We are working on two high-speed rail projects that examine intercity passenger rail at different scales. First, we developed five key recommendations to speed up high-speed rail project delivery in the United States. This report proposes five concrete recommendations related to governance; standards; linkages between universities and industry; project management, procurement, and risk; and permitting, third-party agreements, and planning. Our second project, which will be done in the fall, takes a granular look at the Northeast Corridor.

The cost data in our HSR database is for civil infrastructure, systems, stations, and overheads, but not rolling stock or financing charges.

We have not included lines that were canceled, even if their design or physical construction began. This is because their costs tend to be upward-biased, the higher than average costs usually being the reason for their cancellation.

Differently from our subway costs database, we include more historic lines in our HSR database; and we have almost complete data for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Korea. Taiwan, Netherlands and UK data are complete. On the other hand, it has been difficult to find tunnel and viaduct percentages especially for the ongoing projects.

Please get in touch with us if you have more accurate and/or complete data to contribute in our HSR database.