the possibility of a rail line in 1994. Construction didn’t begin until 2015. At that time, the authority projected it would be able to begin operating high‐speed trains from Los Angeles to San Francisco by 2028. However, because of cost overruns and the pandemic, the authority now projects completion no earlier than 2033, nearly 40 years after planning began. Not all high‐speed rail lines may take this long, but two decades seems a likely minimum.
A lot will happen in two or more decades that could completely nullify the claimed benefits of high‐speed rail. The pandemic is likely to reduce people’s eagerness to use various forms of mass transportation even after most people are vaccinated. Driverless cars will reduce the cost of travel time because people will be able to work, socialize, or enjoy entertainment while they travel in personal vehicles.Electric aircraft could reduce the dollar and environmental cost of short‐distance air travel These and other uncertainties make big‐budget, high‐risk projects even less likely to succeed.
10. A Source of Political Corruption
As with any megaproject, high‐speed rail is a tempting target for people who would illegally or unethically divert government dollars to their own political or economic gains. In 2011, a fatal high‐speed train crash in China was attributed to design flaws and hasty construction. This contributed to China’s arrest and conviction of the state minister of railways, Liu Zhijun, for embezzlement, accepting bribes, and conspiring to murder someone who threatened to expose him.
In 1974, Kakuei Tanaka had been prime minister of Japan for only 2.5 years when he left office under a cloud of scandal and corruption and was eventually convicted for accepting bribes and directing government contracts to businesses in his prefecture. One of the biggest projects he promoted was the Jōetsu high‐speed rail line.This line cost far more than Japan’s first bullet train, yet it carries only a quarter as many passengers.
Similar political pressures have already influenced high‐speed rail plans in the United States. For example, the Obama administration’s revised, 2010 high‐speed rail plan included a line to Duluth, Minnesota, which has only 120,000 people in its urban area. Not coincidentally, at the time the map was issued, the chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee was from Duluth.
Politics also influenced the California rail project. Many people wonder why California started building high‐speed rail in the Central Valley, which has the fewest people along the route. The answer goes back to 2010, when the Obama administration gave California a high‐speed rail grant. Rep. Jim Costa (D‑CA) was running a tough re‐election campaign, so Obama required that funds granted to California be spent in or near Costa’s district and allowed Costa to announce the grant instead of the secretary of transportation, who usually makes such announcements. Costa won by only 3,000 votes, so the grant may have made the difference to his campaign.
An Archaic and Obsolete Technology
The Tokyo–Osaka high‐speed rail line supposedly made money, but it was built across fairly flat territory when construction costs were low and in a corridor with some 60 million people who did nearly all of their intercity travel by train. The United States has no such corridors.
High‐speed rail is an obsolete technology because it requires expensive and dedicated infrastructure that will serve no purpose other than moving passengers who could more economically travel by highway or air. The United States should not make the same mistake as China, Spain, and other countries that have gambled their economies on this archaic form of travel.
