Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency’s importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind.
Remarkably widespread derision has greeted the Obama administration’s damn-the-arithmetic-full-speed-ahead proposal to spend $53 billion more (after the $8 billion in stimulus money and $2.4 billion in enticements to 23 states) in the next six years pursuant to the president’s loopy goal of giving “80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.” “Access” and “high-speed” to be defined later.
Criticism of this optional and irrational spending—meaning: borrowing —during a deficit crisis has been withering. Only an administration blinkered by ideology would persist.
Washington, disdaining the decisions of Ohio and Wisconsin voters, replied that it will find states that will waste the money. California will. Although prostrate from its own profligacy, it will sink tens of billions of its own taxpayers’ money in the 616-mile San Francisco–to–San Diego line. Supposedly 39 million people will eagerly pay much more than an airfare in order to travel slower. Between 2008 and 2009, the projected cost increased from $33 billion to $42.6 billion.
“The average intercity auto trip today uses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train.” And high speed will not displace enough cars to measurably reduce congestion. The Washington Post says China’s fast trains are priced beyond ordinary workers’ budgets, and that France, like Japan, has only one profitable line.
So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.
The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism. To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/27/high-speed-to-insolvency.print.html
In this fun post, Will digresses to a Type M argument (speculating on the motives behind another's decision), and so should not be taken as more than an opinion of one person. Nonetheless, aside from helping to exacerbate the significance of government via the elevation of government projects to world changing status, it hard to understand why people are so in love with high speed rail, and other mass transit projects, which have proven to be failures wherever add hoc'ed into an existing transportation market.
Examples: America’s highest-profile monorail project, the expansion of Seattle’s line, was plagued by cost overruns and funding gaps, and was finally dissolved in 2005 (costing taxpayers $125 million). The Las Vegas monorail has filed for bankruptcy. http://lindberghlavista.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/streetcars-vs-monorails/
Of course, if mass transportation were really a priority, perhaps the President could have skipped health care, payoffs to states to keep them solvent, and other parts of the spending spree of the last two years so that the money to pay for this incredible mass transit upgrade that's going to win the war for the future could be paid for. And that is of course exactly why all that money was not spend on high speed rail two years ago - it isn't really a priority, it's some fluff to throw to the government-spending-porn-freaks who can be bought off with the equivalent of a peep show. As we approach the absolute limit of what our government will borrow in our names, we can see which politicians are willing to inch right up to the cliff in order to get just that last little bit of money in order to be able to spend it and claim they did something for posterity. Nothing like using other peoples' money to burnish one's humanitarian resume!
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