The U.S. Is Not Ready for High Speed Rail

[John Ashworth]

The U.S. Is Not Ready for High Speed Rail

The U.S. already has 140,000 miles of perfectly good regular train tracks. Let’s start with what we have...

There is no doubt that HSR is a fantastic technology that would make the U.S. much better in any measurable way. It is a proven technology. It is also not a new technology, having first debuted in Japan in the 1960s (although like any technology it has of course improved over time). The fact that other countries like Germany, France, South Korea, Spain, and especially China have successfully built lots of HSR leads many hopeful Americans to believe we can too...

We have no passenger rail culture to speak of outside of the northeast corridor and some tourist novelty routes...

So, at the heart of this HSR question is not "would it be good?" but, rather, a more strategic issue. Do we take the lower risk, lower reward path to drastically improve the rail infrastructure we already have? Or do we go with the big swing and try to start all over with high speed rail? We have a passenger rail network. It sucks right now, but we can make it better a lot easier than we can build a new one...