High-Speed Rail Not Such A Swift Deal For I-4 Corridor

Following today's Sunshine State News story on SunRail, a transportation analyst cites more discouraging numbers about the cost-benefit of high-speed rail (HSR) ventures.

"One of the rationales for both the California and Florida HSR projects is to relieve congestion on, respectively, I-5 and I-4, both of which are projected to need widening over the next decade or two," Robert Poole testified at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Washington, D.C.

"The Orlando-Tampa (I-4) corridor allows us to do a comparison of highway and HSR alternatives. The official cost estimate for this 84-mile HSR project is $2.6 billion, but if it ends up with a cost/mile thats the average of recent European HSR projects ($51 million/mile in 2008 dollars, per GAO-09-317), the cost would be $4.3 billion.

"Using Federal Highway Administration cost figures for adding lanes to existing interstates, the cost of adding one lane each direction in the Tampa-Orlando corridor would be about $715 million.

"Unlike the HSR dollars, which would all come from federal and state taxpayers, the highway lane additions would be paid for out of highway user taxes -- or if the lanes were built as express lanes, the funding could come partly or entirely from tolls. And with variable (value-priced) tolls, the congestion relief on I-4 would be sustainable long-term."

Poole, a researcher at the libertarian-leaning Reason Foundation, is currently writing an article about transportation for Tallahassee's James Madison Institute Journal.