High-Speed Rail

Paul Krugman and especially Matt Yglesias have been writing about High-Speed Rail over the last few days in response to this WaPo Op-Ed.

Krugman and Yglesias are correct that the portions of this country that are clearly dense enough to support high-speed rail. The Boston-NYC-DC corridor certainly can, and the SD-LA-SF corridor most likely could as well, and perhaps all the way up to Seattle, but I don't know. Those lines make economic sense. The problem with Amtrak is largely political.

Leaving aside from the problems of a government monopoly, because Germany shows that this can be overcome in practice, we have institutional problems with our federal government that make high-speed rail pretty much a non-starter at the federal level. For Amtrak to make sense it needs to focus on high-speed rail on the coasts, and pull out of the cross-country business. The Chicago-SF line will never make sense.

Problem is that the Chicago-SF line means jobs in lots of little places. Loss of that line means a loss of jobs in Ottumwa, IA. Plus, the loss of Amtrak service is an expensive perk for the small group of people who travel between Mt. Pleasant, IA and Creston, IA that their representatives and senators will be loathe to lose.

So, all told, high-speed rail does make economic, social, environmental and practical sense in certain regions, but not nationwide. We should drop Amtrak altogether and let the regions deal with their own high-speed rail. There's no good reason why Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia and DC can't get together to build a high-speed rail network. Ditto for California once its current fiscal issues are sorted out.

The other factor, and one I've mentioned before, is that we need to just buy an off-the-shelf technology, like the TGV from France, and not try to develop our own.