All aboard the High-Speed FAILroad

Sam Smith To understand why Obama’s high speed rail efforts are stumbling, it may help to consider the reaction if the same principles were applied to funding air travel, in which case the bulk of the money would go to subsidizing business and first class.

For example, one can travel on a regular train along the Washington-Boston corridor for about a half of what it costs to go by Acela. Not surprisingly, Acela has about 45% the ridership of the regular service. In fact, according to one Amtrak study, Acela was twenty percent more costly than flying.

Thus high speed rail – as your major long-range transportation policy – make a lot of sense either a practical or political point of view, and reflects an increasingly, albeit often unintentional bias, towards the culture of campaign contributors and upscale liberals over that of other Americans.

Yet in all the articles I’ve read on the topic – written of course by journalists used to travel allowances – there has been hardly a mention of the class content of this issue.

A more reasonable approach would be to improve ordinary rail and bus service, which would have the added advantage of not only meeting the needs of more people but would economically open up areas – especially in the American heartland – that have been suffering.

A modest goal would be to end up with as many rail miles as we had about a century ago. We peaked at 254,000 miles in 1916; today we have only 55% as much.
 
Sam Smith, February 2009 – There’s nothing wrong with high speed rail except that when your country is really hurting, when your rail system largely falls behind other countries’ because of lack of tracks rather than lack of velocity, and when high speed rail appeals more to bankers than to folks scared of foreclosing homes, it’s a strange transit program to feature in something called a stimulus bill.

….there is a lot of talk about how the Obama administration is a second New Deal. But the first New Deal would never have spent huge sums on super trains for the better off; it would have expanded decent if unexotic rail service for ordinary folks. Today you can hardly even get Democrats to talk about such things.

One might even call it an $8 billion earmark.
The problem became permanently embedded in my mind after I asked a transportation engineer to identify the best form of mass transit. His immediate answer: “Stop people from moving around so much.” So simple, yet so wise and so alien to almost every discussion of the topic you will hear.

If we were really smart, we would be spending far more effort, for example, on redesigning neighborhoods so travel isn’t so necessary.

Instead we are planning to spend $8 billion so that people who already travel more than they should can do it faster and easier.

Please read more by Sam Smith over at TPR

Haase Comments: It is imperative that we move towards a (More bucky Fuller) generation of cars and public transportation that can reduce our dire addiction to fossil fuels. 

And rail is another good answer. Highspeed is the problem. 
 
Not even I and a room full of enviros would promote fossil fuel guzzling “high speed” rail that costs more than filling a SUV with gas with equal if not more environmental impact. 
 
“Rail done right” has proven to save billions every year in job time, fuel costs and resources. HighSpeed has not. 
 
It is just adding another luxury ride for the “top ten club” while we continue to fill the streets with poor and taxed to death middle class who could NEVER afford one ticket on this train wreck. 
 
Using this funding for “net renewable energy programs” would eliminate the highest costs to the poor and middle class (energy, food & transport).

Between the proposed destination points alone we can “line the rails” with enough renewable energy programs to power this entire rail program and make it financially and environmentally sustainable. 
 
Creating 1000’s of additional jobs (than proposed) and LOWERING transportation costs to allow the people who need public transportation the most an opportunity to ride the elitist rail.

Written correctly, a program “powering states with the intention to power future sustainable public transportation systems” is what we NEED these dollars for. 
 
Progress… lets see a little. We had more public transportation at the turn of the century that today. 
Nearly all privately funded.

And the program I mentioned above would be fully funded by private capital if we offered a 10 year tax/profit relief with all current renewable energy funding incentives. 
 
Investor /taxpayer payback would be a four year turn to profits and not a lifetime of tax burden, debt and environmental impact for our children.