Faithful readers know that I am a skeptic about the prospects for high-speed rail lines in the United States as promoted by the Obama administration. Proposals may sound good, but European academics Bent Flyvbjerg Nils Bruzelius and Werner Rothengatter have found that high-speed rail promoters typically underestimate costs and overestimate ridership by orders of magnitude. Now from newgeography.com’s Wendell Cox comes news from Brazil, where the government has proposed a 310-mile high-speed rail line between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and has sought private sector bids on the project. Wisely, the Brazilian government insists that investors absorb any cost overruns.
The result: no private investor is interested.
Cox notes that the ridership estimates assume that 50% of current car riders between the two megalopolises would choose to take the train, at $100 per passenger. That’s obviously ridiculous. In addition, Brazil also has excellent intercity bus lines, which charge less than half of that amount for a Sao Paulo-Rio ticket. It’s not likely that many cost-conscious bus travelers will choose to spend two to three times that amount to ride on even the most superduper train. It looks like the Brazilian high-speed rail line won’t be built before the 2014 World Cup or the 2016 Olympics—and probably not ever.
High-speed rail, with a very few exceptions, is starting to look like the Concorde supersonic airliner: technologically feasible but not economically viable.
