How to make high-speed rail a reality in the US 🚆

First, some context 🔎 🗺️

Climate Solutions  //   ISSUE  #86   //   HOTHOUSE 2.0

Now see the complete high-speed rail series here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Final Installment.

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Hello dear readers, 

Thank you so much to those of you who elected to support Hothouse in its next iteration last month.

To kick off Hothouse’s more zealous look at how individuals can advance systemic solutions to climate change, today’s dispatch broaches the subject of high-speed rail. 

As a sector, transportation is the largest contributor to the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions annually. The majority of that comes from our individual travel, including our commutes to and from work and cross-country drives and flights. That makes improving how we think about and actually get from place to place extremely critical, and today’s author has been opining about just that for quite some time. 

Today’s dispatch comes from Sam Sklar, an experienced New York City-based transportation planner and avid writer of a Substack appropriately titled Exasperated Infrastructures. Sam was a joy to edit. I hope you have as much fun reading his work as I did helping him pull this piece together. 

By the end of this post, I hope you leave with a better understanding of high-speed rail as one piece of a fuller buckshot required to minimize our collective transportation emissions. 

If you enjoy and appreciate this work, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to support more work like it. 

Sincerely, 

Cadence Bambenek

Editor-in-Chief 

By Sam Sklar

It’s May 19, 2018, and you’ve got a trip planned from West Palm Beach to Miami, FL. You’ve got one of two options. The first is to drive on I-95 and the Florida Turnpike. This is a trip you’ve done many times—it’s instinctual. The road is familiar, the cost of gas familiar, and the Jack In The Box at milepost 155 comforting. Without traffic, it takes about 100 minutes from central West Palm Beach to a parking garage in downtown Miami. You’ve allotted for tolls, parking, and road rage.¹ You cannot work, eat, or read. Over 3,000 people died in car-related fatalities in 2017—and you don’t want to be a statistic. You’ve got places to be!

Your second option? Take the inaugural trip between the two destinations on Brightline—Florida’s new privately-owned, “high-speed” passenger rail. 

The trip from West Palm Beach to Miami takes about 80 minutes and can be completed in relative serenity; your rail car is caught in zero miles of traffic and you’re free to relax. It’s pleasant, even. 

Brightline is the future. And yet, Brightline is an island—for now.

In 2018, Brightline effectively marked the United States’ first new public passenger rail service at any meaningful scale since 1983. A handful of other projects are in the works, including a Brightline “West” service from Las Vegas to (almost) Los Angeles, but nowhere at the construction rate required to bring the United States on par with its international peers.

If the United States hopes to be economically and environmentally competitive in the 21st and 22nd centuries—if it hopes to make it to the latter half of the 21st century and beyond—building high-speed rail must be a national priority. 

At 28 percent of total emissions, transportation is by far the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. There are two ways to cut that number—shrink the whole pie or convince travelers that there are better ways to move around. The not-so-hard truth: we’re not going to stop people from traveling, and, in the future, we can expect people to travel even more and to even more diverse places. What we can do is build to make sure these trips—some new, some old—don’t all require individual tailpipes.

This is where rail comes in. Rail is the least bad option—the more trips we can convert from car or flight to rail, the better off we’ll be. And this is where high-speed rail comes in: the more competitive, easy, and attractive we make a rail trip over a drive or a flight, the better off our planet will be. Brightline is the future, but we need the future to be right now. 

At 46 g of carbon emitted per kilometer traveled, high-speed rail is just north of national rail emissions as depicted above. Source: Our World in Data; Federal Railroad Administration. 

So why aren’t we building more rail?

The tried-and-true approach to this type of essay is to share an aspirational map and opine about why we’re not building more rail in the U.S.: It’s the Republicans’ fault. It’s the highway lobby’s fault. Democrats don’t know how to lobby for rail. Pin it on Big Oil—et cetera.

I’ll say it: it does not matter who is at fault. There will always be a boogeyman to fight. 

No. Instead, we need policymakers and train riders and drivers and everyone to be armed with the information to push back and make a case for high-speed rail as a solution to a handful of problems.

To that end, this multi-part essay will crystallize your understanding of the roadblocks hampering high-speed rail in the United States. Understanding the roadblocks is the first step to deconstructing them. From there, I will outline the concrete actions individuals and organizations can take to advance high-speed rail in the states.

After reading this series, you will be equipped with three things: 

1. Context, knowledge, history—facts about how we got to where we are. 

2. What our peers are doing inside and outside our country to make rail and high-speed rail a reality.

3. What you can do to promote the climate and commuter future you want.

If we do succeed in building high-speed, when we look back, we will see that a pivot to high-speed rail was also an essential tool for shaping the fate of mobility and our planet’s climate. 

