Train Ride to Hollywood

I'm not talking about Bloodstone's 1975 pop movie.

Brightline Holdings, a company known for building passenger rail lines, is constructing a new high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.  Well, not exactly all the way to LA.  It would terminate at Rancho Cucamonga, California, where it would like to commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles.  Most of the 218-mile track would be laid in the median of Interstate 15 to relieve weekend traffic between the two cities.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is quite bullish on the project.  He made that clear at an event celebrating the project at the site of a terminal to be built outside the Las Vegas Strip.  "People have been dreaming of high-speed rail in America for decades," he said.  "It’s really happening this time."

Whatever.

If I sound blasé about this project, that's because I am.  High-speed rail works best when it connects transit-friendly cities, and Los Angeles and Las Vegas are probably the most autocentric cities in America, or at least the most autocentric cities in America west of Houston. Woody Allen once joked that Los Angeles' idea of a cultural advantage is a right turn on a red light, while Las Vegas, apart from the Bellagio's art collection, doesn't have a culture.  It does, though, have a lot of casino-hotels so far apart for each other that the idea of taking an Uber from one of them to the railway terminal would be a trek in and of itself.

Also, both Los Angeles and Las Vegas are major metropolises that were built in the desert.  LA is too big for its location along a semi-arid stretch of the Pacific coast, and Las Vegas has even less reason to be in such a remote, hot corner of Nevada.  Ironically, it was founded as a "tank town" - a town meant to service the railroad line between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City because it was roughly equidistant from both cities.  Why would you want to build any transport project to encourage more growth in cities stretched way beyond their limits? 

And - and you knew this was coming - why doesn't Brightline build a high-speed rail line connecting ur heavily populated megalopolises in the Northeast or the Midwest?  Better yet, why doesn't Amtrak do that?  In the Northeast, Acela remains a joke, and in the Midwest, Republican governors and legislatures have successfully resisted efforts to upgrade Amtrak service to high-speed rail.  These places need bullet trains the most.  And if Buttigieg really wants to help high-speed rail in California, he'll get the Biden administration to get that Los Angeles-San Francisco line finished.  That line is way over budget and way behind schedule.  As for Brightline's track record (no pun intended), it operates a train in Florida from Orlando to Miami that only runs 125 mph - a slowpoke by European standards.   

As for me, I'm not pushing for bullet trains anymore.  It's become obvious that real high-speed rail, at least where I live (full disclosure: I live in the Northeast), is a pipe dream.  If I ever do ride on a bullet train, it will be in Europe - assuming, of course, Trump isn't returned to power and doesn't close the nation's borders to people wanting to leave.    

High-Speed Fail - California Edition

Donald Trump has demanded that California return federal funds given to the state to develop high-speed rail.  This directive, though it may be difficult for Trump to enforce, should signal the end of efforts to build high-speed trail in California or any other place in America for awhile - maybe for good.

Gavin Newsom, California's new Democratic governor, and other Democrats suspect that this is payback on Trump's part for California suing the executive branch over Trump's national immigration "emergency."  But I have a feeling that Trump would have found a reason to pull the plug on California's already-scaled-back bullet train even if Newsom had minded his business and not done anything to upset Trump at all.  The truth of the matter is the Trump is a Republican, and Republicans have historically been against intercity rail transit since the jet age began.  Even Richard Nixon, who nationalized intercity passenger rail with the creation of Amtrak in 1971, is believed to have done so as a precursor to getting rid of it.

I give up.  If I'm going to ride anything resembling high-speed rail in America, I'll have to settle for the Acela - Spanish for "bullet train lite" - which I actually did ride once . . . in 2001, but not since  then because I haven't been able to travel much in the past several years thanks to the hollowing out of the middle class . . . which we could rebuild by giving people jobs to build and run a modern intercity passenger train network!

Don't bet on that. Trump's attention span is so limited that he seems to have an "infrastructure week" every few months to talk about rebuilding America as an excuse for not talking about Russia or Robert Mueller.     

 

High-Speed Hijinks - 2019 Edition

When the Green New Deal championed by U.S. House member and hot Democratic property Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mentioned high-speed rail as part of a more environmentally friendly future, I was ecstatic, as it meant that Washington was abuzz with talk of fast trains for the first time in nearly a decade.  Then, on cue, the roof caved in.  Or so it appeared.

