High Speed Rail: Pros & Cons

I was listening to WPR yesterday morning while running errands, driving around town wherever I pleased by whatever route appealed to me, on nobody’s schedule but my own, and the topic of the hour was the High Speed Rail initiative. Joy Cardin had two guests, both of them very much in favor of commuter rail. They recited all the Obama talking points for why it is good for Americans generally, and Wisconsinites specifically, and then fielded questions from mostly pro-rail callers.

One of the callers asked why if Europe has been using rail successfully for decades America can’t seem to get it going. This question was asked while I pulled into the massive free parking lot in front of the local Ace Hardware store. Nobody on the radio acknowledged the subtle irony.

I finally decided to run through the pros and cons of railroad travel in my head instead of just listening to people regurgitate talking points. Here goes.

Pros:
- It’s nice to have someone else do the driving once in a while, especially when the distance is long. Anything over 2 hours can be tedious.
- Today’s Amtrak Passenger cars are relatively comfortable, if you can find a newer reclining seat.
- It is often nice to have restrooms and a food car available at all times without having to stop.
- Railways carve through some beautiful country you otherwise do not have a chance to see from a car or plane.
- Once a certain passenger threshold is met, trains are more environmentally friendly than other forms of transportation.
- Trains have the potential to get you from place to place very quickly. Some French trains can go 300 mph!

These are the fanciful arguments you hear from people who want it, appealing to the emotional but impractical ideals of those who don’t think long enough to get to the actual implications of the proposal or the real-world cultural roadblocks that will quickly doom this venture to Amtrak-style failure times a thousand. In the spirit of common sense, here’s my list of cons.

Cons:
- Train travel can be prohibitively expensive. A one-way ticket from La Crosse to Milwaukee costs, on average, $51 per person. An entire family can make the trip in a single vehicle for half that.
- Trains operate on schedules. Americans are conditioned by three generations of travel by car. We leave and arrive whenever we please.
- Trains are political animals, and succumb to the failings of jurisdiction. If a municipality wants a stop, and they are willing to pay for it, they will probably get one. That means one more 20 minute delay for anyone trying get from one side of the state to the other. Ideally a high-speed train would not have this problem, but get serious already.
- Once you get to the end of the tracks you still need to get to your destination. One of the major differences between Europeans and Americans is that Euros walk. Think Americans will be willing to walk a mile or two after getting off the train? Good luck. Oh, but we could take the bus…
- Europe has been resigned to train travel because its cities were not planned around roads or parking lots. Ours were. Americans are not forced to take the train, and the only way to change that is to make car travel much more expensive. This will be accomplished by a gas tax. On a cultural note, Americans are rarely won over by negative reinforcement. That’s the kind of thing that causes landslide elections.
- Trains are incredibly annoying. You cannot control who you share a car with, and you’re just likely than not to be in a car that smells bad or has out of control children and screaming babies, or people taking up more than one seat or coughing or talking too loud and generally being inconsiderate, or the bathrooms being disgusting and the food car being out of just about everything.
- Security is impossible. First of all, nobody has brought up the ominous prospect of installing and operating TSA-like security at every train depot. Imagine airport TSA issues times a hundred in terms of cost and manpower and logistics and delays. And don’t forget unions!
- It will be a simple matter for terrorists to walk up to any length of track in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin and put a bomb on the track and detonate it from the comfort of a sunny hillside and watch the speeding train pile into the surrounding fields and kill hundreds or more. If I have thought of this, trust me, terrorists already have stretches of track in mind. They’re just waiting for Obama to supply them with human targets.
- Our current infrastructure of freight track cannot handle so-called bullet trains. Trains that move at 300 mph need tremendous lengths of straight, flat track. The cost to get the United States up to French standards could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
- We do not have enough track to simultaneously accommodate current freight traffic with desired passenger traffic. The cost of the current plan includes a proposal for new track, but expect freight lobbies to want in on the new track or use it as leverage for massive public expenditures to upgrade existing track. The cycle never ends.
- Finally, the current proposal creates a supply for which there is insufficient demand. If there were, Amtrak would be profitable, or at least break even. Americans enjoy the freedom of travel by car, and until that fundamental right is legislated away high speed rail will not be viable.

I’m sure there are many more considerations, including all the political infighting in every municipality the trains will travel through. I cannot imagine this thing ever getting beyond the planning phase, but I am certain the debate, now that it’s started, will never, ever, end.