High-speed rail's trillion-dollar (!) money pit
Cato Institute's Randal O’Toole argues that high-speed rail is obsolete tech. It’s slower than jets, pricier than driving, and a fiscal flop that'd bury America in trillions of debt for paltry gains. With California's rotting rail project now lurching past $100B, Silicon Valley taxpayers might wonder: why fund this broken-down bureaucracy any longer?
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s proposal to make the United States a “world leader” in high-speed rail would add more than $4 trillion to the federal debt for construction of new rail lines plus tens of billions of dollars of annual deficit spending to subsidize operating costs. In exchange, such a high-speed rail network is likely to carry less than 2 percent of the nation’s passenger travel and no freight.
High-speed trains were rendered obsolete in 1958, six years before Japan opened its first bullet train, when Boeing’s 707 entered commercial service; the airliner could cruise at more than twice the top speeds of the fastest scheduled high-speed trains today. Air travel cost more than rail travel in 1964, but average airfares today are less than a fifth of the average fares paid by riders of the Amtrak Acela, the only high-speed train operating in the United States.
The main disadvantage of high-speed trains, other than their slow speeds compared with air travel, is that they require a huge amount of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards. Since the United States is struggling to maintain the infrastructure it already has—particularly its urban rail transit systems and Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, which together have more than $200 billion in maintenance backlogs—it makes no sense to build more infrastructure that the nation won’t be able to afford to maintain.
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The California High-Speed Rail Authority began construction on its Los Angeles–San Francisco project in 2015 despite knowing that it only had about $10 billion in hand to complete a project that it then estimated would cost $55 billion. Since then, projected costs have risen to as high as $100 billion.
The one good thing that has come of the project is that it has proven that building high-speed rail costs a lot more and takes a lot longer than experts claimed. The $10 billion spent so far has produced zero results. The one Amtrak train connecting Los Angeles with the Bay Area still trundles along at an average speed of less than 39 mph. Result: $4 billion in federal funds and at least another $6 billion state and local funds wasted.
Editor's note: The Golden State just lost $4 billion in federal funding, adding to CA's chaos.
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