True High-Speed Rail--How Near? How far?

by Charles A. Turek

March 3, 2024 - The subject of High-Speed Rail or HSR is a touchy one. Precision, when it comes to HSR, is difficult to find in the United States. In fact, there is no widely accepted working definition for HSR, let alone uniform standards that would allow a railroad project to meet that definition.

49 U.S. Code § 26106 defines high-speed rail as "intercity passenger rail service that is reasonably expected to reach speeds of at least 110 miles per hour." (Source: Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute) By this definition, the United States is within touching distance of HSR, while almost every other Western nation, and many Asian nations, have leaped right past this conservative HSR standard. In Europe, HSR is over 120 mph for existing lines and over 160 mph for new ones. The design speed for new lines in China is 240 mph.

How near? The fastest trains in the United States are on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and Brightline's Orlando to Miami privately-owned line. Amtrak Acela reaches 150 mph on a few short stretches, and Brightline is clocked at 125, also for limited portions. Both lines average under 100. While Brightline uses both new and upgraded existing tracks, the Northeast Corridor right of way is a century old with periodic upgrades and refurbishments, none of which created long segments of high-speed track.

(As an aside: The Northeast Corridor passes through some of the most densely populated real estate in North America. This alone makes piecemeal upgrades a costly and controversial proposition. For the same reason, the possibility of creating a new and dedicated line is remote.)

Some regional passenger projects in the pipeline for literally decades are shooting for the federal HSR definition, some are shooting higher, and some have shot themselves in the proverbial foot and disappeared. California is looking to exceed the European speed and approach, but not reach, the Chinese.

How near? Well, you can get on a high-speed train today--if you can get a reservation--but only if you are in a few very limited geographic areas that include one or two densely populated cities. If you are in most of the Desert Southwest, you are nowhere near, not even in Los Angeles at this time, and not even in Phoenix or the viva kind of Las Vegas. Not at this time. The Pacific Northwest had the ball and dropped it big-time. So not there. Great Plains? Nope. Deep south outside of Florida? Nada. Upper Midwest? If you stick to Illinois and Lower Michigan? Maybe. Otherwise, no.

How far? Geographically, as stated above, not near at all. Timewise? For many of us, not in our lifetimes. California is the best example of how not do HSR fast. Politically, the state is 16 years out from the initiative that started the project. Physically, it has been almost a decade since ground was broken.

Percentage of completion is difficult to gauge, since the project is not starting at one end and finishing at the other. Of the total projected line only an eighth is under construction, and some of that eighth is still acquiring real estate. At the current rate and level of funding, California HSR will be completed somewhere between 2094 and 2136. Even your great-grandkids might not see its end. Officially, the projected end is 2029, and I am the Mad Hatter.

The Brightline people have been much better at getting things done, if not as good at imagining Chinese-like speeds. As currently built and projected, Brightline Florida exceeds the United States federal definition, but will never reach the Asian standard. They did this in four years for the West Palm Beach to Miami segment. Brightline West, a project to run HSR from near Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Nevada, is on track to be equally efficient in getting things done. It will, by virtue of the passage of time, be newer than Brightline Florida and even more high tech, with projected speeds approaching the Asian standard at 200 mph. It may be done by 2028, so within reach in our lifetimes for those who can hold on for another 4 years.

Illinois has a passable high-speed project running between Chicago and St. Louis, but it has taken twenty-five years to get trains just barely fast enough at 110 mph to be HSR wannabes. Likewise Illinois' Michigan line. Neither will ever be true HSR.

If you get the gist that true HSR is probably far into the future for most of the United States, then you need to look into public policy to understand why. While government--federal, state and local--puts forth a pretty face on passenger rail policy because the public wants to have the option to travel by rail rather than fly or drive: Government (big G) does not like passenger rail. Many in government see passenger rail as an outmoded, low-tech means of travel that would not be missed if it were to disappear completely.

Big G has shortsightedly supported (subsidized) driving or flying for years, to the extent that it would currently have to put 200 percent of all current transportation subsidies solely into passenger rail for the next half century to catch up. Amtrak and its funding are mere lip service to those who value passenger rail and recognize both its strategic significance in the event of national emergency as well as its national security importance.

Only recently have the regulatory bodies responsible for passenger rail in all its forms come out in favor of establishing a national goal that includes HSR as well as expansion of service and addition of new conventional routes. That may be a pipe dream as funding needs for such a goal come up against other underfunded "progressive" dreamscapes and a recessive economy.

Under many circumstances, Big G regulatory bodies mind their own business. By this we mean that Transportation mucks with transportation, Labor mucks with labor, and Environment mucks with everything. Defense and Homeland Security pretty much leave will enough alone when it comes to most modes of transportation. For all these agencies and their myriad of sub-agencies and departments, however, rail is entirely a different beast. And that's just rail. When it comes to HSR, these agencies go into literal convulsions.

As we mentioned at the top of this post, DOT has no established guidelines for a railroad to establish itself as HSR, but DOT does know that any HSR system will have to function fast and on time. The Department of Labor wants to see that HSR is open to unionization and all of its benefits, and the OSHA sub-agency wants to see that HSR is at all times safe for workers. The Environmental Protection people will make any HSR project jump through hoops to save the environment and the Lesser Prairie Chicken even though it knows less than squat about what it takes to make HSR run . . . or to save the chicken, for that matter. The DOD will see HSR as another way to move personnel and materiel in a national emergency and it's sister Homeland will look for ways that these vital defense assets can be protected from harm. Each and every regulation promulgated by each agency and sub-agency amounts to significant time and resource sunk into any HSR project just to get it near completion and within striking distance of highly-scrutinized testing. And this is whether or not the project is privately funded.

And though it's not entirely a public policy issue, the civil courts will get involved. The purchasing of land and easements is a major expenditure for any new HSR project. Public Domain actions and the acquisition of long-held family lands in rural areas can, as you would imagine, raise a lot of public ire. Establishing fast, noisy trains on what once were sleepy freight train habitats triggers a NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) response even from railroad fans who live near the right of way. The courts can, will, and (I think somewhere in their bylaws or operations manuals it says) must drag the resulting lawsuits on for years to decades. The NIMBY's must be compensated as well or better than the people who are giving up Great Grandfathers South Forty.

Can the U.S. ever catch up? Does it have to? In my opinion, the short answers are NO . . . and NO. . . and to turn the first answer into YES is grossly wasteful and unnecessary.

Rant Warning! I need a high-speed train to take me from Albuquerque to Chicago in ten hours or less about as much as I need an Albuquerque football (soccer) team to win the World Cup. Nonetheless, Big G and private enterprise will spend gobs of money to make both happen, and the latter is more likely to actually happen. I need public sports and public transportation only where either is going to provide a quality of life that can't be provided by anything else, and neither HSR no soccer fits that bill. Even if boatloads of jobs and barges of potential business developments are on the ticket, we have other established forms of transportation and entertainment that will do the same if properly managed.

In Europe, HSR makes sense because city centers are close together and this makes airline starts and ends grossly inefficient, a situation like the U.S. Northeast Corridor, but unlike California's Central Valley. Trying to emulate European HSR there and in most parts of the U.S. is just boondoggling, and supporters of those projects know it. Where HSR does make sense in the U.S., the market will eventually see to it that HSR happens, like Brightline, and probably in a way that is unique to America. Maybe (but probably not) in our lifetime.

And I am Mistertrains.

©2023 – Charles A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

Graphics courtesy of: Microsoft Co-pilot and DALL-E 3

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM.  After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Posts contain opinion as well as factual information and are conservative in nature.