“High-speed rail is a global disaster,” says one YouTuber, “but we must build it anyway.” “I don’t care about the cost,” says another, “California high-speed rail is fine.”
Are these people on the payroll of the companies earning millions in profits building rail lines that few people will ever use? Or are they just train lovers with no conscience who think everyone else owes them a heavily subsidized ride on trains that will travel less than half as fast as and cost more to ride than airliners?
Never mind that costs have quintupled. They admit they don’t care how much cost they are imposing on taxpayers. Neve mind that ridership estimates for the California line are at least four times too high. They don’t care if anyone else rides it; they just want to be there for the first trip. Never mind that the steel, concrete, and petroleum required to build it spews trillions of grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If it will get just one car off the road, one advocate told me, it will be worth it.
Advocates act like fiscal conservatives have some sort of double standard when it comes to rail vs. roads. But 96 percent of the cost of driving is paid for by the users while only half the cost of Amtrak, and far less than half the cost of high-speed rail, would be paid for by riders. Don’t forget, the same fiscal conservatives who oppose California high-speed rail also opposed things like the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska.
Apparently more reasonable is an article in Bloomberg arguing the “case for private high-speed rail.” No one has ever objected to private high-speed rail, but no one has ever built one either because the economics make no sense when the trains have to compete against faster and cheaper planes.
The Bloomberg article points to Brightline as an example, but Brightline in Florida is losing money and isn’t really high-speed rail anyway. At least one-quarter of the money raised for Brightline’s Los Angeles-Las Vegas line came from a federal grant so it is hardly privately funded. Even more comes from tax-free municipal bonds — I didn’t know Brightline was a municipality.
How about this: Immediately cease construction on the Los Angeles-San Francisco high-speed rail line and give everything that has been built so far, plus all the right-of-way that has been purchased, to Brightline. If they want to privately finance it, let them. If they fail to make any progress building it in the next ten years, the right-of-way should revert to public ownership. Maybe it could be used as special truck lanes for moving produce out of the Central Valley.
HSR is superior to air travel in compact cities. It is faster and more convenient then. And compact cities are superior to sprawling cities. To look at things just individually without taking into account the context and bigger picture is not scientific. We need to turn sprawling cities into compact cities and HSR does help to achieve it. If we don’t move towards more livable cities it will cost us much more.
“We need…” is a false and misleading attempt to imply consensus. There is no “we” in your argument. You are merely stating your own opinions. You are not speaking for anyone other than yourself. And “We need…” is always camouflage for legislation forcing people to do what you want.
Millions of people live in “sprawling cities.” This suggests it’s what they want. They seem to find those cities perfectly “livable.”
That’s a misinterpretation of people’s needs. Just because someone lives somewhere doesn’t mean the person wants to live there given there are no economic or other outer circumstances that force that person to live there. There is also a lot of propaganda out there just like false advertising that brainwashes people into thinking they need to live somewhere without considering their own needs and desires. Your post implies, that you think, that all people make rational decisions, but obviously they don’t.
If that were true why EU nations like France impose route restrictions on airlines operating parallel to HSR routes.
Mother fucker are you competing against us?
HSR enthusiasts argue airport inefficient wait times but rail stations in Europe are targets for terror, violence and have lengthy wait times.
Liveable cities are buzzwords. There’s the Paris you see in postcards …
https://assets.vogue.in/photos/667922097830445356ea2be9/3:4/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Paris.jpg
And one they don’t show you where sizeable portion lives and works.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1*Ozv-hNEaKjbZ4778V-ffQg.jpeg
Funny, when I searched for the second photo on Google I found it on a website saying “The Ugliest Building in Paris” to describe the building on Boulevard Mortier on the eastern edge of the city. Clearly not the standard building where most Parisians live. But do you know what is the funniest thing? This building doesn’t even look like this anymore. It has been renovated and looks like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/G6DU3Y6RKSquXkE3A
With nice green tram tracks in front of it. That’s really a nice place to live. The infrastructure is kept well in tact (much better than in any American city) and it is safe and there is a nice historic building on the other side of the street: https://maps.app.goo.gl/UMvkedaRaSpBv86L7 I am also pretty sure you have a nice view from the upper levels.
