The mass transit Americans love is the mass transit that we need to leave behind

America and public transit are two things that don’t really go together well. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, nearly half of all Americans do not have access to public transit. The ASCE gave the US a dismal D- grade for its transit network in 2021, with hundreds of billions of dollars of deferred maintenance and issues plaguing the system.

However, there is one form of “public transit” that Americans use regularly – aircraft. 

There are nearly 20,000 airports in the US, 5,000 of which are public. 16.4 million flights, at 45,000 a day, carry almost 3 million passengers in and out of American airports. At nearly half a trillion dollars in annual earnings, the aviation industry is clearly a powerhouse in American society. 

There are a whole host of issues with the airline industry, and flying is one of the worst forms of commercial transportation available, all things considered. But the fact that so many Americans are willing to fly proves that public transportation can work in America, and it can work well.

Are airplanes a form of public transit?

Simply put, airplanes are indeed a form of public transit. They function quite similarly to a bus or a subway – they run on a predetermined schedule that you must buy a ticket for, and you ride (or fly) alongside numerous other members of the public. 

A key difference is that public transit is often, though not always, subsidized and government-operated. Numerous countries around the world have their own airlines, but all airlines in the United States are privately owned.

This isn’t to say that airlines are completely devoid of public funding. The government handed out nearly $80 billion in bailouts to airline companies during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the High Speed Rail Alliance (HSRA). The HSRA also notes that taxpayer dollars give billions each year for airport costs – $8.5 billion is being spent to expand O’Hare Airport in Chicago, and public funds are responsible for a third of the $8 billion expenditure of LaGuardia. 

The actual experience of flying on a plane is not unlike any other form of public transit, despite the fact they are privately owned. The East Japan Railway Company, which services the Kanto and Tohoku regions of Japan, is privately owned. But anyone riding on high-speed rail to Tokyo would be hard-pressed to call it “private transit” instead of public transit.

Another important benefit that airlines have is that their physical infrastructure is not as extensive as other forms of transit. Airports are huge, yes, but there are no roads in the sky. Despite airports being extremely difficult to construct, they do not need to continuously build more lanes or tracks to facilitate an increase in passengers.

It’s much more difficult to build a railroad with right-of-way conflicts and planning difficulties, and planes can simply take to the skies without worrying about these sorts of issues. It’s one of the reasons why the number of people flying keeps increasing decade after decade.

The problems with flying

Despite flying’s ubiquitous presence in American culture and its status as the go-to option for long distance travel, flying is, “mile for mile… the most damaging way to travel for the climate,” according to the BBC.

Airplanes are responsible for about 2.4% of global CO2 emissions and 5% of all global warming, and plane emissions increased by 32% from 2013 to 2018 alone. This is considering that only 3% of people in the world take flights “regularly.” 

A 2017 study out of Lund University in Sweden found that flying less was one of the four best things a person can do to reduce their carbon footprint. According to the study, avoiding a single roundtrip transatlantic flight a year saves 1.6 tonnes of CO2 – the study advises that per capita CO2 emissions should not be greater than 2.1 tonnes in order to limit global temperature increases.

Flights are also a timely and costly endeavor for passengers. Flights can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars per person depending on the distance. They also take an extensive amount of time.

Besides the actual travel time in the air (which fluctuates, because planes are not always flying over 500 miles per hour), passengers usually arrive hours in advance because of security and baggage. Of course, it also takes plenty of time to land, disembark, and retrieve luggage, making a single flight become quite the ordeal.

A competitor emerges

There is one clear option to the growing list of issues with the aviation industry that would benefit everybody except for the airlines themselves – high-speed rail (HSR).

High-speed rail is exactly what it sounds like, and usually travels at over 155 miles per hour. Rail in general, but especially HSR, is far more efficient than automobiles or flying in nearly every metric. Simply put, it’s the most effective way to transport large numbers of people on the ground.

Rail only uses 2% of the world’s energy transport requirements and contributes a fraction of the emissions of aviation, at only 0.3%. According to a 2019 report by the International Energy Agency, “if all services performed by railways were instead carried by planes, cars and trucks, transport-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would be 1.2bn tonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2e) per year higher… this is equivalent to the CO2 emissions of the whole of Africa.”

Rail also uses about “90% less energy than trucks per unit of freight” and can compete with the trucking industry for freight transportation. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) notes that data from the International Union of Railways shows HSR is “more than four times as energy efficient as driving in cars and nearly nine times more efficient than flying.”

HSR is fast, efficient, and safe. In Japan, where HSR originated with the Shinkansen line, more than 400,000 passengers are served daily. Remarkably, after more than 50 years of operation, there has never been a single passenger fatality or injury because of accidents.

Due to its speed, HSR is naturally a quicker form of transit compared to other modes. It’s cheaper, too. 

According to the HSRA, plans for a HSR line in the Pacific Northwest clock in at about $42 billion for the development of the line. On the other hand, “adding one lane to Interstate 5 in each direction—from the Canadian border to the Washington/Oregon border—would cost an estimated $108 billion.”

