Wonderful article dissecting high-speed rail and those people who would advocate it.
From Randal O'Toole writing at the CATO Institute:
A Global Leader in Obsolete Technology
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wants to make the United States the “global leader” in high-speed rail. That’s like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives, all technologies that were once revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today. High-speed trains, in particular, were rendered obsolete in 1958, when Boeing introduced the 707 jetliner, which was twice as fast as the fastest trains today.
Aside from speed, what makes high-speed rail obsolete is its high cost. Unlike airlines, which don’t require much infrastructure other than landing fields, high-speed trains require huge amounts of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards. That’s why airfares averaged just 14 cents per passenger-mile in 2019, whereas fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela averaged more than 90 cents per passenger-mile.
Highways require infrastructure but not this level of precision. While a four-lane freeway costs about $10 million to $20 million a mile, California ended up spending $100 million a mile building its abortive high-speed rail line on flat ground, and it predicted building in hilly territory would cost at least $170 million per mile.
In 2009, President Obama proposed that the United States build 8,600 miles of high-speed rail lines in six disconnected networks in the Northeast, South, Florida, Midwest, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Without ever asking how much this would cost, Congress gave Obama $10.1 billion, which (after adding $1.4 billion of other funds) Obama passed on to the states. Except in California, no one expected that these funds would produce 150-mile-per-hour bullet trains, but they were supposed to increase frequencies and speeds in ten different corridors.
Now, more than ten years later, what has happened with those projects? One corridor saw frequencies increase by two trains a day. That corridor and two others saw speeds increase by an average of 2 miles per hour. Three other corridors actually saw speeds decline by an average of 1 mile per hour. Four corridors saw no changes at all. The one corridor that saw both frequencies and speeds increase also saw ridership decline by 12 percent. Effectively, the $11.5 billion was all wasted.
Yeah - our tax dollars wasted again. And these are supposed to be the best and brightest? Grifters gotta grift. Wonder how much Mayor Pete will be worth at the end of his tenure. Millions?
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