A decade-and-a-half ago I was calling for high-speed rail both in California and America. I remarked how Japan was a fast-train adherent well before its first Shinkansen (New Trunk Line) bullet train in 1964 rolled off its first revenue mile. “The Asian nation is among the world’s leaders in high-speed rail technology and use,” I wrote.* If it happens that Brightline West receives its first paying passenger in 2028, sixty-four years will have passed before true high-speed-train operations will have gotten underway here in the United States. Sixty-four years!
Emissions Produced, Emissions Saved
Fifteen years ago, in a commentary* I made mention of the “High Speed Rail and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the U.S., January 2006 study” from both the Center for Clean Air Policy and the Center for Neighborhood Technology. In the study, the two “concluded, ‘Current projections show that passengers would take 112 million trips on high speed rail in the U.S. in 2025, traveling more than 25 billion passenger miles. This would result in 29 million fewer automobile trips and nearly 500,000 fewer flights. We calculated a total emissions savings of 6 billion pounds of CO2 per year (2.7 MMT [Million Metric Tons] CO2) if all proposed high speed rail systems studied for this project are built. Savings from cancelled automobile and airplane trips are the primary sources of the emissions savings; together these two modes make up 80 percent of the estimated emissions savings from all modes.’” That says much about the emissions and the emissions savings coming just from autos and planes.
The situation at present? Well, if you remember, the country was coming out of a recession. Conditions were slowly returning to normal. Today, after recovering from the pandemic, the situation is nearly the place it was pre-Covid. Which means we’re returning to what travel was in 2019, with one big difference: Transit agencies are, with rare exception, feeling the pinch of having less patronage, less money at the fare box on account of it and fewer dollars coming courtesy of the fed. That puts more pressure on roadways and airways to accommodate satisfactorily those who have been affected. The fact that a number of people continue to work remotely negatively impacts transit even more.
Traveler And Tardiness Issues
Back in 2010, I also related, “Turning to the airways, ‘A new Brookings Institution study in U.S. air travel concluded-unsurprisingly-that delays will worsen when travel rebounds, and that delays are generally concentrated in the busiest metropolitan areas….,’ the Wall Street Journal’s Scott McCartney declared.
“Added to this McCartney wrote: ‘More than 6 million people fly between the Los Angeles basin and [the] San Francisco Bay [Area] per year, the study said.”*
And, jumping ahead a few paragraphs, I penned, “Meanwhile, ‘In the northeast corridor, Amtrak carried 11.7 million people on Acela and Northeast Regional lines in fiscal 2008, hitting 14 metropolitan areas. The Amtrak ridership suggests high-speed rail would be viable in out [sic] busiest air corridors, the study concluded,’ McCartney noted.”*
Interesting observations all.
Now, as it applies to today’s air travel situation domestically and with regard to international flights originating and/or terminating in the U.S., and happening alongside the government shutdown (now in what, its 11th day?), there is a dearth in air-traffic-controller staffing plus the air-traffic-control hardware is, I hear, not state of the art, which means systems are in need of updating and that’s just going to take time to do.
The unfortunate reality in all of this is while this is going on, outside of the improvements made to Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor just recently, America is not up to speed, if you will, regarding fast passenger train travel generally. Two deficit conditions or situations, in my view, that in the long- and longer- distance travel sense make it more difficult if not more burdensome and worrisome when it comes to our moving about the country, that is, comparatively speaking.
So what I would say regarding travel within the United States today compared to pre-COVID, post-Great-Recession days, the problems consistent with those are the same but worse or more pronounced, in other words. A situation that needs to be turned around.
* Alan Kandel, “Why We Need High-Speed Rail and Why Trains Are Needed Now,” California Progress Report, Nov. 15, 2010
