“OF ALL the high-speed train services around the world, only one really makes economic sense,” The Economist observed last week, that one being the Tokyo-to-Osaka route. “All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping keep them rolling.”
What a difference a year makes. In February 2010, an Economist columnist pen-named Gulliver was gushing over “China’s dashing new trains.” “Scarcely a week goes by without another glowing report about racy Chinese trains,” the columnist reported in March.
In April, Gulliver praised Obama’s high-speed rail plan. “America’s failures in the HSR department are so glaring that they’re impossible to ignore,” the article noted, not considering that those “failures” might be because America was slightly less interested in “political patronage and national chest-thumping” than other nations. (Gulliver also often confused the “top speed” with the “average speed” of trains.)
