California High Speed Rail

CAHSR: Issues and Concerns

Ridership Projection

Succulents

Forecasts for a new transit service is always controversial. It is because you are making a projection based on the assumption, and the assumption can be exaggerated, biased, or sometimes wrong. California High Speed Rail (CAHSR) became an issue from its initiation, and it still is. Although we cannot stop the CAHSR from happening at this point, I think it is meaningful to look at the basis of the CAHSR project, and not make the same mistake in the future.

This work is completed with the group of classmates. Two big stream of the work are 1) current and projected ridership and 2) assumptions and comparative analysis. My part of the work was mainly looking at the assumptions and comparing CAHSR with the successful international cases.

For the first part, we compared the current daily ridership and projected daily ridership by the station to raise the issue. Ridership numbers are joined the Northern/Central/Southern region to compare with the population growth within each region. Interestingly, CAHSR ridership projections compared to existing ridership differ significantly by region – where Northern region shows lower ridership and Central region shows substantially higher ridership compared to the existing ridership. Central region does show high number of population growth in the year 2030. However, is it reasonable enough to explain the increased number of ridership only by the population growth?

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Assumptions & International Cases

To answer this question, we then looked at the assumptions and the international high speed rail cases. Tokaido Shinkansen, the Japan’s high speed rail line which covers from Tokyo to Osaka, is chosen to compare with CAHSR because it is one of the most successful and the busiest high speed rail line in the world and also its similarity to CAHSR. Tokaido line connects Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, which are the three largest cities in Japan. Since its introduction in 1964, the ridership gradually increased to 420,000 per day.

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Total population in the service area is 21.8 million, which is lower than the CAHSR service region of 32.6 million. The key issue here is the job distribution within the service region. Considering the population number, the average number of jobs near the Shinkansen station is much higher for Tokaido Shinkansen than CAHSR. The main reason Tokaido line is so successful until today is because of its proximity to jobs. However, CAHSR only presents total number of population growth and total number of job growth in the California, but not by the region where the station is located. CAHSR should have more reasoning behind the increased number of high speed rail users in terms of job locations.

Another issue of CAHSR is its target market. CAHSR mainly targets automobile users as their potential riders, which accounts for 96.3% of the total long distance trips. However, international cases show that HSR’s market share is mainly transferred from existing train or air users. For example, for France's TGV (Paris to Lyon and Marseille), HSR increased the total market share of rail services from 40% to 72%, and most of the HSR ridership was transferred from the previous train service (56%) and the airlines (33%). Only 11% of the ridership was from automobiles. For Spain's AVE (Madrid to Seville), total rail market share increased from 16% to 51%, and the ridership was transferred from train (31%), airline (53%), and automobile (16%). From the existing cases, we can assume that previously train or air users are more likely to be attracted for HSR. However, for CAHSR, the majority travel mode is automobile, which is a different market from air/train mode because it provides the door-to-door experience.

The last issue of CAHSR is its overestimation of automobile operating cost. Non-fuel cost, which includes insurance, tire, depreciation and others, is estimated to be almost 48% of the total automobile operating cost. These costs are indirect and happens throughout the long term – so perceived cost of using automobile may be less than the assumption made by CAHSR. While it overestimates automobile operating costs and travel times, thus making it less desirable, it underestimates rail travel time and congestion of shared track to make the high speed rail attractive.