Reece Martin

“We already have a high-speed transportation system”

Recently, someone with a lot of followers was being dense on Twitter regarding how the US “already has a high-speed transportation system” — referring to passenger aviation as some sort of replacement for high-speed rail, which this person remarked was “slow” with top speeds of only about 200 miles per hour.

People were quick to rightly point out the many benefits of high speed rail — compact stations (at least compared to airports), high frequencies allowing you to just show up and get on a train, and connections straight to city centre. These are obviously great arguments for high speed rail, but what concerns me is that America’s best (and perhaps only) shot at a true modern, purpose-built, high-speed rail line that actually connects in the next decade is Brightline West.

Sometimes people like to suggest that California High-Speed rail counts for the above, but despite what YouTube comments I get sometimes suggest, the central valley cities are not major — certainly not on the scale of LA or Las Vegas, and thus the potential impact CAHSR (at least until it connects a major city) will have on the Overton window for high-speed rail in the US is small in my view.

I will write something on it soon, but projects that are technically impressive (built to modern standards with modern technology), but that don’t connect well to existing systems or major population centres should not be heralded as great achievements. I do not feel uniquely about CAHSR in this regard — I am sceptical of other projects that have poorly connected stations in other places as well, such as Tren Maya in Mexico or some of the rail projects you see in Africa. At the same time, there is a strange tendency to respond to critiques of CAHSR with the connectivity of the final stage, but with the timelines of earlier stages.

Getting Brightline West going means finally having a proper high-speed rail line that policymakers can go on a junket to visit and try out, and I think having that on continent will speed up the rate that high speed rail is moving — even if the project has issues, and that excites me. Even if Brightline West isn’t great (it doesn’t connect Las Vegas to Los Angeles, but Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga 60-kilometres east of downtown LA), it will hopefully inspire projects to learn from its mistakes.

When I express concern about projects like CAHSR, I often get pushback that I am being overly negative or unfair. But as I see it, I’m just trying to imagine how the project will function and thus how it will be received by the general public.

If CAHSR only gets completed between Bakersfield and Merced and remains that way for a long time, it will be seen as, and reported on as, a white elephant. Perception matters as well: someone skeptical of high-speed rail who visits California and decides to take a ride on it might decide “high-speed rail makes sense, but the US can’t do it”. The idea that by simply having a high-speed train within the country you will suddenly convince people it is a good idea is something I want to believe (as I referenced in the previous paragraph). However, it’s worth remembering that the New York City Subway exists and despite its flaws is pretty amazing for getting around New York (seriously, travelling fast underground with other trains running next to you is an impressive experience) and is used by immense numbers of visitors every year, yet most cities in America don’t have a subway, much less anything that can hold a candle to New York.

Now, it’s fair to say that high-speed rail is probably a little more impressive and awe-inspiring than an underground subway, even an impressive one — and it’s also probably better adapted to the sprawling land use in much of the US, but I am not convinced that it’s so different that it will suddenly change the minds of policymakers who are not inspired by urban subways or the existing fast trains in the US. Basically, of course I am on board with high-speed rail and want it to succeed — I just worry about the risk inherent in building a project which doesn’t show people what high-speed rail could be and instead is only some fractional version of that.

Brightline West

Relatively recently, the Federal government, interested in giving a shot in the arm to Brightline West, awarded the project a $3 billion grant — likely in a bid to get something high-speed between major centres off the ground (though again Brightline West goes to Rancho Cucamonga not LA, which would be like having a high-speed rail line go to Stamford, Connecticut and saying it goes to New York City — and Stamford has a lot more rail service to New York than Rancho Cucamonga has to Los Angeles). And to be clear, this is good! I’ll list the major reasons why — even with my above stated concerns.

