High-speed rail is a fast track to government waste (Understatement)

This paragraph from the Washington Post article sums up what is wrong with this Administration. There is an amazing lack of common sense coming out of the President and the Cabinet Secretaries. This time it is Ray LaHood, the Transportation Secretary who we have never had any faith that he would do a good job or come up with ideas that makes sense. He has not disappointed with the high speech rail. You want to toss money down the drain, then invest in high speed rail. Obama wants 80% of the Country covered? Why?

Governing ought to be about making wise choices. What's disheartening about the Obama administration's embrace of high-speed rail is that it ignores history, evidence and logic. The case against it is overwhelming. The case in favor rests on fashionable platitudes. High-speed rail is not an "investment in the future"; it's mostly a waste of money. Good government can't solve all our problems, but it can at least not make them worse.

Let me give an example of Amtrak. There is an Amtrak train that runs once a day to and from Oklahoma City to Fort Worth, Texas. The cost of the train is $26.00 one way which is okay but the problem is it takes 4 hours 14 minutes to travel. I can drive to Fort Worth in three hours but then I would have my car to get around Dallas/Fort Worth. Ever try taking public transportation in Dallas/Fort Worth? If your original destination is Dallas, then you arrive about 30 miles from your destination when you arrive by train. You will probably have to rent a car which adds even more cost to the trip. Unlike the upper east coast, public transportation leaves a lot to be desired in Middle America but we have all kinds of interstates.

Because the chances of Obama having driven across America is probably slim to none, don't think he or his people have any idea how far it is from destination to destination in this part of the Country. You drive for miles and don't even see a gas station which is why when you drive out here, you had better be filling up when it gets around half a tank. Our cities are not located close together and smaller areas have zero public transportation or even a rental car company.

Chicago has great public transportation even though the trains are old, but you can go pretty much all over the city by train and it sure beats getting stuck on Lakeshore Drive and other places in a traffic jam all the time. What works in Chicago would be a waste of money in someplace like Oklahoma City where people are going to drive not take rail to get around.

This is another reason why you don't elect someone who came from a big city to be President. They have zero common sense and don't understand that high speed rail is joke in areas where cities are not close together. If I have to rent a car and it takes me over an hour longer to get to Fort Worth, why would I want to take the train except for the fun of it. High Speed rail would never work because there are not enough people that would use it between OKC and Fort Worth that would make it profitable.

You can watch the Biden video at Washington Post and shake your head as he doesn't have any more clue than LaHood and the President about rail service in most of America.

High-speed rail is a fast track to government waste

By Robert J. Samuelson
Monday, February 14, 2011

Vice President Biden, an avowed friend of good government, is giving it a bad name. With great fanfare, he went to Philadelphia last week to announce that the Obama administration proposes spending $53 billion over six years to construct a "national high-speed rail system." Translation: The administration would pay states $53 billion to build rail networks that would then lose money - lots - thereby aggravating the budget squeezes of the states or federal government, depending on which covered the deficits.

There's something wildly irresponsible about the national government undermining states' already poor long-term budget prospects by plying them with grants that provide short-term jobs. Worse, the rail proposal casts doubt on the administration's commitment to reducing huge budget deficits. The president's 2012 budget is due Monday. How can it subdue deficits if it keeps proposing big spending programs?

High-speed rail would definitely be big. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has estimated the administration's ultimate goal - bringing high-speed rail to 80 percent of the population - could cost $500 billion over 25 years. For this stupendous sum, there would be scant public benefits. Precisely the opposite. Rail subsidies would threaten funding for more pressing public needs: schools, police, defense.

How can we know this? History, for starters.

Passenger rail service inspires wishful thinking. In 1970, when Congress created Amtrak to preserve intercity passenger trains, the idea was that the system would become profitable and self-sustaining after an initial infusion of federal money. This never happened. Amtrak has swallowed $35 billion in subsidies, and they're increasing by more than $1 billion annually.

Despite the subsidies, Amtrak does not provide low-cost transportation. Longtime critic Randal O'Toole of the Cato Institute recently planned a trip from Washington to New York. Noting that fares on Amtrak's high-speed Acela start at $139 one-way, he decided to take a private bus service. The roundtrip fare: $21.50. Nor does Amtrak do much to relieve congestion, cut oil use, reduce pollution or eliminate greenhouse gases. Its traffic volumes are simply too small to matter.

(snip)

Rail buffs argue that subsidies for passenger service simply offset the huge government support of highways and airways. The subsidies "level the playing field." Wrong. In 2004, the Transportation Department evaluated federal transportation subsidies from 1990 to 2002. It found passenger rail service had the highest subsidy ($186.35 per thousand passenger-miles) followed by mass transit ($118.26 per thousand miles). By contrast, drivers received no net subsidy; their fuel taxes more than covered federal spending. Subsidies for airline passengers were about $5 per thousand miles traveled. (All figures are in inflation-adjusted year 2000 dollars.)

High-speed rail would transform Amtrak's small drain into a much larger drain. Once built, high-speed-rail systems would face a dilemma. To recoup initial capital costs - construction and train purchases - ticket prices would have to be set so high that few people would choose rail. But lower prices, even with favorable passenger loads, might not cover costs. Government would be stuck with huge subsidies. Even without recovering capital costs, high-speed-rail systems would probably run in the red. Most mass-transit systems, despite high ridership, routinely have deficits.

The reasons passenger rail service doesn't work in America are well-known: Interstate highways shorten many trip times; suburbanization has fragmented destination points; air travel is quicker and more flexible for long distances (if fewer people fly from Denver to Los Angeles and more go to Houston, flight schedules simply adjust). Against history and logic is the imagery of high-speed rail as "green" and a cutting-edge technology.

Excerpt:  Read more at Washington Post