“Why doesn’t the United States have high speed rail like Europe and China?”
It’s a question that routinely comes up in a lot of online discussions, and there’s no lack of accusations ready to be hurled on why this is so.
“The airlines don’t want it.”
“The railroads want freight, not people.”
“The politicians are doing what big business wants them to.”
“It would infringe on the auto companies’ profits.”
Etc., etc. But I’d like to offer a reason that is based not on politics but on demographics, specifically population density.
Trains are economically viable when they carry large volumes of passengers. There’s little economic point to building train lines where there aren’t many people to use them. Trains work well between dense population centers that are relatively close to each other, which is why the Boston-Washington corridor gets more passenger rail traffic than anywhere else in the country, and five times more passengers than all New York-Washington air traffic. And it’s not even that fast compared to trains in Western Europe, Japan, and China. True high speed rail is exceedingly expensive to build, requiring special tracks, ancillary equipment and of course, locomotives and cars. And it’s expensive not just for the rail line hardware itself, but to acquire the land necessary for the right-of-way, and the permits through countless states, towns, and cities, any one of which can dig their heels in until their price is met or simply refuse to cooperate. And complicating the land acquisition is the fact that high speed rail lines need to be a lot straighter than traditional tracks, or high speeds can’t be reached.
Comparing Population Densities Between Countries
China
This map of China has a diagonal line through the country that is known as the Hu Line. It is named after a Chinese demographer of the 1930s named Hu Huanyong. What he observed about the population distribution of China was that over 90% of people lived east of a line separating the fertile and low-lying flatlands in the east from the mountainous, arid, and barren land to the west. The part of China to the east of the Hu Line today, about 1.32 million square miles, contains 94% of China’s total population, about 1.316 billion, but comprises only about 43% of its land area. The population density east of the Hu line is about 815/sq. mi. By comparison, the most densely populated area of the US is the northeast with a density of about 317/sq. mi., or about 39% of eastern China’s, and the overall density of the contiguous US states is only 111/sq. mi.
Now let’s look at a map of China’s high speed rail system: Not surprisingly, almost all of China’s high speed rail lines lie east of the Hu Line, where 94% of all the people live.
This is why China leads the world in high-speed rail and we have so little: They have 3 times as many people in less than half the land area of the contiguous US. And the distances are shorter. The longest high speed line is 1710 miles, about half the width of the US.
In addition to having the population density to support it, China has a communist government that can more or less do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, at least compared to our messy democracy where citizens have a voice. So, no troublesome eminent domain fights, or congressional funding battles to bother with. Well, it’s not quite that simple, but they have a lot more power over people and their land than our government does.
Japan
Japan has an even higher population density of 872 people/square mile, and it’s small. It’s only about as long as from Maine to South Carolina. The longest high speed line is 422 miles, not quite as long as Boston to Washington, DC at 439 miles.
Western Europe
Western Europe is not one rail system, obviously, but a collection of partially interconnected smaller networks. The overall population density is 477/sq mi, or more than four times that of the contiguous US. Also, the individual countries’ rail lines are fairly short. The longest is 500 miles (Madrid-Barcelona-French border) in Spain. So, it’s easy to see why the individual European countries can justify high speed rail. Their population density is high and each individual country’s longest line is short.
The Boston-Washington corridor in the US fulfills the same requirements: it’s heavily populated (although still not as much as Europe), and the distance is 439 miles, only a bit shorter than Europe’s longest.
So, a fair comparison between the US and other countries reveals that we do have somewhat high speed rail (I’ve clocked AMTRAK at 127 mph (203 kph) in Rhode Island) in places with similar population densities and distances that other countries do.
Size matters!!
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