Skip to main content
Menu

Main navigation

  • About
    • Annual Reports
    • Leadership
    • Jobs
    • Student Programs
    • Media Information
    • Store
    • Contact
    LOADING...
  • Experts
    • Policy Scholars
    • Adjunct Scholars
    • Fellows
  • Events
    • Upcoming
    • Past
    • Event FAQs
    • Sphere Summit
    LOADING...
  • Publications
    • Studies
    • Commentary
    • Books
    • Reviews and Journals
    • Public Filings
    LOADING...
  • Blog
  • Donate
    • Sponsorship Benefits
    • Ways to Give
    • Planned Giving

Issues

  • Constitution and Law
    • Constitutional Law
    • Criminal Justice
    • Free Speech and Civil Liberties
  • Economics
    • Banking and Finance
    • Monetary Policy
    • Regulation
    • Tax and Budget Policy
  • Politics and Society
    • Education
    • Government and Politics
    • Health Care
    • Poverty and Social Welfare
    • Technology and Privacy
  • International
    • Defense and Foreign Policy
    • Global Freedom
    • Immigration
    • Trade Policy
Live Now

Cato at Liberty


  • Blog Home
  • RSS

Email Signup

Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!

Topics
  • Banking and Finance
  • Constitutional Law
  • Criminal Justice
  • Defense and Foreign Policy
  • Education
  • Free Speech and Civil Liberties
  • Global Freedom
  • Government and Politics
  • Health Care
  • Immigration
  • Monetary Policy
  • Poverty and Social Welfare
  • Regulation
  • Tax and Budget Policy
  • Technology and Privacy
  • Trade Policy
Archives
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • Show More
March 22, 2021 9:26AM

Reinventing the Jet Airliner

By Randal O'Toole

SHARE

Suppose I told you that I have reinvented the jet airliners that carried Americans more than 750 billion passenger miles–about 10 percent of all passenger travel–in 2019. My reinvented jet will go less than half as fast as existing jets. It will cost six times as much to operate, per passenger mile, as existing jets. Unlike existing jets, which can go anywhere there is air, the reinvented jet will only be able to go on a limited number of fixed routes.

The reinvented jet airliner: less than half the speed, more than six times the cost, and doesn’t go where you want to go. Photo by Cobaltum.

This wondrous invention will become a reality if the federal government spends a mere one, two, or possibly three or four trillion dollars. Does that sound like a good deal? No? Yet that is exactly what high‐​speed rail advocates are proposing. Some proposals, such as the Green New Deal, even call for almost completely replacing low‐​cost, fast jet airliners with high‐​cost, relatively slow trains.

High‐​speed rail advocates get very emotional when you point these facts out to them. Case in point: a young urban planner named Sam Sklar totally freaked out when he read a 975‐​word blog post I wrote about high‐​speed rail a few weeks ago. His 5,750-word response called my post “the single dumbest article” he ever read. Yet all his response proves is that he doesn’t understand such basic concepts as the difference between taxes and user fees, long division, large numbers, and obsolete technologies.

I pointed out that, unlike the high‐​speed rail, toll roads pay for themselves, which almost everyone except Sklar understands is shorthand for meaning the users pay for the roads. “The roads don’t ‘pay for themselves,’” exclaims Sklar. “Someone has to pay for them.… Drivers pay tolls and tolls are regressive.”

Excuse me? Since when is paying for what you use, and not having to pay for what someone else uses, regressive? Tolls are not regressive provided the revenues actually pay for the roads people drive on and are not diverted to some transit megaproject.

Regressive is using taxes that are disproportionately paid by low‐​income people to build a transportation system that will disproportionately be used by high‐​income people. That’s regressive. That’s high‐​speed rail.

My blog post pointed out that average airfares in 2019 were under 14 cents per passenger mile while average fares on Amtrak’s high‐​speed Acela were more than 90 cents per passenger mile. To support the latter number, I included a link to an Amtrak annual report that listed fare revenues and passenger miles by train, including the Acela. Sklar confessed that he was “baffled” by this because he looked up the report I cited and wasn’t able to perform this simple arithmetic.

