Babbage looks at the economics of the various high speed railway lines both in service and planned:
Of all the high-speed train services around the world, only one really makes economic sense — the 550km (350-mile) Shinkansen route that connects the 30m people in greater Tokyo to the 20m residents of the Kansai cluster of cities comprising Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and Nara. At peak times, up to 16 bullet trains an hour travel each way along the densely populated coastal plain that is home to over half of Japan’s 128m people.
Having worked for many years in Tokyo, with family in Osaka, your correspondent has made the two-and-a-half hour journey on the Tokaido bullet-train many times. It is clean, fast and highly civilised, though far from cheap. It beats flying, which is unbearably cramped by comparison, just as pricey, and dumps you an hour from downtown at either end.
The sole reason why Shinkansen plying the Tokaido route make money is the sheer density — and affluence — of the customers they serve. All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping keep them rolling.
California’s planned 800-mile high speed rail route cannot possibly earn a profit, for many reasons (not least of which is that the first segment of the network won’t even run high speed trains until the entire system is built). It’s going to cost an eye-watering amount of money even to build that first section:
Between them, the federal government, municipals along the proposed route and an assortment of private investors are being asked to chip in $30 billion. A further $10 billion is to be raised by a bond issue that Californian voters approved in 2008. Anything left unfunded will have to be met by taxpayers. They could be dunned for a lot. A study carried out in 2008 by the Reason Foundation and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association put the final cost of the complete 800-mile network at $81 billion.That is probably not far off the mark. Last week, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office came out with a damning indictment of the project’s unrealistic cost estimates and poor management. The bill this legislative watchdog put on the first phase of the high-speed rail project alone is $67 billion — and higher still if the project runs into trouble gaining route approval in urban areas.
If the latter number is correct, then the first phase of the system is clocking in at nearly $1 billion per mile. And this is the “cheap” section running through mostly thinly populated farming areas. If, somehow, the more expensive sections of the planned network don’t cost much more, the total construction bill will top $800 billion. The original plan had the entire system costing $43 billion.
Cost overruns are an expected part of major government construction projects, but that’s insane.
