High-Speed Rail for the US, Finally!

High speed rail is among the most economically-challenged ideas of the past century. Projected costs are always dramatically understated, and projected passenger usage, based on previous government projections for Amtrak, are always dramatically overstated. Later, the fix will be greater subsidization of passenger tickets while applying more taxation on alternative forms of transportation. The end result of this, and other pie-in-the-sky ideas, is a lower standard of living for all.

I’m frustrated that we’re only just now kinda-sorta getting the ball rolling with this. We should have had this decades ago.

No wait, privatization is such a great idea, let’s first privatize our existing transportation infrastructure – roads and highways! It will be great. Every time you exit one highway and enter another, you’ll stop at a toll booth to pay the company that owns it. Oh, that’s inconvenient so we’ll add tracking systems to every car so the road companies can be paid fairly. Oh that’s too “big brother” so we’ll just give one big company a monopoly. But monopolies are famously inefficient and bloated. Damn, it’s almost like the government should do it!

Seriously, road transportation is already incredibly heavily subsidized. Asking private rail companies to compete with government-funded road transport and turn a profit is absurd.

All a great idea (and I really love it quite frankly) until you realize all the waste that will likely occur. I have little doubt the cost will be double that projected. The technology will likely be from overseas (as there is none for this in the US), providing lots of jobs in other countries. Finally, these will all likely operate at enormous losses (you could probably safely bet your home on it). America’s logistics are not the same as those in Europe.

I would have preferred that we removed some anti-trust laws and encouraged (via massive tax credits) rail companies, who already own huges tracts of right-of-ways, air-lines, and even bus companies, to work together to provide high speed rail where it makes sense.

This will just end up as another tax-payer subsidized rail that over time, due to politics, will become an increasingly bloated bureacracy (likely with many more SEIU members). Nope – figure out a way to get the private sector to do this, keep the government out of it.

If these are to be run by the government, it should be mandated they cannot run at a loss. Ideally, they’d at the very least be managed by contracted private companies, who would by law be dropped and banned from the next bidding if they didn’t meet financial operational criteria that would be frequently reviewed.

High speed rail outside maybe the eastern corridor will not meet any ridership projections. Once they are built, you will have to pay for them forever when they fail to meet expectations. But then again, that’s the way the bureaucrats want it.

I’m frustrated that we’re only just now kinda-sorta getting the ball rolling with this. We should have had this decades ago.

Go on Youtube and search for SkyTran. That is the kind of system we should be building.