Instead, he looked up the fares for all Amtrak trains, the vast majority of which are low‐​speed trains, and found they averaged 42 cents a passenger mile, less than half the number I claimed. Apparently, he doesn’t understand that running trains at more than 200 miles per hour costs a lot more than running them at less than 80 miles per hour.

Sklar also appears to be baffled by large numbers such as trillions, as he pretty much ignored my estimates that building the skeletal, 8,600-mile high‐​speed rail system proposed by President Obama in 2009 would cost well over a trillion dollars. Considering that California is spending $100 million per mile to build high‐​speed rail on flat ground and estimates it will cost $200 million per mile to build in hilly territory, the more elaborate high‐​speed rail system featured in Sklar’s response, which is nearly 20,000 miles long, would cost well over $3 trillion.

I suspect that high‐​speed rail advocates such as Sklar simply breeze past these numbers because they don’t understand how much a trillion dollars really is. As engineer Randall Monroe points out, humans understand small numbers like 1, 10, and maybe 100, but they don’t understand big numbers like million, billion, and trillion. So when we hear numbers like $500 billion vs. $3 trillion, $3 trillion sounds smaller.

How much is a trillion dollars? It is enough money to buy every major transportation company in this country, including BNSF, CSX, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific railroads; Alaska, American, Delta, Southwest, and United airlines; General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler; and still leave more than $250 billion left over for UPS, Fedex, and various other transport companies.

But that same trillion dollars won’t be enough to build Obama’s high‐​speed rail system that completely misses such major cities as Denver, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Phoenix and doesn’t connect Houston with San Antonio, Jacksonville with Orlando, Buffalo with Cleveland, Pittsburgh with Columbus, or many other city pairs. And that high cost doesn’t seem to bother Sklar and other high‐​speed rail supporters at all.

Finally, the heart of my article was that high‐​speed rail was an obsolete technology because it is slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and more expensive than both. Sklar’s response is that “almost every developed country” in the world except the U.S. has it, so it must not be obsolete. In fact, only about a dozen countries have true high‐​speed rail; among the many that don’t are Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, and Switzerland, to name a few.

What the dozen high‐​speed rail countries have in common is that large numbers of people were riding low‐​speed trains before they built high‐​speed rail, and that is where they got their high‐​speed train riders. Nowhere have high‐​speed trains put a dent in the overall growth of either driving or flying. The most it has done has been to replace profitable intercity bus service with unprofitable trains.

The United States doesn’t have a huge base of low‐​speed train riders who will jump on the high‐​speed trains. In 2019, Americans traveled an average of more than 15,000 miles by automobile, 2,200 miles by airplane, and 19 miles by Amtrak. Passenger trains, no matter how fast they go, are functionally obsolete in the United States, and will eventually be seen as obsolete in other countries as well.

I apologize to Sam Sklar for my failure to communicate these basic concepts to him in my short article. I have written a much more detailed paper on high‐​speed rail that will soon be published by the Cato Institute. I hope that will settle any misunderstandings that remain between us.

Related Tags
Urban Growth and Transportation

Stay Connected to Cato

Sign up for the newsletter to receive periodic updates on Cato research, events, and publications.

View All Newsletters

1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20001-5403
202-842-0200
Contact Us
Privacy

Footer 1

  • About
    • Annual Reports
    • Leadership
    • Jobs
    • Student Programs
    • Media Information
    • Store
    • Contact
  • Podcasts

Footer 2

  • Experts
    • Policy Scholars
    • Adjunct Scholars
    • Fellows
  • Events
    • Upcoming
    • Past
    • Event FAQs
    • Sphere Summit

Footer 3

  • Publications
    • Books
    • Cato Journal
    • Regulation
    • Cato Policy Report
    • Cato Supreme Court Review
    • Cato’s Letter
    • Human Freedom Index
    • Economic Freedom of the World
    • Cato Handbook for Policymakers

Footer 4

  • Blog
  • Donate
    • Sponsorship Benefits
    • Ways to Give
    • Planned Giving
Also from Cato Institute:
Libertarianism.org
|
Humanprogress.org
|
Downsizinggovernment.org