If you're a rail travel proponent, there's good news and there's bad news when it comes to high-speed trains.

The good news is, globally, high-speed is up and running around the world — to the tune of some 13,000 miles of track in more than half a dozen countries.

"You can take a high-speed train from Seville to Barcelona and never leave a high-speed track," says Rick Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association. "It really is a proven technology."

The not so good news is, if you live in the United States, you're out of luck when it comes to HSR, thus far. High-speed rail in the U.S. is mired, for the most part, in opposing views about what's best for the country's travel infrastructure — and how we should pay for it.

The U.S. does not lack for recent efforts to implement high-speed rail, however. The western part of the country is alive with proposals. But if there's a future for the technology of moving people from one place to another along a fixed track at tremendous velocities, it will be born of something other than entrepreneurial spirit alone.

California Connections: Plans

Image: California High Speed Rail

When you think about high-speed rails, you think about shaving drives which would take an entire afternoon into a quick couple-hour commute.

For example, one project in California would link Los Angeles to San Francisco in a 2.5-hour shot, hurtling north and south at some 220 miles per hour. The estimated price tag: a cool $68 billion. Proponents say building the high-speed system will bring jobs. Opponents maintain that its projected ridership — by some estimates, approximately 20,000 people per day — simply doesn't justify the expense. Lawsuits from landowners along the proposed route are also ongoing. Construction is supposed to start this year, but, as of August, it has not.

Image: XpressWest

Another project, dubbed the XpressWest, is a private enterprise meant to shuttle riders between a park-and-ride station in Victorville, California (about 100 miles east of L.A.), and Las Vegas at approximately 150 miles per hour. But the concept hit a hurdle it couldn't clear earlier this summer when the U.S. Department of Transportation said no to a $5.5 billion loan meant to help pay for the projected $7 billion plan.

The Debate over High-Speed Rail

The underlying issues when it comes to high-speed rail projects are often political. Or, to put a finer point on it: the underlying issues revolve around government subsidies. Proponents say that would-be riders can't get their voices above the din of tax-conscious objectors.

"The people who want trains are dispersed, and not recognizing that if they want trains they have to tell their Congressman they want them," Harnish says. "And on the other hand, people who think that any government spending is Communist and evil make their voices heard very frequently."

Opponents say that the massive government subsidies involved in high-speed rail construction and operation are the wrong way to spend taxpayers' money. While it's not clear that they consider it "Communist" and "evil", they certainly do consider it the kind of expenditure that benefits developers over riders — which they also suggest are too few and far between.

"It's easy for me to advocate for a system when somebody else is paying for it," says William Ibbs, professor of civil engineering at Berkeley Research, at the University of California. "Most rail systems require about one third of their costs to be subsidized and virtually all of the capital costs to be subsidized."

Ibbs suggests that a better use of money would be to expand road-based systems that he says are more dynamic, flexible and widely used — he says that highways are able to accommodate shifting population in ways that perhaps fixed rail would not.

Harnish, on the other hand, says highways drain tax dollars as well, and are not what commuters would choose to use first — if they had a better choice than what rail offers now.

In the U.S., it seems certain that the future of high-speed rail will hinge on the resolution of these differing approaches. If high-speed rail does get a nod somewhere, anytime soon, most projections put the first rides as coming sometime in the 2020s.

Japan: Getting On Track

High-speed rail is met with debate in other countries, to be sure, but in Japan the Super Komachi train is a now working demonstration of what the technology can do. If there's a future for high-speed rail everywhere, the Japanese are setting down a template.

Image: Flickr, hikosaemon

At speeds of 186 miles per hour, and a projected leap to nearly 200 MPH upcoming, passengers on the Super Komachi can hurry from Tokyo to Akita in less than four hours. Another high-speed train in Japan, the Hayabusa Shinkansen, roars back and forth between Tokyo and Shin-Aomori in less than three hours.

But what do these success stories mean to high-speed rail advocates? Harnish points to the lesson that lies, perhaps, in the work of the president of Japan National Railways, whose own staff at times questioned the value of high-speed in that country.

"The lesson is that there was a guy who pushed the first line through," Harnish says. "He was mocked by his own chief operating officer for having spent so much time and effort on this 'waste of money' ... There's no question that it's a government project, and there needs to be a strong champion making it happen."

Whether such a champion is to emerge in the coming months and years in the U.S. remains to be seen. Meanwhile, workers in California are waiting for the go ahead to bring at least one link of high-speed rail out of the future and into the present day.

"In my opinion, we need to take a pragmatic view about HSR," says Dr. Sandeep Sovani, transportation expert with Ansys, a company that models simulations of complex engineering problems such as those involved in high-speed rail. "What are the big issues that we are trying to solve and is HSR the best solution for them? Is it improvement of commerce, or reduction in green-house gas emissions, or job growth? Will HSR provide the best return on investment with respect to the objectives? Once we answer these questions, we’ll have a clear path forward."

Image: Flickr, lwy