A sub-moronic congressional staffer apparently let out a first draft of the Green New Deal that advocates building enough high-speed rail to make air travel in the United States unnecessary, overlooking not just the fact that airliners would still be a preferred transport mode for transcontinental travel but also overlooking the fact that Hawaii - which, last time I checked, is a state - is out in the middle of the Pacific, suggesting the desire to build an ambitious undersea rail line that is the realm of science fiction.  Needless to say, Republicans, who hate passenger trains because it eats into the profitable business of selling cars, pounced and said that this demonstrates what a bunch of twerps high-speed rail advocates are.

But then California's new governor, Gavin Newsom, seemed to have dealt the biggest blow to the hope for high-speed rail in America when he announced that he was scaling back his predecessor Jerry Brown's plan to build a high-speed train line to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles because millions of dollars were spent to get it going and the state isn't one millimeter closer to finishing it than when it started.

California politicians who never wanted a bullet train in the Golden State in the first place - such as U.S. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy - applauded Newsom's announcement.  The project had been wrongheaded from the start. The route chosen bypassed too many cities and towns in between San Francisco and Los Angeles and took a meandering, indirect path so that it would go through the Central Valley and gain gain political support in that region of the state, and the contractors went ahead and started building without securing the entire route, studying the terrain, or making sure the funding was in place.  

It turns out, though, that Newsom's decision does not mean the end of high-speed rail in California.  Newsom still wants to build it, and he first wants to concentrate on connecting Kevin McCarthy's hometown of Bakersfield with Merced - two cow towns in the Central Valley - by way of Fresno, an agricultural center known for its little 5,000-watt radio stations and not much else.  The distance between Bakersfield and Merced is 164 miles - an easily manageable two-hour drive on California State Route 99.  As ludicrous as building such a line sounds, there's a method to Newsom's madness - he wants to get the easiest part of the project done while rethinking and re-configuring the San Francisco-Los Angeles connection by completing an environmental review and seeking new sources of funding.

A Newsom spokesman told a San Francisco news site that the governor hopes to move forward on the link between San Francisco and Los Angeles as "the Central Valley section demonstrates the viability of the broader project" and added that Newsom's comments about the lack of a path for the overall line was meant  merely to convey that "there isn't the funding to do the project from SF to LA under the current funding stream."

I was ready to throw up my hands when Newsom first declared his intention to scale back this rail project and the media made it sound like he was giving up on it completely, and had Newsom not clarified his comments, this blog entry would have turned out differently.  But I can't help but feel the deepest skepticism that high-speed rail will ever take root in These States, just as I've since become skeptical about the Green New Deal and the folks behind it, given the PR disaster that resulted from the aforementioned first-draft statement about getting rid of all air travel (more on my skepticism later).  I've said this once, and I'll say it again: My initial reaction to a policy proposal I'd be inclined to support, like high-speed rail, used to be, "Sounds good, I'm in!"  Now I'm more likely to say in response, "I've heard it all before."

It's Not Easy Being Green

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a woman on a mission.  With a brazen effort to seize the moment and hit the ground running, she unveiled a proposal for a Green New Deal - a Roosevelt-style economic policy that emphasizes the creation of jobs and the implementation of policies to benefit the environment and fight climate change while putting people to work.

Her proposal, which she put out with climate hawk and congressional veteran Edward Markey, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, would incentivize the creation of jobs to help the poor, underemployed and unemployed - jobs to expand renewable energy, get the United States on track to depend entirely on a 100% renewable, zero-emission energy grid, encourage the development of electric cars and high-speed passenger rail, and promote sustainable farming.

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez wants America to do what other countries have been doing for quite some time now.

Let's get something straight.  This Green New Deal proposal is not going to become law in this Congress, so long as the Republicans, who still control the Senate and the Presidency, scoff at anything that cuts into the profitable businesses of refining oil and selling SUVs.  Even if there is a Democratic sweep in the 2020 elections, we might still have to deal with moderate Democrats who laugh off the idea of going all-renewable and call it a "green dream" (to cop a phrase from Nancy Pelosi's reaction to the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey proposal).  But it does do something Republicans detest - it gets an issue they don't want to talk about in the public discourse.  Ocasio-Cortez is betting on the Green New Deal  to galvanize progressive, millennial and minority voters to become more politically active and demand change to our insane energy and transportation policies, which gave us electric-power plants belching carbon into the sky and an unsustainable overreliance on cars.  Not to mention the incentivization of mechanized farming based on petrochemical fertilizers.  The idea is to get enough voters riled up to the point where they make Washington pursue a path to a cleaner and greener economy.

