High-speed rail is about pork, not transit
Examiner Editorial
July 8, 2009
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President Obama has set aside $13 billion in federal funding as a "down payment" on a nationwide system of high-speed rail lines. This is yet another manifestation of the American Left's ongoing love affair with European socialism, with its top-down bureaucracies herding highly regulated citizens hither and yon. As it is, rail passengers in the U.S. already receive massive public subsidies. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the net government subsidy for airline passengers is one tenth of a cent per passenger mile and a half penny for motorists. That compares to 22 cents for Amtrak riders and 61 cents for public transit passengers. The Obama administration's plans to pump billions more into high-speed rail will increase this already grossly distorted distribution of federal transportation funds.
And what a coincidence that three of the top contenders for high-speed rail funding just so happen to be located in the home districts of the president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. High-speed rail, it seems, is more about pork than transportation. For example, at the top of the funding list is an $11.5 billion high-speed electric rail project to link Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago with St. Louis, even though there are plenty of other ways to get from one city to the other without spending billions in tax dollars that the federal government doesn't have.
Another 800-mile high speed rail line in California would link Pelosi's San Francisco district to San Diego and Sacramento, at a cost of at least $30 billion. Half of the funding for what Jon Gertner, writing in The New York Times, called "the most expensive single infrastructure project in United States history" would come from federal taxpayers - this in a state that is now issuing IOUs because it's flat broke. And then there's the $3.5 billion DesertXpress, which would run high-speed rail from Las Vegas, in Reid's home state of Nevada, to Victorville, California (81.2 miles from LA) - a trip that would take just 3 hours and 10 minutes by car. Private investors plan to finance 30 percent of the cost and use low-interest government loans to build their Tracks to Nowhere.
Amtrak's Acela Express, currently the nation's only high-speed train, runs between Washington and Boston and is unprofitable. "It is a fact that no nationwide passenger rail system anywhere in the world is considered profitable when all costs - including capital - are accounted for," Amtrak spokesman Clifford Cole told CNNMoney.com. High-speed rail is a luxury that a nation running record deficits can clearly not afford, and one that can never replace the freedom and convenience provided by private passenger cars.
