October82
Well-Known Member
I'll come back to your comment about ROI in a moment, but I've highlighted the important part. Projected markets are not the same as current markets. Consumers can't react or purchase services that don't exist.
The way you model whether people would use a new service is through demand modeling. This can get quite complicated in the case of transportation infrastructure because you need a full network analysis - and complete networks don't exist in much of the US, which is incidentally going to be a major problem for Brightline West - but the basic model for all transit infrastructure is called a gravity model. As a guide to the ridership potential for different modes, you can take the product of the population of destination pairs and divide by the square of the transit time. When you do these for a representative sample of possible US routes for different modes (airplanes, cars, trains), you find that a large number of routes in the US would exceed ridership of internationally comparable routes.
This is a very simple way of bootstrapping the lack of revealed preferences given the poor quality of existing services. We know from what people empirically choose to do - when given options they don't currently have - that they would choose rail if it were of sufficient quality. When you add in full network modeling, many additional more marginal routes become viable. Much more detailed modeling to determine economic viability is currently being supported through the FRA's Corridor ID program, which is the go to resource for a comprehensive listing of potentially high ridership routes.
To return to your point about ROI - this is really the wrong way to look at transportation infrastructure. None of it generates direct return on investment, including the interstate highway system or much of the existing airport infrastructure. The point of spending on transportation infrastructure is to enable the rest of the economy to function efficiently. Where trains make sense they are a generally lower cost (both in $$$ and time) way to move large numbers of people compared to highways. Again, this isn't a competition - highways are very good at moving most kinds of freight - but all transportation infrastructure requires upfront investment from governments even in cases where private operators ultimately use that infrastructure. We should consider the total direct and indirect ROI and not just, for example, the costs at the point of use.
European and Asian countries have only developed their intercity rail networks in the last several decades. Most people, when given a cheaper and faster way to get from point A to B aren't going to choose a more expensive and slower option. That's the whole reason why people don't use trains now - they're slow and expensive - and why we should invest to bring them up to international standards. If countries as dysfunctional as Spain or Italy can manage to do this at scale in a few decades, American industry should be able to do the same.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's a fact in virtually every other wealthy country. If you want to see how these services work, take a trip on Spain's AVE, France's TGV, Germany's Intercity Express, Japan's Shinkansen, or China's G-class. You'll pay the equivalent of about $20 for a service that beats domestic air travel or driving in any of these countries.
I responded to your comment and pointed out that all three are already met by existing standard services in other wealthy countries. In no country that I know of has the fourth point been born out. People choose high quality trains because they're good, not because they're forced to by policy.
Land acquisition costs are actually not a significant barrier for HSR projects in the US. The main issues are that we lack the engineering experience. Foreign rail operators, such as SNCF, have explored building region scale HSR in the US for around $50 billion, and expected around 50 million passengers/year and profitability within 15 years. Even if you think their cost estimates are too low (which I do!), for comparison, state and local highway expenditures are about $200 billion/year. We're not talking about an insurmountable change, we're talking about redirecting a portion of dollars that are presently going to highway expansion projects towards higher capacity, more efficient, and ultimately lower cost alternatives.
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