At last, a workable plan for high-speed rail

How to build a fast train in the northeast for 10% of the cost

Kate is mildly concerned that too many train takes will lead to mass flight of subscribers and the collapse of our business, but I cannot resist the temptation to write about the NYU Marron Center Transit Cost Project’s new report on Northeast Corridor High-Speed Rail.

The report’s authors make some striking claims:

• It’s possible to create Northeast Corridor HSR such that both Boston-NYC and NYC-Washington would take about 1:56.

• Trains would run every ten minutes between Philadelphia and New Haven, and every fifteen minutes¹ north and south of there.

• This can be done for a relatively modest price: $12.5 billion in new infrastructure and $4.5 billion in new trains.

This is a lot less than the $117 billion that the Northeast Corridor Commission is asking for in its high-speed rail proposal. The difference is so large that it’s not just that the TCP plan is cheaper and would save money — the NECC plan is so expensive that it’s simply not going to happen under any conceivable political alignment.

The TCP plan, by contrast, could actually be achieved if the relevant stakeholders (which I think is primarily the governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland) want to do it. They would, of course, want some money from Uncle Sam, and there would be the difficult question of portioning out the state spending.² But it’s clearly within the means of the region.

It would also be a genuinely lucrative franchise, such that I think it’s pretty easy to imagine the capital being raised privately and the operations being undertaken by a new private company rather than Amtrak.

The flip side of the shockingly cheap price tag, though, is that the proposal involves a lot of reorganization of commuter rail services. It doesn’t make the commuter rail services worse. I would say they would end up better, on average. But the commuter rail system would be different, and at least some people would feel they were worse off. Similarly, the TCP plan involves running trains that are much faster than the Acela, but entirely killing off the Northeast Regional, so some stations would lose intercity rail service altogether.

But I think this is the price of a cost effective project.

Rather than papering-over all tradeoffs with extra construction and ending up with a price tag so high nobody will do the project, the TCP plan focuses on the core goal — fast, frequent trains connecting the corridor’s major locations — and delivers at a reasonable price. To get that, though, politicians would need to make choices. In this case, I wouldn’t even call them “tough choices.” The upside is huge compared to both the financial cost and the changes to operations that would need to be made, and I think every elected official between DC and Boston should seriously consider getting behind this proposal. But choices do have to be made, and the outcomes won’t make everyone happy. Officials have to be willing to say to some people, “Sorry, I hear you, but I decided this was the best approach, all things considered.”

Beyond those points and my personal interest in trains, though, I think this report is a really good example of nonprofit advocacy work done well — something that is all too rare in the political arena, even though donors put lots of money into nonprofit advocacy work.