Biden Says High-Speed Rail Will Get Millions of Cars Off the Road. That’s Malarkey – By Scott Shackford (Reason) / March 16 2020
This is what happens when you think all of America looks like the Acela corridor.
In the midst of Sunday’s presidential debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, Biden blurted out that his campaign’s high-speed rail plan would take “millions of automobiles off the road.”
This is the second debate in which the former vice president brought up the belief that bullet trains will get people out of their cars. This is, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely.
Biden’s campaign site calls for “the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts, unlocking new, affordable access for every American.” Would bullet trains passing through major cities scattered across the U.S. actually get people out of their cars?
“The answer is no,” explains Baruch Feigenbaum, assistant director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation. (Full disclosure: The Reason Foundation publishes this website.) “High-speed rail primarily takes customers from aviation. Car travel might be substitutable with inner city buses, but we don’t really see it in rail. That’s not why other countries have built high-speed rail.”
Feigenbaum notes that countries that have built high-speed rail have typically done so to reduce crowding on existing rail lines, not as a substitute for roads. The sole exception was China, which used it as an economic development project during a time when its highway system was much less robust than America’s.
Continue to article: https://reason.com/2020/03/16/biden-says-high-speed-rail-will-get-millions-of-cars-off-the-road-thats-malarkey/
