Good news for people who like fast trains as it seems a significant amount of high speed rail funds made it into the stimulus:

And while many initiatives were scaled back as Congress and the White House sought to cut the overall cost, there were some surprise increases, including a quadrupling of money for high-speed rail projects to $8 billion.

The White House pushed for the added money in the final rapid-fire negotiations, seeing it as a tangible way to create jobs and benefit different parts of the country. It also added a futuristic element to legislation that has been criticized as lacking forward vision.

I’m glad to see this happen, though it’s still the case that my first, second, and third preferences for transportation funding in the stimulus would have been money for mass transit system operating costs. The really good news about this is that my understanding is that the President took a personal interest in this provision, which is crucial because building-out an HSR network in such a big country would require a lot of followthrough.

Meanwhile, it seems that Harry Reid was talking about this provision and mentioned the idea that a high-speed rail corridor from Los Angeles to Las Vegas might be eligible for some of the money. That’s true. It’s also, I think, a pretty good idea. But some conservatives have decided to portray this as Reid sneaking a special “high speed rail to Las Vegas” provision into the stimulus package. There is no such provision and he did no such thing. The United States has many metropolitan areas and no true high-speed rail corridors. Consequently there are a lot of plausible city pairs and corridors that could benefit from these measures. My guess would be that the folks best-positioned to take advantage of this would be in California where they’ve already got the HSR ball rolling. Pennsylvania also has an actively ongoing initiative to upgrade service to Pittsburgh and Ed Rendell puts a high priority on this sort of thing and Arlen Specter was a pivotal Senator in pulling the deal together, so they might benefit.

Rep Peter DeFazio has authored an amendment that would increase the level of rail funding in the stimulus bill. It’s an excellent idea. Funds for highway repairs are a fine use of stimulus money, but insofar as we’re investing in new transportation capabilities we ought to be investing in what we don’t have enough of—mass transit and intercity rail—while fixing up our vast, but crumbling, road network. Right now the amendment is being bottled up by the Rules Committee, so if you happen to live in a district of one of the members you have a special obligation to get in touch with their office and offer your opinion. But even if DeFazio wins there, there’s still the small matter of the actual vote so even if your member isn’t on Rules, it’s never too early.

Meanwhile, The Hill reports on the promising development—the creation of a new broad-based pro-rail coalition that includes all the key stakeholders:

The newly minted OneRail coalition markets itself as a first time assembly of disparate groups representing commuter rail lines, freight rail lines, public transportation and the environment. [...] Several trade and issue advocacy groups are part of OneRail, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Amtrak, the American Short Line & Regional Railroad Association, the Association of American Railroads, and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.

The group will be working on the stimulus package but also, and in my view more importantly, on the reauthorization of the big transportation bill.

Phillip Longman has a piece in The Washington Monthly making the case for increased investments in high-quality freight rail. I think this is about right. There are certain kinds of trips that are — if the trains exist — intrinsically better-suited to passenger rail than to driving or flying. But that’s a limited set of trips, especially in the United States which is relatively sparsely populated. For freight there’s a similar calculus, but you wind up with a different answer, and there’s a much wider set of trips that are best done by rail. Which is one of the reasons why in even our current pathetically train-deprived state a great deal of freight shipping happens on trains. But we could be doing much more. He observes:

By all rights, America’s dilapidated rail lines ought to be a prime candidate for some of that spending. All over the country there are opportunities like the I-81/Crescent Corridor deal, in which relatively modest amounts of capital could unclog massive traffic bottlenecks, revving up the economy while saving energy and lives. Many of these projects have already begun, like Virginia’s, or are sitting on planners’ shelves and could be up and running quickly. And if we’re willing to think bigger and more long term—and we should be—the potential of a twenty-first-century rail system is truly astonishing. In a study recently presented to the National Academy of Engineering, the Millennium Institute, a nonprofit known for its expertise in energy and environmental modeling, calculated the likely benefits of an expenditure of $250 billion to $500 billion on improved rail infrastructure. It found that such an investment would get 85 percent of all long-haul trucks off the nation’s highways by 2030, while also delivering ample capacity for high-speed passenger rail. If high-traffic rail lines were also electrified and powered in part by renewable energy sources, that investment would reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emission by 38 percent and oil consumption by 22 percent. By moderating the growing cost of logistics, it would also leave the nation’s economy 13 percent larger by 2030 than it would otherwise be.