Understanding the roadblocks 

Proponents of high-speed rail love to look west and east for examples of successful high-speed rail: China, Japan, and Western Europe. These places offer the passenger rail service we should aspire to: city pairs (e.g. London to Paris) are connected because the rail service providers simply have the ability to connect them. The rail companies build schedules to make a train trip competitive with a car trip and market it so that the traveler doesn’t have to do cost comparisons in their head. The idea, I think, is to make travel options so plentiful and simple to use that anyone can move cheaply and effortlessly through a system rather than being constantly stymied by driving’s high costs and inconvenience. 

For the large part, our counterparts across the globe have been successful at building a flexible and growing transportation system with passenger rail at its core. 

But Americans—despite all of these global, successful examples of high-speed rail—must be extremely careful when extrapolating from these international examples. Not because true high-speed isn’t successful elsewhere, but because these examples live in a totally different context relative to our own. Thus, Americans can’t simply plug and play lessons from other places without first feeding these lessons through the context of the United States' sheer size and contentious politics.

Let’s start with a simple fact. Despite the history of rail construction dating back to the infancy of the country itself, and despite the numerous times our country has crisscrossed tracks and trains from California to New York, as of August 2023, there are no trains that operate at speeds high enough to meet the international qualifications for “high-speed rail.”

Even Brightline’s smooth rides don’t meet muster for international standards. Operating between 80 and 125 mph—admittedly faster than most U.S. highway speed limits—Brightline still falls short of the 160 mph minimum speed generally accepted for high-speed rail internationally, even though it technically is rail, and it moves at comparatively high speeds. 

When we’re so used to crawling from destinations and arriving beat up by constant delays, rail that moves even a little faster than not moving at all feels like high speed. But it’s not. Here’s the litmus test: is it still easier, cheaper, or faster to get from, say, New York to Chicago or from San Francisco to Los Angeles by car or train? 

If the answer is “no”, then the rail is not truly “high-speed.”

In order to convert more transportation from cars and aviation to rail, we need to make rail overwhelmingly attractive: reliable, affordable, and convenient. And building high-speed rail is a crucial component in doing just that. 

The rest of this essay will help you understand the contemporary state of passenger rail in the U.S., and equip you with the context necessary to advocate for building high-speed rail—the levers you can pull, buttons you can push, and ideas you can twist.

Where we need to go

So what could an aspirational, intercontinental high-speed rail look like?

Graphic artist Alfred Twu shared the following map in 2013, which is, according to Slate, a “mass-transit lovers’ wildest dream.” But, that’s what it is: a wild dream. 

The country is simply too vast, too empty, and too treacherous—dotted with mountains, rivers, literal cities, and towns—to build high-speed rail. But we’ve got to build some form of it anyway—just not in the way the drawn map would have us believe.  

It’s also not a fantasy to connect the U.S. by rail because we’ve done it, several times over, for the movement of goods, and at one point, the movement of people. Nearly two centuries old, North America’s freight railway coverage is truly spectacular. The map below shows the contemporary crisscross of freight rail lines across the continent. 

If we’ve done it for the transportation of goods, why not for the transportation of people?

Where we’ve been 

First, a little history: during the second half of the 19th century, the U.S. government transferred millions of acres of land to several freight companies building transcontinental railroads. In exchange, these freight companies agreed to provide passenger rail services. 

But the introduction of the private automobile as a viable means for short- and medium-distance trips changed the profitability calculus for passenger rail at the turn of the 20th century. 

Despite a brief spike in rail passenger trips during World War II, the overall trend was clear: the popularity and the prevalence of the private automobile came to dominate passenger travel throughout the first half of the 20th century. The victims: the bottom lines of the freight companies, which still had to provide passenger service even though it was no longer profitable and there was no future envisioned where the trend would reverse. As a result, the railroads began cutting deals with individual states and rail commissions to reduce or phase out passenger rail service from their operations. This went on for about twenty years before all at once, in the late 60s, the freight corporations petitioned Congress to free them of their obligation to provide passenger service at all. Big Rail won.

Not willing to give up hope for passenger rail service entirely, Congress passed a law that instead consolidated it inside a single organization. And so, in 1971, Amtrak was born. 

Today, Amtrak is the largest and only intercontinental passenger rail provider in the U.S. It effectively operates as a state-supported monopoly, even though it’s supposed to operate like a private provider. 

So, if Amtrak is effectively operating as a monopoly, why can’t it just wave a legislative wand and simply will high-speed rail into reality?

Some more background. Currently, Amtrak operates “more than 30 train routes throughout the United States, and some in Canada, [connecting] over 500 destinations in 46 states.” Some of these routes offer multiple round-trip services per day, while others offer just a single trip per week. Think about that. If you live in western Massachusetts, you better hope you only need to travel to New York on a Sunday, or you’ll just have to buy a car or rely on a bus to fly down I-84 with no traffic whatsoever.

