Replies

This is a progressive wet dream. Obama pushed the idea. And now it’s re-appearing in the Green New Deal. The left is convinced that we need these high speed rail trains in order to reduce air travel and reduce carbon emissions. But none of these plans explain how to pay for these projects. The feasibility studies that are done show astronomical costs in construction and maintenance. The price tags are so out of sight they make even liberals like Gavin Newsome pause.

A few reasons for this. For one, the US the is a very large country. And our population is spread out. Most people do not live in big cities. China is a large country too, but they have very high population density. So the train is useful to a high percentage of the population. In the US, a cross-country train would have dozens of stops and wouldnt be close enough to impact enough people.

The corruption factor would also be out of sight. Wherever you put a station, the land value is going to increase. So what do you think is going to happen when a politician (and his donors) own land near the train route? A station is going to magically appear even if that station is kind of pointless. But it also highlights the political grudge match that will ensue over where the stations should be.

But it’s also way too expensive to build anything like this in this country anymore. There is too many layers of bureaucracy and regulations to comply with that slow everything down. You will have to defend one lawsuit after another for one reason or another. You also got tons of middlemen with their hands in the cookie jar. And that is all exactly what was happening in California. The costs were soaring out of control.

So unless the progressive left can figure out how to pay for this and control the costs....high speed rail in America is going to remain left-wing fantasy. There is a reason why some are saying the Green New Deal is going to cost $90 trillion dollars. All these ideas they are proposing are so expensive the price tag is something the human brain can’t even wrap around. It’s impossible.

[A few reasons for this. For one, the US the is a very large country. And our population is spread out. Most people do not live in big cities. China is a large country too, but they have very high population density. So the train is useful to a high percentage of the population. In the US, a cross-country train would have dozens of stops and wouldnt be close enough to impact enough people.]

China’s population density is just over half of Germany’s. It doesn’t have a high population density. China has high speed rail because of massive subsidies. The problem in China isn’t ghost cities, which are purchased by private investors. It’s massive white elephants the government has spent money on. And one of those white elephants is its high speed rail system. The Party, in effect, is wasting large amounts of money building unnecessary infrastructure with high operating costs in the same way as Japan did during its boom period. Except Japan had drawn level with the US, per capita output-wise, when it embarked on its white elephant spree. China’s output per capita is now ~1/7 of the US and the white elephants are already everywhere.