High-Speed rail coming to United States

The Department of Transportation has appropriated $8 billion among 31 states to start development on the first nationwide high-speed passenger rail service. The DOT sites environmental and financial reasons for the new project, specifically the desire to reduce oil dependency. “Experts in the oil industry have been saying for a number of years now that there is not enough oil left in the ground to continue our current level of consumption, not to mention no way to meet growing demand, and we can expect half as much oil available to us in the next 20 years,” said Andy Kunz, president and CEO of the rail association. “If we are to continue economic development and prosperity, we will need to greatly reduce our daily oil consumption, and high-speed rail is the only possible solution that can scale up to meet the growing demand of American mobility while greatly reducing our oil consumption,” said Kunz.

Not everyone thinks the rail is a good idea. Some think the plans won’t meet up to the hype, because they won’t save enough energy if they are ever built. “Even in a strong economy, building high-speed rail makes little sense, offering minimal reductions in travel times at exorbitant costs,” said Ronald Utt, the Herbert and Joyce Morgan senior research fellow for the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.”For instance, one has to wonder what exactly motivated the review team to endorse the proposed $1.1 billion investment in the Kansas City-St. Louis-Chicago route, which would allow customers to reach their destinations 10 percent faster than they could by driving between Chicago and St. Louis,” said Utt.

Randal O’Toole, of the CATO Institute, says that encouraging consumers to drive fuel efficient cars would be much more energy efficient operate high-speed rail. “Moreover, in places that do generate electricity from renewable sources, it would be more cost-effective to use that electricity to power electric or plug-in hybrid cars than high-speed rail,” says O’Toole. “A Department of Energy report adds that boosting train speeds to 110 mph will reduce the energy efficiency of the trains, making them less energy efficient than automobiles.”