Of course, some of these ideas have been around for awhile (*cough cough*, high-speed rail, *cough cough*), and the political realities of the present make the Green New Deal a heavy lift.  But it's not impossible to get it done; it's just difficult.  Here are a few other things that were heavy lifts - health care reform, civil rights legislation, old-age pensions, women's suffrage . . . I could go on.  I won't, because we have to start getting the Green New Deal off the ground.  And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect person to instigate it.  This is not unlike the idea of putting a man on the moon within ten years, which, you'll remember, happened.  Ocasio-Cortez's and Markey's plan happens to envision a ten-year transition to an all-renewable energy grid. And Ocasio-Cortez is firing up voters and inspiring the American people to find their can-do spirit and get this thing done.

With a little luck, we can make this whole damn thing work out. A little push, please.  ;-)    

Not Up To Speed

I have bad news for railfans.

The federal government has proposed spending more than $120 billion over thirty years for improvements on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor rail line, which include new trains, new stations, improved track, a new tunnel, and upgrades to bridges.  

Why is that bad news, apart from the fact that this is only a proposal?

Because a more ambitious proposal to build a parallel high-speed line between Boston and Washington for trains going up to 220 miles an hour was rejected.

Rejected.

I give up.  We're never - never - going to have real high-speed rail in this country, maybe not even in California.

So take a good look at this French TGV . . .

. . . because you're never going to see anything like that here.  You're better off going to France, though I wouldn't suggest moving there, because Marine LePen might be France's next president.

Oh well, you know what they say about half a loaf . . .  

Ranting and Railing

This is ridiculous . . ..

The U.S. Department of Transportation recently announced that Amtrak, the national passenger railroad, will get $2.5 billion that will go to improvements on the Northeast Corridor line from Boston to Washington, improvements to various stations, a new maintenance facility, and 28 new Acela train sets the will increase passenger seating by 40 percent.  The Acela trains, Amtrak's so-called "high-speed" train sets, will go 160 miles an hour or faster after track improvements are made.

So what is ridiculous about this, aside from the fact that some European bullet trains go faster than two hundred miles an hour and also the fact that Acela trains rarely reach their top speed owing to track curves and similar issues?

The $2.5 billion funding is a loan.

That's right, a loan, not a subsidy.  Amtrak is actually expected to pay it back, as if it were a completely private company, like General Motors.

This is just another example of how the U.S. government is non-committed to developing rapid rail in America.  Rather than invest in high-speed rail and commit public money to it, as it does with aviation and highways, the federal government is letting Amtrak borrow money to get its Acela (Spanish for "bullet train lite") service up to second-rate.   It was President Obama's Transportation Department that approved this loan, with the support of Amtrak supporter Joe Biden, our Vice President.  What happens if we get in 2017 a pro-business, anti-big-government President who decides we can't afford to lend money that Amtrak might take more than awhile to pay back?

Worse yet, what happens if Trump is elected President?      

High-speed rail in America?  I'll believe it when I see it, and as for the improvements Amtrak is borrowing money for, that goes double. 

To The Moon?

The Florida Republican presidential primary is today, and I'll be glad when it's over. Not because it'll bring an end to the sniping and snarling from Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for awhile - that's going to resume in time for Saturday's Nevada caucuses - but because after Florida, it'll be the last we hear of Newt Gingrich's cockamamie scheme to colonize the moon in eight years' time. He only proposed it in Florida because of all of the jobs there connected to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and even after that, he's still behind in the polls.

Gingrich's 2020 vision of a permanent lunar base is a relic from a time when Americans thought that they could accomplish anything if they banded together (and we did make it to the moon, of course), and when space exploration hinted at a future dramatically different from what existed in the 1950s and the 1960s. It was expected that one day we'd be driving around in flying cars, vacationing on Mars, and eating capsules instead of real food. The only thing that came true is that we don't eat real food anymore.

A permanent lunar base, once entertained by both the Americans and the Soviet-era Russians, is a spectacularly bad idea, because it diverts resources toward establishing an unnecessary habitation project and away from doing things like trying to house people and fight poverty here on earth. I understand that Gingrich is suggesting a scientific base like the one at the South Pole, not a Tomorrowland-style city, but if the goal is to expand knowledge of the sciences, we can do it more efficiently with robotic vehicles on the moon, like the ones we sent to Mars in the nineties.

