In the State of the Union address, Barack Obama called attention to the oddity that a proud and wealthy nation such as our own is such a laggard in basic passenger train technology:

Next, we can put Americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow. From the first railroads to the Interstate Highway System, our nation has always been built to compete. There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains, or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products.

Tomorrow, I’ll visit Tampa, Florida, where workers will soon break ground on a new high-speed railroad funded by the Recovery Act. There are projects like that all across this country that will create jobs and help move our nation’s goods, services, and information.

In that context, it’s worth noting that the new high-speed rail initiative the administration was touting today in Florida will still leave China and Europe with much faster trains. They’re anticipating this Central Florida rail corridor to operate at a maximum speed of 168 miles per hour. The Lorraine-Champagne TGV line in France goes 173 miles per hour on average with a maximum speed of about 200 miles per hour. The Shanghai maglev has a max speed of around 270 miles per hour.

Of course, speed isn’t everything. Britain and France built the world’s fastest commercial passenger jet and nowadays nobody uses it because it turns out to be totally uneconomical. What’s wanted is transportation infrastructure that meets a reasonable balance of needs, not just bragging rights.

A few points about the new study of Amtrak’s per passenger losses that’s being cited by some as an argument against investments in passenger rail. For one thing, there’s all this about the lack of context in the report.

But for a second thing, I would merely emphasize the fact that the whole point of advocacy for high-speed passenger is precisely that Amtrak as it currently exists isn’t a good idea. The United States doesn’t have a real high-speed passenger rail system, and the problems with Amtrak don’t justify that situation, they’re a symptom of it. If you look at the Acela routes, which is the closest thing to HSR we have in the United States, they’re turning a profit. The biggest losses are on low-speed long-distance routes like New Orleans to Los Angeles and Chicago to San Francisco. That’s dumb. To get from Chicago to San Francisco, people should fly. The HSR point is that a reasonably speedy train from Chicago to Milwaukee or from Chicago to Indianapolis would be valuable.

Third, while we probably should try to avoid running routes that involve huge operating losses, there’s no particular reason the government should treat passenger rail investments the way a business would treat investment in a new factory and expect it to earn a financial return. Infrastructure is infrastructure. Highways don’t “make money” they facilitate activity. Transit and intercity rail are the same way. Charging money to avoid overuse and to efficiently allocate scarce spaces makes sense. But the creation of public infrastructure in general, and of passenger rail in particular, isn’t a bad business proposition it’s just not a business proposition at all. It’s a policy proposition.

For all that high-speed rail opponents in the United States like to cite misleading statistics about population density, I don’t think anyone can seriously deny that the United Kingdom is a densely populated country. And yet, the land from whence the railroad originates doesn’t have a proper high-speed rail network. Plans are afoot, however, to remedy that:

Network Rail’s proposed new line linking Glasgow and Edinburgh with London, on which trains could travel as fast as 200mph, would also serve Manchester, Liverpool, Preston and Birmingham.

A spokesman for one of Manchester’s biggest employers, Kellog’s cereals, said: “This is great news for business in Manchester, just as London is going to be more accessible for us, Manchester will be for those in the South East.”

The new line would cut the journey between London and Birmingham to 45 minutes, from a best time of one hour and 22 minutes currently.

One thing to note here, and something that’s generally the case with HSR, is that there will benefits to this scheme even for people who never take the train. Right now there are tons of London-Glasgow flights taking up space on runways. Developing a better rail link between those cities will reduce the need for air travel between them and allow airport resources to be focused on those routes that really can’t be served adequately by train. And that, of course, is a lot of routes—especially for a country located on an island.

Don't build the train here! (cc photo by J B Foster)

There were a lot of problems with the hatchet job on high-speed rail by Robert Samuelson that The Washington Post decided to run yesterday. But all you really need to know about the quality of the column is that it actually advanced the following argument: “Distances also matter. America is big; trips are longer. Beyond 400 to 500 miles, fast trains can’t compete with planes.”

Of course Samuelson is correct to think that a Miami-Seattle line isn’t going to work. But why should America’s large scale counsel against HSR in general? After all, if instead of defining Spain’s high-speed rail system as serving “Spain” we decide that it’s something that exists in “Europe” we’ll swiftly discover that Europe is even larger than the United States. By Samuelson’s logic, whether we count a Madrid-Seville train line as part of Spain or as part of Europe matters critically to its viability. Or if Japan somehow annexed a huge swath of Siberian wasteland suddenly the bullet trains between Japanese cities wouldn’t work.

