There are numerous sketches showing a dream high-speed rail network for the US, and they inevitably include multiple horizontal cross-country routes, going through Salt Lake City and Albuquerque on their way from Los Angeles to the Midwest.
And then the same exact dialogue happens every time this is posted. Skeptics inevitably seize upon those routes to characterize the whole idea as pie-in-the-sky: America is just less densely settled than Europe or Japan, he (presumably he) will tell you, so whatever works elsewhere just won’t work here. Others will then (also inevitably) respond that the eastern half of the continent is significantly more dense than the west, so we should surely just move forward with the segments that make sense.
Fine, just the eastern half
High-speed rail for the eastern half might look something like this. Penned by Alon Levy, a railfan who is very well-researched on construction costs and passenger demand, this system is centred on the Northeast and the Midwest, with two additional lines dropping from Chicago and from Washington to converge on Atlanta. Florida gets its own mini-network, as do the cities of Texas, while other lines are described as “maybes”.
I’ll defer to his judgments about most things given his expertise, but I kept a Dallas-Memphis segment, even though there are no large cities along it, because it could run reasonably fast and direct services both to Chicago and to Atlanta.
Even the east is too vast
Alas, it turns out that New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta — the four anchor corners of this network — are just too far away from each other for HSR to work.
- New York-Chicago is 925 miles (5:00);
- New York-Atlanta is 962 miles (5:30);
- Chicago-Atlanta is 735 miles (4:00);
- Dallas, by my calculations, is 1020 miles from Chicago (~5:30?) and 912 miles from Atlanta (~5:00?).
But see the diagram below, from the “High-speed Europe” paper from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport:
According to this, HSR is competitive against flying for journeys up to 500 miles, or just shy of a 3-hour journey. (The diagram presumes that flying has an in-built 1.5-hour “fixed cost” compared to transit, because airports tend to be out of the way, and you need time for security, checking baggage, etc.)
Which means that people are unlikely to ride end-to-end from Atlanta or Dallas to Chicago or New York. Now, for Atlanta and Chicago, it might still be worth it to build HSR, since there are plenty of nearby cities within 500 miles. But the end-to-end rides, that would do the most to take passengers out of planes and ensure the solvency of the rail enterprise, aren’t there. Meanwhile, Miami would be a 4-hour ride even just from Atlanta, and Dallas is quite isolated.
Which yields a practical diagram like this one. It resembles a lot of diagrams already out there.
Adding maglev to the equation
This is with high-speed rail, which can average 180~200 mph. But then there is maglev, which has the potential to run at 300 mph. Install maglev, and suddenly Chicago-Dallas is 3.5 hours (only an hour longer than flights, less than the 1.5-hour “fixed cost” of flying mentioned earlier) and New York-Atlanta is 3:15 (also competitive).
If maglev is feasible, then surely we should skip over HSR and go straight to maglev? (Perhaps the US’ late adoption of HSR was even a blessing in this sense.) However, there are many unknowns: only one long-distance maglev train is even in construction at the moment, between Tokyo and Nagoya. That particular project is unambiguously worth it (the largest megalopolis in the world, and the bullet train is consistently crowded), but also exceptionally expensive (since almost the entire route is blasted through mountains), which means it’s hard to draw any lessons from that for the US.
Maglev does not run on what you imagine as “train tracks”, meaning that you need to build brand-new infrastructure from scratch. This has 2 implications:
1) The Northeast Corridor is passenger-only (i.e. separate from freight) and is considered more or less HSR-ready; even in the real timeline, there are plans to raise the Corridor to HSR standards by 2040.
Building a parallel maglev track through the metropolises of the Northeast would be enormously expensive and disruptive. And since HSR is fast enough for the Northeast (offering 3 hours Boston-Washington), maglev would not save much time. But not building it at all would mean that Chicagoans would have to transfer at Philadelphia to get to Washington or New York. (A similar calculus applies for Canada’s Corridor, where HSR is plenty fast for Toronto-Ottawa-Montréal, meaning Chicagoans have to transfer at Toronto.)
2) Most cities have central stations with tracks running through them. HSR could simply run on these existing tracks at regular speeds, sparing the particularly high costs of construction within cities. Maglev cannot. Maglev would involve constructing all-new train paths through city centres.
Trying anyway?
One solution is that maglev stations should be at the outer bounds of each city, and local rail should connect them to downtown. (Japanese cities like Yokohama and Kobe have HSR stations separate from their central stations.) After all, an America that decides high-speed rail is worth it is also an America that will have begun investing in urban rapid transit. However, stations can’t be so far away that the train’s time advantage vs. planes is wiped out.
The ultimate cost-benefit for HSR vs. maglev would be as follows: HSR would be able to use existing rail and station buildings in most Atlantic and Midwestern states. This would allow it convenient, city-center access at low cost. Maglev would forgo that, and in return offer a competitive service for NY-Atlanta and NY-Chicago end-to-end travelers — whether this is worth it depends on the demand modeling.
None of this is true of the Atlanta-Dallas-Chicago segments, where all construction would be new in either case (south of Indianapolis), so you genuinely might as well go for maglev. Maybe even build this first to see what happens (blue segments below).
A last point
A Florida extension isn’t competitive at 300 mi/hr; from Miami, even getting to Atlanta would take 2:30 at least. A similar calculus would probably apply to Texas: a train to Dallas might be solvent, but one to Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, would not be.
However, train speeds to go up over time as technology improves. The fastest train in service hits an average of about 200 mi/hr, but 357 mi/hr has apparently been achieved on a test-track. (And I don’t mean maglev – conventional HSR with wheels.) If we get even halfway there, New York-Chicago trips would start penciling out.
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Unless, of course, electric airplanes are not only introduced but normalized by 2040, in which case flying will be good, and all of this train business will be nonsense. *shrugs*
Originally published at http://kojisposts.blogspot.com on June 19, 2020.
