Week 1

Week 0 Recap:

Hello everyone and welcome back! Before I dive into my findings, I would like to recap my previous post. In my week 0 post, I outlined the critical importance of studying high-speed rail (HSR) development methods by examining the benefits HSR has brought to countries like Japan, China, and France in terms of sustainability, urbanization, and economic growth. I also delved into the persistent challenges the U.S. faces, including the oligopoly freight railroads have over U.S. rail trackage and the high fixed capital costs required to build new HSR infrastructure. Given these challenges, I believe that my research provides a helpful role in potentially capturing the untapped market for HSR in the U.S., providing an effective top-down blueprint for officials to utilize when building a world class, American HSR network. If you are interested in understanding the topic further, please visit my Week 0 post or click here to see my full project proposal.

Week 1 Results:

This week, I started discussing the key factors for High Speed Rail construction success with my outside advisor Oleg Yakovenko, Director of Strategy and Transformation at JSC Ukrainian Railways. In our conversations, Mr. Yakovenko suggested a very important resource for my research: the International Union of Railways’ High Speed Rail Handbook. This resource stressed the importance of evaluating HSR projects success based on if it lived up to its suggested projections and not how it exactly compared to other countries’ methods (especially when it comes to construction costs as geography and labor costs vary significantly from country to country). This made me reevaluate my current criteria for the assessment of a HSR method’s success. Consequently, I decided to revise my 6 initial sub-questions and turn them into the 8 sub-questions displayed below: 

• Sub-Question 1: What high-speed rail market structure has been the most effective on a per kilometer basis in spurring high-speed rail network development/network coverage?
• Sub-Question 2: What high-speed rail market structure has been the most effective in limiting cost overruns?
• Sub-Question 3: What high-speed rail market structure has been the most effective in limiting construction time overruns?
• Sub-Question 4: What high-speed rail market structure has the highest intercity market share percentage?
• Sub-Question 5: What high-speed rail market structure has been the most equitable in providing cheap and accessible tickets in context of the country’s cost of living?
• Sub-Question 6: What high-speed rail market structure has resulted in the most limited environmental impact?
• Sub-Question 7: What high-speed rail market structure has resulted in the safest high-speed rail infrastructure?
• Sub-Question 8: What high speed rail market structure has the highest profit margins?

With the addition of 2 additional sub-questions that I will need to answer for, I decided this week to complete the parts of the rubric for the first 4 of the 8 sub-questions, the results which you can access here. When developing this rubric, a great resource that I was able to find was NYU’s Transit Cost Project preliminary data analysis on worldwide HSR development. His data analysis of 75+ different high speed rail routes served as a really great source in developing the method analysis rubric, especially when determining the exact rubric numbers for sub-questions 1, 2, and 3.

Week 2 Future Plan:

For next week, my plans are to complete filling out the last 4 sub-questions in the rubric while also finalizing the list of countries to study. Additionally, I will decide what location to choose for an example implementation of the optimal high speed rail development method in the United States, with me currently deciding between the Chicago/Great Lakes Region and Texas. While the project has definitely been difficult in terms of finding sources in the English language that exactly fit my research needs, this project has definitely been an enjoyable challenge as I try to learn more about an industry I see a potential career in.

Thank you for tuning in and see you guys next week!