Air travel still hasn’t returned to pre-9/11 levels and the looming recession isn’t helping. The New York Times has reported that varying forms of aviophobia affect 40% of the world’s population and that 6.5% of Americans refuse to fly under any circumstances. If the current population of the United States is 305 million people then at least 19 million Americans are unreachable by the airline market regardless of economic pressures.
That’s a lot of people High Speed Rail could bring into the travel market.
I hate flying but I do it because rail travel is excruciatingly slow. Once a year, my wife and I take Amtrak from St. Paul to Chicago for a short vacation and it takes us around 8 hours if everything goes smoothly – that’s as long as I can stand to be on a train. So when we go anywhere else, naturally, we fly. But, air travel is worse for the environment than automobiles – jet engines emit carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and water vapor and because they do so at high altitude, the effects are more damaging. HSR requires only one third the energy of air travel per passenger and one fifth the energy of automobile travel. Additionally, upwards of 40% of all flights are less than 480 miles.
At trips of that length, HSR has multiple advantages over air travel. Because you can’t crash a train into a skyscraper, and you don’t need to check baggage your time at the boarding facility is greatly reduced by HSR. Also, rail service has, historically, much higher on-time reliability than air travel so there aren’t as many wasted hours sitting around the rail station because a train was canceled. When considering these factors, HSR beats air travel at distances of approximately 435 miles. In fact, in Europe, competition with HSR has completely killed connecting flights between Paris-Brussels and Cologne-Frankfurt, among others.
So, if we had HSR in the United States, the market for ridership at distances up to approximately 480 miles would be greatly expanded and we could reduce environmentally damaging air travel by around 40%. Now, I know, some people will point out that locomotives are powered by diesel, or electricity or some hybrid of the two and that electricity, in the US, means coal burning which is not environmentally friendly either.
To this I would respond with – wind power linked to population centers by HVDC – but that’s another post for another day.
All of this brings me to the news (for some) that the California legislature and governor have approved a HSR line from Sacramento to San Diego with an approximate travel time of 2 hours and 38 minutes. The bonds still have to be approved by the voters on November 4th, but if they are, bids for construction would begin in 2010.
This is an exciting development. Currently, there is only one HSR line operating in the US – Amtrak’s Acela Express, which runs anywhere from 75 to 150 mph, much slower than the proposed 220 mph of the California line. This article touts the economic effects of the HSR line on the San Francisco area:
The report finds significant benefits to the region in four areas: employment; mobility; urban development; and the environment. In an uncertain economic climate where California jobs are vulnerable, the high-speed train project has the significant potential both as an investment in the state’s long-term future, and as a potential economic stimulus that will create new jobs and generate near-term economic activity.
Overall, the project can be expected to increase employment in the region by 1 percent, or 48,000 long-term jobs. It will also stimulate between $6.9 and $8.9 billion in construction spending in the region, which will directly or indirectly generate between 100,000 and 128,000 jobs during the period of construction.
Obviously, these rail lines cost an enormous amount of money to construct, but with globalization having already beaten down our door we need jobs that can only be done here, and what could fit that requirement more than the construction and ongoing operation and maintenance of these rail lines?
If you think HSR is a good idea, there are many organizations currently supporting HSR lines in the US. They can be found in the Midwest, Southeast, Indiana, and Virginia, to name a few.