The Fallacy and Fantasy Of The Potential For High Speed Rail Success In This Country

High speed rail service has been on mind my lately since there are two big rail projects in the news lately, one from my home state of New Jersey and one from my current state of Florida. They both came to mind when I came across a Washington Post article by Robert Samuelson, "The Myths Of High-Speed Rail Service," that was summarized in the November 12, 2010 issue of The Week magazine. Mr. Samuelson quickly reviews the Obama administration's high speed rail plans that will cost $10.5 billion for the preliminary work and eventually could cost $200 billion to build high speed train lines in 13 major U.S. corridors.

What does Mr. Samuelson think the payoff for this taxpayer investment of $200 billion? He thinks the return will be next to zero because:

• America will not be able to replicate the success of high speed rail in Europe because the bulk of America does not live close to metro centers like the populations of Europe, rendering high speed rail line virtually useless for the travel needs of most Americans.
• Also, most Americans work relatively close to their homes, making high speed rail lines a non-event for most of the 120 million Americans that commute by driving to work each day within or near their local communities.
• According to Mr. Samuelson's estimates, a national U.S. high speed rail line will serve only a very small subset of people, possibly in the tens of thousands of people. This small set of people would only include those that make occasional trips between urban centers.
• If you assume worse case and that the estimate of tens of thousands comes out to 100,000 riders, then dividing the cost of $200 billion by 100,000 riders you end up with a cost per high speed rail rider of $2,000,000 per rider, hardly an efficient use of taxpayer money.

Thus, in Mr. Samuelson's informed opinion, high speed rail service between major metro centers will be expensive, will not affect most Americans, and will not make any significant improvements in the environment since high speed rail will remove very few cars from our streets and highways.

The scary thing about the $200 billion estimate is that our political class has never put forth a transportation project estimate that was even close to the final reality. Most people know about the Big Dig  project in Boston that was supposed to cost less than $3 billion but went over the budgeted amount by many times over, was completed late, the finished product leaks water badly, and a construction flaw actually killed a driver there several years ago from falling roof panels.

More recently, the New Jersey governor shut down a planned project that would have built a much needed new rail tunnel from New Jersey into Manhattan. While everyone agrees the additional tunnel is needed, the cost of the project went from $5 billion in 2005 to a recently updated figure of $9 billion just five years later with the governor's office estimating that the real number might actually be between $11 and $14 billion. For a state that is suffering from huge revenue shortfalls, the governor probably made the right short term decision to stop the construction of the new tunnel because the state cannot afford it.
But the granddaddy of all failed transportation projects belongs to California and its attempt to build a high speed rail line along its length. According to an article by Tim Cavanaugh in Reason magazine last August, the following situations have cropped in California's High Speed Rail Authority:

• A state auditor found that the authority had paid $4 million worth of invoices that it had not receipts for.
• When the auditor checked 22 contractor invoices, she found the Authority had paid 20 of them worth $6.9 million without checking if the work on those invoices had actually been done.
• The Authority paid $46,000 for furniture for the Project Manager's office.
• The auditor concluded that the Authority had weak estimates of ridership, weak estimates of what government entities would be funding the entire project, and how the authority would manage the risks involved in a project of this complex undertaking.
• The auditor found that the regional contractor working on the simplest part of the entire plan, the Los Angeles to Anaheim leg, had completed 81% of the planned hours to work on the project but had spent 230% of the budgeted dollars.
• The state legislative analyst's office in California in early 2010 discovered that the Authority had no timeline plan for the completion of the entire project and had possibly illegally used bond funds to subsidize its operating budget.
• Mr.Cavanaugh points out that since 1996, this project has cost taxpayers more than a quarter billion dollars but not one rail of track has yet to be laid. This time frame is longer than the time it took to build the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1800s.
• The project is estimated to cost $43 billion of which only $11.25 billion has been allocated. Given the dire straits of California's finances, it is doubtful additional funding can be found under favorable terms, given the dive in the state's creditworthiness.

Enough with California, you can begin to see my doubts with the current members of our political class being able to pull off any kind of major transportation public works project efficiently and effectively. But the bad news on public transportation has recently hit closer to home here in Florida. In an October 29, 2010 article in the St. Petersburg Times by Bill Varian, he laid out a major problem that Tampa Bay area officials were having relative to their proposal to build a light rail, more commuter friendly rail system in Tampa's Hillsborough County. A rail system like this, tailored to the local needs of local residents, probably has a far better chance of success, from a financial, environmental, and usability perspective than a high speed rail line that most ordinary Americans would never use.

The problem Mr. Varian points out is that the construction cost for the proposed light rail line, which was originally estimated at $70 million per mile by the county's Metropolitan Planning organization, was reestimated recently by the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit organization to be between $85 to $120 million per mile of construction. Thus, you have two government entities giving two wildly different cost estimates of the same project. As a result of the escalating cost estimate, and possibly other factors, on election day Hillsborough County voters turned down a plan to increase the sales tax to fund the light rail project.

The second local rail project close to my home is the planned high speed rail line from Tampa to Orlando. The proposed high speed rail line would run from Tampa to a stop in Lakeland, Florida and then continue on to Disney World outside of Orlando to another stop outside of Orlando and finally finishing up at the Orlando airport. This project is part of the Obama administration's plans to build out that $200 billion network of high speed trains. This leg of the plan is considered relatively easy to build out since the land it will travel over is quite level, there are no mountains, forests, or residential communities to cut through, and most of the high speed line will run on a straight line along Interstate 4, which is the main road between Tampa and Orlando.

