Around the world, high-speed trains zip from city to city, sometimes at speeds exceeding 250 miles per hour, dropping off hundreds of passengers in cities’ downtowns. But in the United States, the vision of efficient, fast, and environmentally friendly travel remains a dream.
Japan built its high-speed railway more than 50 years ago, an engineering marvel then and now. The Shinkansen (a term coined by the Japanese) connects the nation’s largest cities with remarkable efficiency, with average delays of less than a minute. China has 33,500 miles of high-speed rail through the countryside, connecting coastal cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as vast inland areas. European railways connect the continent well, serving both backpackers and executives rushing from one country’s financial capital to another on trains like the London-Paris Eurostar.
Meanwhile, the United States is waiting on the situation. Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner says it’s not because the company lacks the technical know-how to build high-speed rail, but because it doesn’t have the appetite to give money to politicians.
“This is an economic story, not a technical story,” he said. luck In an interview. “There are no technical barriers to building high-speed rail. But what is needed is political and financial coordination to make the investment.”
Aging infrastructure has slowed passenger rail service in the United States, a problem that has been hampered by decades of political disagreement and early lobbying by the auto and airline industries for competing infrastructure investments. It got worse. In some sections of the Northeast Corridor, Reconstruction-era tracks reduce train speeds to just 30 miles per hour.
Even the $66 billion in federal funding for rail in the 2021 Infrastructure Plan is just a drop in the bucket of the money needed to build high-speed rail. The cost of building such a network across the United States would be about $4 trillion, according to the libertarian Cato Institute, which does not support building a passenger rail network because it is too expensive.
“We have to decide to do it, and it’s that simple,” Gardner said. “The federal government of the country has to make a decision. That’s what happens. That’s what happens everywhere in the world.”
This does not mean that infrastructure development costs are wasted. On the contrary, we are upgrading passenger rail infrastructure across the country, from the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest to Texas and Appalachia. This funding will also go toward new vehicles, both rolling stock and locomotives. Amtrak has already invested $7.3 billion in 83 new trains from the mobility division of German industrial giant Siemens, with the first scheduled to begin carrying passengers in 2026. These trains will reach top speeds of 125 mph. A new high-speed model of the Acela train, which can run at 160 miles per hour along parts of the Northeast Corridor, began testing in January, the paper said. new york times.
Both trains are much slower than trains in France, Japan, and China, which has the world’s fastest trains with a top speed of 456 miles per hour. In fact, new trains in the United States may not reach their top speeds as often. Due to the winding tracks, trains on the Northeast Corridor travel at an average speed of 70 to 80 miles per hour. To achieve true high speeds, the U.S. would need to build a straighter, specially designed track, a project that would take at least 10 years and possibly up to 30 years, Gardner said.
Funding these projects is also not an easy task. All other high-speed rail networks around the world were built with huge investments from governments that made them national priorities. Governments must subsidize investment in rail travel because virtually all railroad companies are unprofitable, or at least not profitable enough to regularly fund tens of billions of dollars in capital investment. There are many cases where this happens. Even China’s vaunted rail system is raising fares because its state-owned operator is saddled with $870 billion in debt.
By comparison, U.S. investments over the years are “about a rounding error of what Europe has invested in networks,” Gardner said.
Asked to elaborate more on the CEO’s comments, an Amtrak spokesperson provided per capita spending data from a German industry group. According to this, the countries in Europe that spent the most on railways in 2022 were Luxembourg at $625, Switzerland at $489 and Norway at $376. In the United States, the equivalent figure is just $39, below even the stingiest spenders in Europe, such as Spain’s $73 and France’s $50.
Passenger and freight railways
In addition to tackling vast infrastructure projects like rail construction, Amtrak also has to deal with stakeholders it doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with. Amtrak has to work, sometimes reluctantly, with freight rail companies, which own about 71 percent of the tracks on which Amtrak runs many of its trains. Relations between the two groups have sometimes been tense, as Amtrak claims it is not complying with laws designed to give passenger trains the right of way over freight trains.
These laws “have not been enforced for decades,” Gardner said.
Amtrak is currently preparing for a battle with freight rail operators. In recent years, Amtrak has become increasingly vocal about repeated violations by its host railroads of these right-of-way laws that date back to Amtrak’s founding. After years of complaints, Amtrak will ask federal regulators in 2022 to investigate delays caused by freight shipments and will also seek legal action in federal court if it believes these operators are not complying with the law. lobbying for the right to sue.
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for the Association of American Railroads (AAR) said: luck It was in response to a May 2023 letter from an industry group accusing Amtrak of substandard performance on its Sunset Limited route between New Orleans and Los Angeles. The spokesperson also referred to a section on AAR’s website that calls on policymakers to ensure passenger rail expansion “does not impair freight rail’s ability to serve current or future customers.” did.
In other parts of the country, several private passenger rail companies are also entering the race to compete with Amtrak. Brightline, which claims to be the only private intercity rail company in the United States, broke ground last month on a $12 billion project aimed at connecting Southern California’s Inland Empire with Las Vegas. Brightline already operates rail lines from Miami to Orlando and plans to expand to Tampa Bay by 2026.
The US is too large to build high-speed rail everywhere
But all high-speed rail in the United States, whether Amtrak or Brightline, must contend with real geographic considerations that make it more difficult to implement than in other countries. That’s because the United States is a big country, said Alan Zalensky, director of the Rail Engineering Safety Program at the University of Delaware.
Some train journeys are less appealing than air travel. Traveling from Houston to Boston or San Diego to Milwaukee is virtually meaningless by rail, even on trains that travel at 456 miles per hour, like the world’s fastest trains. These two trips take him 6 1/2 hours and he 7 1/2 hours each, but are unthinkable for a trip of about 3,000 miles, with no stops. As a result, Gardner doesn’t see air travel as Amtrak’s main competition.
“The automotive market is a major market in which we compete,” Gardner said.
High-speed rail is perfect for traveling between cities that are close to each other, without the hassle of a trip to and from the airport, and where you can catch a train in about the same time as a short flight. Trains are also a far more environmentally friendly option than carbon-emitting airplanes. According to an Amtrak analysis, a flight from Washington, D.C. to New York emits 1.4 to 3.7 times more greenhouse gases per person than a train, depending on the type of locomotive.When traveling by car on the same journey Cars can carry far fewer people than trains, resulting in 2.2 to 5.8 times more carbon dioxide emissions per passenger.
“If we’re going to eliminate carbon dioxide in any meaningful way, we need to move more people and goods by rail,” Gardner said. “There’s no way around that fact.”