This proposed line would not only be cheaper but faster for passengers. The HSRA notes a “trip from Seattle to Portland or Vancouver would take about an hour on ‘ultra’ high-speed trains—versus nearly three hours by car or air, including terminal time. Furthermore, it’s easy to relax on a train, kicking back and reading or playing on your phone – something that is impossible to do while dealing with the stresses of driving.

Another popular route, San Francisco to Los Angeles, would be better by rail. According to the EESI, factoring in all aspects such as travel to the station, traffic, waiting for arrival, etc. rail is the fastest potential transit method at just over three hours. Flying would take more than five hours, and driving would take more than seven.

Globally, HSR has been expanding rapidly in the past few decades, most notably in China. China is expected to have over 38,000 kilometers of HSR lines by 2025, more than the rest of the world combined. 

China’s HSR lines began operation in 2008 and have been proliferating ever since thanks to hundreds of billions of dollars in funding. These lines are quickly proving their worth – the line from Beijing to Shanghai brought in over $1 billion in profit in 2015 alone. This is also considering that profit is not even the goal of these systems.

High-speed rail struggles along

While the rest of the world speeds along their tracks, the US lags far, far behind. Numerous publications, including Popular Science, the New York Times, and Scientific American, covered multiple plans for the introduction of HSR to America in the 1990s- since they have written about these designs, not a single high-speed rail project has succeeded. 

Upgrading conventional tracks to handle HSR can be difficult, according to Popular Science, because these tracks are often curved and run near populated areas. HSR lines need to be flat and straight with only slight, gentle curves. 

This doesn’t mean it can’t be done, and America’s terrain and size is not an inhibiting factor in HSR’s construction. Take Spain, for example. According to the High Speed Rail Alliance, Spain recently finished “a 68-mile section of high-speed line through a mountain range. Sixty percent of the segment runs through tunnels and across bridges. Despite such obstacles, Spain’s network has grown to more than 2,200 miles of high-speed line since the country began building HSR lines in the early 1990s.”

It’s lamentable that the world’s foremost superpower has only 54 kilometers of HSR lines. Even America’s “high-speed rail,” Amtrak’s Acela train, only averages 66 miles per hour, far below the speeds of other nations.

The real obstacle that’s preventing HSR from coming to America is not geography nor expensive costs, but politics.

Airline opposition to high-speed rail

As mentioned previously, airlines aren’t the biggest fan of HSR as it would take away their customers. Information from the International Energy Agency shows that from 2006 to 2014, for example, the introduction of a HSR line from Paris to Strasbourg led to an 80% reduction in flights along the same route.

In the 1990s, Texas was actually poised to have a HSR line – this has clearly never come to fruition. In fact, the Texas GOP’s official position today is that “taxpayer money shall not fund or subsidize high-speed rail, nor shall eminent domain be used in the construction of high-speed rail.” This comes along with it a slew of other pro-car, anti-environmental policies.

Although not entirely their fault, Southwest Airlines is responsible for the “lion’s share” of blame for the failure of HSR in Texas in the 1990s. All in all, Southwest spent $37 million in lobbying against HSR.

Southwest actively legally challenged the development of HSR, wanting the state to prohibit use of state funds for the rail. They argued that their flights were already “convenient and affordable,” using the upfront costs of HSR as leverage to justify their opposition – this, of course, neglects that airports are incredibly expensive to build as well.

Southwest even brought up the public subsidy route in a 1991 brief. “The American reality,” Southwest wrote, “is that high-speed rail will be viable in Texas only by destroying the convenient and inexpensive transportation service the airlines now provide, and only by absorbing huge public subsidies.”

Since the pandemic, Southwest has received over $7 billion in federal subsidies.

The politics of rail

It’s not just the airlines that have contributed to the failure of HSR in America. Despite having over 150,000 miles of railroad tracks (the most in the world), about 93% of the tracks are used for freight instead of passengers, a third of which is solely for the transport of coal, according to Carbon Brief. Further, the EESI notes that most of the railways are owned by freight companies, making passenger transport a lower priority.

Because of a Reagan administration policy, funding is also disproportionately balanced in favor of cars and highway spending. Since the policy was signed in the early 1980s, spending from the federal Highway Trust Fund has been balanced so that 80% of the funds go towards highways, while only 20% goes towards public transit. Transportation for America also notes that this fund has received nearly $150 billion in taxpayer dollars total from all Americans regardless of their method of transit.

If it weren’t for backwards policies and aggressive political lobbying, the US could be enjoying the same high-speed transportation that other countries around the world have been utilizing for decades. America’s acceptance of aircraft shows that a form of public transportation that is effective, fast, and affordable will be used if it is available – all things that rail does better than flying.

News about high-speed rail coming to the US has been buzzing recently, and hope is a powerful thing to hold onto here. But with policies like those of the Texas GOP and an obvious lack of efficient rail in this country, it’s looking like a repeat of the 1990s might be more likely.