Groupe Chronos

Climate change, ash clouds, economic recession, distance to city centres and the troublesome safety procedures in airports are as many reasons for the re-introduction of high-speed railways on the high-priority lists of policymakers in Washington, Beijing and European capitals. Still, there are significant differences between the plans on the three continents, which are important to note.

In the US, everyone seems to be talking about high-speed railways - a key example is the latest book of economist Richard Florida, one of the most influential persons in North American planning. In The Great Reset, he argues for massive investments in high-speed railways and he claims that the funds made available as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are far too limited. Approximately $ 8 billion were handed out with an additional $ 2.5 billion to be granted in 2010. Priority is initially to be given to connecting Washington, Boston and New York, reducing travel time between e.g. Philadelphia and New York to half an hour. This is likely to be followed by a $ 45 billion Los Angeles - San Francisco connection, and the Portland - Seattle area is another priority corridor.

Even though the Obama administration has yet to propose a long-term funding strategy for the development of the national high-speed rail network then it is clear that there is an ambition and a plan for providing an alternative to domestic air transport in the US. And one also have to bear in mind that, according to a recent study from the United States Conference of Mayors : upcoming U.S. rail projects will create a substantial number of jobs and $19 billion in economic growth.

Ambitions are also high in China, to say the least. Having completed a number of high-speed links in recent years including Shainghai - Pudon Airport (click for one of many videos available of the 431 km/h connection), Beijing - Tianjin and the currently world-fastest train in regular service Guangzhou - Wuhan, China will become the largest operator of high-speed railways within a limited period of time, possibly before the end of this year. The Chinese government is pursuing a strategy of creating four vertical and four horizontal lines, thereby including the majority of the country in the network.

However, this national matrix of railways is not the most challenging project undertaken by China. Recently, the government has laid forward plans of creating two linkages to Europe and one to Southeast Asia. The latter of these is already under construction, as China has initiated railway work in Burma, but most attention is drawn to the two European lines. The ambition is that it will take 48 hours to travel from London through Central Asia to Beijing in 2020, while the Northern link is to go mainly through Russian territory before ending in Germany. But why spend huge sums on trans-Eurasian railways when most experts argue that high-speed rail does not have a competitive advantage over air transport at distances of more than 1,000 kilometres?

A possible answer is that the plans are more a question of geopolitics than transport policy. The Chinese rail gauge is similar to the European, while the old Soviet standard is wider - and few expect the Russians to change voluntarily. Thus, the completion of the Northern connection is highly doubtful. Contrary to this, the Central Asian countries might be more easily tempted by the resources and development offered by the Chinese. Should China actually succeed in creating the high-speed link through Central Asia, then it would imply a significant change in the power relations in a region, which has been dominated by Russian influence for a very long time.

Finally, this leads to the question of the position of high-speed railways on the European policy agenda. On the one hand, a number of large projects are being initiated, e.g. the London - Birmingham connection with possible extensions to Manchester and Leeds. On the other hand, most significant projects are intra-national and there is only limited public debate about the future of the trans-European high-speed rail network. Furthermore, politicians tend to prioritise national projects over the connections which could increase European integration. A telling example of this is the forthcoming Femern Bridge which will connect Germany and eastern Denmark. It is an obvious occasion to connect the German high-speed network to Scandinavia, and the Swedish government has also tried to promote this idea. However, there are few signs of this becoming reality, as the German government is currently unwilling to provide the funding for the sufficient upgrading of the stretch between the coast and Hamburg.

Overall, even though many European cities are today connected through high-speed rail, then it is beyond doubt that the Chinese network will soon be world-leading in terms of both coverage and speed. The problem of Europe compared to both China and the US is the lack of coordinated planning, which is quite striken when it comes to DB and SNCF. It is an advantage to have the possibility to test a plurality of solutions on many policy areas - but physical infrastructure, which is transnational in its nature, is not one of them. Thus, it can be expected that the development of the European high-speed rail network will be relatively slow, as long as the national governments are unwilling to transfer decision-making power to the EU level on these issues.