All Aboard: Can High Speed Rail Get Back on Track? (2012)

High speed rail across the country was expected to usher in economic prosperity, increased interconnectivity, and energy efficiency.Supporters maintain dreamy visions of stepping onto gleaming trains downtown, and stepping out mere hours later in another downtown -a few states and a few hundred miles over.However, others decry the necessary costs of building the required infrastructure.Who's right?Is high speed rail worth it?Our consulting firm was first tasked with projecting the number of passengers travelling on a series of potential high speed rail systems.To begin, we simplified the problem at hand and analyzed the existing rail infrastructure of the most populous metropolitan areas to choose pairs of cities to model.The choice to model city pairs allowed us to consider a more fundamental model, although it introduced potential issues when comparing our proposal to the original, more extensive HSIPR plan.We then projected the population growth of metropolitan areas, and calculated the proportion of travelers choosing between high speed rail, cars, and planes using a transportation demand (multinomial logit) model.We analyzed the only existing high speed rail in the United States, the Acela Express, to determine key modal choice factors (i.e.expected fare rates).Our consumer choice model was stable and relatively insensitive; small percent changes in inputs led to proportionally smaller changes in output consumer choice.The cost of building high speed rail involves significant initial costs: land, raw materials, and construction, as well as annual variable costs of maintenance, labor, and power consumption.Each component of cost was independently determined, and the final cost was a function of the length of each proposed railway route and the projected mean travel speed.To examine the claim that HSR conserves energy consumption, we analyzed two scenarios for projected energy consumption.In the first, HSRs were constructed and took market share from cars and planes.In the second, passengers chose only between travelling by car or plane.Our projections indicate that due to the significant energy cost of implementing high speed rail, we actually expect our energy consumption to increase by 600 million gallons of gasoline over 20 years, weakening the case for high speed rail.We performed a cost-benefit analysis to generate recommendations for high speed rail with regards to each hypothetical pair of cities. Cost consisted of both the initial costs and 20-year operating costs, while the benefit consisted of the total expected revenue.Our analysis indicated that for eight of our chosen pairs, constructing high speed rail would result in significant losses.The exceptions are the Boston to New York and New York to Washington, DC lines.Incidentally, these are the pairs that compose the existing Acela Express.We finally ranked the lines that would run at a deficit based on their potential to reduce local traffic congestion, if for political reasons a line must be constructed and operated at a loss.We have identified key metropolitan areas of interest consistent with future HSIPR plans, and have proposed a refocused railway system.Our analysis indicates that high speed railways beyond the Acela Express will not be profitable.Since the implementation of high speed rail will also increase energy consumption, we do not foresee a quantifiable benefit of high speed rail.We therefore discourage future funding towards the further development of high speed rail.