We sent out a blog entry with the Economist article: "Life in the Slow Lane" on April 29th. If you haven't read it yet, you should because the argument is central to the issue of whether high-speed rail should be built in the US, or not.
Here is another article on this Economist article. Indeed, there are several that have surfaced on the various search engines I scan each day.
The issue can be reduced to simple terms. The US infrastructure is going to hell due to our neglect. That includes railroads, highways, airports, bridges, dams, water routing systems, the power grid, and anything else that can be included under the term infrastructure. In some cases, it's concrete or asphalt. In other cases, its software and info-tech. It's school buildings and hospitals and prisons and all other government support structures intended to benefit all of us. (My wife has a professional interest in the Air Traffic Control System under the FAA, and it's in deplorable shape. Upgrades are decades behind. 'NextGen,' the plan for revolutionizing air traffic control, will cost $12 billion, and it's not happening. Every politician flies. Wouldn't you think that they would want to be as safe as possible while flying?)
We haven't spent enough on the nation's infrastructure to maintain it, much less to upgrade it. We have become selfish, cheap and reckless about the common good. This situation includes all public transit modalities running on rail, roads, highways and airways. Even our highway infrastructure, which supports the American vehicular dream of independence, autonomy and self-determination, has been permitted to deteriorate.
We like to compare ourselves with other nations regarding fast trains? Why don't we do it regarding all the other infrastructure components of modern civilized life as well?
Now, with sudden pangs of envy and the perceived loss of our Alpha status in the world, we discover that we don't have high-speed rail while most of the other industrialized nations do, and therefore we feel like the 97 lb. weakling getting sand kicked in our face at the beach by those big, strong, other nations. I know that's infantile, but, there you are. (Google '97 lb. weakling' for source of analogy.)
As adults, we would have, and certainly should now, repair all that broken infrastructure we rely on more than ever. First fix all the old stuff; then build new stuff.
High-speed rail is dazzlingly glamorous and fashionable, makes its riders feel special and upper class, and costs one hell of a lot for tickets. Building such rail systems brings out the politician in everybody who wants to be in on the ribbon-cutting and photo ops. Also, it's vast amounts of money; far more than the US has ever spent on any one infrastructure program, including the Interstate Highway System. Why would any politicians with any career ambitions support funding for fixing highways, which nobody gives a damn about, and not support the "hottest" rail program in the US. This, as President Obama keeps telling us, is his vision of how we intend to "win the future." With over-priced fast trains we don't need. No, it's not a joke.
All what I've just been saying prevents any rational thinking from taking place. No one wants to know how much it costs. Those who are building it, lie about that. No one wants to know if anybody is really going to use it. Those who are building it are also lying about that as well with grossly inflated ridership numbers.
Final point. A Federal Infrastructure Bank would be a good idea on another planet, but not this one. As the article says, its a funding mechanism for "ambitious regional transit projects." Unfortunately, it's an invitation to more boondoggles than we've already had. Due to our parochial and political vision, our fixation with the accumulation of wealth at the top and survival for the rest of us, we can't think big at a national scale anymore, and we certainly don't want to build big anymore because we know that much of that money will go where it shouldn't, and we will have wasted vast resources on something that we won't need. . .HSR.
Meanwhile, we're neglecting what is obvious to any parent who says to her kid, "Clean up your room." Instead of building something glitzy and unaffordable, we need to "clean up our room."
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Economist Takes Scathing Look At US Transportation Infrastructure
by ARMIN ROSEN on Friday, April 29, 2011 at 12:31 PM
This week, the Economist took an alarming look at the state of America’s transportation infrastructure. The world’s most obsessively-thorough news magazine issues a grim verdict on the condition of the country’s highways and passenger trains, and opens with a near-apocalyptic appraisal of the nation’s transit systems that’s worth quoting in full:
America, despite its wealth and strength, often seems to be falling apart. American cities have suffered a rash of recent infrastructure calamities, from the failure of the New Orleans levees to the collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis, to a fatal crash on Washington, DC’s (generally impressive) metro system. But just as striking are the common shortcomings. America’s civil engineers routinely give its transport structures poor marks, rating roads, rails and bridges as deficient or functionally obsolete. And according to a World Economic Forum study America’s infrastructure has got worse, by comparison with other countries, over the past decade. In the WEF 2010 league table America now ranks 23rd for overall infrastructure quality, between Spain and Chile. Its roads, railways, ports and air-transport infrastructure are all judged mediocre against networks in northern Europe.
And there are other, even scarier facts and stats peppered throughout: partly because of crowded and deteriorating highways, the road fatality rate in the United States is 60% greater than it is in Europe. Around a quarter of American passenger trains run late, compared to only 10% in Europe. And America’s population will likely increase by 40% over the next four decades, putting even more strain on our suffering transit infrastructure.
The article basically argues that US is in need of a more integrated, more coherent transit policy: for instance, local or federal fees on drivers licenses or an increased federal gas tax would serve as targeted taxes on motorists, raising much-needed revenue for the upkeep of the very highway systems those motorists use. And a system for regional, rather than state investment in major infrastructure projects would put less pressure on states, which that are perhaps unfairly expected to shoulder much of the cost of these projects. For instance, why was New Jersey the only state asked help pay for the nixed Hudson River tunnel, when New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland would have benefitted from faster travel times on rail corridors that terminate at New York’s Penn Station? If those states had been asked to chip in, the tunnel may well be on its way to being built.
But the most intriguing recommendation in the Economist article had to do with President Obama’s plans for a national infrastructure investment bank, an idea which was largely shelved after last year’s Republican sweep:
[A National Infrastructure Bank] would use strict cost-benefit analyses as a matter of course, and could make interstate investments easier. A European analogue, the European Investment Bank, has turned out to work well. Co-owned by the member states of the European Union, the EIB holds some $300 billion in capital which it uses to provide loans to deserving projects across the continent. EIB funding may provide up to half the cost for projects that satisfy EU objectives and are judged cost-effective by a panel of experts.
Brookings Institute domestic policy analyst William Galston has been a vocal supporter of an infrastructure bank, which would be capitalized through a combination of private and public investment. In September of 2010, Galston wrote that a bank would allow the federal government to issue loans for ambitious regional transit projects, and would serve as an alternative to the federal government’s Byzantine process of resource allocation. An infrastructure bank would be a crucial step towards solving the problems the Economist article identifies—problems that neither party seems to have the political will to deal with at the moment.
