High Speed Rail Systems or Electric, Automated Vehicles? Why Not Both?

Transportation is always political. The only question is whether it's transparently political. In other words, are groups affected by transportation access and cost, or the environmental impact of various modes (as well as the environmental impacts of building new transportation platforms and corridors) brought to the table? Are we listening to them, or are we listening only to those entities seeking to profit from the transportation needs of others? We also need to know more about the impacts of Covid-induced, and economically induced, at-home work and telecommuting. 

One of the hottest question about the current transportation outlook is whether the mass conversion to electric vehicles and a transition away from individual driver control is going to take the form of traditional mass transit (in this case high-speed rail, or “HRS”), or the continued decentralization of individual vehicles, modified into electric, autonomous (self-driving, “AVs,” “EVs” and “AEVs”) units. 

High speed rail is already here all over the world–Russia, China, most of the European Union, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Its production in the United States has been blocked by politicians in the service of their oil and gas donors, but such resistance can't last forever if HSR truly makes sense. In the meantime, AVs, by which we almost universally mean electrical-powered AVs, should be increasing in numbers for the next several years and one of those years, I think sooner rather than later. The development of a radar chip is key to mass consumer AVs, and that chip is coming soon, as Junko Yoshida wrote last year, sharing an industry prediction that such chips should be in mass production by 2024 or 2025.

The benefits of HSR are overwhelming. It's probably the single greatest possible fix for carbon emissions among all means of transportation, particularly public or mass transit. The need to overcome oil dependency is surely obvious to everyone but oil investors and executives, and if we really could establish a nationwide network of electric trains and tracks that can compete with air travel, we will use a heck of a lot less fossil fuel. High speed rail's impact on reduced oil demand (around 4 million barrels per day) and carbon emission reductions (90% less carbon use than other methods) may be easier to measure than that of individual vehicles, but electric cars will undoubtedly decrease overall emissions over time as well. This is true even if the "start-up" costs of building EVs and AEVs include greater carbon emissions, or if the continued generation of electricity also comes partly from fossil fuels. 

Electronic and autonomous vehicles will completely eliminate fossil fuel use in the automobiles themselves, and Richard Nunno of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute maintains that even if generating electricity causes pollution, it's on balance far better than fossil fuels. Autonomous vehicles are much lighter than non-autonomous ones because of the necessary safety features. They could be up to 75% lighter than gas and non-autonomous vehicles, which will massively reduce environmental impact. Marketers looking to push these technologies will first look for signals on which consumers are likely to use “green” products, using data such as Accurate Append’s “Green Score” or even a companion “Wealth Score” to find those deep-pocketed early adopters. 

We know HSR will reduce individual drivers on the road, which will decrease density and the propensity for accidents. On the other hand, autonomous vehicles promise to virtually eliminate auto accidents. Some of the speculative data on AVs is mind-numbing, like the idea that "self-driving cars could decrease accident fatalities by as much as 90 percent." I haven't seen the data or methodology, but I wonder what level of systemic reliability and security can be guaranteed–will entities be able to hack into them (and for that matter could HSRs be hacked)? 

There are short-term environmental costs to producing and deploying both. Some of them are insidious and less well-known, like the impact of mining rare metals. Our current tight labor market in construction and technology may also make high speed rail difficult to crank up. But increases in automation should eliminate some jobs and thus open a market for HSR and E/AV jobs. Scientists are also exploring alternatives to the rare-earth metal mining that is necessary to get electric vehicles (car or train or whatever) to work.

Are the two mutually exclusive? Libertarians are pretending this is the case. Marc Joffe of the Reason Foundation forebodingly wrote in 2019: "By the time the first bullet train pulls out of San Jose’s Diridon Station it may well displace more electric vehicle trips than trips by cars relying on fossil fuels.  If our electricity comes from renewable sources by then, high-speed rail would be replacing car trips that don’t produce greenhouse-gas emissions." But this is silly, as Roger Rudick at StreetblogSF pointed out in response: recognizing E/AVs' many virtues, it's nonetheless true that "whatever’s under the hood, cars always use many multiples more energy to move the same number of passengers."

But why not both? In the past few years, we've learned a new term: microtransit, which is "demand-responsive" system of buses and smaller vehicles, with flexible scheduling based on community member needs. So let's build better mass transit (including HSR) where it makes most sense, which is in areas of denser population and low-impact pass-through access. In rural communities, and urban neighborhoods, smaller transit vehicles or shared electrical or autonomous-electrical vehicles might be added to community and neighborhood car-sharing plans. 

In order to figure this all out, cities and counties need to survey and collect and regularly update data–demographic, attitudinal, even political. We need to know where people live and work, and what they truly need. 

So what can we take away from this? That building just and sustainable transportation in the United States will require joint public and private projects geared toward mass- and micro-transit. We can also surmise that a profit-only metric is wrong, not just because it's immoral to only consider profits, but also because transit has external benefits that strengthen the economy, and workers' economic security, in other ways. In the meantime, for fans of high speed rail, APTA has prepared a good debating guide. Do your homework and research, because this comparison between sustainable cars and sustainable trains is likely to go on until both are fully deployed. 

Photo via UKDOT