It's easy to understand Gingrich's obsession with a lunar base, since his politics and policy proposals border on megalomania. Harder to understand is Neil deGrasse Tyson's interest in the proposal. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and he's actually enthusiastic about the idea. His objection to Gingrich's proposal is not to the idea itself but to Gingrich's failure to explain how to do it or why to do it. But Tyson thinks it would be wonderful if we had such an ambitious project like a lunar base that would encourage young people to engage in and study the sciences (and a lunar base would necessitate study of biology, chemistry, physics - pretty much the complete works).  Never mind that it's impractical. He laments that we haven't done anything like that in nearly forty years.

Hmm . . . forty years . . . the early seventies. So, what happened in the early seventies that changed our big-picture outlook? How about the Arab oil embargo? The sudden shortage of oil that resulted from American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War reminded us that limits exist not only in the mind but in the real world. Once we had trouble running our tech-happy civilization on earth, colonizing the moon or Mars and trying to begin a new civilization elsewhere seemed pretty silly. True, we did get some amazing technological breakthroughs from NASA's space exploration programs, such as the Internet and ready-mix foodstuffs, and I am grateful for a computer network that has allowed me to write this blog, but why should I care about Tang?

Besides, the space race with the now-defunct Soviet Union was an extension of the lamebrained Cold War psychosis that led both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to spend lots of money to demonstrate whose economic system was better. When the Cold War ended, it turned out that neither side won. Both the U.S. and post-Soviet Russia were flat broke.

If we're going to have a massive technological project to expand our capabilities and grow our economy, I'd obviously prefer that we focus on something that can give us real value. I'd prefer we focus on building a national high-speed rail network - and build one that's accessible to everyone by 2020, not build one that's accessible to four out of five Americans by 2035, as President Obama's pathetic piecemeal approach would do. The only problem is that even Obama's modest plan has been repeatedly attacked as a government boondoggle (and Florida's own attempts to build high-speed rail lines keep getting canceled by Republican governors), so if Obama proposed something bolder and more dramatic, opposition to such a program might be even more hostile. And no one seems to be interpreting Newt's moon plans as anything other than the boondoggle it is. Romney has said if he ran a company that did business with NASA and someone came to him with that idea, he'd fire him. Good for him.

But Romney - no big thinker - would as President probably fire a Transportation Secretary who proposed a national high-speed rail network as well.

Corridor Concerns

With the governors of Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida - three governors who, incidentally, could all be fighting for their political lives will before they're up for re-election in 2014 - having canceled high-speed rail projects in their states, Congress is likely to do the same for the nation at large. President Obama's attempt to make high-speed passenger rail accessible to 80 percent of all Americans by 2035 could be a casualty of the budget-cutting attempts on Capitol Hill. But - and this is an important "but" - that doesn't mean high-speed rail in America is about to be abandoned completely. And I'm not talking about Illinois's "high-speed" Chicago-St. Louis corridor, which will feature six train sets that travel at 110 miles an hour (you call that fast?) or California's bullet train project, with a projected cost off $100 billion that could be hard to sustain economically and politically.

I'm actually talking about the Northeast Corridor. (Yes, we in the Northeast have the Acela, but at 150 mph it hardly compares to the even faster trains enjoyed in France and Germany.) As a Florida Republican, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman John Mica hardly sounds like an ally of high-speed rail, given the fact that both his governor and his party have said no to it. But Mica not only supports high-speed rail, he thinks that the only way to ensure its success nationwide - even in increasingly crowded California - is to first build it where it's going to get the most use and be most appreciated. For Mica, that means the line between Boston and Washington by way of New York.

"While I want to give California every chance and opportunity to be successful," Mica told a conference of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association in New York on November 8, "I think we have to redirect our efforts to having at least one success in high-speed rail in the nation. And that high-speed rail success needs to be here in the Northeast Corridor."

Mica also reversed himself on privatizing Amtrak. Some Republicans have suggested that privatizing the national passenger railroad and making it susceptible to market forces would encourage high-speed rail to be developed faster. However, Mica, who once agreed with the idea, now rejects the idea, believing that Amtrak is now willing to work with Congress to make something happen.

Meanwhile, Congress is also ready to allocate $15 million as a down payment for engineering work on the proposed Gateway tunnel to connect Secaucus, New Jersey with Penn Station (someday to be named Moynihan Station, after the late U.S. Senator from New York) in Midtown Manhattan. The project looks to be less expensive than the proposed Access to the Region's Core tunnel that New Jersey governor Chris Christie canceled for being too costly, and it will allow thirteen extra New Jersey Transit trains and eight extra Amtrak trains into New York when it is completed in 2020 or 2021. Christie is more receptive to this plan.

