House Votes to Take Back High-Speed Rail Funds

One more nail in the high-speed rail coffin: The House of Representatives voted to redirect $833 million from high-speed rail to Midwest flood relief. This is money that the Department of Transportation had awarded to Amtrak and Northeast Corridor states in May, but since Secretary Ray LaHood hasn’t actually signed the checks yet, Congress can take it back.

So now the race is on: New Jersey Senators Lautenberg and Menendez and Representative Rodney Frelinghausen want LaHood to release the funds before the Senate can vote on the House bill. If he does, Congress will have to look elsewhere for funds for flood relief. If the Senate passes the bill first, then the Northeast’s loss is the Midwest’s gain.
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Either way, it is clear that high-speed rail is dead, at least as long as the House is run by Tea Party fiscal conservatives. Of course, there was a time when the president would have vetoed a bill for flood relief on the grounds that “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution; and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.”

Why Some People Support High-Speed Rail

One reason some people support high-speed rail is that it provides an opportunity for all sorts of fact-finding missions, such as this trip to Europe. “High-speed rail is becoming a reality in the U.S.,” says the Transportation Research Board (a part of the National Acadamies, a supposedly private but actually government-funded and government-created group of organizations). So naturally a bunch of These factors play an important role and also have low self esteem because they cannot fully give cheap cialis 20mg what is expected of them as guys. One should be very careful while women viagra australia using Kamagra pills. Just like any other type of sleeping condition like pickwickian syndromeand exploding head syndrome, you need order cheap cialis to consult your doctor about any sleeping issue. Obesity can promote atherosclerosis, and become the reasons of their separation as well. cialis on line australia engineers and other consultants have to go to Europe on a two-week trip to find out how they do it there.

Sadly, for those of you ready to pack your bags, word via email is that the trip has been cancelled. Maybe it’s because the status of American high-speed rail has changed back from “becoming a reality” to “still a fantasy.”

Spain’s High-Speed White Elephants

How did I miss this story? A European publication describes Spain’s high-speed rail system as “a bona fide policy error typical of a nouveau riche nation.”

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Spain has spent or is spending 6 billion euros on a high-speed network that is only expected to carry about 1 percent as many passengers a year as the nation’s commuter trains. Moreover, the high cost of high-speed rail fares “forces young people onto the bus” (which, as the Antiplanner pointed out earlier this week, isn’t necessarily a bad thing since buses are far less expensive and can be far more energy-efficient than trains). The bad thing is that rail advocates in the U.S. use Spain’s example to argue that we should build similar white elephants.

NC Says No More High-Speed Rail

The North Carolina legislature has forbidden the state’s transportation department from applying for more high-speed rail funds from the federal government. Before the department can apply for any grants that would obligate the state to pay $5 million or more in operating costs–which any high-speed rail project would do–it must receive approval from the state legislature.

In the view of some, this makes North Carolina the fourth state–after Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin–to reject federal high-speed rail funds. But unlike the other three states, North Carolina isn’t turning back the $496 million in funds it has already received. But that $496 million will not buy much without further grants, which are unlikely to happen now. Many people credit the John Locke Foundation, which published two reports on high-speed rail–one by the Antiplanner and one by Wendell Cox–with persuading the legislature to take this step.

Meanwhile, Democratic governors across the nation “admire the way [Illinois Governor Pat] Quinn grabbed up federal high-speed rail dollars rejected by the Republican governors of Wisconsin and Florida.” Yet the Chicago Tribune, the state’s largest paper, has–belatedly perhaps–come out against the state’s high-speed rail projects as expensive and not really high speed.

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Bullets in a Railway Heart

This “news” is a couple of months old, but Caixin Weekly, a Chinese business magazine, has published an extremely critical article about that country’s high-speed rail program. This report probably inspired similar but shorter articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

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One theory is that China will continue to waste money on things like high-speed rail in order to persuade the U.S. to bankrupt itself trying to keep up. If the U.S. doesn’t fall for it–and it appears it has not–then China will have to stop building or end up contributing to its own bankruptcy. That’s not so hard to believe considering that Japanese National Railways piled up a $300 billion debt (in today’s dollars) in 1987, which the government was forced to assume and which contributed to that nation’s economic doldrums since 1990.

Finally: The Truth About High-Speed Rail

“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.)

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California HSR Fading Fast

You know you are in trouble when a liberal bastion such as the Washington Post questions your big-government program. So last week’s editorial questioning the California High-Speed Rail Authority for being “bound and determined to start building the railroad before its long-term funding is clear” should be one more sign that the rail project is doomed.

The editorial cites a recent report from the California Legislative Analyst’s Office recommending that the state stop funding high-speed rail other than $7 million for “needed administrative tasks.” The report also urges the state to negotiate with the feds for more flexibility on where to spend the rail grants it has received. One of the federal grants required that funds be spent in the congressional districts of some Democrats who were fighting close re-election campaigns. As the Post says, this is likely to result in California spending “a fortune to plan and build a stretch of high-speed track that would end up as a railroad to nowhere.”

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Driverless Cars vs. High-Speed Rail

The Los Angeles Times says the California high-speed rail project “is a train wreck” that has become “a monument to the ways poor planning, mismanagement and political interference can screw up major public works.” But the newspaper still favors “Obama’s inspiring vision of a nation crisscrossed by bullet trains, providing cleaner, safer and cheaper competition to airlines and reducing reliance on gas-guzzling automobiles” because “the benefits still outweigh the costs.”

Apparently, all it takes is a totally unrealistic vision to persuade people supposedly as sophisticated as the editors of the LA Times. The truth is bullet trains are far more expensive than airlines (75 cents vs. 15 cents a passenger mile); Amtrak’s safety record is far worse than the airlines (1.4 vs. 0.1 passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles); and cleaner depends on the energy source (and powering trains with renewable energy won’t help much if all those trains do is displace some other energy consumer who therefore relies on fossil fuels). As for “reducing reliance on gas-guzzling automobiles,” the state’s own extremely optimistic numbers show that California high-speed rail won’t displace more than 2 or 3 percent of the state’s auto driving; and by the time it is built, autos won’t be guzzling that much gas anyway.

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LaHood Lied about Michigan HSR

When Immobility Secretary Ray LaHood gave $200 million to Michigan for high-speed rail last Monday, he claimed this grant would bring “trains up to speeds of 110 mph on a 235-mile section of the Chicago to Detroit corridor, reducing trip times by 30 minutes.” That’s a lie. In fact, the state itself says the top speed will only be 79 mph, and the money will only save 12 minutes.

Photo courtesy of Michigan View.

Some journalists even got conned into thinking that the money would reduce travel times in the corridor by 50 minutes. In fact, the state says it will need nearly $1 billion more to bring the tracks up to 110-mph standards–and that’s not counting the cost of locomotives and railcars.

The Antiplanner explains this in detail in Michigan View, a political news site published by the Detroit News.

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TSA Helps Kill High-Speed Trains

One of the punchlines of President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address had to do with high-speed rail: “For some trips,” he said to “laughter and applause,” “it will be faster than flying–without the pat-down.”

Now the Transportation Security Administration has announced a new policy that will eliminate this frequently used but inane argument for high-speed rail. Under the new policy, “trusted flyers” whose names were drawn from airline frequent-flyer lists would have a special bar code printed on their boarding passes. This would make them eligible to go through a fast lane without removing shoes, taking laptops out of their cases, and passing through an ordinary metal detector rather than a full body scanner.

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