Pic courtesy of Noodlefish, via Flickr
The Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson takes the Op-Ed pages of his paper to hammer the president’s high speed rail initiative today. What has Mr. Samuelson’s undies in a twist? Basically a Catch-22 that he constructs by ignoring two of the central fact about rail in the United States.
You see Mr. Samuelson is upset that the 53 billion dollar, ten year, program would build a lot of new tracks that the states would have to pay to maintain and would then lose the states money, exacerbating their budget woes. I know I say this all the time, but it bears saying all the time, conservative arguments are often true, as far as they go, and this one is no exception.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
You see Amtrak does lose money. It’s prices are high compared to flying and it does often take longer. But what Samuelson ignores is that the biggest problem Amtrak has is that it does not own the tracks it operates on. The scheduling of the trains is at the mercy of the Rail Road companies who make much more money hauling their own loads than letting a passenger service operate on the limited amount of track available.
The other component of that is the fact that while cities have grown considerably in the last 50 years the amount of track has not. Many of the tracks are now in places where they can not be expanded or most importantly for high speed rail, straightened. Without making changes to this infra structure we can not get above the very low average speed of 45 miles an hour for rail transport of people or goods.
Mr. Samuelson argues that the long term goal of a massive nationwide high speed system with a price tag of 500 billion over 25 years (yeah he is bitching about 16 billion a year in a project that would cost in total just under what we spend on defense in a single year) would take money away from other funding priorities, like schools, cops and you guessed it defense!
As a scare tactic it is pretty laughable to say that we don’t have a huge amount of money we can cut from our bloated defense budget. This year we will spend more on defense than every other nation in the world, combined. That’s right, if you piled up all the defense spending of all 195 other nations in the world, they would still spend less than the United States. Yet Mr. Samuelson thinks that transferring a little bit of that kind of spending to an infrastructure project that will just start to bring us up to the level of the rest of the world in this area is not worth it.
Having built up his strawman, Samuelson proceeds to hammer away at the poor creature. He says:
It's a triumph of fancy over fact. Even if ridership increased fifteenfold over Amtrak levels, the effects on congestion, national fuel consumption and emissions would still be trivial. Land-use patterns would change modestly, if at all; cutting 20 minutes off travel times between New York and Philadelphia wouldn't much alter real estate development in either. Nor is high-speed rail a technology where the United States would likely lead; European and Asian firms already dominate the market.
He presents us with a Chicken or the Egg scenario, since we don’t have high speed rail, we don’t have the tech business here in the United States, unfortunately if we don’t build high speed rail, there is no opportunity to build up that sector.
His other argument is all about Amtrak, as if having the benefit of more and straighter track will not accrue to the whole rail industry, but just to one service. There are a couple of way to look at this, first off if Amtrak is off the freight rails there is an increase in the amount of track available, and so there is less congestion on the existing tracks. Second with new, state owned track that is not going to be completely filled with high speed passenger trains there is an opportunity to sell some of that space to the freight companies. If they have the opportunity to move lighter loads faster, that is win/win for them. They can keep the heavy loads like coal (almost all coal moves by train, it is the only economic way to move it) and put lighter loads like consumer goods on the tracks with higher average speeds.
This means Mr. Samuelson is dead wrong on the points about congestion and fuel savings. More freight traveling by rail means less trucks on the highways. This means less wear and tear on the highways and a lower maintenance costs to the states, as well as less fuel consumption (rail already beats that hell out of trucks in terms of fuel efficiency). Also note that he only focuses on Eastern Rail corridor and totally ignores the rest of the nation.
On the aspect of fuel efficiency Samuelson also fails to look to the future. Yes, right now air travel is cheaper and more convenient, but the thing that is strangling the airlines is the cost of jet fuel. In his piece Samuelson is tacitly assuming that it will not go up, that there will always be reasonably cheap flights wherever one wishes to travel. That just is not going to be the case. Whether we are at or past or near peak oil the reality is the cost of petroleum based fuels is going to go up and up and up as the world wants to use more and can not produce as much. Basic economics there.
Rail, high speed or otherwise is so much more fuel efficient that flying it is not even funny. A jet liner averages 48 passenger-miles per gallon; it sounds pretty good until you hear that rail averages 468 passenger-miles per gallon. That is today’s system, and it could be much improved upon by increasing the number of passengers and the speed of the trains.
Finally Mr. Samuelson misses an important part of this program. The 53 billion spent over the next ten years will pump money into construction projects. It means steel, it means heavy equipment, it means people working in many states all of which is going to help create more demand in an economy that has all the supply it can stand (and more) and will help to bring us out of this horrendous economy the views of folks like him have brought us. At the same time it will set the stage for the larger nationwide project that our economic future may very well depend upon.
This is classic Conservative penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking. They don’t want to invest in the kinds of things that might change the game, because, frankly, right now the game favors them and their patrons. No nation can be successful assuming that the way we have done things in the past is the way that need they need to be done now. There were good reasons why the transcontinental rail system was built, but by the time the Interstate system was proposed those conditions had changed. Things are now on the cusp of changing again and a national system of high speed freight and passenger rail is one of the requirements to meet those new challenges.
The floor is yours.