Weekend Reads | Keeping a High-Speed Rail Project On Track

by Kevin Schofield

This weekend's read is a new report from the University of Washington's Department of Urban Design and Planning that tries to lay out the best practices for building out a potential high-speed rail project in the corridor from Portland, Oregon, to Vancouver, British Columbia.

High-speed rail networks are very popular throughout Europe, as well as in China and Japan. But with few exceptions, they have never caught on in the United States; instead, we have doubled down on highways and air traffic, especially in the western part of the country. But with urban centers continuing to grow and increasing awareness of the severe climate impacts of automobiles and airplanes, lately there has been a surge in interest in high-speed rail projects (and President Biden's well-known fondness for trains doesn't hurt either). But the projects tend to quickly gain a bad reputation as prohibitively expensive nightmares that suffer from delays, budget overruns, and political infighting.

Here in Washington, the State Legislature has recently allocated $4 million for initial pre-planning of a high-speed rail project along the I-5 corridor and committed $150 million to be used as matching funds to allow the State to qualify and apply for federal funding. As part of that pre-planning effort, the UW report studied several high-speed rail projects in the United States and a handful of systems in other countries to try to glean the best practices that will help Washington be one of the success stories.

The first important insight the researchers highlight is that high-speed rail must be a viable transportation service: It must meet customer demand and attract ridership; otherwise, it's just a ridiculously expensive trophy. It must provide competitively fast and convenient transportation between places that people want to go. It notes that during the planning process, there are constant political pressures to adjust the routes and the station locations, but at the end of the day, changes that compromise the quality and competitiveness of the service offered will undermine the larger effort. We have seen similar issues with light rail here in the Seattle metro area: In the original "phase 1" plan, the last southbound stop was Tukwila, achingly short of Seattle—Tacoma International Airport; and as light rail has extended eastward, numerous compromises were made to gain buy-in from Mercer Island that added little to the value of the service.

The researchers also note that high-speed rail must be designed to compete with air travel, but at the same time, it must partner with airports because airport-rail hubs add tremendous value to both air travel and rail travel.

The second critical insight is that high-speed rail projects are public-private partnerships, but unique ones — especially since there are so few successful high-speed rail systems in the United States. The researchers recommend setting up a new agency to plan, build, and manage the rail system, with a "strong owner" in charge to keep the effort moving forward. At the same time, they argue that it's important to bring in expertise from other successful high-speed rail projects, including those in Europe and Asia, in part because there are several models for high-speed rail public-private partnerships, and it will be important to choose one that is right for a project here. They also suggest that the agency should adopt a management model that creates "competition in the market, not competition for the market": the infrastructure should continue to be publicly owned, but multiple vendors could compete for various franchises within it (as opposed to contracting the entire operation out to a private company).

Their third big insight is a reminder that high-speed rail is a "mega-project": a project of enormous scale that will take 20—30 years to plan, fund, design, and construct. Further, it involves dozens of government jurisdictions and requires not only buy-in from political leaders but also from communities that it touches. Political processes, however, tend to favor short-term outcomes, so the leaders of a high-speed rail effort will need to work hard to build buy-in for the long-term benefits of the project. They also point out that high-speed train stations in urban metropolitan areas and at airports are mega-projects of their own and must be prioritized from early on so they don't hold up completion of the project later.

Finally, the researchers observe that high-speed rail has a unique role, relevance, and urgency as part of a larger effort to address climate change. If embraced by riders, it has the potential to provide an important contribution to decarbonizing our transportation system. That also broadens the potential funding available for high-speed rail: It's not just a transportation project, it's also a climate-action project. On the other hand, it's also a reminder that high-speed rail systems need to be designed to be resilient to present and future climate change.

The UW report is not a plan or proposal to build high-speed rail through western Washington, nor does it advertise itself as such. It's more like the "read me first" guide waiting inside the box of a new tech gadget, in the hopes you will take a few moments to stop and think before plunging in. Nevertheless, it's an interesting primer on what can go wrong — or right — with a sprawling megaproject, one that will hopefully be heeded by local officials who are eager to push forward on high-speed rail here.

Keeping it on the Tracks: High-speed Rail Success and Lessons Learned

Featured image by DedMityay/Shutterstock.com.