High speed rail is great, except when it isn’t
Great nugget from Megan McArdle on high speed rail:
The primary obstacle to high speed rail in those locations is not conservatives of any stripe–it’s community activists, environmental groups, and various other sorts of lawsuit-happy left-wing institutions. They tie up the projects in so much procedural nonsense that by the time they’re built, they’re way over budget, and crippled by the various compromises that had to be made along the way. The Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor, established in 1992, is expected to finish its final environmental impact statement sometime in 2011. Some unspecified time after that, it will begin building out the links between Washington DC and Charlotte, North Carolina. For somewhere between 2-5 billion dollars, and three or more decades, we will finally be able to travel from Washington to Charlotte in 6 hours and 50 minutes–just 30 minutes more than it takes to drive the same route. On the plus side, you can read while you travel. On the minus side, it will cost at least three times as much, and you’ll still have to rent a car when you get there.
High speed rail is one of those things that’s great in theory — It burns fewer fossil fuel than air or car travel and saves you time by cutting down on security procedures at the airport/dumping you in the heart of a city instead of its outskirts! — and terrible in practice. As Megan mentions earlier in that post, the only place where it really makes a ton of sense is the northeast corridor: Washington, NYC, and Boston are all very dense urban centers that have easily navigable public transportation/easy walkability. It would make a ton of sense to connect these cities via some sort of high speed rail system. Connecting Houston to Dallas via high speed rail is great in theory for the reasons mentioned above, but a failure in practice due to the structure of those cities. Same with a plan to connect cities in Florida. And, I think, the plan to connect San Diego/LA/SF would be equally hard to pull off: LA is essentially impossible to get around in without a car. San Diego isn’t much better. What’s the point (from the traveler’s perspective) of replacing a car ride with a train ride when you’re just going to need to rent a car at the end of the train ride anyway?
The real rub, of course, is that guys like Ryan Avent don’t particularly care about the traveler’s perspective: they think they know best, and goshdarnit, they’re going to force people to bend to their will. Keep that in mind the next time someone hectors you about the glories of faster trains.