Multi-criteria pathfinding for high-speed rail: A Computational geospatial analysis of the Albany–New York City corridor

Intercity passenger rail between Albany and New York City has been identified as a strong candidate for higher-speed rail investment, yet existing planning studies do not provide a fine-scale, raster-based assessment of where new or substantially realigned high-speed rail corridors could feasibly be located within the Hudson Valley. This case study develops a geographic information system-based multi-criteria framework to screen environmentally and geographically suitable alignments along the corridor. Publicly available elevation, land cover, protected lands, and hydrography datasets are combined into a composite cost surface using analytic hierarchy process weighting, and least-cost path analysis is applied to derive candidate high-speed rail corridors. The composite cost surface concentrates low-impedance cells along the Hudson River Valley, reflecting the joint influence of terrain, hydrologic constraints, and conservation lands. The baseline least-cost path closely parallels the existing Amtrak Empire Service corridor while achieving a lower modeled construction cost per kilometer on the composite surface, whereas an eastern alternative is longer and traverses higher-impedance terrain and more fragmented land cover. A slope-dominant sensitivity scenario produces an alignment that overlaps the baseline path by more than 96 percent, suggesting that the resulting corridor geometry is relatively stable under plausible variations in weighting assumptions. Together, these results show how transparent, reproducible GIS-based screening methods can support early-stage corridor planning for higher-speed rail, clarify tradeoffs among terrain, environmental protection, and corridor geometry, and provide policy-relevant evidence to agencies considering investment in constrained river valley settings such as the Hudson Valley. • GIS-based multi-criteria framework for screening high-speed rail corridors. • Raster cost surface integrates terrain, hydrology, land cover, and conservation. • Least-cost path analysis identifies candidate alignments in the Hudson Valley. • Results highlight the Hudson Valley as the lowest-impedance corridor. • Framework supports early-stage infrastructure planning and corridor screening.