MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Japan, China and many European countries are known for high-quality passenger trains. The U.S.? Not so much. Our colleagues at The Indicator From Planet Money, Stephan Bisaha and Wailin Wong, explain why.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Our conductor into the world of railroads today is Allan Zarembski. He teaches classes on railroad engineering at the University of Delaware.
ALLAN ZAREMBSKI: It sounds like you're going to be asking me the classical questions of how come the U.S. railroad system's not as good as Europe, which is sort of the classical misunderstanding of what's going on. [inaudible] ...
STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: Misunderstanding. Oh, I look forward to being corrected.
ZAREMBSKI: Let's start off with the fact that the United States has the best freight railroad in the world.
WONG: The U.S. has more railroad tracks than any other country, but those tracks are almost exclusively used to transport goods, not people.
ZAREMBSKI: The United States has chosen to put its emphasis on freight transportation. Europe has put its emphasis on passenger transportation.
WONG: One reason for that choice comes down to density. Europe, by comparison, is packed in with lots of cities not too far apart. The U.S. is vast and spread out. A coast-to-coast train ride would just take forever.
ZAREMBSKI: You're still talking about a day and a half to two days.
WONG: Versus, you know, six hours on a flight.
BISAHA: Yeah. So you could have a multi-day train ride between LA and New York, or you could have freight trains.
ZAREMBSKI: Freight railroads are extremely profitable.
WONG: These railroads are also owned by publicly traded companies, and it makes sense these businesses would pick the more profitable option.
BISAHA: But, you know, couldn't they just share the railroads, passenger and freight trains, kumbaya, taking turns?
ZAREMBSKI: The answer is yes, we can, but there's an inherent conflict. You can't run as many freight trains as you can, which means railroads suddenly are losing money.
BISAHA: You were telling me, though, that these freight trains are so profitable. And yeah, they might lose some money if a passenger train is sharing the tracks. But is it really that much money that they're losing when they're making so much money, like you're saying?
ZAREMBSKI: What the railroads would say is it's our duty to our stockholders to maximize our profit. What you're saying is that there's a societal benefit by you allowing to route the passenger trains, and it has some value. And how do you reconcile that?
BISAHA: OK, whole different option. Why not just build new railroads? And while we're at it, let's make them high-speed rails, too.
WONG: California has been trying to do that for nearly 20 years to connect San Francisco and LA, but it's been bogged down with political issues like where the train should and shouldn't cut through and stop.
ZAREMBSKI: One of the problems with California high-speed rail is that it's turned out to be much more expensive than anybody expected it to be.
BISAHA: Where does that leave us?
ZAREMBSKI: The corridor approach.
WONG: The corridor approach. A train corridor is a simple stretch of railroad connecting a few large metros, ideally, not too far from each other.
ZAREMBSKI: We actually have a very successful passenger rail system in the Northeast Corridor.
WONG: And the private company Brightline is building a corridor between Las Vegas and Southern California. The company already launched a South Florida line back in 2018.
BISAHA: It's just not exactly profitable, at least not yet. But Allan says passenger trains are almost never profitable, not even in Europe. Those trains are supported by taxpayer dollars.
WONG: So if the U.S. really does want a big passenger train network, it has to be willing to pay for it.
BISAHA: Stephan Bisaha.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CRAZY TRAIN")
OZZY OSBOURNE: (Singing) I'm going off the rails on a crazy train. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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