High-speed rail needs national direction to get rolling, report says

Construction is underway to build high-speed rail lines in California and Nevada, with the promise that both would whisk passengers along at close to 200 mph. Meanwhile, Amtrak is pushing to build a Japanese-style bullet train in Texas. Those projects come after decades of efforts to catch the U.S. up with European and Asian countries in building state-of-the-art high-speed rail networks.

But now that the U.S. is finally starting to build high-speed rail, it risks creating a “inchoate and fragmented” system of networks that promote parochial concerns over national needs, according to a new report.

Eric Goldwyn, the program director of transportation and land use and an assistant professor at the New York University Marron Institute, warned in a new report that the lack of a national vision for high-speed rail hampered efforts to build new networks in places like California, Florida and Texas.

Congress is largely to blame as it has not made high-speed rail a major priority, Goldwyn allowed, and support from the U.S. Department of Transportation shifts from one administration to the next.

Plus, he noted, Amtrak, the primary passenger rail provider for intercity routes throughout the country, has mostly been left on the sidelines when it comes to high-speed routes. The company owns the Northeast Corridor, where Acela trains on some stretches travel more than 100 mph. But those speeds fall short of the international thresholds for high-speed rail. Amtrak recently “elbowed” its way into high-speed rail construction by taking over an effort to build a bullet train between Dallas and Houston, Goldwyn wrote. Before that, the biggest U.S. projects to build high-speed rail involved the private railroad Brightline and California’s state-led initiative to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Congress “has not resolved Amtrak’s largest issues: sustainable funding, greater control over the infrastructure it operates on, or a clear picture of how intercity rail fits into the national transportation policy framework. This is not how other high-speed networks have been built in Spain, France, China and Japan,” he wrote. “It is clear that there has been little intention of committing to Amtrak as the national high-speed rail carrier or addressing the national network at the national scale.”

The hands-off approach at the national level means that projects take longer to finish and cost more than they otherwise would, Goldwyn cautioned.

Under the Biden administration, the Federal Railroad Administration awarded more than $6 billion in grants to build two high-speed rail projects: with $3.1 billion for California’s state-run project and $3 billion for Brightline West, an effort to link Las Vegas to the Los Angeles suburbs. The FRA has also given Brightline access to $3.5 billion in low-interest loans for its Las Vegas project.

But the federal agency has remained “agnostic” on the finer points of those railroad’s operations, Goldwyn said. FRA, for example, hasn’t codified design standards that the projects should use.

“This tentative approach to high-speed rail policy has created uncertainty, delay, interoperability challenges, and additional costs as existing projects extend timelines and suppliers fail to participate in an active domestic market for the specialized inputs needed for high-speed rail, such as rolling stock, rail, ballast and turnouts,” he wrote.

As a result, Texas Central, Brightline West and California High-Speed Rail are all using different technical standards for the kinds of rail they use, signals, right-of-way dimensions and traction power facilities that deliver electricity to the trains using overhead wires. And in some cases, the U.S. projects are mixing components that are standard in Europe or Japan with what is available locally.

Standards matter. For high-speed rail, one expert told us that codifying design standards will move the HSR market “from confusion to alignment.” CA HSR, Brightline West, and Texas Central are currently working from different standards when it comes to rails and rolling stock. pic.twitter.com/koGQGNRRiS

— eric goldwyn (@ericgoldwyn) July 9, 2024

The lack of common standards means that the different parts will be harder to find and more expensive to buy, Goldwyn said. If FRA had standardized those components, it would mean the different systems would be interoperable. The railroads could have used “joint procurement of common items that could reduce costs and help catalyze a domestic market for key high-speed rail components,” he added.

“If high-speed rail were a fledgling technology, one could see the benefit of testing different designs before selecting a specific standard,” Goldwyn wrote. “When standards are mixed, as is the case with California High-Speed Rail and Brightline West, there is concern that designs that work on paper will not work in practice because of unanticipated interface challenges. This mixing and matching approach also leads to time consuming design, coordination and testing efforts.”

The lack of a clear national vision also allows local concerns to stymie progress on projects that would benefit a much larger region, Goldwyn said.

He gave the example of the California High-Speed Rail’s lengthy fight with Shafter, a town north of Bakersfield. The rail agency settled a four-year lawsuit with the town in 2018 over the environmental impact of the new passenger rail line going through town. Shafter insisted that the state agency had to provide six grade separations not only for its rail line, but also for a parallel freight rail line, to keep them from interfering with vehicle traffic. The federal government agreed in 2023 to provide the California agency nearly $202 million to build those separations.

“Separating rail traffic from automobile and pedestrian traffic is good. It speeds up operations and eliminates conflicts. All of this should happen and be celebrated,” Goldwyn wrote. “The question remains: Should a city be allowed to sue the California High-Speed Rail Authority to pay for grade separations that are distinct from the Authority’s project?”

Goldwyn said the FRA should impose terms and conditions on grant recipients to make sure they prioritize the construction of the high-speed rail projects. In countries such as Germany, France, Italy and Spain, projects that get funding get a special designation that prioritizes their construction. The Canadian province of Québec passed a law that gave municipalities 60 days to reach an agreement with a local transit agency building a rail project to issue a permit, otherwise the rail agency could move forward without it.

“Federal agencies should require governors, state legislatures or receiving project sponsors to commit in writing to binding processes with clear, unambiguous timelines for coordinating local permitting issues so that project sponsors are not derailed when a municipality files a lawsuit, a utility company delays relocating a cable, or an impacted third party frames an out-of-scope betterment as a necessary mitigation,” he wrote.

Goldwyn said states could pass similar laws, rather than leaving it up to rail operators like California High-Speed Rail to litigate or negotiate with the many entities that could hamper its construction efforts.

“Without rules in place to protect project sponsors from litigation like this, project sponsors have to decide whether it is worth going to court or capitulating,” he wrote. “Without state laws in place, federal jurisdiction, or financial commitments from cities, states, utilities, and freight railroads, large infrastructure projects will always provide an opportunity for municipalities, utilities, freight railroads, and other third parties to extract upgrades and improvements with impunity.”