Highspeed Rail is Better than Upgrading Old Infrastructure  rovements to existing rail networks would ultimately fail to be viable as a replacement for highspeed rail. As British Transport Secretary (now reshuffled) Phillip Hammond states, "Opponents of the project have asked why we cannot simply upgrade our existing infrastructure to deal with this capacity challenge. But no upgrade of existing infrastructure can deliver the huge improvements in journey times and the transformation of our economic geography that a new high speed network would bring. Reliability would also deteriorate as we tried to squeeze ever more capacity out of existing, mixed-use lines. And another major upgrade to the West Coast Main Line would deliver years of disruption and huge economic cost." [1] Upgrading infrastructure may be an answer in some places, but not in all. There may not be the existing infrastructure to upgrade. The United States for example just does not have lines that could take both large numbers of passengers and the large amount of freight they already take. Moreover any upgrade of these existing lines would end up with a rail system which is uncompetitive with road and air transport, exactly why rail passenger transport ended in the 1930-50s in the United States despite having been running faster than Amtrak trains do today. [2]  Further, railroad tracks permit a far higher throughput of passengers per hour than a road the same width. A high speed rail needs just a double track railway, with one track for each direction. For the Eurostar the typical capacity is 15 trains per hour and 800 passengers per train (as for the Eurostar sets), which implies a capacity of 12,000 passengers per hour in each direction. By contrast, the Highway Capacity Manual gives a maximum capacity for a single lane of highway of 2,250 passenger cars per hour (excluding trucks or RVs). [3] Assuming an average vehicle occupancy of 1.57 people, [4] a standard twin track railway has a typical capacity 13% greater than a 6-lane highway (3 lanes each way), while requiring only 40% of the land (1.0/3.0 versus 2.5/7.5 hectares per kilometer of direct/indirect land consumption). This means that typical passenger rail carries 2.83 times as many passengers per hour per meter (width) as a road. [5]  [1] Hammond, Phillip. “High Speed Rail: the case for.” The Telegraph. 26/11/2010   [2] “Ask Trains from November 2008”, Trains, November 2008,   [3] Elefteriadou, Lily, “Chapter 8 Highway Capacity”, Handbook of Transport Engineering, 2004,   [4] U.S. Department of Energy, “Vehicle Occupancy by Type of Vehicle”, Fact #257: March 3, 2003,   [5] High Speed Rail, Railsystem.net