Pure, unadulterated BS! The installed asset - the rails, in this case - will NEVER appreciate. The land may appreciate in value, but not the rails. Rails and wires deteriorate over time and must be replaced. They do not appreciate at all. The are, functionally, a long-term consumable of the line.
Furthermore, the land? It's an asset that you CANNOT leverage. You can leverage assets that you can possibly liquidate; you can sell the asset for the cash, or get a loan against it because the new lien holder could force you to liquidate the asset to recoup their costs.
How do you go about leveraging your right-of-way? Kind of hard to sell property for housing when there's a TRAIN that runs on it! You cannot leverage a few miles of the line because - unlike roads - you have one right-of-way that your train must use. A gap of 10 feet renders the line as inoperable as if the line didn't exist at all. It's an all-or-nothing asset.
Driftdiver's analysis was spot-on. Spend $1.5 billion to deploy the line, and at $30 a ticket you have to sell 50 million tickets. Simple division Willie, surely you are capable of that? How many people will ride this line, annually? One million? Two million? Three million (which would make it one of the most-ridden trains in the US)? Do the math again to find out how long just to recoup the initial investment (minus the time value of money), let alone cover the operating costs.
Willie, you've been smoking the good stuff again, I see...
Those are NOT "low population density areas."
Yes, they are. High speed rail only makes sense in China because we're talking 10 TIMES the density. A train from a metropolitan area of 25 million to another metropolitan area of 10 million.
Here in Shanghai, Hong Qiao airport (and train and bus and taxi and subway station) is in the Changning district. This is a "suburb-style" district of Shanghai, very low density population compared to the inner-ring area of Shanghai. And there are a 600,000 people who live within 5 km of Hong Qiao. Density on the order of 20,000 or more people per square mile.
THAT is density. Think Manhattan and go UP in density from there. That's the density required to make trains economically viable. Twenty thousand people per square mile or more.
Tampa? Around 2500 per square mile. Orlando? About 2000 per square mile. An ORDER OF MAGNITUDE lower density. The ONLY place in the US that comes close to Asian-style high density is downtown Manhattan; everywhere else is - by comparison - wide open spaces.
You really haven't a clue about the economics of trains, or you have a LOT of willful suspension of reality. Not ONCE have you ever made an economic case for trains, other than "PEAK OIL" which has been proven to be a lie...
There is no economic case to be made for passenger trains in most of America. That’s why they cannot and will not argue on that basis.
FYI, in 1865, when the first NYC subway opened, Manhattan's population density was 35K per square mile. It is now 70K per square mile. Most Chinese cities are like the biggest American cities, ex-NYC, in terms of population density - closer to Long Island than NYC. Shanghai's population density is only 7K per sq mile. Beijing's is 3.4K per sq mile. Bombay and Madras are far more densely populated, with 59K and 69K per sq mile respectively. Again, just FYI.