A Different Type of Criticism of HSR

[LA Resident]

I'll reserve any comment on what I think of this opinion piece and just post it because the author takes an interesting take in criticizing HSR, one I haven't read before (or at least remember)

Op-Ed Contributor/The New York Times

Fast Train to Nowhere

By RICHARD WHITE

Published: April 23, 2011

Stanford, Calif.

IT is hard for liberals like me to find good news in the latest agreement to cut the federal budget, but there is at least one silver lining: subsidies for high-speed rail have been sharply reduced. Why is this good news?

In his State of the Union address, President Obama compared high-speed rail to the 19th-century transcontinental railroads as parallel examples of American innovation. I fear he may be right.

full article at link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/opinion/24white.html

 

[jis]

I don't think there is anything wrong in creating public-private partnerships to enable growth. Every major advancement in the US has been achieved using that method. But apparently only when a rail advancement , a means for growing while minimizing the impact on nature, is in question it suddenly becomes a bad idea. That is why I always take anything espoused by so called "Liberals" (with a capital "L") with a huge pinch of salt. And mind you, I am a "liberal" (with a small "l" myself).

What has gone awry in the US is that the public has decided to give up on enforcing regulations on these worthy partnerships thus letting the private side run away with the riches. And this is partly because the public has somehow come to believe that they are just two steps away from being those that will be advantaged by this flow of riches to private hands. The fact that 99% of them are being idiots in thinking so somehow does not seem to matter to any one. What we need to fix is getting the right balance back in regulation vs. stimulation.

Trust me, I have lived in a country where the theory that all public facilities should be controlled by the government was practiced to the T. And until that was unshackled in the 90's it had the proverbial Hindu growth rate of 1% or so, with forever growing unemployment and reducing per capita income. Don't want to get back to that situation again, either there or here.

BTW, in case you did not notice, basically Mr. White is working on advertizing his book

 

[Ryan]

Not to mention the fact that the university that employs Mr. White wouldn't exist without money from the railroads. Those so called "worst laws money can buy" have provided him with an employer.

 

[jis]

Not to mention the fact that the university that employs Mr. White wouldn't exist without money from the railroads. Those so called "worst laws money can buy" have provided him with an employer.

And furthermore according to an article in the current issue of the Economist, a prime reason for California being in the self-inflicted too much direct democracy mess that California is in now too. Afterall it was one Mr. Stanford who was the boss of Southern Pacific Railroad when it managed to essentially buy off the entire government structure of California, all three branches, and hence **** of a generation of people, causing them to reject representative democracy and opt for a far more dangerous direct democracy experiment.

Anyway, back to the topic....Here is a Blog pointing out one line of reasoning regarding the flaws in White's argument. It is somewhat different from why I think the whole thing is flawed, but the point is well made.

 

[DET63]

From the article:

Critics, the most trenchant of whom are part of the Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail, say that only two high-speed rail routes run without operating subsidies: Paris to Lyon and Osaka to Tokyo.

Is this factually accurate?

 

[AlanB]

From the article:

Critics, the most trenchant of whom are part of the Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail, say that only two high-speed rail routes run without operating subsidies: Paris to Lyon and Osaka to Tokyo.

Is this factually accurate?

No. As pointed out here at AU, in the rebuttal that Jishnu linked to, and even in the Amtrak monthly reports, Acela covered its operating expenses last year. By more than $100 Million in fact.

 

[George Harris]

This article has got to be one of the nearest to fact-free load of nonsense I have read in a long time. To call this guy an expert on railroads is nonsense. He has also managed to rewrite quite a bit of history to suit his own purposes. He thinks the farmlands would have been settled without the railroads? Not likely and certainly not with an eye toward selling anything, because without the railroads how else were they getting the crops to market economically. The Pacific Railroad Act was one of the best financial deals the government ever made. Aside from giving value to a lot of government owned land that was essentially worthless without transportation, the reduced tariffs for government shipping that were part of the act paid off the values of the grants several times over.

He also pulls out the completely false "train to nowhere" arguement. If he thinks that there is "no demonstrated demand" he should get out of his ivory tower and see the people out there on the existing Amtrak-California state subsidized trains despite having bus segments to reach either San Francisco or Los Angeles. Maybe a look at the number of flights between LA area airports and SF Bay area airports would be somewhat enlightening, but then, None is so blind as he who will not see.

Who is this Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail anyway? Sounds like some anti-HSR group masquerading as an objective analytical body.

But then what sort of logic can we expect when you realize that a very vocal group in Palo Alto has decided that if we take the current railroad, which has numerous diesel trains and at grade road crossings, so that there is lots of horn blowing and engine noise, and separate all the road crossing and convert all the trains to electric, the resulting railroad will be noiser? Reason and logic are unrecognizable to these people.

 

[Anderson]

From the article:

Critics, the most trenchant of whom are part of the Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail, say that only two high-speed rail routes run without operating subsidies: Paris to Lyon and Osaka to Tokyo.

Is this factually accurate?

No. As pointed out here at AU, in the rebuttal that Jishnu linked to, and even in the Amtrak monthly reports, Acela covered its operating expenses last year. By more than $100 Million in fact.

I think those two lines are the only ones that not only turn a profit but also pay their cost of capital (again, alongside the Acela, which is highly profitable as well these days).

 

[jis]

I think those two lines are the only ones that not only turn a profit but also pay their cost of capital (again, alongside the Acela, which is highly profitable as well these days).

Actually TGV Atlantique turns a profit and is well on its way to pay off the capital with interest. TGV Nord-Europa that connects to the Channel Tunnel and to Belgium is also quite profitable above the rails but it will be quite a while before the capital gets fully paid off.

As usual part of the problem with any profitablity statement is how costs are allocated and partitioned. For example it is common knowledge that Southwest Airlines is profitable. But are we sure that the costs are all actually allocated to it? Or are some of them carefully and cleverly hidden away in some government funded support infrastructure?