No, Passenger Trains Don’t Work in Europe & Asia Either

By Randal O'Toole. Excerpt:

"Both Europe and east Asian countries are highly celebrated for building high-speed rail lines. But these efforts have to be judged by their results. Are they making money or at least covering their operating costs? Are they attracting people out of their cars or airplanes? Are doing anything other than putting their countries deeply in debt?

The answers to all of these questions are “No!” Spain and Italy are jeopardizing their entire economies by going so heavily into debt for high-speed rail. A case can be made that Japan’s economic stagnation since 1990 is due to that country’s continued construction of subsidized high-speed rail lines. Despite growing high-speed rail systems, air travel in Europe and auto travel in Asia are both growing much faster than rail travel.

Instead of high-speed rail, Turon’s letter points out that commuter railways “in Japan and Hong Kong are for-profit publicly traded companies.” But this isn’t because they are innovative but because Tokyo and Hong Kong have far higher population densities than any U.S. urban area. With the possible exception of New York City, those results just don’t apply here.

Turon also cites privatized passenger trains in Britain. As I discuss in the book, privatization has certainly made a difference for British passenger trains, as they are the only trains in Europe outside of Switzerland whose market share of travel is growing. But only some of the privatized trains are operationally profitable and all depend on taxpayer subsidies to infrastructure maintenance. The book notes that we could privatize Amtrak, but it is likely that only the Northeast Corridor would survive and only if taxpayers provided more than $50 billion in infrastructure subsidies."