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Predicting Bullet-Train Ridership Is a Numbers Game

Forget eminent domain. The key question about the proposed bullet train between Dallas and Houston may be just how many people would ride it.
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To date, much of the kerfuffle about the plan to build a private, high-speed train connecting North Texas, the Brazos Valley, and Houston has focused on eminent domain—the train’s right to force rural landowners to sell it the land needed to build the rail line. But another aspect of the ambitious proposal—its claim that nearly 5 million passengers are expected to use the bullet train by 2026—is stirring controversy as well.

The claim is key because the train’s developer, Texas Central Partners LLC, contends the 240-mile, $12 billion line will be privately financed, without the use of any federal or state grants for construction or operations. Skeptics question that. Some say the developer’s ridership projections have been exaggerated, which could lead to revenue shortfalls and, ultimately, an inability to pay back any debt that’s incurred unless taxpayer subsidies are provided.

“I don’t have any animus toward the project, but ultimately I question whether there would be sufficient demand for the service,” says Bud Weinstein, an economist and adjunct business professor at Southern Methodist University. Adds Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, a potential Texas Central rival, in an emailed statement: “Texas already enjoys a very robust ‘high-speed’ transportation system, and it departs Dallas Love Field 20 times a day for Houston.”

According to a study done for Texas Central by L.E.K. Consulting, about 14 million trips are made annually between Dallas and Houston, 20 percent of them for business. While 1 million of the annual trips are by air, more than 90 percent of the journeys are made by road—typically via Interstate 45—and they can take as long as 5.5 hours during peak congestion times.

The bullet train will whisk passengers between the two cities at more than 200 miles per hour in less than 90 minutes, L.E.K. says, with an average total journey time of less than 3 hours and 30 minutes. Anticipating the state’s population and economic growth over the next few decades, L.E.K. forecasts that annual bullet-train ridership will reach nearly 5 million by the mid-2020s—almost 25 percent of all trips between the two cities—and more than 10 million by 2050.

Critics, however, say those figures are unrealistically optimistic. A 2017 study of the project by the libertarian Reason Foundation projected 2035 bullet-train ridership at just 1.4 million. The disparity comes mainly because the foundation says far fewer Texans will switch from passenger vehicles to rail than Texas Central believes.

The foundation and others also point out that Amtrak’s nearly 17-year-old, high-speed train between Washington D.C. and Boston—a corridor that includes more than 15 percent of the entire U.S. population—carried only about 3.5 million passengers in fiscal 2016.

Texas Central, for its part, dismisses such concerns. It recently issued a statement criticizing the Reason study for using flawed data. Texas Central’s own ridership projections, spokeswoman Holly Reed says, are based on sophisticated, “in-depth, high-tech studies” that cost the developer tens of millions of dollars to produce. Says Reed firmly: “The numbers are there.”

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