27/09/2022
Calling Out the Lies that Block High-Speed Rail in America
By Henry Teitelbaum, P3 Planet
Over the past year, countries across Europe have begun implementing bans on short-haul domestic flights in favor of high-speed rail to help reduce carbon emissions. Sadly, the US can’t participate.
This is primarily because over the past 60 years, fossil fuel interests have sought to undermine any and all zero-carbon transportation planning. The success of their efforts is most notably visible in today’s absence of high-speed rail in the US - a service that travelers across Europe, China, and even Morocco now enjoy. So while the rest of the world embraces the efficiency, convenience, and greater safety of high-speed rail travel, Americans are stuck with crowded roads and crowded skies, with no truly reliable option for lowering their carbon footprint.
Proven Technology
Japan has been running bullet train (Shinkansen) services since 1964 without a single fatal accident, and can now boast at least eight generations of bullet train technology and an HSR network that reaches every corner of the country. Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia are all now offering HSR services on major urban routes within their countries.
China, for its part, has spent the last decade building a larger network of HSR routes than all of Europe, including the world’s fastest scheduled high-speed rail train service.
Today, China’s new Beijing-Shanghai HSR line covers a distance longer than that between New York and Chicago in as little as 4 and a half hours 30 times a day. The US, meanwhile, continues to struggle with wholly out-of-date concerns about the viability of such a service.
The litany of wrong-headed excuses for America’s failure to embrace high-speed passenger rail services is long.
Nonsense Excuses
The environmental arguments tend to focus on the damage to cropland and the rights of landowners who might become forced sellers should the government invoke eminent domain to acquire property for track laying. But they tend to ignore the daily cost, both in terms of economic productivity and CO2 generation, that accompanies worsening traffic congestion on America’s roads and skies.
Opponents also deride HSR as a waste of public money and that highway expansion is a better use of infrastructure investment capital. This continues despite clear evidence that adding additional lanes on major highways typically induces demand so that automotive traffic congestion rarely improves. Moreover, many HSR routes have demonstrated a capacity for operating successfully without subsidies.
Another argument goes that the distances involved in intercity travel in the US are longer than in Europe and that the more rural distribution of the US population excludes many Americans from access to HSR. They also claim that demand for HSR in major US population centers will never be sufficient to financially support it without massive government subsidies.
These arguments are disingenuous at best because they overlook the considerable subsidies that both air and ground transportation have long been receiving either directly from the government or indirectly through subsidies to the oil & gas industry. They also ignore the tangible benefits to society that subsidies to rail infrastructure return in the form of of less pollution, less disease, and improved climate change resilience.
Doris Chevalier, chief executive officer of Paris-based infrastructure finance consultancy Infraboost, says other overlooked benefits of HSR investment include the long-term job creation and tax revenue that is generated through these large-scale public and private investments.
“High-speed rail construction offers a very diverse range of jobs in the short- to medium-term, while the operating and maintenance phase provides permanent roles that can be passed on to the next generation,” she says. “In France, for example, the first French TGVs projects in the 1970s today continue to create high-quality jobs, along with a knowledge base that supports capacity building."
Blind Opposition
The economic arguments against HSR that opponents are recycling today similarly pay no attention to the changing dynamics on the ground.
For example, the idea that the US is predominantly a rural nation is simply not true. Urbanization has been underway in America every bit as much as most other parts of the world, and today more than 82% of the US population now lives near or within cities.
High-speed rail financing specialists also point to improving prospects for private capital investment, which is increasingly global and tends to view HSR from a service perspective.
Jean-Christophe Barth-Coullaré, Executive Director of the World Association of PPP Units & Professionals, says “long-term investors today are focused on added value opportunities not just in HSR, but in multi-modal services.” In Switzerland, for example, he notes that single tickets that provide for seamless journeys to final destinations are already a popular convenience that saves passengers time and money. Opportunities also abound for creating more sustainable and profitable luxury passenger services, he adds.
Even the argument that HSR requires the seizure of vast tracts of private property is less compelling than in the past. The deployment of tunnel boring machines, the technology for which has advanced enormously in recent years, has reduced the need for eminent domain acquisitions, as well as “Not-In-My-Back-Yard” local opposition along planned routes.
Technology Changes the Equation
Britain’s High Speed 2 rail project linking London with Birmingham and northern England is just one current example of technology overturning these old assumptions. Giant self-contained mobile tunnel boring factories with the nicknames “Florence” and “Cecilia” are currently cutting tunnels as deep as 90 meters below the surface of England’s Midlands. These units not only dig holes, but line walls with concrete and lay track at a pace of 15 meters a day. In total, some 80 miles of tunnel excavation work is planned for the HS2 route, reducing not only the need for expensive overground viaducts, but allowing for speedier travel times due to a more direct path between destinations.
Technology advances are changing other assumptions about the viability of high-speed rail. China, which has laid more high-speed rail track than the rest of the world combined over the past decade, has spent two-thirds or less of what other countries have previously spent to deliver their rail infrastructure. The World Bank estimates that China has been able to bring the cost of HSR infrastructure down to $17m and $21m per kilometer through more efficient centralized planning, scaled-up volume production, standardized construction techniques, innovative tunneling and track-laying procedures, and of course, low cost labour.
While labour costs in the US are unlikely to ever fall to the level that China pays its workers, a host of other new technologies are also aligning to lower the cost of building and maintaining high-speed rail infrastructure.
Nano-fibers, 5G, and Hydrogen Fuel Cells
For example, nano-fibers can now be incorporated into concrete and rebar. This allows real-time data to be collected about the condition of tracks, signaling systems and local weather conditions, as well as predict when maintenance and replacement will be required.
Enhanced 5G mobile broadband is also ready for adoption into HSR construction, enabling not only the internet-of-things, but ultra-reliable low-latency communications for more efficiently managing large scale rail programs and monitoring performance, all while enhancing a level of public safety that is far ahead of other transportation modalities.
Yet another transformative development in rail technology has been the introduction of battery electric and hydrogen fuel cells into train locomotives.
These non-polluting transportation platforms feature uninterruptible on-board power supplies
that eliminates the need for expensive overhead electricity infrastructure.
Beyond HSR, both battery electric and hydrogen fuel-based motors offer the near-term prospect of replacing diesel locomotives on the many conventional train routes that are not electrified, thereby lowering train travel’s carbon footprint even further.
That’s a big plus when you consider that full adoption of zero-carbon automotive travel remains decades away and zero-carbon air travel is today mostly just a concept.
The Biden Administration has wisely put high-speed rail at the forefront of its agenda for investing in a 21st century infrastructure. After years of watching the world pass America by, he’s right to ignore the naysayers.