The real world answer to this problem, of course, is that we shouldn’t build high-speed passenger rail across America’s giant expanses of empty land. We should build it in the places that aren’t like that! Florida is geographically smaller than Spain and more densely populated. If Spanish cities can be beneficially connected by high-speed rail, then so can Florida’s cities. From Miami to Tampa is 260 miles. From Miami to Orlando is 236 miles. Orlando to Jacksonville is 140 miles. A Tampa-Jacksonville route that passes through Orlando is 224 miles. Samuelson even cites France’s 259 people per square mile as possessing sufficient density to support HSR—in Florida there are 338 people per square mile.

Obviously the fact that there’s a network of cities in Florida that could be productively linked by high-speed passenger rail doesn’t mean that we should have train lines linking up every random pair of towns on the empty northern plains. But by the same token, the existence of large sparsely populated areas of the country doesn’t mean that the densely inhabited areas where most of the people live shouldn’t have trains.

When last we met Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, he was trashing his reputation for intelligence and seriousness about public policy with this nonsensical attack on trains and volcano monitoring as wasteful:

JINDAL: While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a “magnetic levitation” line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called “volcano monitoring.”

Now my colleague Lee Fang observes that Jindal seems to love trains:

The AP reported earlier this month that Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R-LA) administration is planning to request $300 million dollars from the federal government to develop a high-speed rail between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The trains, which would run at about 79mph, would be part of a larger Gulf Coast rail plan with top speeds of 110mph. Much of the money, however, comes from the Recovery Act, a stimulus measure Jindal not only opposed, but recently called a failure.

I haven’t looked at this issue in detail, but on the face of it a Baton Rouge to New Orleans line actually does sound to me like a wasteful project. We’re talking about connecting the 46th largest metro area in the country to the 67th largest, which suggests that there are a lot of city pairs that ought to be higher priorities. Compare that to Chicago (number three) and Milwaukee (number 39) or consider that the state of Florida contains four separate metro areas (Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville) that are all larger than New Orleans. According to Google, the drive between these cities only takes an hour and a half. You could imagine this working, and of course if the state of Louisiana has some vision for it I wouldn’t want to discourage them, but as a use of federal money this strikes me as pretty low down the list of rail projects I would want to fund.

Via Steve Teles, Ed Glaeser has a post implying asking “Is President Obama’s vision of hyper-fast trains racing through America a sound transportation policy or a costly boondoggle?” His conclusion implies that it’s a costly boondoggle. I think there are a number of problems with his analysis, but to start with the basics he’s running the numbers on a hypothetical Dallas-Houston High-Speed Rail link. When I first saw the Obama administration’s list of designated corridors this city-pair jumped out at me for not being on the list:

It struck me, intuitively, as a city-pair that would work. But it didn’t seem that way to federal HSR planners. So I don’t really understand why Glaeser is condemning the whole initiative on the basis of an analysis of something that the initiative doesn’t propose doing. Just eyeballing the map, I’d say that some of the corridors here are good ideas and some look like politically inspired boondoggles. But it would be useful to analyze the actual proposals.

The larger issue is that I don’t think it makes a ton of sense to evaluate rail investments in a static way. Typically if you look at a place that doesn’t have any rail, you’ll see that it’s not built densely enough to support rail. But by the same token, if you look at a place that doesn’t have any roads, you invariably find that it’s not built densely enough to support roads. That, however, isn’t a reason not to build a road. Rather, you need to ask yourself “do we want to encourage development in this area, or do we prefer to leave it vacant?” It’s a legitimate question, and one that requires analysis. Similarly, when it comes to new rail investments—be they intercity rail or rail transit—the important thing to ask is usually whether the investment is part of a larger plan to develop the area.

It’s probably not fair to say that conservatives have no idea, but this entire George Will column is basically the same as the column he wrote about how he hates jeans, except this time it’s about how he hates Portland. But now he wants national policy to be driven by his hatred for Portland:

LaHood, however, has been transformed. Indeed, about three bites into lunch, the T word lands with a thump: He says he has joined a “transformational” administration: “I think we can change people’s behavior.” Government “promoted driving” by building the Interstate Highway System—”you talk about changing behavior.” He says, “People are getting out of their cars, they are biking to work.” High-speed intercity rail, such as the proposed bullet train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, is “the wave of the future.” And then, predictably, comes the P word: Look, he says, at Portland, Ore. [...]

