STEPHEN P.

MATTINGLY: So for High Speed Rail today,

we're going to be talking about markets and users.
This is the area of civil engineering transportation where we're really
trying to look at what kinds of people will
be using the road or bus or, in this case, high speed rail system
and trying to project the impacts that this new system may
be able to have on the overall transport system, and the ridership throughout.

So here we're looking at what role does high speed rail serve.
And it's really a particular niche that fits well for high speed rail.
And the types of people who would then choose to ride high speed rail.
Here I've created a small example where we're
looking at different ranges of trips in terms of distance.
And so with Dallas as our focal point here,
the blue circle indicates the 100 mile per hour distance away from Dallas,
and then the red circle indicates the 500 mile distance.
So anything out to 500 miles fits the USDOT definition for that range
you'd be looking at for operating high speed rail.
And anything shorter than that, you'd clearly be wanting to use auto.
What we'll be looking at next is looking at some of the travel times
that we might see to some of these different distances.
So if we look at the trip between Houston and Dallas,
two very large cities, very promising for getting the kind of ridership that
would be necessary to support one of these high speed rail lines.
And we get a distance of 239 miles.
And then you're looking at being a typical air trip, 55 minutes,
and that's from landing to take off, all the taxi
time, everything taken care of.
High speed rail-- probably about an hour and 35 minutes,
so really not that much difference in terms of time, especially
if you consider the security constraints that you're associated with on air.
And the loading and unloading timeline on an airline where you actually
have to load through a single door as opposed to a train
where you're going to be able to load through multiple doors simultaneously.
For auto, that trip would take four hours.
It could be done, certainly, if you need your car in the Houston or Dallas area,
you'd be likely to drive by auto, but if you don't need the car,
air or high speed rail would be more attractive.
When we're looking at the distance of 790 miles per hour for Houston
to Atlanta, this is a air trip of two hours.
Not too bad.
But with high speed rail, it would take over four hours at maximum high speed
rail speed, which is not going to be obtainable throughout
the entire distance, and no stops.
Also not likely because you'd end up probably
needing to stop at least in New Orleans along the way to Atlanta.
And then by auto, auto is no longer competitive at all.
It's looking at 11 hours to make that trip.

So when we look at when a high speed rail line is implemented,

we see that typically more users come from the current air travelers
then auto travelers, and convert over into rail users.
This makes sense because you've got two public modes of transportation,
if you will, where you're not traveling by your own private vehicle.
If you are traveling by auto right now, you're
probably choosing to travel by auto for a reason.
You need your car at the end, you're traveling with more than one person
and you don't want to spend the extra fares associated
with buying air tickets.
Something along those lines is probably driving that mode choice more
specifically than just cost and time.
What we do see though is as your travel times on rail increase
beyond two hours, the air is really able to maintain a lot of that market share.
Two hours or less, you're usually looking at 80%-90% of the air travelers
switching over to the rail.
And then 2%-3 1/2%, it's a pretty even split between the air and rail market
shares.
But then once you get beyond three and a half hours,
air's going to dominate those markets and capture 80% of those trips.

So as an example, when the TGV reduced the travel time from Paris to Lyon
by almost two hours-- so it went from four hours to two hours
now-- the market share rose from 40% to 72% overall,
but the air market share is what took the biggest hit.
It shrank from 31% to 7%.
And the auto market only shrunk from 29% to 21%.
Another issue that we have facing these market share analysis
and looking at what's likely to happen is that European cities
don't look like US cities.
The city cores are much more important in European cities.
And you also have a lot more public transit available.
And so when we look at US cities, a lot of those trips
are going to originate from outside of the cores
and need to move into the downtown areas or wherever the train station is
located to access those rail systems.
So the role that high speed rail serves particularly
well is this range where you're looking to two hours or less is ideal.
Maybe all the way up to three and a half hour trips.
But any rail line that has trips in excess of three and a half hours
is just not going to be very competitive against air.
So when we're looking at these differences between the US,
it really focuses on where are our trips originating and where are they ending.
And because our downtown cores are not where people live and are not
where all of the activities are located, you
tend to need other forms of transport at each trip end.
So whether that's driving or using transit,
depends on what facilities are available and services
are available with the high speed rail lines.
So when we look at the future, we see that high speed rail in the US
certainly-- and it currently is-- competitive
when it's at the right travel times.
If it's in larger travel times though, like Boston to Washington,
D.C. As we saw last time, it's just not going to be competitive.
We need to keep this in mind as we look to the future for developing high speed
rail.