Planes, Trains and Automobiles

As a part of the stimulus plan, there's going to be an expansion in American High Speed Rail (110+ mph) capacity. Now, as a technophile, understand my first emotion is to get really excited about this. After all, high speed rail just seems really, really cool. Plus, as a cold war era jingoist, it makes me jealous that crummy countries like Japan and France have more high speed rail capacity than us.

But let's think about this for a second - does America really need high speed rail? Someone new to the topic might see high speed rail as the panacea between gridlocked automobile traffic and our greenhouse gas spewing airlines. Somehow, intuitively, we think since rail goes along the ground, it's intrinsically less costly than flying, even though current day train tickets simply aren't nearly where they need to be to be competitive with flight. Imagine what tickets on a high speed rail system will cost?

And this isn't just America. The same cost differences exist elsewhere too. When I took the high speed chunnel to and from France, while I was studying in the UK, tickets were upwards of 100 quid and it took probably a little over an hour. When I flew later on RyanAir, tickets were around 40 quid and actual flight time was less than thirty minutes.

Why is there still a fascination with high speed rail when air travel is so much faster and more cost competitive? Probably because, like I said, it's really really cool. But it's not something America needs - we're already subsidizing Amtrak (and our airlines, for that matter), we don't need yet another underutilized mode of transport for the government to prop up.