Guest Entry: How can HSR gain speed and momentum in North America?

By: Leonard Machler

Infrastructure inflation has caught up with us, and we are starting to get used to billion dollar projects being thrown around with the casualness that we used to reserve for bus stops and phone booths. And even though high speed rail (HSR) may cost less than expanding airport and freeway capacity – with the added benefit that it provides a transportation alternative that is more environmentally friendly and that is meant to stimulate development in dense, walkable downtowns, the cost of HSR still represents a significant chunk of change.

The California High Speed rail system is estimated – at a minimum – to cost around $40 billion dollars; upgrading the Northeast Corridor of the United States for 300 km/h operation has been pegged at $117 billion. To compare, this figure is about the same as the total economic output of the Ukraine last year. Even if high speed rail in the US was not a political hot potato, it would be hard for any government to scrounge up that kind of cash. To compensate, governments, such as the Obama administration, contribute toward the project incrementally by providing “small” funding commitments.

This year, roughly $1.4 billion (including $624 million that had been allocated to Wisconsin, but turned down by a newly-elected Republican governor) was earmarked for the California High Speed Rail (HSR) project. In 2009, $2.3 billion was allocated to the California HSR program. At this rate, it will take over 20 years to fund the project in full, so the California HSR authority has proposed building a segment of the line between the two Central Valley cities of Fresno and Hanford. While not so small that they can’t be found on a map, connecting these two towns with a high speed rail line hardly has the cachet as a link between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Predictably, critics have derided this first segment as a line between nowhere and nowhere.

On the one hand, they are off base: the segment has to be built eventually, so why not now? Moreover, the short line would serve as a handy test track to evaluate the performance of high speed trains before they see regular service. On the other hand, the fact that it will be used as a test track for nearly a decade before regular service begins is a political high-wire act because almost nobody other than industry insiders will see the public benefits (i.e. trains that people can actually ride on) for this project. For the average voter, the line will not just be a train from nowhere to nowhere, it will be a line from nowhere to nowhere with no trains on it. Did it have to be this way? Are we doomed to wait an eternity until enough cash trickles in so that we can build a line people can actually use?

Most European countries have a different attitude. They would use the partial funding to build a short high speed line – similar to the Hanford-Fresno demonstration line – and then run the remainder of the service on conventional track. This way the public gets high speed rail service from day one and, over time, services and speeds improve as an increasing amount of high speed track comes on line.

This was how I remember the evolution of high speed rail in Germany. When I first used the system as a kid in the early 90s, only a handful of sections – usually meant to bypass especially slow or built up areas – were actually genuine high speed rail lines. Most other times, the ICE train would plod along the old rail line, bypassing freights and slower passenger trains at a comparatively “slow” 160 km/h. As the years went by, the ICE would spend less of its time dodging freight trains on the old tracks and more of its time speeding through the German countryside in its own dedicated high speed line.

It’s time for California and other North American jurisdictions to try a similar approach. The high speed line in the Central Valley should be built for demonstration purposes, as is the plan, but conventional trains should be allowed to use it – at least until the full HSR line is built out. Granted, track conditions in Germany – even on old, conventional lines – are better than pretty much anything that exists in North America today and are also electrified for higher speed too. California could use the earmark from the next two years to upgrade the existing track between San Francisco and Los Angeles* to support at least some quasi high speed service using conventional passenger trains, while taking advantage of the short high speed segment in the Central Valley.

Running conventional trains at higher speeds along incrementally longer stretches of high speed rail is not as sexy as a bullet train whisking passengers along a fully built-out line, but at least it has the chance of seeing the light of day sometime this decade. More importantly, it provides taxpayers with the impression that the line is immediately useful. As they say, it’s not perfect, but at least it’s a start.

Leonard Machler is a PhD student in the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC. He is a transportation enthusiast and is a strong advocate for more sustainable and accessible urban transportation systems.

*For a rail map comparing trips statistics (airplane, HSR and car) between San Francisco and Los Angeles, click here.*