A group called the High-Speed Rail Alliance was pleased to announce that Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton is proposing that the federal government spend $240 billion on high-speed rail lines. This is, says the Congressman, “a vision worthy of the moment.”
Is it worthy because ridership of Amtrak is down 95 percent? Or is it worthy because Americans are rethinking their use of mass transportation?
No, apparently it’s worthy because President Trump started a trade war with China that was exacerbated by accusations over COVID-19. China, says Representative Moulton, is expected to “invest” (meaning spend) $46 billion a year on high-speed rail between 2020 and 2030. So, since China is doing it, we have to do it too in order to stay “competitive.”
Just how does spending money on trains that go less than half the speed of airplanes make us competitive? Competitive for what, the tourist dollars of train nuts? It certainly doesn’t help move freight around the country, which could truly improve our competitiveness. Amtrak collects fares averaging 95 cents a passenger mile for its high-speed Acela; airline fares average less than 14 cents per passenger mile. Tell me again how high-speed rail is competitive?
China does a lot of other things to be competitive. It represses freedom of speech. It denies people the right to democratically elect their government. It censors the internet. It has concentration camps for religious minorities. Mr. Congressman, should we do those things to be more competitive with this country which is widely considered to be one of the most repressive in the world?
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In the area of transportation, China built 88,500 miles of freeways between 1984 and 2018 and its goal was to build another 16,000 by the end of this year. For comparison, the United States, which has more land area and 3-1/2 times as many vehicles per capita, has only 67,000 miles of freeways. It sounds like we need to build several tens of thousands of miles to catch up.
A table in the back of Moulton’s report indicates that he believes the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s environmental reports claiming that it can finish that state’s Los Angeles-San Francisco line for under $40 billion. Not even the California High-Speed Rail Authority believes that anymore. This just shows how gullible Moulton and whoever wrote his proposal can be (or expects us to be).
Congressman Moulton laments that “robust funding mechanisms exist to build highways and airports” but “no trust fund nor formula funding exists” for passenger rail. What he doesn’t mention is that the robust funding for airports comes from passenger ticket fees while the robust funding for highways comes from gas taxes, tolls, vehicle registration fees, and other user fees. (There’s also some other funding for airports and highways but it is hardly robust being subject to political whims.) Of course, Amtrak can legally spend its net passenger revenues building all of the high-speed rail lines it wants — except that, after paying for operating costs, there aren’t any net revenues.
Given that the pandemic is completely shaking up the nation’s transportation system and America’s travel preferences, this is the worst time to talk about spending a quarter of a trillion dollars on trains that people are avoiding. However, Representative Moulton probably also thinks high-speed rail is worthy because Congress is spending trillions of dollars like it used to spend billions. If there is so much money to be wasted, he is apparently saying, some of it might as well be wasted on high-speed rail. Apparently, the Massachusetts congressman doesn’t understand that one way to remain competitive is not to go too deeply into debt.
“ This just shows how gullible Moulton … expects us to be.”
Don’t underestimate how gullible the Congress can be.
Congressman Moulton’s white paper on this is cringe worthy. He’s incredibly tone deaf in leaning on a argument that we should be more like China. It was never a good time to argue to be like an evil dictatorship that slaughters it’s own citizens. To do so now is stunningly out of touch with the times.
https://moulton.house.gov/imo/media/doc/FINAL.American%20High-Speed%20Rail.pdf
” It represses freedom of speech. It denies people the right to democratically elect their government. It censors the internet. It has concentration camps for religious minorities.”
That reads like the dream platform for the Democratic Party election campaign.
China does a lot of things to be competitive
– They’re the largest slave labor market in the world, with nearly 2 million people working mandatory labor
– they steal technology
– Their industrial wages are so low, worker depression and suicide is ubiquitous. Salvation and help me letters left in imported merchandise and nets to deter suicidal jumpers are common practices
China’s investment in high speed rail has accumulated enormous debts. China’s high-speed rail mainly relies on debt financing, and the construction of the high-speed railway has caused CRC’s debt to surge almost tenfold since 2005. From 70 billion dollars in 2005, to 700 billion in 2016. China exports the debt by convincing other countries to buy this technology.
It wasn’t too long ago,Gavin Newsom posted on twitter about California having a surplus budget and mocking the Trump admin running a deficit. Of course California had a surplus they were begging or extorting the fed to finance all their ambitious plans like the billions of federal money on it’s few miles of High speed rail, electrifying overhead rail lines. One out of every three welfare recipients live in California so everything from Food stamps, welfare, unemployment, HUD assistance, etc. There’s Tens of thousands of defense employees in California, NASA, all expend federal money. For the last few years used the reluctance of Trump to push for more federal funding for high speed rail; Nobody is gonna use………
High speed rail is often a discussion point of technological supremacy. China’s high speed rail system has accumulated debt; a total of nearly a TRILLION dollars by 2020. On the other hand if China wants to accumulate debts by building massive amounts of infrastructure it doesn’t need, by all means; encourage them. Japan’s faded economic prowess for the last 30 years was the result of a massive splurge of expensive building projects that served little actual use. Trains, highways, bridges, tunnels among other projects.
Japan, which faces intense competition from China, France and Germany in the global market for high-speed rail transport, has not found any takers for its maglev overseas despite aggressive marketing. Japan has staked premiership on restoring economic dynamism. Germany mastered the basic technology for maglev 40 years ago….and failed to sell it to anyone.
China’s greatest strength is it’s biggest Achilles heal. They have no regional or local authority to spend or authorize projects. Every infrastructure decision is made by the communist party discretion. This “from the top down” approach often leaves localities with nothing short but begging and a numerous array of failed urban projects often approved by party leaders who’re easily bribed. Combine that with a nations propensity for building poor quality construction. Such as that lethal HSR derailment whose track was built at the behest of a railway minister who was laundering funds and accepting bribes and was subsequently executed. Poor quality building materials which fall apart as seen in youtube videos. In Joseph Needhams famous book series “Science and Civilizations in China” which chronicles invention in the region going back centuries but one critical thing he misses is China’s propensity and lengthy history of conformity driven technological adoption and subsequent missteps and technological disasters. In China it’s cheaper to compensate the victims family than invest in preventing what caused the disaster
China does a lot of things…………namely lying to cover up their incompetence.
They covered up the corona virus, but they had no choice, that’s how their system works. If they handled it better……..lots of lives would have been saved.
But it reveals a staggering aspect of the CCP it’s Top to Bottom control mechanism.
In a one party system, exercising extreme control of lives, to social media to how many children they can. They take all credit when things go well…….but should also bear all blame when things go wrong? That’s why they’re obsessed with “Stability” the Internal security budget for stability is greater than the Army’s.
What’s a threat to stability? A deadly epidemic.
So they suppress problems rather than help citizens. To this day the Chinese party still insists the SARS outbreak was a sudden manifestation, with little time to prepare, when in reality the first cases happened a year before alerting the World Health organization til 2003. When it started spreading to other provinces…….they covered it up too.
The chinese communist party can “NEVER BE WRONG”, so when something goes wrong, lower level officials become the scapegoat. A result, the they’re afraid to do anything without punishment. ANother problem with centralized systems, they wont permit anyone else to help…including churches, civil society groupes and non profits, i.e. it’s own people.
In the fiftys when millions died in the “Great Leap Foreward” Local officials told Mao everything was doing just fine………….they got promoted. No bad news is good news.
In the 90’s, the governor of Hunan province, helped cover up a massive AIDS epidemic. Thousands of farmers got HIV thru a botched government blood program, was he punished……no. 20 years later he’s the 2nd highest ranking member of the CCP.