Assessing Benefits from Shifting Passenger Travel from Air to High-Speed Rail in California

Status

In Progress

Project Timeline

August 19, 2020 - August 18, 2021

Principal Investigator

Project Team

Kaijing Ding

Areas of Expertise

Public Transit, Shared Mobility, & Active Transportation Travel Behavior, Land Use, & the Built Environment

Campus(es)

UC Berkeley

Project Summary

We propose a Synthesis Study that will assess the economic benefits and impacts shifting air passenger traffic from air to rail. Our assessment will take account of recent technological, economical, political, social, and epidemiological developments. It will incorporate the latest thinking on the importance of resilience and adaptability in assessing and planning infrastructure, and emerging recognition of the need to incorporate uncertainty into analyses of long-term benefit. Finally, it will inventory HSR deployment experiences from around the world to find the claimed and realized benefits from shifting air traffic to rail, as well as the role of complementary policies to the HSR deployment itself in promoting this shift.

According to the 2015 Interregional Transportation Strategic Plan, California High-Speed Rail (HSR) is the highest transportation priority for the corridor between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Many advocates view HSR as transformational and its benefits difficult to quantify, but consider reducing traffic demands on California’s roads and airports to be a major quantifiable benefit. The approaches to monetizing this benefit, while reasonable, is quite simplistic. We seek a more comprehensive analysis that captures a wider set of benefit mechanisms and places confidence bounds on the benefits from each mechanism.