However, I am not a transportation expert and I foresee some serious problems with this use of taxpayer money:

• First, since the area around Tampa has very little mass transit capability, especially since the voters nixed the idea of a local light rail system, potential users of a high speed rail line will find it difficult to actually get to the rail line station without using a car.
• The current plan does not foresee the rail line ever connecting to the Tampa Airport so that anyone flying into Tampa and wanting to get to , or making the reverse trip to get to the Tampa Airport, would have to make some additional ground transportation arrangements to get from the Tampa Airport to the rail line station.
• We are frequent Disney visitors from our Tampa Bay area home in Pinellas county and on most trips to and from home to Disney, the elapsed car travel time is about an hour and forty five minutes (105 minutes). We have done it in an hour and a half or over two hours  but an hour and forty five minutes is a very consistent time. Several sources I have come across put the travel time from the Tampa high speed rail station to the Disney station at  about 82 minutes, a difference of 23 minutes from my experience driving.
• However, that is rail travel time. If I was to use the line to get to Disney, I would have to first get to the station from my home which would be about 30 minutes, wiping out the 23 minute advantage. On the other end, the estimated travel time only gets me to the Disney station, there would be additional time to get from the station to my Disney destination.
• Thus, one of the selling points for this high speed rail line, getting to Disney quickly from the Tampa Bay area, does not hold water for me as a selling point, I drive there quicker almost every time. It does not make much sense from a cost perspective either. The door to door distance, round trip, is about 180 miles. We drive over to Disney using our Honda Civic that gets about 37 miles a gallon. Thus, the cost of gas for the round trip is about  five gallons or currently less than $15 dollars. I sincerely doubt that a trip from Tampa to Disney on the high speed rail line will cost less than $15 for two adults. Thus, from a time and cost perspective, this idea makes no sense for a large number of its target market.

If you do not believe me, consider a March 22, 2010 article by Michael Cooper of the New York Times which discussed the downsides and risks of this high speed rail line leg:

• According to his estimates, the high sped rail line would trim only about 30 minutes off of the travel time along its entire length, consistent with my 23 minute time reduction over part of the line.
• In Mr. Cooper's mind, since neither Tampa or Orlando have great local public transportation, high speed rail travelers "may discover that they have taken a fast train to a slow bus." The article cites a real life example of some Tampa tourists who took a bus from Tampa to St. Petersburg to visit the Dali museum. The bus ride took two and a half hours, one way, even though the distance between their hotel to the museum was only 20 miles.
• Even a local Florida Congressman, John Mica, publicly doubted whether the allocated money for the Tampa-Orlando high speed rail line might be better spent in a higher volume traffic corridor like the Northeast. Think about that for a minute: a politician actually questioning whether money from the Federal government to his area should be sent somewhere else! Shows how bad an idea this line might actually be from a taxpayer perspective.
• State transportation officials do not know where they will get the additional funds needed to actually complete this leg of the high speed rail line network, never mind where they will find the money to extend it from Orlando to Miami.
• Since Tampa and Orlando are so close to each other, the rail line is highly unlikely to draw airline passengers since currently there are no airline connections between the two airports and an environmental impact study issued back in 2005 said the line would have little impact on auto traffic.
• America 2050, a planning group, analyzed the country's rail needs and established a prioritized list of "Where High Speed Rail Works Best." The Tampa-Orlando route did not even make their top 100 and the Miami-Orlando route came in only at 100.
• Orlando is planning a local light rail commuter system but current plans to not have the local route connecting to the high speed rail line.

Enough already. What does all of this mean?

1. Our current set of politicians do a horrible job of correctly prioritizing the country's transportation needs.
2. Our current set of politicians do a horrible job of correctly estimating the cost of transportation projects.
3. Our current set of politicians do a horrible of planning, budgeting and executing a plan that comes in on time and on budget.
4. Our current set of politicians do a horrible job of understanding the reality of the situation, putting in rail lines that cannot compete on a time schedule and cost basis or how local conditions on the ground do not make a transportation project viable.
5. Our current set of politicians do a horrible job of holding people responsible and accountable for the planning and budgets of transportation projects. As always with our politicians, everyone is in charge but no one is responsible.

As a result of this incompetence, we again end up in the situation that David Brooks of the New York Times calls "immobile government." Immobile government is what we are currently living through right now in this country: bad priorities, bad money management and no accountability in our political processes results in nothing being accomplished by our political class. As a result of this incompetence, voters no longer trust government to do anything right and end up defeating potentially worthwhile projects, like the Hillsborough Country local light rail line, because the political class has shown no ability not to waste resources on such projects.

It is a nasty place to be. That is why we need to execute a few steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" to break out of this immobile government mode:

• Step 34 would hold Congressional members of Senate and House of Representatives transportation committees and subcommittees accountable for the success of transportation projects, removing those members from their committee posts for failures like the Big Dig and other wasteful, failed projects.
• Step 37 would institute an annual voter satisfaction study for Congress that would directly affect Congressional raises, providing a way for voters to express their frustration with wasteful spending on failed transportation projects.
• Step 39 would install term limits on Federal government elected posts in order to ensure that long term membership in Congress does not result in long term, friendly relationships with transportation contractors, relationships that never work to the advantage of the taxpayers.
• Not explicitly listed in the book, but the political class and the government departments it oversees has to start demanding retribution from transportation contractors that fail to meet their committed time and budget commitments. It would no longer be acceptable for budgets to be busted and the disaster dumped at the feet of the American taxpayer.

Bottom line is somehow we need to inject accountability into the entire process. Until we do, public transportation projects in this country, the good, the bad and the ugly ones, will all remain a costly legacy of our immobile government.


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