Don’t Ask a Tourist About High-Speed Rail

The first thing to build is the foundation

A quick note to begin today’s issue: BigThink Media has kindly published an excerpt of my book, The End of Driving. If you’re curious about the book and the arguments that my co-authors and I make, please check it out!

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California High-Speed Rail’s 2008 business plan projected it would serve 90 million riders annually. 2025’s annual ridership, of course, is much less than that; it’s zero.

That’s because California High-Speed Rail (HSR) is unfinished. And that’s for many reasons. The initial segment being built is between two minor nodes, Bakersfield and Merced, and as such will neither serve neither the primary Los Angeles–San Francisco market nor build local connectivity, while the chosen route, through Tehachapi, adds cost and construction complexity. But one reason doesn’t get enough attention. The project’s poorly-conceived alignment and phasing were chosen, at least in part, to satisfy the public conception of what a good HSR project should be.

And I won’t soften the blow: that conception was mostly wrong.

It stemmed from a common North American experience, namely of visiting Europe and taking the TGV: departing Paris and arriving eight or ten hours later in Berlin or Rome. As the tourist alights in a clean and spacious train station, head swimming, the thought arises. This! This is what we must build at home. This is what we deserve.

This epiphany is perfectly understandable. It’s genuine, heartfelt, and completely mistakes how European rail systems work. The result of that mistake is twofold… not only do North American railfans and Europhiles transpose a system from one place into another where it won’t succeed, but they also transpose the wrong parts of that system. They want the penthouse view without building the lower floors.

I’m not the first to notice this. One of the transit thinkers that we at Changing Lanes most admire, Alon Levy, recently explored this error. The tourist’s experience of European rail, says Levy, is not what European rail actually is. The tourist sees only the visible surface of a much larger machine. HSR in Europe is the prestige routes that connect cities tourists visit, powered by an invisible substrate of unglamorous regional travel that tourists never see. Levy’s analysis provides the essential framework for understanding this disconnect, but the implications reach further than they suggest. When North Americans aspire to their own rail projects based on the tourist experience, we end up trying to copy the wrong thing entirely. We see the cathedral spire, then try to build it without a foundation.

Notwithstanding my established skepticism on the subject, I love HSR, and would love to see it in North America, someday. Unlike some, I think trains are a progress-and-abundance technology. And copying Europe is a good path to building the future we want.

But we have to pick the right European things to copy.

The Core Misreading

North Americans consistently misread European rail because they observe it as tourists, and then design policy from what they’ve seen: as if the European system exists to serve tourists. But it doesn’t.