What ever happened to “I think I can”?

“Engineers can do anything, you’ve just got to give them time and you’ve got to give them a giant pot of money,” Corrado said about building a true HSR system along the Thruway. “Mountains of money, seas full of money.” But doing so, she said, would be imprudent: consequently, the Thruway “was as near to the impossible mark as you can get.”

Other estimates involving the use of the Thruway are lower, in part because this option reduces the need to acquire property for the right-of-way. John Egan’s 2006 study put the upper-end cost of a maglev line from New York to Buffalo at $10 billion ($11.4 billion in 2012 dollars). Robert Paaswell, of the City College of New York, offered Remapping Debate a very rough guess of $10 billion for an Albany-to-NYC line. The 1995 study conducted by Shafer and the Thruway Authority set the price per mile at $26.8 million ($44.2 million in 2012 dollars), not including vehicles. Translated  into 2012 dollars, Shafer’s findings would mean approximately $6.2 billion for an elevated maglev track from Albany to New York City.

At any of the projected cost levels, some HSR advocates wary of the utility of true high-speed service between New York and Albany. Petra Todorovich director of America 2050, a pro-HSR project of the Regional Plan Association, said focusing on the NYC-Albany route wasn’t warranted. Instead, she said, the money should be used for the Northeast Corridor, which connects Boston with NYC and Washington, D.C. “I’m not sure the Empire Corridor needs true HSR,” she explained. “I’m not sure you’d get enough return on investment.”

Tucker of Albany’s Center for Economic Growth concurred. Spending far less fixing up the existing capital-to-New York commuter service, which is often late and slow, would be good enough, he said. “Do you really need the super-duper bullet train?” he asked. “Or do you have a more efficient train that makes all those [commuter] stops but you can rely on it?”

Bruce Becker, a longtime HSR booster and president of the Empire State Passenger Association, in our interview said an Albany-NYC HSR route would be too expensive. He said activists have to scale back their demands in these tough economic times. “Our organization doesn’t feel it’s realistic to think there’s enough investment possible to make the leap from what we have today to a TGV-style system,” he explained. (Becker’s association is on the advisory committee of the ongoing DOT study.)

But Elliot Sclar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, was critical of this timidity. He questioned those who are prepared to accept the sacrifice of true HSR for New York State in favor of superfast trains on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington. Similarly, he disagreed that Albany-to-New York HSR would necessarily preclude other improvements in service. People are suffering from a lack of imagination, he asserted. “When those kinds of choices are put out there — do we improve and maintain, or do we build HSR? — why is that the choice?” he asked. “Yes, we should be spending on bus and rapid transit, on helping people get from their homes to work, but not to the exclusion of other possibilities.”

Steve Fitzroy, senior vice president of the Economic Development Research Group, which produced the Conference of Mayors’ report that looked at HSR in Albany, took a more complex view. He agreed with those who said that a stand-alone 142-mile HSR wasn’t worth the cost because of its short distance. On the other hand, he thought an HSR link from Manhattan to the capital would make sense if it were connected to a statewide HSR network: “If you went to that expense [of building an Albany-New York leg], certainly you would want to put the rest of the system in place.”

Paaswell agreed with Fitzroy that HSR along the entire New York City-to-Buffalo corridor would bring great benefits: “You [could] link up SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Albany, and the schools in New York City. You would form a sort of science nexus,” he said. “It would be very important for the state.”

Unlike Fitzroy, however, Paaswell was unwilling to reject an Albany-to-New York line that, at least initially, would stand alone. “You want to do it,” he said. First, Paaswell argued, there is already demand on the Albany-New York line — and he was convinced that with true HSR, that demand would only grow. “With access to the universities in New York City and the high-tech people there and the new generation of internet people there. You’ll see ridership expand even more.” Secondly, he said, “It will be a great illustration for what else should be put in place. You need to start one piece at a time.”

The DOT was unwilling to identify the criteria it is using for its cost-benefit analysis prior to the release of its draft environmental impact statement this summer.

Potential sources of revenue

Indeed, New York to Albany is a bustling route with over one million riders a year. The capital’s Renssellaer Station is the fifth busiest in the country, according to the DOT. As the DOT online briefing acknowledged, a 125-mph train that runs the full corridor from New York City to Niagara Falls would attract 4.5 million riders a year by 2035. In its study, The Conference of Mayors estimated that annual ridership on a 220-mph train operating strictly between New York and the capital would jump to 2.25 million passengers in the same period of time.

All these people would be buying tickets, which would provide some revenue. But since ticket sales would not meaningfully defray the initial capital investment, many HSR proponents, including Egan and Shafer, say the government must provide financial support.

Shafer thought the money for a new HSR railway along the Thruway should come from a combination of sources: train fares, Thruway tolls, and direct government spending. He said he imagines that, at some point, people will come to see high-speed rail as a public utility, “like electricity and water.” He drew a comparison between intercity HSR and New York City’s subway system. The subway is run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which needs money from the state government to supplement its farebox revenue.