President Barack Obama’s plans to transform fundamentally the way Americans travel is gaining speed, and North Carolina wants to go along for the ride.

The president announced in April a plan to provide $1 billion a year for the next five years, in addition to the $8 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, as a down payment on a nationwide network of high-speed rail lines.

The plan builds on a long-standing idea to make America more train-friendly like Europe and Japan, two places often cited as gold standards for modern mass transit. But a new John Locke Foundation report from Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute working on urban growth and transportation issues, calls into question the conventional wisdom of those systems’ effectiveness.

O’Toole’s report, “Why North Carolina Should Not Build High-Speed Rail,” details the expense, scope, and consequences of high-speed rail development in the United States, addressing key questions about President Obama’s plan.

Obama’s dream

The president’s plan names 10 high-speed rail corridors as priorities for funding in the 8,500-mile system, though details of which states will get the money are not final. A 2001 study by the Federal Railroad Administration suggested corridors, including the California, Pacific Northwest, South Central, Gulf Coast, Chicago Hub Network, Florida, Keystone, Empire, Northern New England, and Southeast lines.

North Carolina is part of a Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor from Florida to Washington, D.C., with connections to the North¬east Corridor. The SEHSR (pronounced like “Caesar”) has its roots in a U.S. Department of Transportation designation from 1992. The Southeast Corridor initially was designed to connect Washington, D.C., with Richmond, Raleigh, and Charlotte; since then, the SEHSR has expanded to Jacksonville, Fla., including Atlanta, Savannah, Ga., and Birmingham, Ala.

High-speed rail fits into a part of what O’Toole calls Obama’s livability agenda. “Instead of using federal dollars to build highways, we spend it on high-speed rail,” he said. “Our highways are going to get more congested, making it harder for people to drive.”

Obama’s team uses a more positive spin.

“President Obama’s vision of robust, high-speed rail service offers Americans the kind of travel options that throughout our history have contributed to economic growth and enhanced quality of life,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in an April announcement. “We simply can’t build the economy of the future on the transportation networks of the past.”

States have begun lining up for their respective portions of the network, with federal grants expected to begin by the end of the summer.

North Carolina’s role

In early July, North Carolina submitted a preapplication for high-speed rail stimulus funding. In the application, state Transportation Secretary Eugene Conti cited the extensive role railroads have played in the state’s history. He detailed the state’s investment of more than $300 million (coupled with $332 million in federal spending) in passenger rail systems over the past 20 years.
Calling the SEHSR the “natural extension” of the Northeast Corridor, Conti’s description of the economic pluses of high-speed rail reads like a wish list for a state strapped for cash. Among other benefits, he said the SEHSR will “generate more than $700 million in new tax revenue; yield nearly 19,000 permanent full-time jobs; develop mixed-use activity centers surrounding stations; provide an alternative to congested highways; and improve air quality by reducing the emissions per passenger-mile traveled. …”

But O’Toole says even the mildest expectations for high-speed rail belie the truth about their commercial and environmental potential.

First is the issue of cost. Building true high-speed rail corridors, which allow travel at average speeds of 140 to 150 mph, is enormously expensive. The FRA estimates that its plan will cost about $90 billion. O’Toole, on the other hand, estimates that a system connecting major cities in 33 states would cost well over $500 billion, with likely costs closer to $1 trillion.

In North Carolina, trains would run at top speeds of 110 mph, with average speeds hovering closer to 85 mph. Currently, SEHSR passenger service runs at an average speed of about 47 mph. SEHSR estimates that reconstructing, upgrading, and building lines between Washington and Charlotte (not including the extensions into the rest of the Southeast) will cost about $5 billion. “Yet the average North Carolinian will take a round trip on such trains only once every 27 years,” O’Toole writes in his report.

Nor is high-speed rail as green as its advocates contend. “Passenger rail’s environmental benefits are negligible and costly,” O’Toole says in the report. Per mile, fuel-efficient cars and buses use significantly less energy than passenger trains do, yet admitting that is politically unpopular.

Colleen Calvani is a contributor to Carolina Journal.