High speed trains in Colorado?

Half of my geopolitics course here is devoted to student group presentations on various energy related topics. It is fascinating, because we have 15 or 20 different nationalities in our class of 34 people. People end up presenting on countries other than their own, often countries of other people in the class.

For example, we had two non-Americans present on American energy policy last week. They did a great job with the presentation and hit a lot of the nuances involved with developing renewables and reducing energy use in America.

One of their assertions, however, was that the U.S. needed to invest significantly in public transportation and especially rail connections. They viewed it as simply a failing of public will that we have very few public transportation options and even fewer high speed rail connections.

It's not. It's geography and population.

I don't think many Europeans truly understand how big and spread out the U.S. is. Because of proximity, business, and the number of tourist locations, I would guess that most Europeans visit the East Coast of America if they have been to the States. Not too many have been to Colorado, for example.

But let's look at the option of high speed rail in Colorado. The Front Range of Colorado is often mentioned as a good candidate for American investment in high speed rail, because it's a relatively big population living in relative proximity and is a natural travel region. In fact, there are already proposals on the table to build passenger rail connections, to the tune of $20 billion or so.


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Compare that with the trip from Paris to Lyon, connecting the two biggest cities in France. Even though it is 9 PM here, I can currently find 27 high speed trains from Paris to Lyon, leaving tomorrow.

The distance from Paris to Lyon is 466 km. The distance from Cheyenne to Pueblo (if we define the Front Range that way) is 346 km. Shorter, but having driven past both Cheyenne and Pueblo, I can guarantee that you can include 100 km past either one and have approximately 0 impact on the total population in the region.

So what would be the potential customer base for these two routes?

Paris-Lyon: 13.71 million people. This includes Ile-de-France (the greater Paris region), Lyon, and Dijon. There are many more small towns along the way that are not included.

Front Range: 3.67 million. This includes Cheyenne, Ft. Collins, Greeley, Loveland, Longmont, Boulder, Golden, the Denver metro area, Castle Rock, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. I'm not sure there are any more significant towns within 100 miles.

So the Colorado train would have about 27% of the customers that the French train has, not to mention that 87% of them would live between C-Springs and Boulder, meaning most trips wouldn't go to the ends of the line.

This wouldn't just be a matter of running a few less trains per day. Rail travel, especially high speed, is extremely high fixed cost. The current proposal for high speed rail in Colorado estimates a cost of $20 billion dollars (although it would be a wider system). Public transit has to run on a fairly regular schedule to be a viable option, and doing so in the Front Range would leave most of them nearly empty. Running empty trains is not the most economically efficient use of $20 billion, and more than likely, it would consume more CO2 per person than cars.

I can see why the rest of the world thinks we need to reduce energy usage- we currently consume over 20% of the world total. We could follow Europe and use much smaller cars. Increase the gasoline tax substantially (I would be in favor of this, for a variety of reasons). Stop living in enormous air-conditioned houses. Spend $20 billion on housing energy efficiency improvements. Expand metro-area public transit.

Just not trains. Regional transport in the U.S. is not the same as regional transport in Europe.