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January 30, 2010
The "High Speed" Rail Boondoggle
Posted by Gregory of Yardale at January 30, 2010 6:52 AM
Chairman Zero packed his Teleprompter down to Tampa to proudly unveil something else the country doesn't need and can't afford. Progressives, out of their mindless infatuation with Europe, are going to have us borrow billions and flush them down the can for: a "high-speed" train that will someday link Orlando and Tampa for some reason. I mean, why the hell are people supposed to leave their cars in Tampa to take a train to Orlando and be stuck there without a car? Doesn't that seem, I don't know, dumb?
Call me Mr. Crankypants, but I would just like to lay out just a few of the ways this is a really stupid scheme.
1. The estimated costs of building the thirteen "high speed" rail systems is in the range of $125 Billion to $200 Billion, and that's before the inevitable public project 'Big Dig' type multipliers double, triple, quadruple or quintuple the cost. So, within a week after "freezing" 11% of Federal spending to "save" $250 Billion, he's out putting at minimum that same amount back on the table and probably 5 times more than that. And those thirteen systems won't even be interconnected. How many billions will it cost to link them up (which progressives will demand inevitably when the initial systems turn into money pits and progressives decide its because they aren't connected).
2. These are not even really high-speed trains in the TGV or Bullet Train sense. They are more like the Acela, which, on average, travels below the speed of a car on the freeway. So, we're going to pay hundreds of billions on a system that will service a limited number of locations at about the speed you could drive to them and a lot slower than you could fly to them. Yeah, that makes sense.
3. High-speed rail networks work best in small, densely populated countries like those in Europe (density >600 peeps per square mile) or Japan (880 peeps per square mile) not the USA where... except for a few coastal corridors, population is only about 70 peeps per square mile. And by the way, ridership on high speed trains in Europe and Japan is declining. The system doesn't even work in countries where it supposedly works.
4. Ongoing subsidies will be required to keep the system operational, even more than the $35 Billion flushed down into Amtrak over the years.
5. Cui bono? Union laborers who will build and run the trains, and politically-connected contractors (Chicago politics) who will win the business. By the way, there's no American company with expertise in building high-speed trains. So, a lot of these hundreds of billions would go to jobs for foreigners.
6. Oh, and don't forget, before any of these get built, environmentalists and community organizers get to sue for several years to fatten the pockets of the litigation lobby.
7. The trains can be destroyed by sheep. What kind of wussy-ass train loses a fight with a sheep, for Set's sake?
Long story short, high-speed rail is not a practical transportation solution, nor is it even a jobs program. It's progressives taking out massive debt because they want to be like Europe, and because they see humans as masses, not as individuals who should be treated like individuals.
I bow to Angry Fletch. His video stinger is more on the nose than mine.
