The Antiplanner

Rail Jobs Overestimated

10th February 2010

Rail Jobs Overestimated

posted in News commentary, Transportation |

Remember all those jobs that high-speed rail was going to create? Turns out, not so much.

Wisconsin, for example, had claimed that its share of high-speed rail funds would create 13,000 jobs. In fact, it is only going to be 4,700– and then only at the peak of construction.

So how did 4,700 turn in to 13,000? If you have a job this year, and a job next year, they counted that as two separate jobs. And if you have a job the year after that, that’s three jobs.

“Some of the jobs connected to the project would be filled by the same people from year to year,” admitted the state. “Other jobs would be short-term positions replaced by other short-term positions.”

Of course, once the construction work is done, there will be jobs running and maintaining the trains, right? Yes, 55 of them. That’s a long way short of 13,000.

As a friend of the Antiplanner’s pointed out, they lied about the ridership, they lied about the costs, so why wouldn’t they lie about the jobs?

In some ways, this is a good thing. In the perverse world of politics, jobs are a benefit. But in the real world, jobs are a cost. The benefit comes from the income earned by the job. Of course, high-speed rail isn’t going to generate much income, so it is good to know that fewer people are going to waste their time on it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under News commentary, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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  1. 1 On February 10th, 2010, C. P. Zilliacus said:

    I wonder what the job benefits to the U.S. would be if the trainsets for the high-speed rail lines proposed by the Obama Administration were manufactured in China (as in Red China)?

    I am normally in favor of open markets and free trade, but given the way that the Communists in charge of the Chinese government are using exchange rates and ultra-low wage rates as strategic weapons, I do not think that U.S. taxpayers should be funding the purchase of capital goods made in that country. And beyond that, I do not think that spending billions of taxpayer dollars on ineffective rail systems is an especially good idea.

    Getting back to the political heirs of Mao, this is not a joke.

    Consider what happened recently in the Canadian province of Quebec (home to the train manufacturer Bombardier), where plans by the Société de transport de Montréal (English: Montréal Transit Corporation) to award a sole-source railcar (yes, they currently run on rubber tires and not steel wheels) contract to Bombardier and its consortium partner Alstom were derailed (pun intended) by objections raised by representatives of China’s CSR Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive Co.

    Read more in the Montréal Gazette here.

    posted on February 10th, 2010 at 10:40 am

  2. 2 On February 11th, 2010, the highwayman said:

    You guys are such hypocrites it’s funny & sad at the same time.

    The Montreal Metro already has steel wheels & rails, like with Paris.

    As for Zhuzhou they want to open a plant in Montreal.

    posted on February 11th, 2010 at 12:32 am

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