The Argument for High-Speed Rail | Dr. Joseph M. Sussman | Big Think

The Argument for High-Speed Rail

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Other countries have it. Why doesn’t the U.S.? Because we’ve been unwilling to pay.

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Dr. Joseph M. Sussman:

Dr. Joseph M. Sussman is the JR East Professor (endowed by the East Japan Railway Company) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Engineering Systems Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he has served as a faculty member for 40 years. He is the author of "Introduction to Transportation Systems," a graduate text published in 2000, in use at a number of universities in the U.S. and abroad. It has been translated into Greek, Chinese and Spanish. His book Perspectives on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) was published in 2005. Sussman received the Roy W. Crum Distinguished Service Award from TRB, its highest honor, “for significant contributions to research” in 2001, and the CUTC Award for Distinguished Contribution to University Transportation Education and Research from the Council of University Transportation Centers in 2003. In 2002 ITS Massachusetts named its annual “Joseph M. Sussman Leadership Award” in his honor. He became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007. The Engineering School Alumni of the City College of New York (CCNY) gave him its 2008 Career Achievement Award.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Is high-speed rail a feasible solution for our transportation issues?

Joseph Sussman: Whenever my neighbors go on vacation or on business to Europe or Asia, I know when they come back since they know what I do for a living, they’re going to say, “Joe, why don’t we have high speed rail in this country. I just went to France, I just went to Germany, I just went to Japan, and everyone gets whisked around the country at high speeds in a very convenient way. We don’t have to deal with all the hassles of checking it at airports and so on and so forth. Why can’t the U.S. do it?” And it’s an excellent question, and in some sense there are a variety of answers that one could come up with, but the simplest answer is that, to date, we have been unwilling to pay within the public sector for developing these systems. The systems that I alluded to a moment ago, France, Germany, and Japan were all initially built by the government and the government of the United States has chosen to make its investments in other areas in highways and in air traffic control systems and the like.

Now why is that? Certainly we have as talented a group of transportation policymakers here in this country as in those other countries. One of the problems is that from a size point of view, from a geographic point of view, this is a huge country. Much larger than any of the countries that I’ve mentioned. We’re 3,000 miles, 5,000 kilometers, coast to coast, and 1,500 miles, maybe 2,000 plus kilometers, from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. These are huge distances. And if, in fact, we were to build high-speed rail on a national basis, it’s very unclear even if we were able to do that. And let me emphasize, I am not advocating that we do that. That high speed rail would take much of a bite out of, for example, coast to coast travel because even though you are going at 200 something miles an hour, you’ve still got to go 3,000 miles, and it’s a long ride.

That said, there are many part of the United States that would be ideally suited for high-speed rail. And here we’re talking about corridors in which the distances are on the order of 500 miles or so, or less. And here we have an opportunity to compete quite actively with the airlines. So, we have, of course the northeast corridor, the Washington to Boston corridor, and even going further north and further south, in which we have the only system that, by any definition could be called high speed rail, and by international standards it’s really not at all. But the northeast corridor, very densely populated corridor would be ideal, particularly given the highway congestion on highway 95 going north and south, particularly given the congestion at the airports in the Boston area, the three metropolitan airports in New York; Liberty in Newark and LaGuardia and Kennedy, and in Washington with Reagan National and Dulles.

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