High-speed rail in the United States
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about different ways that the United States might reduce our dependence on oil. One significant component of our oil usage (although by no means the biggest) is passenger airplane transport, primarily between big cities. This is an issue worldwide, but is particularly acute in the US, where there is so little public transit available to move around the country. In part, this is because it’s such a big country. However, we also haven’t invested in other technologies like high-speed rail that can be effective over shorter distances. If we assume a speed of 125 miles per hour for high-speed rail (typical of first generation TGV, off-the-shelf type of technology), with 20 minutes to load and 20 minutes to unload the train, and we compare that to a typical plane (around 600 miles per hour, plus 1 hour to load and 1 hour to unload the plane), we can see that high-speed train is quicker than planes for distances of less than 210 miles. This differential goes up even further if one considers that most airports in the US are around an hour drive from the city center. Thus, if one was considering city-center to city-center travel, high-speed trains are faster for distances of less than 520 miles.
Setting a limit on high-speed train connections at around 300 miles, we might consider the 50 biggest metropolitan statistical areas of the US, and ask which ones might be linked by high-speed train. Here are the 15 most important, as ranked by total population (city1 + city2) served:
1. New York City Philadelphia 24.5 million people
2. New York City Hartford 19.9 million people
3. Los Angeles Riverside 16.8 million people
4. Los Angeles Las Vegas 14.6 million people
5. Chicago Saint Louis 12.2 million people
6. Dallas Houston 11.1 million people
7. Chicago Indianapolis 11.0 million people
8. Milwaukee Chicago 10.9 million people
9. Baltimore Philadelphia 8.5 million people
10. Washington Baltimore 7.9 million people
11. Orlando Miami 7.3 million people
12. Dallas Austin 7.3 million people
13. OK City Dallas 6.9 million people
14. Riverside San Diego 6.8 million people
15. Atlanta Charlotte 6.4 million people
Obviously, some of these cities already have regular train service between them, but none of them have anything approaching high-speed service. The one exception is the Acela Express, which can occasionally get up to 125 miles per hour. However, it still takes 6.5 hours to get from Boston to Washington, DC, which means (with stops) that the train is only averaging around 60 mph. The primary problem seems to be that Acela Express makes too many stops: it could stop as many as 13 times between Boston and Washington (a function perhaps of the need of Amtrak to satisfy Congressmen from many states). The desire of Amtrak to use existing track means that it’s often too curvy to reach top speeds.
Shown below is a map of the US, with links shown between major metropolitan statistical areas that are within about 250 miles of one another. While building high-speed train lines may seem expensive ($10 million per mile of track would be pretty normal), it is actually a fairly modest investment compared with other government expenditures. Assuming around (new interstates in urban areas can cost around $6 million per mile). The total network I show in the map is around 5,400 miles, which would be about $54 billion. This may seem like a lot, but it’s one-tenth of what has been spent in the Iraq War to date. Food for thought…
