Will High-Speed Rail Ever Succeed in the U. S.?

 

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.

Electric Vehicle Owners Pay Tax in Texas

 

Last Friday, a new law went into effect that seeks to close a loophole that drivers of electric vehicles have been enjoying:  their freedom from per-gallon road taxes in Texas.  As of Sept. 1, new electric-vehicle (EV) owners will have to pay a $400 first-time registration fee, and $200 annually to renew their registration.  Up to now, EV owners have escaped the twenty-cents-per-gallon state road tax that internal-combustion (IC) vehicle owners pay.  But as Teslas, Chevy Volts, and other less popular EVs show up in increasing numbers, the concern was that these drivers were essentially freeloading on the taxes paid by their fellow drivers who were paying for gas.  Texas now joins 32 other states which have enacted some form of compensatory tax on EVs.

 

It's interesting that if you do the math, you can figure out what kind of gas-guzzling car you'd have to be driving in order for the EV tax to be equivalent to what you would actually pay in state gasoline taxes for your old-fashioned IC car.  Ignoring for a moment the first-time fee, the Texas gasoline tax rate is 0.20 per gallon.  How many gallons do you have to buy per year to pay $200 in state gas taxes?  That's easy—1000 gallons.  Assuming you drive the fairly typical 12,000 miles a year, that means to pay as much tax as an EV owner does, your vehicle gas mileage would need to be only 12 miles per gallon.  That's in the range of gas mileage of one of the most popular vehicles in Texas:  the Ford F-150.  So while Tesla owners may not appreciate the implied comparison, they'll be paying at least as much road tax as your typical pickup driver does, if not more.

 

Fairness is always a question when the subject of taxes come up, and depending on your political leanings, what is fair in taxation can look very different to different people.  Libertarians, for example, would turn all roads (at least major roads like highways) into turnpikes and make users pay for them per use.  This idea used to be on the impractical pie-in-the-sky shelf, but with RFID systems, computerized license-plate cameras, and allied technologies, there is no longer a major technical barrier to widespread implementation of this notion.  

 

The problem with it is that it would be highly unpopular, as well as unprecedented.  The first scream we'd hear would be from the trucking companies, whose vehicles bang up the roads a lot more than passenger cars do.  Of course, they are already paying a lot more in taxes than ordinary cars do.  A 2015 article said that even back then, the trucking industry in the U. S. paid $21.6 billion in state highway use taxes, and almost as much in federal highway taxes.  And there's a 12% federal excise tax on new trucks, which can add up to $30,000 to the price.  So they are not getting a free ride by any means. 

 

Unmentioned so far in this hypothetical libertarian ideal of paying road taxes per mile is the cost of administrating such a tax.  It costs something to gather the data needed:  those camera and flash bridges over tollroads, or even more intrusive technology such as checking into a car's computer via the Internet to find where and how far it's driven.  We quickly get into privacy concerns there, so perhaps it's just as well that the Texas legislature decided to pass a flat $200 registration fee rather than getting fancy and libertarian about it.

 

We are so used to large-scale infrastructure systems like the interstate highways being paid for by a combination of federal and state taxes, that we don't stop to consider alternatives that modern technical means could allow us to do.  The rather obscure economic and political system called distributism favors smallness over bigness and local control over centralized control.  Economist John C. Médaille points out that the current funding system for highways is a subsidy for suburbs and for industries that depend on long-distance trucking (think Walmart and groceries shipped across the country).  What should we do instead?  Says Médaille, "The freeways should be replaced by toll roads, roads capable of collecting their building, maintenance, operational, and replacement costs."  He estimates we could reduce the current national budget for transportation by at least half in this way. 

 

Of course, such a move probably won't happen in isolation, for all the reasons I gave above.  It would have to be part of a larger trend toward the de-centralization of society as a whole. 

 

In places such as China, and increasingly in the U. S. as well, technology is being used to extract information and money from large numbers of people and concentrate it in the hands of a few, whether those few are government leaders or business owners and operators. 

 

But as we have seen during the COVID epidemic, technology can also be used to return work to home, to enable small local businesses to establish international markets, and to connect people in the same geographic area together in ways that used to work only when people physically met as they walked to the town grocery store or post office.  I will not go so far as to say technology is neutral—it never is, completely—but just because powerful interests are using it for increasing centralization doesn't mean it always has to be that way.

 

In passing the annual $200 registration fee, Texas sought to redress an imbalance that new technology has caused.  As we've seen, the legislation has done a reasonably good job of that.  But the larger question of whether power and money, in the form of taxes, should be concentrated or decentralized has been left untouched by this move.  It will take something bigger than the popularity of Teslas to start a larger conversation about the role of technology in the centralization of power, and whether we want to sit back and let it continue, or to try reversing it. 

 

Sources:  The article "Texas EV Owners Hit With New $200 Registration Fee" appeared on the Forbes website at https://www.forbes.com/wheels/news/ev-registration-fees-texas/.  I also consulted articles at  https://www.reference.com/world-view/gas-mileage-ford-f-150

and https://www.ccjdigital.com/business/article/14933601/heres-how-much-trucking-paid-in-highway-user-taxes-in-2015.  John C. Médaille's Toward a Truly Free Market, from which the above quotation was taken, was published in 2010 by ISI Press.