With the right commercial strategy, high-speed rail (HSR) routes can be profitable, with some lines achieving modal shares of up to 65%. When considering route strategy, HSR's market share versus other modes must be well understood.
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The benefits include direct benefits to riders, indirect benefits include reductions in carbon emissions and traffic congestion, and any indirect aid that rail gives to local economies and to national economic recovery.
For example, most of the companies that run Japan's Shinkansen or bullet train lines operate at a profit, as do some fast trains on France's state-owned SNCF network.
With one possible exception, no high-speed rail system in this country could pay for itself, and the claimed external benefits - cleaner air, energy saved, eased pressure on airports - are nonexistent.
Per mile, the New York project cost $2.6 billion, which is high even by U.S. standards. For example, the Purple Line in Los Angeles cost $800 million per mile.
Implementing high-speed rail will keep billions of dollars in the U.S. economy by decreasing the amount of oil that the U.S. consumes. According to the International Association of Railways (UIC), high-speed rail is eight times more energy efficient than airplanes and four times more efficient than automobile use.
Kelly acknowledges that the $8-billion goal is “aggressive and rightly so” because California is paying for 84% of the cost so far. “If the national government wants to get a national cleaner, faster electrified rail system, it has to do better than 16%. And so we're going to make that case,” he said.
Even if Japan and other countries were to build the train, the expense as well as running expense to maintain the system would be too high to make a profit. Most Americans would rather just hop on a plane if they were to spend that kind of money.
BNSF Railway leads the marketThe railroad focuses on transporting freight commodities such as coal, industrial or agricultural products. In 2022, the company generated some 24.49 billion U.S. dollars in freight revenue and hauled more than 10 million carloads across the country.
Why is construction of a high-speed rail so expensive? It gets way to expensive before you even get to wages. The basis of it is that High-Speed rail needs it's own infrastructure, It usually means building new routes, with different construction methods to normal rail services.
According to the International Association of Railways (UIC), high-speed rail is eight times more energy efficient than airplanes and four times more efficient than automobile use. It will also decrease greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality.
Finally, the cost of HSR is outrageous. Current estimates for California's HSR system come in at $80 billion for 520 miles, or $154 million per mile. Amtrak estimates that it would cost $500 million per mile to turn its Northeast Corridor route into a true high-speed system.
Empirical results suggest that the newly launched HSR services have induced industrial gentrification in the developed station area. Except for the displacement of agricultural production activities, HSR-induced industrial gentrification has not yet been manifested in the newly developed station area.
The main disadvantage of high-?speed trains, other than their slow speeds compared with air travel, is that they require a huge amount of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards.
California's plan is to build an electric train that will connect Los Angeles with the Central Valley and then San Francisco in two hours and 40 minutes.
Amtrak's Acela, which reaches 150 mph (240 km/h) over 49.9 mi (80.3 km) of track and Brightline, which runs at 125 mph (201 km/h) in a dedicated ROW between Orlando and Cocoa, are the US's only high-speed rail services.