Would High-Speed Rail from Dallas to Houston Make Sense?

From: The New York Times
By: Edward Glaeser // August 12, 2009

How large are the environmental and other social benefits of high-speed rail?

I’ve now reached the halfway point in this series of blog posts on the president’s “vision for high-speed rail.” The national discussion of high-speed rail must get away from high-flying rhetoric and tawdry ad hominem attacks and start weighing costs and benefits.

Environmental benefits are one potentially big plus from rail lines.

Today, I focus only on the social benefits that come from switching travelers from cars and planes to rail, not any indirect benefits associated with changing land-use patterns. I’ll get to those next week, when I also discuss high-speed rail as an economic development strategy. As I did last week, I use a simple, transparent methodology, focusing on costs and benefits during an average year. Today, I’ll estimate the environmental and other social benefits that will help offset the costs of rail.

I’d like to include buses, but this post is too long already. Only about 2 percent of inter-city vehicle miles are traveled by bus, and a Center for Clean Air Policy report has convinced me that buses wouldn’t make much of a difference.

I’m going to ignore fatalities for both rail and air and noise externalities (typical estimates for these are modest), and ignore any traffic congestion associated with getting to and from the airport or train station. For both air and rail, the only social cost will be carbon emissions. For cars, I’ll add in traffic deaths, congestion and local pollution.

As in the previous two posts, I focus on a mythical 240-mile-line between Houston and Dallas, which was chosen to avoid giving the impression that this back-of-the-envelope calculation represents a complete evaluation of any actual proposed route. (The Texas route will be certainly far less attractive than high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor, but it is not inherently less reasonable than the proposed high-speed rail routes across Missouri or between Dallas and Oklahoma City.)

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