The bullet train turns 60

Oct. 1 marks the 60th anniversary of the world’s first bullet train, with a high-speed rail service, called the Shinkansen, running between Tokyo and Osaka, Japan. At the time, the journey took four hours on trains running 131 miles per hour. Now, the fastest trains run at 200 miles per hour, cutting travel time between the two cities down to two hours and 25 minutes.

In the United States, bullet trains can still feel futuristic, but there are two rail corridors designated as high speed rail in the U.S., albeit operating at slower speeds than those Japanese bullet trains: Amtrak’s Acela train, running at 150 miles per hour along the Northeast corridor, and the Brightline in Florida, running as much as 125 miles per hour.

But that could change in the near future. Megan S. Ryerson, the UPS Chair of Transportation at the Weitzman School of Design, notes that the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill invested $66 billion in Amtrak, the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak.

Ryerson says the investment is critical because one of the biggest obstacles to creating a national, intercity high speed rail system is cost. Land acquisition and acquiring right of way can account for 10-30% of the cost to build rail in the U.S., with the higher costs felt in more urbanized areas and areas without existing rail infrastructure to leverage.

The California High Speed Rail project, with a vision of connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco with a three-hour high speed train, faces high costs due to topography, land acquisition and right of way, and costs related to fully grade-separating a train traveling as fast as 220 miles per hour, Ryerson says. The state has allocated $23 billion to the project to date, but it will take an estimated $90 to $128 billion to build in total.

Brightline in Florida, a new privately-owned rail system, opened in 2018. It cost $8 billion to build, mainly because they were able to leverage existing right of way, the topography between Miami and Orlando is relatively simple, and the train speed is more akin to the Acela than the proposed California project, Ryerson says.

But despite that, both systems are a part of the future of intercity rail, according to Ryerson. “If we are going to build a network that ties the country together, we have to acknowledge that some places will be ‘easy’ to build rail because they are flat, topographically easy to manage, and have existing right of way, while others will present challenges due to topography, environment, and existing landowners.”

The Brightline offers Miami-Orlando tickets ranging from $29 to $149. Keeping ticket prices for rail competitive is critical for travelers to adopt it as a new mode of travel, Ryerson says. Today along the Northeast corridor, because of ticket-cost comparisons, long intervals between trains, and the dispersed nature of final destinations, travelers can lean on car and air travel as their primary mode of intercity transportation, Ryerson says.

The mode share between Philadelphia and proximate cities, even New York, is around 90% car use according to pre-pandemic numbers, Ryerson says. Even for commuters, less than 25% of Philadelphians use public transit, according to a 2017 U.S. Census Bureau survey. “With more frequent and less expensive intercity rail, more travelers would shift their travel to rail,” she says.

Shifting travelers from air or car to rail has potentially large benefits for the environment. Greenhouse gas emissions from driving are about one-third of all transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and air travel is about 10%, Ryerson says. Depending on the power source a rail system uses, emissions can be cut in half if travelers shift from driving or flying to rail.

“To be effective, high-speed rail must span significant distances,” says Weitzman Dean Frederick Steiner. Steiner works on “megaregions,” large landscapes and their resource systems, such as the Great Lakes region or the Southwestern Sun Corridor, as cohesive units. “As they encompass two or more metropolitan regions, megaregions offer an ideal scale for high-speed rail planning,” he says.

Ryerson, a proponent of express buses for intercity travel, says that mode of transportation could be another viable travel option for places that do not yet have intercity rail. “We could deploy a system of high-speed, low-emission, express buses using existing infrastructure to connect cities without needing to build much new infrastructure,” she says. “We could experiment with express buses on certain corridors and test out demand. Places with high demand could be candidates for new rail corridors.”

Ryerson would like to see an effort for coordinated intercity transportation planning: a system with express buses for short-distance intercity travel, trains for longer distances—say, Philadelphia to Boston—and airline travel for distances of more than 500 miles.

With climate change, gridlock, and power outages, multiple modes of transit offer multiple options and less single-system burden, Ryerson says. “Sometimes, people hop on the train because their flight is cancelled or the roads are inundated, and sometimes the train is inundated and people hop on an express bus. It’s all part of one system, one network that knits us together.”