Texas High-Speed Rail

AKA something that should exist

I recently spent some time back in the old country (Texas) and it got me thinking about the place I grew up. For all the challenges the state has, it has a ton of potential and an opportunity to build a prosperous tomorrow for tens of millions of current and future Texans. 

Building that future, though, will require building physical infrastructure. Texas needs a transportation system capable of stitching together its major cities. Car-dominated freeways won’t cut it in the future (and arguably haven’t for many years).

High-speed rail is the right technology for binding the state’s most productive urban centers into a single mega region and setting the stage for generations of future prosperity. 

The Texas Triangle (much cooler than that knock-off in Bermuda)

Contrary to popular belief, Texas is more than cows and oil rigs.¹ The state is a big, diverse place complete with its very own subregions – the canonical explanation of which I’ve provided here:

The state's economic center of gravity, though, is firmly anchored in the Texas Triangle, the region comprising the four major cities of Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas-Fort Worth. 

Nearly 21 million people live there (over 70% of the state’s population) and it boasts an annual GDP of over $1 trillion (for reference, those are SF Bay Area numbers).

It’s also socio-economically diverse, in contrast to coastal cities that have only become more economically stratified.

The beating, economic heart of Texas

And as impressive as all that is, what’s really noteworthy is that it’s still growing. If the region stays on trend, it could reach a population of over 40 million by 2040. That’s almost 20 million more people – a 100% increase – in under two decades. 

All told, it’s a good place that could be on the verge of becoming great. But to realize its potential as a mega region, it needs regional transit. 

What Transportation Unlocks

When we talk about potential, we’re talking about broad-based wealth production via abundant, high-paying jobs. At their core, cities are labor markets. They’re physical agglomerations of people and capital that have coalesced together over time because, in doing so, they increase productivity. 

Once upon a time, someone made the observation that the size of a city tends to expand to however far a human can commute in a half hour. As we went from walking, to riding horses, to using internal combustion engines, cities expanded.

Transportation technology made physically distant locations functionally closer and that meant for any place one might live, the number of economic opportunities dramatically increased. Modern transit systems have allowed labor markets to widen and deepen. As a result, urban areas have been able to become wealthier. 

This doesn’t mean we should understand cities in solely capitalistic terms. But it does mean that everything else – the amenities, the cultural life, and all the rest – follows from the wealth producing nature of a city. People don’t exist to consume calories, but if we don’t consume calories we eventually don’t exist. Similarly, a city is more than a labor market, but its role as a labor market necessarily precedes everything else it can do or become.² 

The Katy Freeway in Houston … forever one lane away from perfection 

Growth in the Texas Triangle could continue as-is. But even if the individual cities expand to the point of overlap, they’ll just become a group of geographically contiguous – but ultimately balkanized – labor markets. And they’ll be forgoing the economic gains they could have realized by deploying transit technology that can function at scale. 

The Kind of Bullets Texas Actually Needs

So the Texas Triangle is growing and that’s good. But if it one day develops into a mega region that takes three days to drive across because everyone looked at Houston’s traffic and thought that was a good idea, that would be bad.

But is the solution to this really high-speed rail?

Yes. If the goal is to reduce the functional distance between the region’s existing economic cores, high-speed rail is the way to do it. 

The most important corridor for rail service, Houston <> Dallas, is in that sweet spot of being too long to drive and too short to fly. @citynerd has a great video where he models out a trip from Houston up to Dallas, showing that high-speed rail beats flying and driving on speed, cost, and ease of travel. 

From “56 High Speed Rail Links We Should Have Already Built”

In a different video, he goes on to rank the best candidate cities for a high-speed rail connection. Naturally, each of the individual cities in the Texas Triangle makes the list. It’s worth noting, though, that his list is based on current conditions. If we take into account the region’s growth trajectory, the case for doing high-speed rail–and doing it now–is even stronger.

Cool story bro, but is this actually gonna happen?

It might 🙂

Way back in 2014, Texas Central Railway (TCR) was formed to build high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston. The company proposed using a version of the Japanese N700 Shinkansen to transport passengers at speeds of up to 205 mph. 

In the years since, it’s been unclear whether the project would actually ever happen. The pandemic complicated efforts to expand mass transit and the company reshuffled their board and top leadership. 

More recently, though, there’ve been signs of life. TCR has accessed federal grant money through their partnership with Amtrak. The Texas Supreme Court has also ruled that TCR can exercise eminent domain to acquire the rest of the right-of-way it needs to move forward.  

There’s still political resistance, ostensibly over the question of property rights vs eminent domain, but politicians in Dallas and Houston as well as the trades seem to be in favor. 

There’s probably also a larger political question of whether rail is too liberal coded. If allowing mass transit (even privately built and operated) becomes understood as a win for the forces of cosmopolitanism or whatever, someone will find some roadblocks to throw up. Where there’s a will, there’s a NEPA challenge.

Proposed Houston to Dallas Route

Putting politics aside, I’ll take a second to preempt the “public infrastructure boondoggle” discourse.

TCR is a private company (despite the Amtrak partnership) pursuing a business with a well understood model. Rail systems in Japan and Hong Kong develop real estate around their stations. This lets them internalize the increased property values created by rail service. For Japanese high-speed rail, in particular, rail operations account for as much as 94% of total revenue (JR Central Line). Turning a profit as a rail operator is not an unsolved problem.

According to Amtrak, 24K people commute between Dallas and Houston on any given day. So, seems like there’s demand.

Whether TCR can make it all pencil when it comes to land, labor, material, and financing constraints, TBD. But from a does-this-make-sense-in-general perspective, nothing looks crazy here.

Final Thoughts

High-speed rail won’t solve every problem facing the region now or in the future. To varying degrees, each of the major cities still needs to get right with Housing Jesus, though efforts there are underway. 

City level transportation is still a challenge as well. Houston has made impressive strides in recent years with light rail and upgraded bus service. And Austin will likely get going on its light rail soon. But it will be a generational process to move from total reliance on car based infrastructure to more scalable forms of mass transit. 

What high-speed rail would do, however, is conjoin what are currently segmented labor markets into a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The economic opportunity that gets unlocked then makes everything else that much easier to solve. That’s more and better jobs for residents, deeper talent pools for employers, and larger tax bases for public expenditure. But to reap those future rewards, seeds need to be planted today. 

1. That’s Oklahoma.

2. This is a paraphrase of Alain Bertaud’s “Order Without Design”, chapter 2. If that’s a new name to you, you have homework.