So far, the answer seems to be no. While Japan, China, and some European countries enjoy the benefits of rail travel at over 100 MPH (160 km hr-1), the closest thing the U. S. has to a major (rather than single-point to single-point) high-speed rail system is the Acela system in the Northeast. Yes, it does go up to 150 MPH (240 km hr-1), but only over a stretch that's about 10% of its length.
The rest of the time, Acela slows down to the relatively glacial pace of the rest of the Amtrak system, which this summer especially has been suffering more than the usual amount of delays and other problems, according to a recent article on the Slate website by Henry Grabar.
Before you can enjoy high-speed rail, you have to build it. And building such a thing in the U. S. presents an extraordinary number and magnitude of challenges, as Grabar shows from a recent New York University study on how hard it is, and how we could do things better.
First off, there's the permitting process. If you want to take a piece of land and build anything more industrial or transportation-like than houses or apartments (and sometimes even those), you must go hard-hat in hand to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which acts for all intents and purposes as a grouchy de-facto landowner who would rather have undisturbed snail darters on his property than the world's most valuable factory. I have nothing against snail darters, but if primitive man had acted toward the natural world like the EPA tries to make the rest of us act, we'd all still be living in trees and eating nuts and berries—but only government-approved nuts and berries, of course. And there might be as many as 50,000 of us scattered over the North American continent.
Even if the environmental obstacles are overcome, the next problem is getting equipment such as rails, signaling equipment, and, you know, trains. Not surprisingly, there are no domestic high-speed rail manufacturers, and so it becomes a question of which imported model you're going to choose. And because every high-speed rail project so far has been a one-off deal, you go out and hire consultants (because nobody has in-house expertise on high-speed rail), who then steer you this way and that and charge exorbitant fees.
And even if you make it through all those difficulties, there's the not-in-my-back-yard problem. And here we run into an issue we haven't even discussed yet: if you build it, will they come?
Here I'm reminded of a much smaller-scale rail project that is familiar to me: Austin's CapMetro rail line. By the time it opened in 2010, it had cost north of $100 million, and while it's still running, only about 1800 people ride it on a typical weekday. In other words, a system that cost a tenth of a billion dollars fifteen years ago keeps maybe a thousand cars off the streets of Austin. Although it's a silly comparison, that's about $100,000 per car. To make a noticeable dent in the hundreds of thousands of cars that make up Austin commuter traffic, you would have to improve that cost per rider number a lot, or else bankrupt the city.
The NYU folks have suggestions to improve the delivery of high-speed rail projects, including standardizing the equipment, streamlining the federal permitting process, and enacting a nationwide plan that would supersede little local efforts that never seem to get to reality. I can't fault these ideas, and if the political winds blew favorably they would probably work. But I move the previous question: if we built it, would people use it?
That doesn't seem to be the case with Austin's rail line. The reason is that transportation is fundamentally a service, not a product. And the mechanical means you use to provide the service depends on a lot of factors that are not always considered seriously.
Population density and local infrastructure are two of them. In the Northeast, there are numerous cities on the Acela corridor which have public transportation systems of their own—Washington's subways, Boston's surface rail, the New York City subways—which make it not only feasible but preferable to travel entirely without aid of a private automobile. And those cities are so situated for historical reasons—they got big before the era of the automobile got serious around 1920, and built the right-of-ways and housing and commercial patterns that make such a situation work.
The rest of the country, outside of maybe Chicago, and San Francisco if you count cable cars, is not so situated. If there was a high-speed rail line from San Marcos to Fort Worth that opened tomorrow, I still probably wouldn't take it, because although I might manage to get a cheap cab to the rail station here in my town, once I got to Fort Worth I'd either have to ride the slow intermittent buses or catch Uber everywhere I went. And frankly I'd rather have my own car with me, and the four-hour drive from here to there isn't that big a deal to me.
Multiply that tradeoff by a few hundred million, and you get the real reason that the U. S. does not yet have high-speed rail, and may never have it. It's only a partial solution to the problem, and unless and until every town of 50,000 or more people has local public transportation of comparable quality to the best subway system in the country (which used to be Washington, DC, but I'm not sure now), you will end up spending billions on a large-scale version of CapMetro's rail line: it's pretty, it works well, and almost nobody rides it. In other words, a smoothly-running version of Amtrak.
For a while it looked like autonomous vehicles, eventually electric ones, were going to solve the problem. But self-driving cars, at least the Level 5 kind that you can sleep in, seem to be as chimerical as they always were, and so it's not clear how people in 2060 are going to be getting to work. My guess is that high-speed rail won't be a big part of the picture, but I might be wrong. It's happened before.
Sources: Henry Grabar's article "Train Dreams: How high-speed rail in America can become a reality" appeared on July 12, 2024 on the Slate website at https://slate.com/business/2024/07/high-speed-rail-amtrak-transportation-policy-china-japan-europe.html. The NYU report can be viewed at https://transitcosts.com/high-speed-rail/. I also referred to a Wikipedia article on CapMetro Rail.
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