Like it or not, the United States has a big transportation problem.
According to many, a high-speed rail network could help alleviate a lot of the country's
transportation issues, but high-speed rail in the USA hasn't made much progress in the
last 50 years.
Here's why.
In the United States, everybody likes the idea of trains... but American trains are
slow, clumsy, and absurdly expensive.
Nobody wants to creep down the coast in an Amtrak - and to be honest, can you blame them?
Meanwhile, a number of other countries across the world run trains that whiz along so fast
and so smoothly that, according to Vox, the average person actually prefers them to airplanes.
That's because airports have to be situated a taxi ride away from big cities, and force
you to endure unbearable security procedures.
Train stations, however, can be planted right in the city center - meaning that, if you
want to travel a mid-range distance, a bullet train will get you there faster, cheaper,
and more comfortably.
No, they're never going to lay tracks across the Atlantic, where planes have a significant
advantage.
But for shorter distances, high-speed rail closes the gap.
Bullet trains are also dramatically more energy-efficient than planes and automobiles.
The International Energy Agency reports that, even though the rail sector carries 8% of
the world's passengers and 7% of global freight transport, it only represents 2% of the Earth's
transport energy demand.
Even better, three quarters of passenger rail activity takes place on electric trains, making
the rail industry the only form of transportation that is widely electrified today.
Lots of big companies will tell you that Americans don't really care about high-speed rail, a
problem many blame on the country's automobile culture.
However, surveys from the American Public Transportation Association tell a different
story.
A 2015 study found that if bullet trains were available, nearly two-thirds of surveyed Americans
would be happy to use them - and when people were informed of the cost and time-saving
benefits of high-speed rail, that number even increased a few points.
Millennials want it even more, as at least 71 percent of the 18-44 crowd said they would
like to ride bullet trains.
Furthermore, high-speed rail enjoys broad bipartisan support, and three quarters of
survey participants supported making it easier for real estate developers to place amenities
near high-speed rail stations.
So yes, average Americans do want high-speed rail, and on both sides of the aisle, too.
It's popular.
It's proven.
So why not?
Now, it's worth pointing out that America has actually been working on high-speed rail
for over 50 years.
Renewed efforts make headlines every once in a while, but these projects tend to stagnate
pretty quickly.
To be fair, when Japan first introduced bullet trains to the world, the U.S. tried to hop
on board from the get-go.
All the way back in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the High-Speed Ground Transportation
Act.
While construction began immediately, the project ran into frequent mechanical problems,
and its funding had been severely depleted by 1975.
All in all, it wasn't quite the grand achievement everyone hoped for.
And while the push for a proper high-speed rail has become more prevalent in the 21st
century, and things do seem to be amping up, it's not really clear that anything will be
much different this time around.
A major advantage of developing high-speed rail in America is the fact that it already
exists elsewhere.
Sadly, as with basically everything else in the U.S. today, the biggest obstacle in the
way of progress is politics.
Speeding up the Acela Express, for example, would require billions in federal funding,
which isn't exactly going to be forthcoming in today's heavily polarized political climate.
And then there's California.
The political squabbles that have dashed the state's bullet train ambitions are now legendary.
While the concept of connecting the Golden State's biggest cities via bullet train seems
great on paper, the planning process has been fraught by rushed construction and bad financial
decisions.
"The bottom line is we’re really bad at just building things cheaply and quickly in
the US in general."
The political battles got even nastier in 2019, when the Trump administration pulled
$929 million in federal grants for California's high-speed rail.
The big problem here is that none of these pitfalls have anything to do with high-speed
rail itself.
Bullet trains are a proven, established technology that reaps huge benefits across multiple sectors.
But ground-level mistakes and political pettiness have turned a potentially great technology
into a total mess.
But that's not the end of America's bullet train woes.
A major contributor to the downfall of high-speed rail in the U.S. are the gargantuan industries
who lobby against their development through coordinated propaganda efforts - and sometimes
blatant lies.
Many of the attacks against high-speed rail have come from the Reason Foundation, a self-proclaimed
"libertarian think tank" which regularly bashes efforts to build bullet trains.
According to SF Gate, this enterprise is funded by the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil, Chevron,
Shell Oil, the American Petroleum Institute, and Delta Airlines, among others.
These corporations recognize that, whenever Americans are given the opportunity to use
high-speed rail, major airlines and oil companies will be the ones to suffer.
Whenever a high-speed rail project gains momentum in America, big oil pours billions of dollars
into lobbyists, propaganda, paid politicians, and, of course, the Reason Foundation.
"Maniacal laugh!
Maniacal laugh!
Maniacal laugh!"
That's the main reason the U.S. has no high-speed rail network - and this problem won't go away
easily.
Unfortunately, the lobbying issue isn't going to vanish overnight, and successfully implementing
a high-speed rail network across the entire United States is going to take years — if
not decades, depending on how future power struggles turn out.
Despite these obstacles, however, there are multiple high-speed rail efforts pushing ahead.
For instance, Virgin Trains USA hopes to make their electric train from Las Vegas to Los
Angeles operational as soon as 2022.
A similar project is underway in Texas, where they're working on a Houston-to-Dallas line
that could even hit Japanese bullet train speeds - as well as a Florida line from Miami
to Tampa.
The infamous California train seems to face new struggles everyday, but there is hope
that they might someday pull it together.
After languishing on the back burner for decades, the past decade has seen newfound fervor for
high-speed rail projects, particularly since investing in electric bullet trains is a key
element in the Green New Deal.
So don't rule out high-speed rail in the U.S. just yet.
There's still a long way to go, but the future might get here some day.
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