RALEIGH – With the myriad problems facing North Carolina households, businesses, and governments, how can anyone seriously believe that the best use of up to $1.3 billion in new infrastructure funds would be to speed up passenger rail service?
It sounds silly, but the Obama administration and like-minded North Carolina officials aren’t kidding. They think the state should grab the money, upgrade some 400 miles of Amtrak service, and then spend another $25 million or so in tax money every year to subsidize its operations.
I’d use the popular term “high-speed rail” to describe the proposed new service, but it doesn’t really fit. When advocates talk about high-speed rail, they conjure up the prospect of bullet trains zooming from city to city, as in parts of Europe or Japan. In reality, according to a new JLF report by Randal O’Toole, the proposed Amtrak upgrades in North Carolina would increase the maximum speed to 110 miles per hour, with average speeds likely to range between 55 and 75 mph.
Or, as I might have put it in my geeky way, we’re talking Steve Austin speed, not Barry Allen speed.
In his paper, O’Toole lists the usual talking points in favor of higher-speed passenger rail – and proceeds to dismantle each one of them with cold, hard facts. For example:
• Energy efficiency. Rail travel is only slightly more efficient than air service and is about on-par with automobiles, when measured correctly as a cost per passenger mile traveled. The new rail service will have negligible effects on energy use, carbon emissions, and air quality, according to any reasonable reading of the data.
• Traffic congestion. Even in the parts of Europe and Japan where true bullet trains run, rail has still declined as a share of total travel. In the U.S., and particularly here in North Carolina, housing densities and household-consumption patterns are such that it is highly unlikely that the new rail service will divert a discernible amount of traffic off of our crowded interstates and other major highways. O’Toole estimates that the average North Carolina would use the new Amtrak service only once every 27 years.
• Economic impact. Obviously, spending billions of dollars to build or upgrade train tracks will employ people, including some North Carolinians. But borrowing or taxing to finance the rail system will cause even more people to lose their jobs, as resources are transferred from higher-value investment to Amtrak service.
“High-speed rail is a technology whose time has come and gone,” O’Toole writes. “What might have been useful a century ago is today merely an anachronism that will cost taxpayers tens or hundreds of billions of dollars yet contribute little to American mobility or environmental quality.”
And yet, I know very well that the Perdue administration and the North Carolina Department of Transportation are going to pursue these “high-speed rail” dollars despite any real prospect of the benefits exceeding the costs. I guess I’ll just resolve not to take them seriously, just as they seem unwilling to approach the state’s transportation problems seriously.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation