Thoughts on HSR

I've participated in some online debate recently regarding the wisdom of the Obama administration calling for $53 billion in funding for high speed rail programs across the US.  I was in the middle of drafting a post responding to some of the weaker or misunderstood arguments for and against when I discovered that Florida governor Rick Scott released a statement today justifying his rejection of $2 billion of such federal funds.  Much of it is boiler plate Republican talking points about spending and taxes, and I'm happy to address those matters privately, but the explanations are a little rote for the purpose of this post, which is to clarify some of the more mistaken beliefs surrounding HSR itself.

Ridership and revenue projections are historically overly-optimistic and would likely result in ongoing subsidies that state taxpayers would have to incur. (from $300 million – $575 million over 10 years) – Note: The state subsidizes Tri-Rail $34.6 million a year while passenger revenues covers only $10.4 million of the $64 million annual operating budget.


This seems to be the major conservative hang-up about high speed rail:  There's no guarantee that it can pay for itself, and will probably require taxpayer subsidy for both construction and ongoing operation.  My response is:  You mean like every other form of transportation in the country?  Fuel surcharges and state subsidies fund the national highway network.  Tax breaks and bailouts are the only thing keeping domestic airlines in business, not to mention airports themselves.  The MTA doesn't operate in the black, and I don't think it ever will, but that doesn't mean we should shut down NY's subway system.
 
The insistence that HSR pay for itself is a side-effect of Republican dogmatic belief in the almighty profit motive, and that there is no purpose beyond revenues.  That HSR should be a business.  I can't describe how many people I've debated this week about what exactly a public good is, or how a transportation network can provide regional economic benefits beyond ticket sales.
 
Current commuter rail shares railway with freight rail, causing congestion for both.  If you've ever taken Amtrak between DC and NY you've probably spent some time at a dead stop in Delaware waiting for a coal train (who has right of way) to pass through a single-track lane.  HSR would help alleviate such delays and improve both regional commuter transit times AND freight transit efficiency.  This improves labor mobility (in the commuter sense, not permanent relocation) and freight costs, and is a double-positive in economic terms.
 
HSR will also be more competitive with air transit, expanding the range at which there's price and time parity between the two (to somewhere around 400-500 miles), which increases inter-city tourism, expands commuter range, and puts more people on rail instead of air, which is more energy efficient and offers better revenues per passenger-mile.  It may also increase the draw of rail over road, decreasing highway congestion, decreasing road maintenance costs, lowering road accident incidence, maybe eventually lowering insurance rates, decreasing vehicle ownership, giving people more money to spend on shit they don't need at Best Buy to create retail jobs.
 
The point being, better transportation helps business, usually at a multiplier far greater than the nominal amount of taxpayer funds the transportation network requires to operate.  Ask Mayor Bloomberg if he thinks the benefits of the MTA are worth a couple hundred million per year to the city.
 
It is projected that 3.07 million people will use the train annually. Keep in mind that Amtrak’s Acela train in Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore only had 3.2 million riders in 2010. And that market’s population is 8 times the size of the Tampa/Orlando market.
 
This is particularly dishonest, considering the "Amtrak Acela" competes with the Amtrak Regional, MARC, SEPTA, NJ Transit, MTA, ConnDOT, and the MBTA between each pair of cities, using the same rail lines.  Tampa-Orlando is serviced by...Amtrak.  Twice a day.  It's no surprise that the 3.07 projection seems high.  It's because there's less competition for the route.
 
Rather than investing in a high-risk rail project, we should be focusing on improving our ports, rail and highway infrastructure to be in a position to attract the increased shipping that will result when the Panama Canal is expanded when the free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama are ratified and with the expansion of the economies of Central and South America.


Improving your rail infrastructure like segregating passenger and freight rail so that your precious shipments from Panama get their own uninterrupted transit line?
 
Look, I'm not saying a national HSR grid is automatically a wise investment.  There should be extensive studies done to identify the most likely regions where HSR can help improve current transportation conditions to an economic degree that justifies their implementation costs.  What I'm saying is that this study wasn't done by Rick Scott before dismissing HSR out of hand as a "boondoggle", and is generally not done by the army of conservative bloggers and politicians who feel compelled to reflexively challenge HSR as liberal government expansion instead of bothering to consider basic economic and public policy principles.
 
There are so many examples of HSR working across the globe that dismissing the whole concept as waste is foolish.