Europe isn’t the perfect place regarding urbanism and nobody has ever claimed that. There is a lot of car dependency as well there, but it is still a much better place to live if you aren’t fixated with a lazy oversized lifestyle.
Oldie but goodie:
High Speed Trains are Killing the European Railway Network
High speed rail is destroying the most valuable alternative to the airplane; the “low speed” rail network that has been in service for decades.
I expect “more opportunities for graft” drives high speed rail construction and operation in both the US and EU. Money quote:
Back in 2013 when the article was written Spain’s central government debt was 92% of GDP; last year it was 102%.
Measuring debt in percentage of GDP is economic nonsense. What’s the point? I know there is none. It’s just an arbitrary number without any meaning. GDP is what has been produced in a country in a year. Imagine, your personal debt is measured in percentage of your yearly income. That’s a useless number. Especially since you can artificially prop up the GDP and income numbers without improving anything in real life. Governments can’t go bankrupt except if they want to, because they have the right to taxation and the power of their own currency. Since the EU has introduced several measurements to bail out EU governments at any costs. Just like the US, the EU can’t go bankrupt until politicians decide to. The Spanish economy is also doing very well recently, so these are old news you are presenting here. In the meantime the Spanish HSR network has become the second largest in the world and there are big plans to expand it even further. New trains are coming as well.
No imagination required. The main factor mortgage lenders utilize is the applicant’s debt-to-income ratio.
Which is actually a useless number.
There should be a correction on this post. Its not “millions” made by the contractors but “billions” also digging into the background of the content creator “Alan Fisher”, he has no real background or position in transit or public policy to speak of. I have noticed this with many transit and density advocates. One should question where the money for their content comes from.
Imagine there are people out there who don’t want to live in car-infested hellholes.
Governments can and have failed by allowing their currency to become devalued to the point that it becomes worthless. The Democrats recently lost control of our federal government mainly due to Bidenflation, a 21% drop in value of of our currency.
The United States will not prop up fiscally incontinent states. Nor will the European Union if push comes to shove – it wouldn’t commit economic suicide. In the United States citizens vote with their feet. The high tax, economically backwards states like California, New Jersey, and Illinois are hemorrhaging population to low-tax, more fiscally responsible states like Florida and Texas. There are no restrictions. Is intra-EU migration easy? Are there any remaining barriers? I notice that Spain has negative population growth. Is that mostly due to a low fertility or intra-EU migration?
A democratic loss of power is not a bankruptcy just like private households and businesses can go bankrupt. Inflation has nothing to do with debt, especially not government debt. There are countries which have much higher debt than the US and no inflation of 21%. The inflation in the US is mainly the result of global shortages and problems with the supply chains. For example, if there is a shortage of eggs due to a disease. None of this has anything to do with government debt. That’s completely irrelevant. It has become official EU policy to bail out every single Eurozone country at all costs. They already applied this policy to Greece and other European countries. Before the ESM ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Stability_Mechanism ) was introduced Euro governments could go bankrupt, because they did not control their own currency. It is impossible for governments to go bankrupt if they control their own currency, until they decide to go bankrupt.
California, New Jersey and Illinois are higher developed than Texas and Florida. TX and FL also have a lower quality of life. So TX and FL have to lower taxes to attract professionals to live there at all and develop the state and economy. It’s working on some people, but the vast majority of elites stay. Within the EU people are moving to countries with higher quality of life regardless of taxes. For example, people from Spain and Poland are migrating to Germany, despite Germany having higher taxes. Taxes are used to increase the quality of life (for instance by building infrastructure). Countries with lower taxes often have a lower quality of life with the exception of Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, but these small countries do also have very high costs of living. So it’s a zero sum game that works on some naive people, but the majority isn’t fooled by this. In the US there is a lot of propaganda against progressive policies. This propaganda is funded by corporate funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. It’s working on a higher number of people in the US than in the EU. Just like some people here believe, that sprawling cities are better for people when they evidently are not.