It has been a miserable summer for Amtrak, whose failing infrastructure has stranded tens of thousands of travelers in and around the Northeast Corridor in recent weeks. The results: Pricey last-minute airfares, 60-mile Uber rides, missed commitments. And the return of that eternal refrain: What if America, like our peers in China, Japan, France, Spain, Morocco, and Uzbekistan (the list goes on), could have a functioning high-speed rail network? What would it take to make that happen?
You have questions; the team at NYU’s Transit Costs Project from the school’s Marron Institute has answers. Their new report may be the only high-speed rail document ever produced without a mouthwatering map tying up the country’s major cities. Instead, it has some recommendations on how to actually build something good.
Amtrak’s ongoing Northeast meltdown aside, it’s a relatively auspicious moment for U.S. passenger rail. Amtrak is flush with federal money and aims to double its ridership in the next 15 years with new routes and infrastructure. Brightline has opened the country’s first new, privately funded, intercity train line in a century in Florida, between Miami and Orlando, and broke ground this spring on a West Coast service between Las Vegas and Southern California. In Texas, a company that aims to provide high-speed service between Houston and Dallas has inked a partnership with Amtrak’s new high-speed rail chief, “train daddy” Andy Byford.
All of this occurs against a background of relative consensus, now that Hyperloop fever has died down, that high-speed rail would be an economic boon and effectively reduce carbon emissions and pollution from long-distance travel. (Well, popular consensus anyway—though high-speed rail was a plank of the Republican presidential platform as recently as 2000!)
In that context, the NYU researchers argue, now is the time to adopt some best practices. For example: Washington should make sure that all American high-speed rail projects are designed with the same standards and equipment, rather than letting each state or company reinvent the rolling stock. With compatible trains, tracks, and wiring, these nascent projects may one day connect to form a national network. States may be laboratories of democracy, but they do not need to be laboratories of high-speed rail technology.
Otherwise we’ll end up repeating the mistake of railroads in the American South, which in 1886 had to move all their tracks three inches closer together to be linked with the more developed northern network. A more modern-day debacle along those lines is CalTrain, which pursued a signaling system at great expense that was incompatible with the future California High-Speed Rail project, which may one day connect San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Standardization has another benefit. Currently, it’s hard for railroads to buy things like trains in the U.S., since the market is too small to support domestic suppliers. The nation’s various high-speed projects could catalyze a domestic industry by all buying the same stuff.
For that to happen, explains Eric Goldwyn, one of the report’s authors, Washington must take the lead on planning American high-speed rail. No other country has built this infrastructure without a coordinated, national approach that can impose standards, supply funding, and concentrate expertise. “We don’t need more maps. That is not our problem,” Goldwyn says. “What we need is someone who has the power to translate map into steel and concrete—a five- and 10-year plan with funding and someone saying what’s happening.”
National leadership could do other things, too, like spearhead workforce development and university programs to deepen the talent pool for HSR development and operations, and forge connections with companies. Who among us had the chance to take High-Speed Rail Engineering in college?
With a bank of rail experts in Washington and universities churning out grads with relevant skills, individual projects could reduce their reliance on consultants and do more work in-house. (This was also a recommendation of a previous Transit Costs Project study about local mass transit.) To take a related example, for the price of one consultant contract to study whether to put trash in garbage bins or not, you could hire 10 in-house experts for four years to create a culture of trash expertise at the heart of local government.
Finally, the report suggests, the U.S. should reform the way big infrastructure projects get planned and permitted—also a hot topic at the moment for transmission lines, solar farms, and wind farms. Most rail projects in the U.S., for example, spend most of their planning phase trying to overcome federal environmental review, rather than paying attention to non-environmental planning basics like relocating underground utilities and buying land. This winds up costing them later, when they need to study everything all over again, and in some cases change plans entirely.
Similarly, fear of litigation can force infrastructure planners to submit more than a dozen detailed routes for some sections in order to show that they have studied all possible alternatives. Imagine the time and expense of doing that for a home improvement project. Now imagine doing it for 300 miles of trains running at 220 miles per hour.
Despite the present buzz around intercity rail, the NYU report comes in the context of enduring and repeated failures. There is the discouraging state of the Northeast Corridor, which, with its 50 million residents living all in a straight line, should have the world’s greatest high-speed rail service. There is the disappointment of the California High-Speed Rail project, which is way over budget and with no end date in sight. There was the GOP rejection of Obama administration grants for rail projects in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and New Jersey. It’s an intergenerational story of failure: The federal government established the Office of High-Speed Ground Transportation in 1965.
Or as one of the founders of the Transit Costs Project, Alon Levy, put it recently: “Currently, all American high-speed rail plans should be treated as case studies of what to avoid.” It seems at times that American high-speed rail is the project of the future, and always will be.
Then again, high-speed rail is not a state secret. It has been built in poorer nations, in regions with fewer people, in landscapes with bigger mountains, and in places with more historic buildings. Surely it can happen here.