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1/ The fetish for high-speed passenger rail is near the top of the list of views people hold because they are fashionable rather than because they make any sense or because the author really understands the issues.
@antiplanner
@antiplanner
2/ No country in the world that I know of has high-speed passenger rail that covers thousands of miles. It is not only absurdly expensive for the benefits but it also would be almost impossible to get permitted in this country
3/ But the real ignorance here is that the US already has the best rail system in the world, because our rail is focused on freight. Freight rail makes WAY more sense from an energy-efficiency standpoint than passenger rail.
4/ In passenger rail, most of the weight is in the cars, the load carried (people) is trivial. You are spending energy to haul steel cars at high speed. In freight rail, most of the load carried is actually the freight itself.
5/ As a percentage of its total freight movement, the US moves more freight by rail than any other industrialized nation. There is a perception that Europe is rail oriented but more of their freight moves by trucks on highways than in the US
6/ It is really hard to have a rail system that is optimized for both freight and passengers -- it is generally optimized for one or the other. In Europe, where the rail is state-owned, citizens demand that movement of passengers gets prioritized and subsidized
7/ In the US, where rail still is mostly private, freight gets optimized because it makes economic sense. You might say that this is an example of capitalism and economics selecting for the wrong things, but you would be wrong.
8/ Costs to businesses are just the time-integral of the expectation of scarcity. Choosing the lower cost approach is to choose the approach that uses the least scarce resources, ie is the most sustainable. In rail, fuel is a huge portion of costs.
9/ Almost no country, except for a few lines in Japan, covers its cost of high-speed rail without subsidies. This means that HSR is using too many resources for its benefits, but somehow we call it sustainable. The US as it turns out already has a sustainable rail system
