Why Do Conservatives oppose High Speed Rail?

Upgrading our railroads could be analogous to expanding freeway capacity.

 

If there was profit to be made the private sector would have already done it.

 

Taxcutter says:
A boondoggle like HSR will not make the nation more productive. We could electrify our freight railroad mainlines, at least two truck lanes in each Interstate and build nuclear power plants to drive them for a fraction of the cost of HSR, and electrification of freight railroads would enhance productivity far more than a few thousand people riding a handful of trains every day.

 

That is the whole point, we would have lost the Space Race, if we had to wait for the private sector to "earn" a profit to go to the moon and back.

 

The private sector alone cannot build high speed rail or any rail today. The single HSR in CA will cost $100 billion or more so obviously funding is a huge issue. The other issue is obtaining right-of-ways for the track which cuts through private property and city jurisdictions, etc. above ground and in tunnels and with bridges, where in many cases eminent domain is required.

I cannot imagine a financial lender to a private company who would give them $100 billion on a project that might take 10+ years to complete, with cost overruns, and lawsuits from those negatively effected, and municipalities who don't participate, etc. etc. etc. and a very questionable ROI...

 

The reality is that there simply is no profit to be made, which means it will end up as a money sink. Airlines are private companies, granted the feds are in on that action on various levels, but they make money. Rail is a completely different monster. Even if the two married up, rail will lose when it comes to personal travel. I'm a huge supporter of rail for commercial transport, but this is not a nation that wants or cares for it when it comes to personal transport. We are the the nation that made air travel the marvel it is. High speed rail doesn't beat an airplane, although oddly I'd support high speed rail between LA and Vegas, that might actually work. I say that because a drive through the bleak wasteland to get back to LA after dropping a wad of cash at the tables, a ton of booze, and sticking plenty of bills in panties, is rather depressing, but people do it every day, and if they were all stuck on a train together it would decrease the emotional impact and probably be safer for all involved. That drive home really, really, really sucks, regardless of how much fun you might of had. But that market is actually there, that is the only high speed rail I'd support in this country...

 

What objection can there be to simply nationalizing the physical layer of infrastructure to a Standard fixed by our elected representatives. It could lower that cost to the private sector and enable that form of "conduit to markets" in a more easy and convenient manner for any private Person engaged in Commerce.

 

Mere exploration isn't profitable, giving private companies the rights to mine resources, then things will change. Come on, its about profit for the private sector....

 

You may be missing the point. I believe supply side economics should be supplying the private sector with better governance at lower cost.

 

I see, but better governance simply isn't in the cards for a bit...

 

why not? are you claiming our elected representatives may not have the best interests of Capitalism?

I also believe that our Judicatures should be establishing culture of militia service for those Persons who may come before them and who may keep and bear Arms, regarding becoming more well regulated and better ensuring the domestic tranquility and security of our free States.

Besides, what State could be worse off with better aqueducts and potentially, high speed rail roads.

 

I also support normal speed rail and believe it should connect all communities. If such a route exists which validates the use of HSR then fine as long as the normal speed trains interconnect with it. And if HSR was installed between LA and LV, which would imply a healthy consumer base, don't you think the airlines will compete with much lower prices and more frequent flights? Except for those who are curious or not in a hurry, in the USA, I cannot see HSR competing head-to-head with air travel...

 

If profitable PLENTY OF MONEY, you don't understand business capitalization.

My typo $1B The HIGH estimates from private firms who do this all the time and do it very successfully was $50M. Why should we believe these inept fools can run our insurance industry when this is how incompetent they are?

It IS what funds it where do you think the money comes from who do you think buys the highway bonds, and finances it and builds it under contract.

Directly no but we derive tax revenue because of it along with the intangible benefits....how do you calculate how much money it saves you and everyone where you live that you have an open clear transgressable road to where you shop? Where your doctor is........where your work is.........where your kids schools are............and on and on....................what is your point? Compare that to how much having a single line highspeed rail to another city 100 mph for you and your fellow citizens.

We have a very successful freight rail system which competes with highway and air freight. Passenger service should be the same, run on private lines. If the government is going to build the lines then they should be leased at a rate which would cover their cost and maintenance, the intangable value to the taxpayers wouldn't even be a rounding error compared to the roads and highways.

 

Get it through your head you have presented no such evidence except your fallacious claims that Florida is some economic wasteland, you have no idea of what you speak or the vast array of high tech, engineering, light to heavy equipment manufacturing along with investment and business firms and who do you think takes care of all those retired persons, medical PROFESSIONALS.

It is not and either or and as state Florida produces the 4th highest GDP in the country, your claims that there is no economic opportunity in Florida is laughable on it's face.

I gave the numbers showing that the Northern states are losing the economic activity not the Florida. BTW NY mfg percent of GDP 5.2% Florida 4.8%

Yep been great for Florida and LOTS of states.

As is every industry and market.

Amazing how it has always been a highly profitable state with high sales for the MRO field in which I have been for 30 years. Amazing our customer list of industry from woodproducts and building materials to food products to electronics to postal and news paper equipment to robotics, those auto-scan checkout stands were developed there and I supplied a part to them, and just on and on and on.

 

Upgrading our rail road infrastructure to 100 mph minimum, for example; cannot be a bad thing for our private sector.

 

Private firms aren't coming up with the necessary funds to build a nationwide infrastructure project. Not happening.

Then fix the inept fools.

No. Roads are paid for by taxpayers. The GOVERNMENT jurisdiction in charge of the road MAY contract the work out to private firms, but private firms aren't funding them. Private rolls are toll roads, not public roads you use everyday.

If anything you are making the case for HSR!!!

Infrastructure CONNECTS people!

I don't see the significance of making it private. It should be public use, just like other pieces of infrastructure.