There used to be more Amtrak routes and Amtrak-supported routes; so many more routes that served a ton more people in many more cities. The majority have since merged, shrunk, or dissolved because Amtrak, which, despite the arguments from the private rail companies that providing this service is unprofitable, has a profit mandate built into its operating rules. Those routes that no longer exist were simply not profitable. As a result, the United States passenger rail portfolio hasn’t meaningfully expanded since 1983. 

What’s more, Amtrak doesn’t, and will never, own the vast majority of the rail it operates on. 

See those dark blue lines on the map below? No? Look closer. That’s Amtrak’s rail ownership. That’s it. Amtrak owns only about 3 percent of the rail it operates on.

Amtrak owns just 3 percent of the rail it operates on. 

So how does Amtrak run rail service at all if it doesn’t own its rails? Amtrak leases the time and space to run passenger rail services from, you guessed it, the very intercontinental freight companies that petitioned to offload this service from their books. 

The fact that Amtrak is expected to seek profit is especially ironic when you consider that Amtrak continues to be at the total mercy of the very same companies that proved that this service was unprofitable, and who continue to limit Amtrak’s profitability. You see, it’s Amtrak’s prerogative to organize lease deals with each of the seven consolidated freight rail lines that artery and vein North America for “reasonable” service, but what “reasonable” means is often up to interpretation. That’s the law. Although the freight companies are required to play ball, they often toss a ball that they themselves deflate. 

Case in point: Amtrak has been trying to restart daily passenger rail service from New Orleans to Mobile, AL instead of thrice weekly. This upgrade would give access along the Gulf Coast for commerce, recreation, and mobility to tens of thousands of people who live in smaller towns and cities along that route—think Bay St. Louis, Biloxi, Pascagoula; a car would no longer be an entrance fee to society. 

Amtrak isn’t asking for a complete overhaul of this short route—just two additional trains, four days a week. In response, as part of the freights’ mandate to provide the option for passenger service on the rail they own, two freight companies have proposed absurd dollar figures that would make it practically impossible to run this additional service: $440 million—up over $300 million from what they’d last proposed but still $2 billion less than their original proposal. As Steve Davis, associate vice president of transportation strategy at Smart Growth America, wrote: “The freight railroads are [...] trying to either delay the project to death, or take advantage of the federal government and taxpayers with far more public money than they should receive for the necessary upgrades.” 

Davis continued: “CSX and Norfolk Southern are fighting two meager trains per day here because they know that the precedent set by stopping this new service will make future passenger expansions elsewhere—the kind promised by the infrastructure law—more difficult.” 

Where we can go from here 

Even if Amtrak did own more of the nationwide system, and even if the profit motive were redrawn, and even if the federal government simply gave Amtrak the land, it would take a monumental effort (read: cost) to lay track capable of handling trains at speeds that would qualify as “high,” either by the U.S. Code’s definition or by the international standard. 

The sad state of current affairs is the result of the following: U.S. ambitions are aspirational and unreasonable, we have overwhelmed and scattered decision-makers who hold the purse strings and love building asphalt roads² and who have little to no experience with high-speed rail, and an American system so married to highways and skyways that, even with a reasonable map, which provides a credible vision for American High-Speed Rail, there’s just so little in place to support immediate success here, it’s hard to see how we move forward.

One way forward, though, is to build in pieces. This approach will allow us to circumvent federal gridlock, overcome divided priorities across 50 states, and rebuild long-lost institutional knowledge for infrastructural projects of this scale.

High-speed rail in the U.S. won’t look like the graphic artist’s aspirational map from 2013. 

Instead, it’ll look more like this.

Source: Alon Levy. 

But I’ll also say that a map like the one above is both a far cry from what we have now and also a reasonable view of what we can have—if we really want it. If we learn from our global partners and competitors. If we truly understand the problem we’re trying to solve. 

In the next installment, I lay out the seven challenges we must address and learn from along the way in order to have a shot at building a successful high-speed rail network in the U.S., piece by piece, as well as provide concrete advice as to what you can do—as an individual or an organization with an interest in the future of the planet—to get high-speed rail moving. 

I’ll also seek to explain why Brightline Florida—which, by the way, just turned a profit—is a successful jumping-off point for building up the institutional knowledge we need to ramp up high-speed rail development in other parts of the U.S. and why California High-Speed Rail and (until recently) Texas Central flounder. But with the right combination of luck and a clear vision from our rail boosters and builders, we’ll get there. We have to.

1.  It’s taxing.

2. Because it’s something we know how to do; we have a domestic civil corps (the Army Corps of Engineers + local authorities who have teams of traffic engineers) not trained in rail. There’s much less risk and potential for higher ROI / project profits when we can build what we know instead of what we think we want. It doesn’t bode well for public rail policy unless something materially changes—even with a President who “rides the train,” we’ve seen very little movement and prioritization of rail funding. It’s better than it’s been but nowhere near that of other countries.