Riding the Rails to Economic Confusion

Sometimes, Ms. McArdle is very good.  In this piece, she delivers a mixed bag.  First the good:
So basically, the feds wanted to spend $2.6 billion, plus any cost overruns or operating costs, to put in a train for which there was no evident demand.  Why?  Because they didn't have any better options, and they wanted to build a train.  The California High Speed Rail project, following similarly sound reasoning, is going to start out in California's not-very-populous Central Valley, because . . . it's easier to get the right of way.  Never mind that there aren't any, like, passengers.

Building trains is an immensely costly enterprise--not just financially costly, but environmentally and personally costly, as people and habitats are uprooted, and metal is tortured into rails and switches and cars.  If you are going to install one, you should be reasonably certain that there will be people around with an interest in riding your train.  After all, a train running mostly empty emits a lot of carbon.

I am a fan of train projects when those projects start with a problem that might be solved by a train, and then work forward to the train.  The problem is that in America, those routes are difficult to build, because they're places where there's already a lot of stuff.  Rights of way are expensive and time-consuming to obtain, and the project is bound to be blocked by well-organized NIMBYs.

And so the idea seems to have become to build trains where it's possible to build trains, and hope that development follows.  But trains succeed where they are better than some alternative form of transportation.  In the case of Tampa to Orlando, they're worse than a car, and there isn't even any air travel to replace; in the case of Fresno-to-Bakersfield, it may be better than a car for a few passengers, but there are too few passengers to make the trains better than cars for the environment.

 

Illustrating that coercive Federal train projects are ridiculous is child's play, thought this was nicely put.  But look at all the assumptions of coercion that are inherent in her writing -

The problem is that in America, those routes are difficult to build, because they're places where there's already a lot of stuff.  Rights of way are expensive and time-consuming to obtain, and the project is bound to be blocked by well-organized NIMBYs

 

In other words, they are expensive because the crazy people who own the property that the Fed will take by force don't want their stuff taken from them.  Of course, the Fed already took their taxes to pay for the salaries of all the nincompoops who sit around and dream up these sorts of boondoggles (this is the kind of boondoggle that gives boondoggles a bad name, as they say), and to pay for the lawyers that will no doubt be involved when the recalcitrant must be removed from their land by government force.  I for one don't begrudge the NIMBYs their resentment of that abuse of Federal authority.  I would oppose it even if there were some sort of guarantee that the project would work as intended, and all the moreso since there's a virtual guarantee that these projects will not work as intended. 

 

That the rail projects are immoral is beyond question.  That they will waste untold money is also nearly unquestionable.  Speculating on why they are such a darling of certain political circles provides an interesting distraction for some.  It seems to me, as Will wrote, the only logic of high speed rail is to create a symbollic instrument of government orchestration - which will advance the progressive agenda of making the US more like Europe.  Why not strive to match that defenseless, economically weak, and "upward mobility deficient" bastion of 'equality' that it is.  May as well set your sights high, eh.