1. The “Showroom” Effect; building charismatic infrastructure like this gets people excited and encourages more building, both riding (seeing you can cover great distances quickly) but also seeing the structures and seeing trains pass at high speeds.
2. Technology Transfer; Brightline West is going to be the first transit project in the US to use ETCS (the European Train Control System, which allows high-speed, in-cab signalling and high frequencies and is multi-vendor), and they are actually trying to get a waiver from Buy America requirements to buy Eurobalises and Euroloops. ETCS is really a great technology and one which all kinds of North American rail systems can benefit from, and every deployment means more local knowledge and a bigger North American market that encourages more vendors to come into it from overseas — which helps lower costs and build support for projects.
3. Building Station and Infrastructure Design Expertise; in the same building local experience vein, Brightline West will mean some number of engineers and firms in the US learn how to design high-speed rail infrastructure as well as actually construct and maintain it. This lowers the barrier for entry for future projects, and it also creates a new group of people invested in more high-speed rail getting built. There isn’t all that much modern electrified rail in the US either, so Brightline West will also mean more 25 kV electrified railway mileage to help generate more experience building and maintaining that infrastructure.
4. Amtrak Pressure; as much as people on Twitter deeply invested in Amtrak like to complain about Brightline, the truth is Brightline does provide a world-class passenger experience, and things like fare gates for ticket checks should be much more common on intercity rail on this continent — and I am sure Amtrak has noticed. The more “players” there are in intercity rail, the more experimentation and local examples there are that can rub off from one system to another. Sure, rail operators in Europe and Asia already provide a lot of the same stuff as Brightline, but Brightline doing it helps dull the pernicious “not invented here” problem.
5. Having High Speed Rail; obviously, while imperfect (mostly at the ends), the nice thing about the line between Las Vegas and southern California is if and when California High Speed Rail starts getting built out we will have a pretty long leg built capable of very high speeds that can “plug in” to the network, allowing things like direct Sacramento, San Jose, and San Francisco to Las Vegas train services (I can imagine tech people from northern California taking the train en mass to Vegas for CES for example). Basically, things can really only get better.

Healthy Skepticism and a Lack of Learning

But there’s another side to this that I don’t see getting enough acknowledgement — and that’s that despite high-speed rail being a stated policy priority for US leaders since at least back in the Obama days, all that we’ve been able to muster by around 2030 will be one modern line that doesn’t even properly connect to central parts of either of the cities it connects to. As Alon Levy aptly notes in this blog post, the same issues of diffuse funding, high costs, and a lack of emphasis on delivering projects that actually provide the central benefits of high-speed rail (frequency, city centre connectivity, modern TOD at stations) seem almost as bad today as they were a decade ago.

Basically, while it seems that the US wants high speed rail more than ever, a lot of the fundamental planning and policy issues that have prevented it from happening so far are unchanged. At the same time, improvements to the Northeast corridor — which should be huge slam dunks that speed up existing popular trains and add capacity for more — have basically been derailed by cost and timeline blowouts (it’s going to be over a decade before we have four tunnels under the Hudson, which is crazy). Too often, high-speed rail advocacy appears disconnected from critical cost and best practice advocacy as I talked about in an earlier blog post — building world-beating high-speed rail far from city centres might not be better than building really good semi-fast rail right to them.

At the same time, while I think the “Showroom” effect I mentioned before is real, I don’t believe the impressive structures, fast trains, and modern technology will do nearly as much to move needle towards more high-speed rail as tons of people using fast rail and having great experiences doing so. With Brightline West in particular, there is also quite a bit of what I’ll call “airplanification”, which is the treatment of rail service like passenger aviation — even in places where rail should have a clear advantage. For example, the stations for Brightline West are at least as far from the city centres of both Las Vegas and Los Angeles as the primary airports for each city (this is also despite LA Union Station being a pretty respectable transit hub!), which cannot be overstated especially at the LA end. Brightline advertises Brightline West as “car0free and carefree” and as connecting the Las Vegas with the “beaches of southern California”, but in reality I imagine a large number of people will need to drive or take an Uber to the LA area station (which for me seriously would decrease the quality of the journey — I don’t like rideshares), which is set to have lots of what appears to be structured parking and is nowhere near the beaches. There will be Metrolink service from the LA area station to LA Union station, but that journey will be roughly an hour and twenty minutes; this is not all that much shorter than the entire rest of the journey to Vegas, and at the moment there is significantly less Metrolink service on the San Bernardino line than there will likely be on Brightline West (which is oddly planning for 45-minute headways and will probably look like hourly service in practice).