One appealing thing about freight rail investments is that there’s a greater potential for interim steps that make a difference. Since there’s already a lot of freight rail happening, there are plenty of places where smallish improvements would increase usage and capacity a great deal. And then when the small improvements have piled on, that creates a bigger rail infrastructure that can also support passenger projects like commuter rail lines.

One word of caution I would offer about all this, however, is that while we certainly should try to get stimulus money to fund good infrastructure projects, we shouldn’t think of infrastructure spending as primarily a stimulus issue. A genuinely good infrastructure investment is worth making whether or not there’s a need for short-term stimulus. And just spending on infrastructure for the sake of spending can get you a lot of pointless garbage like we’ve seen recently in Japan which isn’t what we want. And people who have worthwhile projects to advocate shouldn’t invite people to think of the projects as make-work by talking about them exclusively in terms of the stimulus. This freight rail stuff would be worth doing in a totally normal economic climate.

Increased rail funding is doing very well on a Change.gov list of ideas the public would like to see the President-elect embrace. Obviously, I don’t think this website is actually going to determine Obama administration policy. But you’re bound to wind up with an administration that contains some rail advocates, and it’s helpful to give those folks every possible piece of leverage they can find, so it’s worth clicking over and voting.

John Judis has an article expressing skepticism that Barack Obama’s stimulus is of the right size and nature to meet our present challenges that winds up touching on a subject near and dear to my heart—high-speed rail:

One area that is ripe for such investment–and that is not, from what I have seen, a declared priority of the Obama administration–is high-speed rail. Amtrak’s Acela trains–the closest thing we have to one–average less than 100 mph between Washington D.C. and Boston, whereas trains in Western Europe and Japan go more than twice as fast. Many of them also run on electricity. They would be the most energy-efficient and quickest means of getting between places like Boston and New York, or Los Angeles and San Francisco. But they would require a massive investment. For instance, installing high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor could cost about $32 billion, while California’s high-speed rail system would require up to $40 billion. A system that would address the other areas of the country could easily raise the cost to the hundreds of billions. The House transportation and infrastructure committee has currently proposed $5 billion in stimulus funds for intercity rail–not even a down payment on what it would cost to convert the U.S. to high-speed rail.

Investing in high-speed rails would be very expensive, but unlike tax cuts–the benefits of which can be siphoned off in the purchase of imported goods–the money spent would go directly to reviving American industry and improving the country’s trade balance. That doesn’t just mean jobs creating dedicated tracks or new rail stations: Though the U.S. abandoned train manufacturing decades ago to the French, Germans, Canadians, and Japanese, this kind of production could be undertaken by our ailing auto companies or aircraft companies–if the federal and state governments were to place orders. And building trains that would run on electricity would be a paradigmatic example of the “green jobs” that Obama often touts.

Like Special Agent Mulder, I want to believe in this. In particular, I do believe that it would be a good idea to make these kind of investments. But I also know that many people hear about the idea of spending $40 billion in California and $32 billion in the Northeast and maybe comparable amounts to build HSR systems in Florida and the rust belt and they start to blanche. So now that all of a sudden there’s broad political consensus in favor of adding a few hundred billion dollars to the deficit, I really want to put my hand up and say “hey! look over here! some productive infrastructure investments we should make!”

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Inauguration planning we can believe in:

In the tradition of past Presidents-elect, the daylong trip will include a series of events on the way to Washington, D.C. Saturday morning, President-elect Obama and his family will hold an event in Philadelphia before boarding a train bound for Wilmington, Delaware, where he will be joined by Vice President-elect Biden and his family. Together, the families will travel to Baltimore, Maryland, and hold another event, before finally arriving in Washington, D.C. on Saturday evening.

Good times.

Bruce Bartlett has a very nice summary of Keynes’ thinking on liquidity traps and the need for stimulation:

What Keynes figured out is that when conditions such as these exist, the federal government must step in to raise spending in the economy and thereby increase velocity. This means running a budget deficit, but that is only part of the solution [...] Keynes argued that the only thing that will really work is if the federal government uses its resources to purchase goods and services. It must buy “stuff”–concrete, computers, paper, glass, steel–anything as long as it is tangible. In other words, the government must spend the way households do, by buying things. It must also employ labor, because much of what people spend money on today is in the form of services [...]

