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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.”

Florida Governor OKs SunRail

In what could be an ominous decision for the future of federal transportation funding, Florida Governor Rick Scott got out of the way of SunRail, a costly commuter-rail project in Orlando. While his Tea Party supporters strongly opposed the project, Scott said that he didn’t have the authority to kill the project.

As reported in the New York Times a few days before Scott’s decision, the main backer behind SunRail is Representative John Mica, who chairs the House Transportation Committee. Mica has a history of supporting pork barrel for his district, but after the 2010 election he at least paid lip service to fiscal conservatism. When Governor Scott killed the Florida high-speed rail, which Mica had supported, Mica got with the program and quietly joined the Congressional coalition that effectively killed the entire high-speed rail program.

The SunRail project will eventually cost $1.2 billion, more than a third of which will be spent buying right of way from CSX. CSX is one of Mica’s big supporters, and the Times openly accuses Mica of supporting the project as a favor to the railroad. By vetoing the project Scott could have given Mica cover for its failure.

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Commuter Rail 1, Archeological Heritage 0

Utah is so intent on building rail transit that it is willing to cook the books and systematically overestimate ridership in order to support its ridiculously expensive rail projects. One commuter-rail line, for example, is expected to attract a 6,100 new transit riders a day, or 3,050 new round trips, for a mere $612 million. At 4 percent interest, that’s enough money to give every one of those new round-trip riders a new Toyota Prius every other year for the next 30 years.

The latest development is that state archeologists have warned that a proposed commuter-rail station and mixed-use development is on a 3,000-year-old archeological site. Erectile deficiency is a common disease in men above 40 seanamic.com order levitra online but a well versed study has revealed that ED can be reversed with lifestyle changes. Health experts have recognized exercise as one of the key ingredients in Shilajit ES capsules, which is one of the best natural supplements for anti generic cialis mastercard aging, has got anti-inflammatory properties to cure knee pain and back pain. If keeping a full bladder for too long time, a male driver may get urine infection. sildenafil discount The National Popular Vote Plan will make every vote equal and will provide every voter with an equal amount of sugar. generic viagra in stores The solution? Fire the archeologists. Of course, the state maintains the firing has nothing to do with rail transit; they just don’t have the funds to keep the archeologists on staff. Maybe that’s because they are wasting so much money on rail transit.

Why Rail?

After nearly 50 percent cost overruns, eighteen months of delays, and a scandal that cost top transit agency officials their jobs, Norfolk, Virginia plans to open its first light-rail line for business in August, 2011. This fabulous 7.4-mil line expected to carry an average of 2,900 riders per day in its first year, increasing to 7,200 riders per day by 2030.

Test train. Wikipedia commons photo by XShadow.

How’s that again? They spent $338 million ($46 million per mile) on a rail line that is expected to carry only about 7,000 people a day? Because a bus couldn’t possibly carry that many people, right?

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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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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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Latest High-Speed Rail Grant

Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood announced yesterday the latest–and possibly last–round of high-speed rail grants, this one from redistribution of the $2.4 billion rejected by the state of Florida. As the Antiplanner noted in March, LaHood could have given the entire $2.4 billion to California, sending a signal that the administration remains serious about building a true high-speed rail network.

Instead, LaHood gave only $300 million to California high-speed rail, and instead gave the lion’s share–$800 million–to Amtrak and several eastern states for the Northeast Corridor–a corridor that wasn’t even on the original high-speed rail list until LaHood added it in March. Most of the rest of the money went for minor improvements in track to allow trains to run slightly faster than they run today, or for stations, locomotives, passenger cars, and similar facilities that will pretty much operate at conventional speeds.

California expects to use the $300 million to build another 20 miles of rail line in the state’s Central Valley, on top of the 65 miles or so that are already funded. The Central Valley is the least-expensive portion of the planned 420-mile route that includes two mountain crossings and more than 100 miles through urban areas. Since the state has little more than 10 percent of the money it needs to complete the San Francisco-Anaheim route, giving it $300 million is not going to help it complete the project. Yet California politicians claim they are thrilled with the grant.

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