THE CASE FOR CONNECTIVITY. The Transportationist contributes to a Popular Science article on the difficulty of providing high-speed rail service in the United States.

Unlike Europe and Asia, where the dividing line between urban and rural is far more defined, the northeast corridor is the definition of urban sprawl, with populated cities separated by endless suburbs and smaller burgs that all want access to the train. To bullet trains, sprawl is anathema.

“The very high speeds that China is achieving can be obtained only if you space the stations far apart because it takes time to accelerate and decelerate the trains,” says Ken Orski, a career urban transit expert who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and is now publisher of Innovation NewsBriefs, a widely read transportation policy newsletter. “If you space those stations very closely you lose the technological advantage of high speed.”

Basic physics and human physiology dictate the limits to how fast a train can gather speed or slow down. The intercity distances – from Washington to Baltimore, Baltimore to Wilmington, Wilmington to Philadelphia, Philadelphia Newark and on to NYC and so on – are all short hauls, too abbreviated to take advantage of bullet trains’ top speeds. That’s not even taking into account all the street crossings, which hinder both automobile and train traffic along the route. Take all that into consideration, and 150 miles per hour is probably about as fast as northeast corridor trains can hope for.

Therein lies the aforementioned quandary: In the northeast corridor, there is enough demand to support an investment in next-gen high-speed rail, but bullet trains simply aren’t practical there. And, as Dr. David Levinson, associate professor of transportation engineering at the University of Minnesota, points out, in more wide-open places like the Midwest where true, 200-plus miles per hour high-speed trains have room to run, populations often aren’t dense enough to justify the trains. “The cost side of this is very high,” Levinson says. “And outside of the northeast corridor and a few other places, the benefits are relatively low, so there are limited places where you have enough demand to support passenger service.”

Of course, if Amtrak really wants to roll out China-magnitude trains in the northeast it could simply eliminate stops between major cities. But where trains go and where trains stop is a political issue, and nothing is so effective a destroyer of a potential public good as politics. High-speed rail tends to enjoy hot-button-issue status in the places where it’s an issue at all. In other places, it’s not even on the political radar.

I suggest that the problem is with interconnections between passenger train operators in the United States. In England, one ticket is good for a ride that might involve multiple passenger train operators, and a change of trains from a Voyager or Pendolino or if you're lucky, a pair of 43s with a High Speed Train, to a puddle-jumper, possibly a nodding donkey bouncing over those opposed joints. For instance, you board the fast from London Euston to Liverpool, making two or three intermediate stops, and ride the nodding donkey onward to Blackpool or Wigan Pier. Or you board the fast from London Paddington to Exeter and change to a diesel railcar for Dawlish Warren.

On the Northeast Corridor, the Acela Expresses already pass through Trenton without stopping. Some commuter trains from Philadelphia or New York make limited stops enroute to Trenton. But a passenger boarding New Jersey Transit has to buy a different ticket for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority or for Amtrak, and the trains are not necessarily scheduled to connect.

While the value of a train is that it makes intermediate stops, and the Acela Expresses might exist as upscale hideaways, there are cheaper ways to provide travellers with the benefits of convenient, reliable trains that beat flying and driving times without busting the budget on electrification or new infrastructure that provides only marginal improvements on what we used to do routinely with steam locomotives on jointed rail or diesel locomotives geared for 117 mph.