(Alex Goldmark, Transportation Nation) A new report compares almost 8,000 potential high-speed rail corridors to find the best routes for future investment. The study estimates potential ridership for each, and suggests predicted passenger demand should be the most important factor in determining where to build the next round of high-speed rail lines. According to the numbers, the lines already under construction aren’t at the top of the list.
The study, “High Speed Rail in America,” was issued by America 2050, a pro-high-speed rail research and planning organization. The most popular existing rail routes—connecting the biggest, most dense cities—come out on top, with New York to Washington cited as the best candidate for HSR in the nation. Some unexpected routes, like New York to Albany, do especially well, while the Tampa-Orlando line already under construction doesn’t rank as high—suggesting that it was chosen for reasons beyond rider demand.
The report is a follow-up study to the group’s 2009 report, “Where High-Speed Rail Works Best,” which analyzed 27,000 potential corridors (or “city pairs”) but did not consider the cities in between each pairing. A key advantage of rail compared to air travel is the ability to make intermediate stops, potentially creating a regional network for smaller feeder cities and corridors.
To be clear, this is a high-speed rail study from a group that is a huge supporter of high-speed rail so it’s conclusions are how to build rail, how whether or not to do so. “America 2050 strongly believes that investments in HSR will be essential to the long- term economic success and mobility of the nation and its megaregions, and supports the Obama Administration’s efforts to lay the foundation for a national HSR network serving these places,” said Robert Yaro, president of Regional Plan Association and co-chair of America 2050. What these rankings do is suggest where to start that network. More details after the jump.
The study evaluates 7,870 proposed rail rights-of-way breaking each one up into small geographic areas around potential stations, and measuring: population, employment concentration, transit, regional air travel, and interestingly, types of industries there. Not all jobs are equal when it comes to creating demand for high-speed rail. “People who work in knowledge industries [like the] financial sector, tend to be more mobile and travel more for business than those in industrial sectors” the researchers say. All of it was then calculated on a per-mile basis.
The main goal in presenting this kind of data isn’t so much to find a cut off of where to build and where not to build high-speed rail, but where to build it first, so the early experiments can succeed, paving the way for more.
As Yaro puts it, the report is a call for “the federal government [to] adopt a data-driven, ridership-based approach to choosing rail corridors for federal investment in the future in order to direct funding toward projects with the greatest market demand.” That’s in contrast to sending the money to states based on which governors beg for it most, or other non-rail factors.
The study points out that Florida may end up with their first-in-the-nation high-speed rail corridor not so much because of high rider demand as fortuitous political conditions. “While Florida’s population, employment, and transit characteristics are not near the top of national statistics, other exogenous factors positioned the state at the front of the line for federal high-speed rail dollars: project readiness and public ownership of the right-of-way between Tampa and Orlando.”
That route scored a 13.63, not even in the top 10 percent, compared to the Northeast corridor’s top score of 20.15 for the stretch from Washington to New York. Amtrak issued a 30 year, $117 billion “vision” for what HSR would look like along the east coast, but no major investments have been made to get that underway.
The other major project already underway, CalTran’s Los Angeles to San Francisco plan, scored a 17.98. As a point of reference: A score of over 19 means that for most of the criteria used, the corridor was in the top one percent. These are the corridors America 2050 believes are the best candidates for “core express” service: true high-speed rail on dedicated tracks.
Scores of 17 and above are the top 10 percent and, the authors posit, are still good potential candidates for high-speed rail or will be in the future. The authors concede though that their model and rankings don’t account for a Disney factor, which very well could act as a magnet for intercity trips upping Orlando’s rankings all around. In addition to ignoring Mickey, the study also leaves out intercity automobile travel because there isn’t any comprehensive data available. In an era of GPS it seems like that data would be the easiest to gather, but the federal government has not done it on an official national scale since the 1995 American Travel Survey according to America 2050.
“Now that the initial rush of high-speed rail stimulus grants have been awarded to regions such as California, Florida, and the Midwest, it’s time to build the foundation for a program that will have long-term sustainability and gain public support. Collecting data on long-distance travel and identifying the most promising markets for high-speed rail is essential to ensuring our money is well spent,” said Petra Todorovich, the director of America 2050.
Aside from praising data, asking for more of it and putting Florida’s rail plans in a national perspective, the rankings, broken down by region, also help compare sub-sections of larger planned routes, like the Los Angeles-San Francisco corridor. According to the numbers, shorter routes from Los Angeles to San Diego and Santa Barbara, or from San Francisco to Sacramento, are better routes than the 453-mile trip between California’s two biggest cities.
North of California, Portland to Seattle scored well. The authors note Amtrak ridership on the Cascades service in the Pacific Northwest has quadrupled since 1994, showing growing demand for future expansion. In the Midwest, Chicago is certainly the hub for many spokes, the strongest connection of which is to Milwaukee. Within the Northeast, the Empire Corridor, from New York City to Albany, scored impressively high–just a hair shy of Chicago to Milwaukee, in fact. As shown on the map above most of the more viable routes are in the dense Northeast, where rail service is already more popular. That’s not surprising–but, the authors stress, it is still important to factor into policy and planning.
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