CALPIRG Blog

High Speed Success

Someone wise (and possessing a dramatic flare) once wrote, “those that do not know history are doomed to repeat it”. Yikes. Well, luckily for the people of California, the global history of high-speed rail is anything but “doom”-inducing.

While the United States spent much of the post-WII construction years establishing a foothold in the automotive and aviation industries, Japan and Europe made a series of brilliant investments in rail-based transportation systems.

The Japanese Shinkansen bullet train is a wonderful example of the worldwide success of high-speed rail systems. The Tokyo-Osaka line that connects most of Japan’s major metropolitan cities has an average ridership of 375,000 people daily, with over 4.5 billion rides registered in 2007.

High-speed rail has also been exceptionally profitable in Japan. The East Japan Rail Company, one of seven major Japanese rail companies, registered a 1.65 billion dollar net profit in 2007 and employees over 70,000 people.

I think its important to note that Japan is roughly the size of California; so it’s not so much a matter of Japan’s population being more ideally geographically distributed for a rail-based society, but rather that they “laid the tracks” for such an infrastructure to be successful.

Proposition 1A would give California the same opportunity Japan built for itself over 50 years ago, the ability to “lay down the tracks” for a successful and accessible high-speed rail system. It seems that, especially in the case of California high-speed rail, history is very much in our favor.