Trains kind of suck in America. They’re slow, expensive, and simply don’t exist in certain parts of the country. What has caused America to fall so far behind in this mode of transportation when it is so commonplace in large areas of Europe and Asia?
The answer to this problem is rather complicated but it can be boiled down into three major categories: geographical, financial, and political.
The United States is huge. It’s so big that it is hard to fully grasp its vastness compared to other countries. The contiguous 48 states alone are big enough to cover a large portion of the European continent. The distance from New York to Los Angeles, the United States’ two largest cities, is roughly 2,700 miles. By comparison, in order to travel that same distance in Europe you would have to start in London and go all the way to Tehran.
Europe’s small size gives it somewhat of an advantage when it comes to urban planning and transportation: population density. Although roughly the same size as the United States geographically, it is home to a little over twice as many people. With a more concentrated population, railroads have to travel shorter distances to reach population centers. More access means more demand which means it’s easier to justify constructing a rail line between any two points.
The main advantage of high-speed rail is a shorter overall travel time compared to airplanes when taking into consideration the time it takes to drive to an airport, check in, and pass through security. This advantage however only exists over shorter distances. No currently existing high-speed train would ever be able to get you from New York City to Los Angeles faster than flying there, but it could theoretically get you faster to somewhere like Chicago or Atlanta.
Most cities in the United States have strict zoning laws which means that homes are kept separate from businesses so someone in the US will have to travel further to get to a grocery store than someone in Europe would. Zoning laws helped contribute to suburban sprawl, which has led to most cities in the US to average a population density lower than 15,000 people per square mile. Some European cities on the other hand, with their more compact urban cores, have population densities of over 55,000 people per square mile. This population sparsity combined with a poor public transportation system means most people in US cities are reliant on cars and would often have to drive to a train station to begin their journey. Thus another benefit over air travel is gone: If I have to drive to the train station, how is that any different than driving to the airport?
High-speed rail requires electrified railway lines in order to operate. The United States’ railroad system is currently the largest in the world with over 140,000 miles of track already built, out of which only 1,000 miles are electrified. Comparatively, 70,000 of the European Union’s 135,000 miles of track are electrified and 55,000 out of China’s 80,000 miles of track are electrified. Updating the existing lines of track would be very expensive and the cost of just building new lines outright would be astronomically more so.
Amtrak, the United States’ only passenger train operator, only has one high speed rail network along the Northeast Corridor of the United States connecting five major cities from Boston to Baltimore. This high speed rail network is incredibly outdated and a trip from Washington DC to New York costs $49 and still takes 3 hours and 30 minutes, only 30 minutes faster than if you just drove. By comparison, a similar trip in France from Rennes to Paris only costs €27 ($30) and take 2 hours. A recent proposal by Amtrak estimates that it would cost roughly $151 billion in order to build track up to the specification of France’s high-speed rail network along the Northeast Corridor. This amount may seem massive but it’s much worse when you break the cost down to $60,000 per foot of high speed track. Since the Northeast Regional line is one of the few routes that is actually profitable, Amtrak has little incentive to spend a ton of money renovating it.
The main problem with renovation however is railway ownership. Amtrak only owns 730 miles of the 21,300 miles of track that it operates on. The rest of the track is owned by massive freight companies like Union Pacific and BNSF. Whenever railway lines become congested, Amtrak trains are given lowest priority on their journey and must give way to the larger, slower freight trains belonging to the company that actually owns the tracks.
Amtrak’s trains also tend to get stuck behind the much slower freight trains en-route to their destination preventing them from being able to reach their top speed. Trains on the Northeast Regional route can reach speeds up to 125 miles per hour but are rarely able to maintain this speed due to traffic and older, inadequate tracks forcing trains to travel on average at 70 miles per hour. If trains along this particular route were able to maintain their top speed, the aforementioned 3.5 hour trip from DC to New York gets cut down to barely over two hours, a 40% improvement.
All of these factors have led Amtrak to have notoriously terrible on-time performance, especially when traveling East to West. Business travelers cannot afford the uncertainty of possibly arriving 2+ hours late to their destinations.
Thus a vicious cycle is formed: Without any money, Amtrak is unable to improve their currently broken system, which then leads to low ridership, which leads to Amtrak continuing to not have any money.
France’s rail system, the SNCF, does so much better particularly because taxpayers pay for about half of the operating cost of each trip, whereas Amtrak is designed to be a for-profit, government subsidized corporation. Amtrak is treated like the neglected youngest child who gets no money, and until that changes, Amtrak is doomed to continue being slow and expensive which is a great segue into the final reason high-speed rail is practically non-existent in America:
In 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $787 billion stimulus package to try to jolt the nation’s economy out of a recession. $11 billion of this stimulus money was to be dedicated to the future of US railways, including $8 billion earmarked for the construction of brand new rail lines. Priority would be given to “projects that support the development of intercity high-speed rail service.”
$11 billion may seem like a lot to you and me, but it would be a drop in the bucket of what would be needed as Eric Peterson, President of the American High Speed Rail Alliance writes that the proposed network “could cost as much as $1 trillion to complete over the next several decades, particularly if it is pursued in the incremental manner described by the [Obama] administration.”
These plans were derailed (no pun intended) after the 2010 mid-term elections saw Republicans win in a landslide with a net gain of 63 seats in the House of Representatives as well as winning gubernatorial races across 11 states previously controlled by Democrats. Many of these Republican candidates ran as part of the “Tea Party” movement, running on a platform of reduced taxes and lower government spending, an idea directly at odds with massive infrastructure projects.
Shortly after Tea Party darling Scott Walker became the governor of Wisconsin he took $810 million specifically earmarked for a Madison-to-Milwaukee high-speed line and redistributed the funds instead to improving the state’s roads. Not to be outdone, another Tea Party candidate, Florida Governor Rick Scott, returned $2 billion to the federal government meant to help build a line between Tampa, Orlando, and Miami and cancelled the project after the planning phases were already underway.
This does not mean that the bill was a complete failure, however. With the funds allotted by the government, Vermonters now have 150 miles of brand new across the state to use and in Illinois, two bridges on the Chicago to Milwaukee corridor were been replaced, allowing 16 daily passenger trains to cross them without needing to slow down.
At this point I usually try to offer a solution as to how things can be better, but to be honest, this seems to be a problem that doesn’t seem like it can be resolved.
When freight rail lines were laid down in the United States back in the 1800s, people flocked to be near them, thus forming large, relatively nearby cities like we see along the Northeast Corridor (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Baltimore). The problem this now poses is that the densely populated cities now have astronomically high land values and acquiring the land needed to install brand new, high speed rail would be too much to bear in the minds of the average taxpayer. The reality is that freight trains got here first and Amtrak, which wasn’t founded until 1970, was too new to be able to lay down its own tracks before land values became too high.
Beyond that, the United States is simply too large. A massive transcontinental high speed rail system would never really work here as even at high speeds trains would take far too long to entice people to use them over much faster planes. High speed rail in America’s only future lies in smaller, intrastate networks like the ones currently under development connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco and Houston and Dallas. Those projects however, are currently threatened due to public support.
Spending tons of money on infrastructure just isn’t “sexy” enough for most taxpayers. Americans painfully take for granted the vast network of roads and highways we have here. It’s hard enough to secure the funding to make sure our bridges and dams don’t collapse, much less invest in an expensive new system many Americans already feel is obsolete, despite it working for Europe, China, and Japan.
