These projects always seem so expensive to me -- this is on the order of $1500 per human in DFW + Houston metro.
When you start to think about how that adds up if you just add the money for each of the members of families on your street, or in your neighborhood, you realize how very expensive they are.
Hopefully they do studies to show how this solution will add more into the economy than other uses of the same amount of money.
If they are spending private money vs government funds, every penny spent building it and running it will be a positive contribution to the local economy. In case you missed it the first time, I wrote every penny. There is no way to get more than 100% when only private enterprise is spending the money.
Lets look at from Texas Central economical point of view.
Costs have doubled in the last 7 years up to $20 billion, some suggest it will cost up to $30 billion by the time they finish building it. Let's assume the middle dollar amount for our exercise in mathematics, the real number will either be half as much or 50% higher - only time will tell what the actual number will be.
Each TGV trainset will have a passenger capacity around 400 passengers.
Let's assume the train runs half full with $100 fares for simplicity purposes.
That's the equivalent of just rather small one passenger jet.
That means each trains will earn $20,000 in fares.
They plan to run a train in each direction every half hour, so that is 4 trains per hour.
So they collect $80,000 per hour in fares.
Lets assume they only start trains for 12 hours each day.
That's $960,000 per day.
Lets keep the math simple and suggest earning a cool $1 million per day.
That would add up to $365 million per year.
In 10 years, that would be $3.65 billion per decade.
Now down to some division, slightly harder math.
$20 billion / $3.65 billion/decade = 5.479 decades, ort 54.79 years.
That's less than 55 years.
Even if the construction costs have doubled, they could pay for it in 110 years.
Or if they keep the construction costs down, but only charged $50 per fare, it is still 110 years.
Or if they actually fill the trains keeping the construction costs down, they could pay for it in 27.5 years.
Of course financing is not that simple, there are labor, maintenance, taxes, interests, insurance, and advertising costs to consider.
I'm not going to suggest here and now they will actually earn a profit, but obviously they think they can or they would not be proposing to build it. Only time will tell.