Last month, Long Island’s newspaper Newsday published an article about a proposed $105 billion project to bring high-speed rail to Long Island. The rail would connect New York City to Boston by first traveling across Long Island and then crossing back to the mainland via a tunnel underneath the Long Island Sound. Zipping along for large stretches at speeds up to 200 mph, a train leaving Penn Station would arrive in Boston in one hour and 40 minutes. The planners of this project are hoping that the proposed American Jobs Plan initiated by President Joe Biden will make the necessary funding available for the ambitious endeavor. There are definitely some pros and cons to consider given the size of the project, but it has support from politicians like Hartford mayor Luke Bronin, US Representative Tom Suozzi from Nassau County, and Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone (all Democrats). I am going to look at it here from the perspective of sustainability and addressing the climate crisis, and make three general points that come in to play in this proposal. Based on these three points, I am going to conclude that this is not the best use of our resources as a whole, but that parts of it are worth looking into.
1. High-speed rail is a very good thing, when the train travels from city center to city center. The obvious reason for this is that high-speed rail would obviate the need for short-distance commercial airplane flights. Air travel contributes 2% to the total carbon dioxide emissions, and it's going to be the most challenging aspect of our transportation system to eliminate emissions from. A significant percentage of the fuel consumed in a given flight comes during takeoff and landing, and the shorter the distance of the flight, the higher that percentage becomes. But if you can get from New York City to Boston in under two hours via train, without having to go through all the additional security measures and baggage checks and boarding processes that you need to do in airports, then flights from New York to Boston (or a number of other cities on the eastern seaboard) will not be necessary. Most train routes are completely electrified as it is, and if the electricity fueling high-speed rail comes from entirely green sources, then you can get from New York to Boston quickly without any carbon emissions.
2. Anything that expands the suburbs will do more environmental harm than good — including, if implemented improperly, high-speed trains. This is a point that needs to be made loudly, because the passage of even a watered down version of the American Jobs Plan will result in a lot of money getting thrown around for development and infrastructure. It’s important that this money gets spent the right way. Before I talk about this particular example, I need to point out for the sake of disclosure that I live in Ronkonkoma, about fifty miles east of Manhattan on Long Island. Ronkonkoma is the terminal station of one of the lines of the Long Island Railroad, and in this proposal it is slated to be the hub connecting Manhattan to New England via the high-speed rail. If the high-speed rail can connect New York City to Boston in under two hours, then it would connect New York City to Ronkonkoma in less than half an hour. Now you may think that a half-hour train ride from where I am to New York City would be a good thing, but here’s why it isn’t. The part of Suffolk County that stretches out to the east from where I am is full of farmland and woods, and the amount of nature out here may surprise people living in the City or the more fully suburban Nassau County. But if people could commute from the more remote regions of Suffolk to New York City in less than an hour, developers will swallow up the Island’s remaining agricultural and open spaces very quickly. Land is a precious commodity. Housing and businesses, the agriculture necessary to feed people, the generation of energy (renewable energy especially), and nature all need their space. Of these, the addition of housing and businesses doesn’t need to spread horizontally. That is why the most sustainable way to develop is upward, not outward. But the demand to develop outward from New York City, including further and further eastward across Long Island, has remained steady and strong since the end of the Second World War. And the pressure to keep spreading out has just been magnified enormously by the pandemic. Wise leaders will look for ways to resist that pressure. Also keep in mind that forestland remains our best means of removing carbon dioxide from the air, so a truly effective plan to combat global warming will keep trees where they are. In other words, we need to start making the most of the space we have already put into use.
3. We should always look at multiple ways to achieve the desired outcomes, and compare them in terms of costs and less-desired outcomes. The primary desired outcome is high-speed land transit from New York to Boston, but rapid trips from Eastern Long Island to New York City and to New England are also desired. The benefits of the first outcome are obvious, but they can be accomplished on the existing Amtrak line without magnifying the cost significantly by digging a tunnel under the Long Island Sound. The second outcome risks the undesired eventuality of the complete suburbanization of Long Island; justifying such a massive expense should require an air-tight plan to prevent that suburbanization from happening, and the burden of proof is on the planners. You can (and should) certainly improve the performance of the Long Island Railroad, but the suggested proposal goes past the point where the combined financial and environmental costs outweigh the benefits. As far as cutting travel time to New England is concerned, one possibility that seems to be getting overlooked is to improve the transportation of people and cars across the Long Island Sound by boat. Electric ferries already do exist, as do high-speed ferries. That means that it wouldn’t require any future innovation to ferry people and their cars across the Sound in substantially less time than it takes now (and than it takes to go from eastern Long Island to New England by car), and to do it cleanly. A fleet of green high-speed ferries might not come cheap, but you’re comparing it to the cost of a high-speed rail tunnel under the Long Island Sound. It also wouldn’t require major disruption within the town of Port Jefferson, the site of one of the ferries between Long Island and Connecticut, whose long-term resistance to big infrastructure projects is mentioned in the Newsday article.
With some sort of large infrastructure package likely to get through Congress and reach President Biden’s desk, now is as good time as any to speculate and think big. I like the ambition of the high-speed rail proposal. But while I believe we can afford massive infrastructure investments, we can’t afford to have them come with significant negative consequences. So we need to be careful and creative. I think we can come up with some big ideas and big improvements, and make them happen in ways that will satisfy most people while helping us make our mark on the planet smaller instead of bigger.
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