Externalities are in economic terms costs or benefits which are not covered by market forces. For example, in London if you drive to your place of work, you are producing harmful emissions and adding to conjestion which other people are forced to consume. Left up to a free market economy situation these costs would never be compensated for, an example of market failure. The government is left to step in and indeed in the UK 80% of the price of petrol is tax, to make people pay for the cost of causing emissions and conjestion. This is similar across Europe.
The point of this is to show that externalities play a key role in looking at high speed rail projects, as to why Government rather than private companies would be interested in setting high speed rail systems.
The USA has the highest CO2 emission rates in the whole world. Why? What is crucial different between the USA and Europe/Japan? Is there more industry in the USA? Well even if there is it wouldn't account for all the extra CO2. Perhaps the rate of car ownership is slightly higher in the USA. Well even that isn't significant. People must use their cars very much more in the USA accounting for the extra emissions. But why? There is one crucial difference, the USA has very little by the way of railways, both high speed and local. It would seem reasonable to conclude that the more trains you have, the lower your countries CO2 emissions. Admittedly its a bit simplistic but it definitely does seem to be related.
High speed railways have by far the highest capacity per unit land they use. A high speed rail needs just a double track railway, one rail for trains in each direction. These have a capacity for 16 trains per hour, each train with a capacity of 800 passengers. This means a high speed rail has a maximum capacity of 12,800 passengers per hour, which clearly is enough to satisfy the highest of demand, only one railway line is needed. This is unlike motorways which take up a very large amount of space and often cannot satisfy demand fully at peak times.
Imagine you have two cities about 500km or 312miles apart, by car the journey time will be about 6 hours. The motorways will be jammed full. If you can provide a new rail service of 300km/h 186mph between two cities the Journey time by rail will be about 2 hours. . Provided the rail service is well priced, very few people are likely to drive any more between the cities, causing a massive decrease in traffic. Of course with a decrease in traffic pollution decreases too.
In our age we know that energy resources are limited, fuel is going to run out one day, and we will not be able to go on using energy in this way. The train offers per passenger energy efficiency that no other form of transport can achieve. The reason is because steel wheels on steel rails because they are hard smooth sufaces provide very little friction. Also because the wheels are held by steel ball bearings friction too is very low even at high speed. Air resistance of a train is not really a problem because it is thin and long. On the other hand aircraft must burn huge amounts of fuel to even move at all, and in flight the engines have to continue to burn just to keep the plane in the sky. Once a train is moving even if the engines are switched off the train doesn't even decelerate noticably, even at very high speeds. Cars as everyone knows are by far the least efficient form of transport.
Because of their efficiency, the pollution that a train makes is very low, and if the electricity being used for the train is generated by a green source then there may well be no pollution at all as a result of running the train. Reduced traffic also reduces pollution, no more cars pumping out gases in huge amounts, and of course compared to aeroplanes which need to burn fuel at an astonishing rate just to get thrust. In fact, it has been calculated that a Eurostar train with a capacity of 800 causes pollution level through power stations about equivalent to 20 cars. Now most cars carry one person.... need I say more.
300km/h is very fast. Imagine the 100 meters running race. Now imagine doing that in just one second. That is the speed at which these trains fly along. No time is wasted in getting people to their destinations. There is no worry about waiting in traffic, or having a long stressful drive. Also it means that flying can be avoided, which is particularly welcome for the more ecological people (or people who don't like flying).
While airports are often out of town and hard to access, railway stations are usually located in the heart of the city. Also with some services you can just buy a ticket and get straight on the train, which is the case in the UK with no advanced booking required. Aircraft have drawbacks such as long check-in times and constant moving around.
What is perhaps not known about is that high speed trains are in fact the safest form of transport. High speed trains are perhaps surprisingly safer than normal trains. Most use very advanced computer signalling systems meaning risk of collision is very low, and apart from that there is not a lot that can go wrong. It is a myth that at high speed trains just fly off the tracks. They don't. France had a train going at 320 mph (512km/h), which shows that dangerous, experimental speeds are a long way off commercial everyday speeds.
With the possible exception of cruise ships trains are the most comfortable form of transport. Even at these very high speeds the train remains about as smooth as an aircraft, and of course very much quieter. Also there are no limitations, the seats are not crampt like in an aircraft, and unlike in a car you can get up, walk around, go to the loo, or buy a snack from the buffet car (or if your really posh have a proper meal in the restaurant car)
The only real externality is the fact that in order to build high speed rail lines the country side has to be sacrificed. This particular externality applies to all forms of transport however (with the possible exception of water). Although high speed rail lines do not occupy a large amount of room, the fact that they have to be straight and level usually involves large amounts of embankments and cuttings causing considerable disruption to the countryside.
Noise of high speed rail
The primary objection is always cost. High speed railways are very expensive. To build the high speed link in the UK between London and the Channel tunnel for 300km/h Eurostars it is costing the Government and private companies £3 billion (US $4.8 billion). This railway is just 68 miles long (108 km). This is perhaps an extreme example, high speed railways typically are not so expensive but difficult geography (rolling hills) and high population density of the area have pushed up the cost. More typical figures are US $33 million per mile.
High initial costs often mean public money has to be used because the private sector is usually unwilling to engage in such large projects. As a result many would argue that the money used to build such rail systems would be more effectively spent in other projects if the primary objectives were to reduce traffic congestion/pollution. For example, if a £3billion high speed rail project is only prejected to reduce traffic by 10%, but if £2billion were spent servicing people's cars would decrease the emissions by 10%, then the same benefit would be achieved at a lower cost.
High speed rail is only applicable to inter-city services in high density corridors. Having said that connecting trains can deliver people door to door. This means something very important, in order to work effectively high speed rail must be backed up by a decent urban/light rail transit system, as found in Europe and Japan. Such systems are more rare in the USA.
A problem experience in the UK is that most of the country is made up of rolling hills. High speed railway lines need to be as straight and level as possible. Therefore often the railways are carried over dips and hills in the countryside by embankments, viaducts, cuttings and tunnels. (Tunnels are sometimes unsuitable due to wind turbulence problems.) However these greatly increase the cost of the railway, and of course if the landscape is mountainous then it becomes very difficult to built straight and level. Naturally railways cannot be built over water for long distances. The 31 mile long channel tunnel costed £10 billion (US $16 billion) so railways across water are likely to remain very much a rarity.
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