 

If I remember the entire rail system of the northeast was near collapse a few decades ago when the major private rail lines were going bankrupt. In the crises they were consolidated through government action and $Billions in bailouts into Conrail. Thousands of miles of right of way were just abandoned and for decades after there was little to no investment in improving service.

Commuter rail services were either abandoned or taken over by state and municipal transit authorities. In order to maintain intercity passenger rail service, Amtrak was created at about the same time. Amtrak is very profitable in the US northeast where it runs on its own tracks but Congressional mandates oblige it to operate many money losing routes on privately owned tracks in other parts of the country. This severely impedes its ability to even maintain service on the lines where it makes money.

If Amtrak in the US northeast received even 10% of the public funding that the airports and interstate highways it competes with received it would have had 200MPH trains running from Boston to Washington twenty years ago and be carrying 5 million people a year instead of 1 million. As it is, there is no way to expand the airports and highways to handle the number of travellers in the corridor now and that is expected to grow considerably over the next few decades. The ever growing congestion on the nations busiest highway and air corridor needs to be addressed and HSR between Boston and NYC and DC would vastly reduce the number of shuttles that fly between these cities every day, freeing up hundreds of landing and takeoff slots and taking thousands of cars and buses off the highways every day.

These states are not waiting for the Federal government and have begun putting their own funds into HSR development in the northeast because there is no viable alternative. The airports and highways have no room to expand and there is no place to build new ones, even if there was the land acquisition and ancillary infrastructure expenses would dwarf the cost of HSR.

You should look at the EU if you want to know the intangible benefits of HSR, which has significantly reduced intercity road and airport congestion and increased commerce and population density towards city centres, which increases efficiency in the use of resources like expensive imported oil. Urban areas connected by HSR have significantly greater economic growth and higher median incomes than similar areas that are not.

Then again, there are a lot of people in the US who see cities as nothing but vast sinkholes of hated liberal ideology, whose ideal is a sort of endless suburbia of shopping malls and cookie cutter housing developments. So they have every reason to be totally against anything that would benefit cities, fuming in the daily traffic jam on the outer ring highway on the way from the cul-de-sac they live in to the cul-de-sac where they work. It is completely understandable that millions of Americans feel that way because it is all they have ever known. Most have never actually lived in a city or taken public transportation and if they ever did it was a completely alien and semi-traumatic experience full of fear and dread. They see no benefit in their tax money going to help that alien race get around faster when their commute on the outer ring gets worse every year.

The thing is, their ideal has reached its event horizon. Suburbia's promise has become a nightmare. Continuously building further and further out has generated an ever more unsolvable transportation mess that cannot be solved by more highways because of popular opposition to the land taking. It could be relieved by mass transit but only if there is sufficiently dense areas of commerce and population to make it viable, in other words, cities. Interestingly enough, some of the most conservative states in the US are building public transit lines in city centres because there is a pressing need to get people off the highways, and the best way to do that is to get them to move into the condominiums and rental apartments in the mixed use buildings that developers are constructing all along the new transit lines that connect them to the new commercial buildings going up downtown. If these cities has HSR coming the building would become a frenzied boom.

The argument over HSR, and public transit in general, is not as liberal vs conservative as many here seem to obsess about, it is about continuing economic development and the model of building out along the highways and its total dependence on autos has run its course. The unrelenting congestion in the suburban highways has become a serious detriment to profitability and continued economic growth. The long neglected areas around city centres are the places where economic investment can be most profitable these days. There are many small and medium size cities in the US whose inner suburbs were originally built out along trolley lines. New light rail lines in Dallas and Charlotte and Phoenix are reviving entire neighbourhoods and attracting $Billions of new commercial and residential development before the lines are even built. The biggest proponents of transit expansion in these most conservative places are private developers. The biggest opponents are tea party republicans who are stuck in some sort of mind loop that all public spending on rail is bad. Perhaps they are reincarnated people who were against the land grants that the railroads got 150 years ago which allowed them to get the financing from England to build the railroads that connected the nation together.

I could be mistaken about all that, if so I would be grateful if someone would step up and set the record right.

 

I prefer to blame the right for insisting on reducing social spending for the least wealthy while allowing CEOs on corporate welfare to retain their multimillion dollar bonuses without even a drug test.

 

High speed rail is a shovel ready job waiting to happen that could be rightfully termed, promoting the general welfare.

 

How is stealing from some in order to pay for one's favored projects equate to promoting the "general" welfare?

If giving a person a job is good for the general welfare, then cutting him a check is just as good. Even better, really, as you don't need to supervise what he does on the job or subject him to risk of harm on the job.

 

It may simply depend on the "favored" project and whether or not it can be rendered, Pareto Optimal. How would the private sector be worse off with high speed rail as a part of our Infrastructure?

 

If you are going to give someone money you might as well get something out of it that will benefit the "general welfare". During the depression of the 1930s hundreds of thousands of unemployed were hired to build schools and roads and bridges. Economists have estimated the return in tax revenues at 800-1000 times over the ensuing fifty years from the increase in economic activity directly related to these infrastructure investments. At the time the republicans were just as apoplectic about infrastructure spending as they are now, and just as unable to see that spending on infrastructure will benefit them as much as everyone else.

 

I don't see how saddling a region with a boondoggle program that will go on costing money and having little utilization into the distant future benefits anyone.

You argument regarding Republicans sounds like a weak strawman. I'm not a Republican, but I see what you mean. Polish a turd and call it necessary for defense and they'll be all for it; polish a turd and call it "infrastructure" and you and your fellow Democrats will be all for it.

 

You only have our InterState highway system for comparison and contrast.

 

Schools, roads and bridges are used by nearly everybody over the decades.

HSR will be used by a privileged few, but paid for by everyone.