Where to start? Does LaHood really think Americans were not avid drivers before a government highway program “promoted” driving? Does he think 0.01 percent of Americans will ever regularly bike to work? Intercity high-speed rail probably always will be the wave of the future, for cities more than 300 miles apart.

Where to start? LaHood didn’t say that Americans didn’t drive before we built the interstate system. He said that building the interstate system promoted driving. I don’t see how you could possibly deny this. Had we spent less money on highway construction and more on mass transit or intercity rail, then there would be less driving. That seems obvious. In a different context, completing WMATA’s Green Line promoted use of Metro. And this is true even though Washingtonians were avid Metro riders even before the Green Line was complete. A seven year-old ought to be able to master this.

Will claims to find it unbelievable that as many as 0.01 percent of Americans would ever bike to work regularly. But rather than tossing off ridicule, he might have looked up the Census Bureau’s statistics on commuting patterns and seen that right now 0.4 percent of commuters normally get to work on bicycles. Now that’s a small percentage. But it’s forty times larger than a percentage that Will deems unrealistically utopian. This would be like saying Dwight Howard is 2 feet tall.

As for high-speed rail, San Francisco and Los Angeles aren’t that much more than 300 miles apart. Indeed, they’re about as far apart as Barcelona and Madrid, which are currently served by a very successful high speed rail link. What’s more, while metropolitan San Francisco is about the same size as metro Barcelona (4.2 million people, give or take), metropolitan Los Angeles’s 12.8 million residents is a much larger city than Madrid with its 5.3 million.

But even if you accept Will’s idea that LA-SF HSR can’t succeed because it’s over the magic 300 miles line, the United States has plenty of city-pairs closer than that. For example, there’s Seattle and the dread Portland, Oregon. And Vancouver’s less than 300 miles from Seattle. Milwaukee to Chicago, Chicago to Indianapolis, Chicago to Saint Louis, Miami to Orlando and Orlando to Tampa, and Houston to Dallas—all fitting under the Will line.

Why does Newsweek want to offer its audience a columnist who wants to write about transportation polic but can’t be bothered to bring any facts or logic to the table?

Extension of the existing Northeast Corridor high-speed rail south from Washington, DC to Richmond, Virginia and then onward into North Carolina is clearly something that would be beneficial to the state of Virginia. Virginia has experience a lot of economic growth in the past 15-20 years that’s mostly been driven by those portions of the state that fall within the orbit of the Washington, DC metro area. There have also been recent, and not especially successful, efforts to leverage the money generated by that growth into enhanced prosperity for other regions of the state. A better approach than much of what’s been done would be to expend funds on building better transportation links between the DC area and other population centers in the state.

That’s exactly what the HSR expansion plan would do, so it’s not surprising to see Rep Eric Cantor (R-VA) trying to hop on the bandwagon (or locomotive, as the case may be):

Yesterday, though, the Henrico County Republican said bringing high-speed rail to the region could further spur economic development, creating as many as 185,000 jobs and bringing $21.2 billion to a region already home to about a half-dozen Fortune 500 companies and 20,000 small businesses.

“If there is one thing that I think all of us here on both sides of the political aisle from all parts of the region agree with, it’s that we need to do all we can to promote jobs here in the Richmond area,” Cantor said.

But of course Cantor voted against the federal legislation that’s making increased HSR capacity possible. Indeed, on Meet The Press he specifically singled-out the HSR provisions for inaccurate, demagogic mockery, repeating the myth that the Recovery Act contained a provision for a “train from Disneyland to Las Vegas” that was an example of the “waste and pork-barrel spending” said to typify the package.

Back in his district, of course, Cantor wants to portray himself as an agent for constructive change in Virginia. But you can’t be a constructive agent for change if you’re busy lying constantly and opposing everything.

Over at the Infrastructurist they’ve made this useful zoomable map of various high-speed rail proposals including the official DOT corridors but also some other ideas:

It’s always important when talking about this stuff to be clear on exactly what’s meant. Incremental track upgrades that get your train up to 110 miles per hour are a lot cheaper than big investments in new 200+ mph “true” high-speed rail. But by the same token, a trip with a top speed of 220 mph will be a lot quicker than a trip with a top speed of 110 mph. We have ourselves a large and diverse country, so there are appropriate places for each strategy, but these are very different ideas.