Be Afraid — Be Very Afraid

Light rail is on the ballot this November in Kansas City and Seattle. Commuter rail is on the ballot in Sonoma and Marin counties, California. BART heavy rail is on the ballot in San Jose.

These rail plans will cost billions of dollars each (hundreds of millions in the case of Sonoma-Marin), yet take few to no cars off the roads. The energy, pollution, and greenhouse gases generated during construction will vastly outweigh any operational savings, which in some cases will be nil. The plans are supported by a baptists-and-bootleggers combination of rail nuts and companies, like Parsons Brinckerhoff, that expect to make millions during construction.

But the real ballot measure to fear is California's proposition 1A, which would authorize the sale of nearly $10 billion in general obligation bonds to build a high-speed rail network from Sacramento and San Francisco to Anaheim and San Diego. This $10 billion, combined with $10 billion from the feds and $5 billion in private money, was supposed to pay for the $25 billion system. The plan was to turn the system over to the private investors, who would operate it and keep 100 percent of the profits.

The first problem is that even the California High Speed Rail Authority admits that the real cost will be at least $43 billion. Considering the history of similar megaprojects -- and this would be the largest state-sponsored megaproject in history -- the final cost will probably be at least $60 billion.

The second problem is that the Authority has probably overestimated demand. It projects the system will carry 3 to 6 times as many passengers as Amtrak carries on its Northeast Corridor trains, which serve a higher population.

If the costs are high, the benefits are minuscule even if rail attracts the projected number of riders. The environmental impact statement for the project projects that it will take, at most, 3.8% of cars off the road, reduce air pollution by about 1%, and reduce transport-related greenhouse gases by 1.4%.

Considering the underestimated costs and overestimated ridership, it seems unlikely that private investors will put up $5 billion, much less a 20 percent share of whatever the final cost turns out to be. The danger for California taxpayers is that the Rail Authority will spend its $10 billion building as far as it can and then ask for more money. How far will $10 billion go? Not much further than San Francisco to San Jose.

Nor is there any guarantee that Congress will match the state's money. But the danger for non-California taxpayers is that it does match the money -- which will lead to demands for high-speed rail support from the rest of the country. Ten other high-speed corridors have received official recognition from the Federal Railroad Administration. Then there are various ad hoc proposals, such as Albuquerque to Casper and even Fargo to Missoula.

The likely cost of a national high-speed rail network will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Except to the contractors that build it, the benefits will be largely imaginary. We can see that by looking at high-speed rail elsewhere.

Japan's bullet trains were a feather in that country's technological cap, but they sent the formerly profitable Japanese National Railways (JNR) into virtual bankruptcy. The government was forced to absorb $200 billion in high-speed debt. Meanwhile, far from attracting people out of their cars, high-speed rail accelerated the growth in driving as JNR raised fares to cope with its losses.

Europe's record with high-speed rail hasn't been much better. Though nations in the European Union spend an estimated $100 billion per year subsidizing intercity rail, rail has slowly but steadily lost market share since Italy opened the continent's first high-speed line in 1978. Today, less than 6 percent of passenger travel goes by rail.

We car-crazy Americans drive for 85 percent of our travel. Europeans drive for 79 percent. Spending several hundred billion dollars to get, at best, 5 or 6 percent of people out of their cars is not worthwhile. The real impact of high-speed rail is that it replaces private air service with heavily subsidized rail service.

Rail is not just a waste of money, it is an intrusion on personal freedom. That's because it is inevitably accompanied by restrictions on people's property rights. Buses and airlines can follow demand by changing routes. Rails cannot, so rail agencies conspire with land-use planners to reshape society and make it more "rail friendly." That means upzoning areas near rail stations to higher-than-marketable densities while downzoning other areas to keep developers from building the kind of low-density housing most Americans prefer.

For more information about high-speed rail, see the Antiplanner, which is blogging about it in a series of nine posts.