At this point, Federal Reserve policy will become effective again. As prices and interest rates rise, the liquidity trap disappears and money begins circulating more rapidly; i.e., velocity increases. This is what ends an economic crisis. Unfortunately, it was not until World War II that the federal government spent enough on real resources–because they were needed for the war effort–to make Keynes’ theory work in practice. [...]

For what it’s worth, Keynes didn’t know what to do in this situation, either. He suggested building pyramids and burying bank notes in deep mine shafts that had been filled in. As people tried to dig up the money, they would be forced to employ labor and purchase equipment that would raise spending and thereby growth. In the end, it took the greatest war in history to make Keynes’ theory work.

I think that mine idea is pretty clever. But obviously the better answer is SUPERTRAINS. In particular, whenever I start prattling on about high-speed rail, people point out that it would cost an ongodly sum of money. But in our current crisis, one of our main problems is a lack of non-ridiculous ideas about things to spend money on. For example, it turns out that the total cost of “ready to go” infrastructure projects in this country is valued at tens of billions of dollars rather than the necessary hundreds of billions. That’s because planning was done in the old “how will we find the money” world. At the moment, we’re in a weird “how will we find things to spend money on” world. Under the circumstances, one thing I’d be doing if I were president is dedicating a small slice of the 2009 stimulus making sure that we get a big and absurdly expensive list of high speed rail projects “ready to go” in some sense by 2010. Hopefully, by then the economy will be back on the path to recovery in which case interest rates will be back at a level where we don’t necessarily want to engage in huge gargantuan deficit spending. In that case, most of those plans will have to be shelved. But if not, some can roll forward.

Joe Biden is best known for his experience in foreign policy issues, but I’ve long been most excited by the possibility that his strong pro-rail views may have influence in an administration certain to be dominated (like all administrations) by people who don’t care about transportation policy. This morning at the National Governor’s Association, Biden took the opportunity to talk a bit about the virtues of investing in rail:

There’s a reason when you turned on the olympics to watch them this past summer, you saw mag-lev trains going over 200 miles an hour in supposedly a third world country [i.e., China] in terms of its economy, blowing into town, dealing with environmental problems they have as well as transporting people in a way that we don’t even come close to being able to do. And as Barack has pointed out, and John Corzine knows, I may have a bit of a pro-rail bias. I think think of the jobs we can create in both construction and innovation if we make similarly bold investments here in the United States as well as the environmental payoff that flows from that kind of investment.

Of course it’s not just a question of jobs we create directly through rail construction, it’s also the prospects of greater long-term growth through more efficient use of space and energy resources that should get us excited. But good for Biden — hopefully he’ll have some influence as the key transportation policy jobs get filled.

If you were willing to spend tens of billions of dollars on aid to auto companies, that would help people living in the rust belt. But by the same token, if you agreed to buy tens of billions of dollars worth of cereal that would also help the Michigan economy. Or what if you spent it on this:

High-speed rail could cut travel time between Detroit and Washington from nine hours to three — just a smidge longer than the train ride from Washington to New York, from downtown to downtown. And you’d never have to take your shoes off, unless you wanted to. High-speed rail would also cut a five-hour drive from Detroit to Chicago to just over an hour. Detroit to Cleveland? Just under and hour. Detroit to Pittsburgh? About an hour and a half.

High-speed rail would, in other words, turn Rust Belt distances into northeast corridor distances, while also shifting the Rust Belt closer to the northeast corridor. It would increase the return to doing business in every city in the region. It would be the Erie Canal and the original railroads on steroids.

And here’s the thing — California is estimating that its 800-mile high-speed rail network will cost it about $45 billion over twenty or so years. The actual cost will probably be higher than that, and a Midwest network would be larger and therefore more expensive, but the total cost is in the same ballpark as the $50 billion in aid automakers are begging for (which wouldn’t even be spread out over a period of years).

I think after what’s just been done for Citigroup, nobody — myself included — has much of a leg to stand on in opposing giveaways to car companies or anyone else. But it’s still the case that money could be better spent on public investments that would both directly create demand for industrial products and also build productive infrastructure for the future, than simply on covering the operating costs of industrial firms and hoping for the best.

Transportation for America Communications Director David Goldberg takes to the CAPAF Wonk Room to urge President-Elect Obama to give America a transportation system we can believe in. You can sign the petition here.