Megan McArdle has argued before that high-speed rail simply will not work in a country as expansive as the United States. Earlier this week she offered several more compelling reasons to question America’s fast train program. One is that the country should focus on the Northeast Corridor and expand from there — a subject discussed in this space yesterday. Another is that the problem of acquiring right-of-way can lead to the construction of suboptimal high-speed corridors:
I am a fan of train projects when those projects start with a problem that might be solved by a train, and then work forward to the train. The problem is that in America, those routes are difficult to build, because they’re places where there’s already a lot of stuff. Rights of way are expensive and time-consuming to obtain, and the project is bound to be blocked by well-organized NIMBYs.
And so the idea seems to have become to build trains where it’s possible to build trains, and hope that development follows. But trains succeed where they are better than some alternative form of transportation. In the case of Tampa to Orlando, they’re worse than a car, and there isn’t even any air travel to replace; in the case of Fresno-to-Bakersfield, it may be better than a car for a few passengers, but there are too few passengers to make the trains better than cars for the environment.
Meanwhile Europe continues to embrace bullet trains as the transportation of the future. Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal ran a profile of Guillaume Pépy, head of the French national railway company, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer. Pépy argues that high-speed rail is really an alternative to air travel — a stark contrast to the debate in the United States, which pits auto enthusiasts against rail advocates:
Not only is train travel often faster than plane travel, he argues, but he also puts the case that it is more environmentally friendly. With domestic borders coming down across Europe’s railroads, he says there is an opportunity to challenge the Continent’s low-cost airlines. Initiatives such as Railteam, a joint marketing and ticketing operation with an alliance of train operators including Deutsche Bahn, allow passengers via one website to book high-speed rail tickets on networks across Europe. …
“When you have good long distance high-speed trains you do not need a low cost airline. The chairman of Air France has always stated that in France the low cost airline is the TGV [Pépy's flagship service, the Trains à Grande Vitesse].”
Cherchez la gare.
Image: Sese Ingolstadt via Wikipedia
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