America’s political elite has an unusual phobia. They are
terrified of large, metal machines that are guided by rails. This doesn’t apply
to all large metal machines, such as SUVs. They just can’t abide the ones with
rails underneath them.
A recent blog
from the Heritage Foundation provides the clearest example of this
irrational fear by using the headline, “Transportation Secretary Wants Us to Be
Like Communist China!” You might expect Secretary LaHood to appear wearing a
Mao suit, but apparently his sin was to call for more investment in high-speed
rail (HSR). He further offended Heritage by comparing America’s commitment to
HSR to China’s and found it lacking.
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| China's High-Speed Rail in service. No sign of terrified Heritage Foundation writers in this picture. Photo courtesy of Khalidshou/Wikipedia |
Those who oppose rail transit tend to gravitate towards the
same talking points as in Heritage’s blog. They are:
1.
It’s fiscally irresponsible, since passenger
railroads always need subsidies.
2.
The public will never ride in trains because
they love their cars so much.
3.
A federally-funded HSR program is an intrusion
on states’ rights.
The first point is perhaps the oddest. Heritage cited a Voice
of America article that, in turn, cited China’s Academy of Science’s claim
that fares from the Chinese HSR system would never be enough to pay off the
construction loans. A large portion of these costs may be generated by
corruption, which Heritage insinuates is inevitable in big government projects.
Heritage appears to be unaware that government corruption in China isn’t just
limited to big rail projects.
I would imagine that the assumption that HSR and corruption go
hand-in-hand would be quite a surprise to Germany, builder of the ICE bullet train,
and Japan, home of the Shinkansen.
Both nations ranked far higher than China on Transparency International’s
Corruption Perceptions Index and slightly higher than the United States.
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| A corruption-free German ICE train. Photo courtesy of Sebastian Terfloth/Wikipedia. |
Cost estimates for US HSR projects range from $50
million ---via an American Enterprise Institute scholar---to a range
between $35
million and $50 million---courtesy of a former chairman of California’s High
Speed Rail Authority. That sounds pretty
high, until you compare it to the cost of a toll-free interstate highway. A
simple upgrade of the Century Freeway in Los Angeles and various routes in
Orange County cost between $25 million and $29 million
per mile (inflation adjusted from 1994 levels). That’s money thrown into
the gas tank and burned, because in less than five years those improvements
will have no effect on these roads’ level of service. Just try driving these
routes in the late afternoon to verify. Plus, it’s all being paid for out of
taxes (fuel and general revenues, mostly). How’s that for a subsidy?
So what about the second point? Will the public refuse to
ride a high-speed train? Acela, the high-speed train running from Washington to
Boston, certainly isn’t running empty. In the first six months of FY 2012
ridership hit 1.6
million passengers. That’s comparable
to traffic out of Washington’s Reagan National Airport bound for New York and
Boston on the US Air and Delta Shuttles. Acela isn’t exactly cheap, thanks to
Congress’s attempts to starve Amtrak of subsidies, but it takes you directly to
Manhattan. The Delta Shuttle out of Washington takes you to LaGuardia Airport
in Queens. Expect a hefty cab fare to get into the city, because there’s no
rail connection of any kind.
California’s HSR will tie the state’s two largest
metropolitan regions together. Opponents claim its first leg will be
underutilized, since it will
not reach either San Francisco or Los Angeles. However, this is not
unprecedented: the first long-distance superhighway built in the US, the Pennsylvania Turnpike,
didn’t reach either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. It stopped well short of both
because builders were using the right-of-way of an unbuilt railroad to get at
least some of it built quickly and cheaply. That’s EXACTLY what HSR planners in
California are doing. We all know the impact of this first superhighway: rail
travel, which had been dominant, declined and nearly died off entirely. The car
became supreme because it was perceived as being faster. That perception is steadily weakening on the highly-congested
Interstate 5 corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles, so HSR has
some competitive space to get established.
This segues into Heritage’s final point that these decisions
are best left to the states. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was a state effort, so
opponents might point to this as an example of state-led innovation. However,
efforts to expand the nation’s network of superhighways crept along at a Model
T’s pace until passage of the Interstate and Defense Highways Act (aka the
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956) under President Eisenhower.
This includes Pennsylvania’s own efforts to add onto the
Turnpike. The first stretch opened in 1940; it wouldn’t reach Philadelphia
until 1950. The proposed extensions to other parts of the state would not get
built until Eisenhower’s Interstate program came into existence in 1956. That’s
right---it took federal involvement to get things done.
This is the inherent weakness in the argument of those who
view federal programs as an intrusion into states’ rights. To think that
California could build an entire HSR line without massive federal assistance is
as absurd as expecting Pennsylvania or a more rural state like Alabama to build
their interstate highway system without any help.
Perhaps the final irony in all of this is that the Heritage
Foundation, a group traditionally allied with the Republican Party, is arguing
against the approach endorsed by that same party at its founding. As Patt
Morrison pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, the Republicans
incorporated in the mid-19th century federal funding of a
transcontinental rail link to California into their party’s platform. They did not insist that Nebraska self-finance
its section. Corruption was rife in the project, as China is experiencing with
their HSR, but it’s hard to argue that the Transcontinental Railroad was a
mistake. In fact, it’s hard to see how the US could have become an industrial
powerhouse without it.
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| A train in a museum display going nowhere, rather like Heritage's vision for the US transportation system. Photo by the author. |
It’s just as difficult to imagine how the US can sustain its
global economic position today if it fails to embrace the same transportation
technology now in place in Germany, Japan, and China. Nobody gets ahead if they
let their fears paralyze them. Let’s hope the Heritage Foundation and its
allies get over their rail-phobia soon.