Despite the criticism Brightline Florida gets, it actually manages to handle a lot of these “little details” better than Brightline West — which highlights to me the importance of things like service and urban integration as opposed to speed and honestly even electrification. Brightline Florida’s stations have some TOD and probably more TOD potential, several of them are in semi-walkable areas, and the station in Miami is very central and provides a number of good transit connections. Even at the Orlando end of the line, which is absolutely the less well-connected end, you’re at least dropped at the airport where you can presumably catch a shuttle bus to major destinations or rent a car.

Ultimately, to bring it full circle, I just worry that if the US’ first proper high-speed rail project only runs once per hour (they are actually single-tracking the line in large sections initially, which was also done in Florida in the new high speed sections albeit with space for a second track to be added), and drops people off in no man’s land far from their final destinations, people may get the sense that high-speed rail is just kind of like flying but with less onerous security — which will give credence to crazy people who suggest flying is just as good, and might take the wind out of the high-speed sails. By comparison, in Japan and France, the first big high speed rail projects were built between central locations in Tokyo and Osaka and Paris and Lyon respectively — it’s just not clear to me that Brightline is going to be able to capture anywhere near the same success without at least providing that central connectivity (which is useful even in cities as decentralized as LA since getting into the city centre still puts you closer to lots of the population).

To end things on a positive note, I do want to talk about what a future looks like where we build on the undeniably useful high-speed line from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga so that it’s a proper Los Angeles to Las Vegas High-Speed route. Ideally we start planning these projects now so that when the first phase of Brightline West is done, we can start on these immediately.

Completing the Vegas End

Firstly, the Las Vegas terminus, while much closer to that city’s centre of gravity (and by that I mean actually within the same solar system) is not really all that close to the strip, since it’s actually south of the airport. Fortunately, this can be fixed pretty easily. It seems evident to me that a roughly 15-kilometre elevated extension of the line (just as you would see on a Shinkansen Line in Japan) should be built north of the existing terminus (this appears to be at grade so it would likely need to be a branch starting south of this, and with some sort of flying junction most likely) along I-15 and then along the railway tracks north of Spring Mountain road all the way to downtown Las Vegas.

I imagine an extension like this would have three or four stations: one at Mandalay Bay/Luxor/Allegiant Stadium, one at Las Vegas City Centre (Aria, Cosmopolitan, Vdara, Waldorf Astoria)/T-Mobile Arena, and one at Resorts World/Fashion Show Mall/Convention Centre and Downtown Las Vegas. These stations could be built on land adjacent to the highway and railway or potentially above them if that proved infeasible, and ideally with direct indoor connections to the events venues and hotels nearby, allowing passengers to walk to many final destinations along the strip which would effectively cut travel time and cost; plus, if Brightline did manage to acquire strip-adjacent land, it could probably make loads developing it, or partner with an existing resort operator. Assuming you are building 15 kilometres of elevated track at ~200 million per kilometre and four stations, you should absolutely be able to do this project for ~$5 billion — which is about half as much as the initial project (and probably less than a rapid transit system connecting all the way to the Brightline station, even if that’s kind of crazy), but which also unlocks a ton of value. Land acquisition and right-of-way planning for this can and should start as soon as possible.

Completing the Los Angeles End

For Los Angeles, the situation is much trickier. So much so that I’m going to cover this in a future post! Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it.