As a passenger rail advocate, you take your victories where you can find them . . ..

I Occupied Wall Street

I finally did it.  I went to the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Lower Manhattan today.  I was in town for a stamp show, and in the interest of killing two birds with one stone (metaphorically, of course - I'm an animal rights supporter), I went down to Zuccotti Park to join the protest.  That's right, I didn't go to take pictures, I went to lend my voice to the protests.  I even walked around carrying a sign.

While other demonstrators went around carrying signs decrying the war, corporate greed, and the lack of jobs, I carried around a homemade sign saying, "Save AMTRAK!"  Because, you must understand, Amtrak faces a possible sixty percent cut in funding by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which could be seen as a grudge against President Obama and his oft-thwarted plans for high-speed rail, but is actually the latest in a series of attempts by Republicans to gut and liquidate the national passenger railroad.  Republicans, of course, don't like any public amenity that serves the greater good - in this case, moving people efficiently - but does not make a profit. Obama wants high-speed passenger rail, but he's dealing with Republicans on Capitol Hill who mostly don't want passenger rail at any speed.    

My sign provoked interest, and  I even got a couple of people to ask about it. I explained Amtrak's situation to them, and I convinced them quite easily that a strong Amtrak would provide more jobs to Americans and help more people travel, as well as benefiting the public realm.  As I see it, it all ties in with the demonstrations against the consolidation of power and money by private interests.

I was surprised at how small Zuccotti Park was, because television footage always seems to make it look larger. It was supposed to have been cleared yesterday for a power washing that has since been postponed.  Ironically, the last time I had been on this block was four years ago, when I was at the plaza across Broadway from the park four years ago where Isamu Noguchi's sculpture Red Cube stands, and . . . the plaza around the sculpture was being power washed.

Zuccotti Park was jammed full of protesters, though, so it was not exactly a small group of embittered misfits. These people were workers, hipsters, young professionals, and ordinary people like myself demonstrating against the growing power of corporations and making it clear that we've had enough. (There was even a theater group performing, appropriately enough, Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot.)   As for my pet cause . . .  Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992 promising to modernize Amtrak but the Republicans took over the House of Representatives two years later and tried to kill it.  So I've seen this movie before . . . and I don't want to see it again.

I stayed for about twenty minutes, taking in the protests and the sloganeering, but I had to move on, as my time in New York was limited.  I think I got enough people to see my sign and think about how Amtrak is linked to their idea of a better America.  I think I made my point.

And I may go back. :-)  

You Call This a Budget Deal?

Planned Parenthood may have been spared from the budget deal worked out in Washington over the weekend, but the deal still chomps the royal prong.

The National Science Foundation got its research funding cut by $43 million. Pell college grants and AmeriCorps were spared, but education spending and social programs were cut overall by $5.5 billion. Health care took one of the biggest hits from the Republican House majority. Talking Points Memo lays out the ugly numbers: $1 billion in cuts to programs preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, $600 million in cuts to community health care centers, and $78 million in research on controlling health care costs. (That's one cut I happen to agree with. How do you control health care costs? Here's the answer for free: Establish single-payer public medical insurance.) The GOP gleefully went after a provision of the health care law, eliminating entirely funding for health co-ops created by the law.

Funding for the Environmental Protection Agency was reduced by 16 percent, along with a $49 million cut to climate change programs and $149 million reduction in the budget of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And, I also understand, grey wolves been taken off the endangered species list, allowing states to make lots of money to issue hunting licenses for them and allowing the feds not to spend money protecting them.

And then there is high-speed rail funding. While federal spending on high-speed rail from now until September 30 has been eliminated and $400 million of the funding appropriated for the program in the 2010 fiscal year has been rescinded, the Federal Railroad Commission has sought to soothe fears of rail advocates by saying that $2.5 billion appropriated by Congress for Fiscal Year 2010 means that there is now $2 billion in high-speed rail funding available, down from the $2.4 billion previously available because of the previously mentioned rescission of $400 million, with $100 million apparently already spent.

So, it turns out, we were actually kind of lucky.

Did everything get cut? No - military spending is up by $5 billion!

No two ways about it: This deal sucks. It does nothing to ensure the social well-being of the country and it does not spread the sacrifice fairly. The military spending increase, in case you haven't noticed - and you probably haven't - is only $500 million less than the education, health and labor cuts!

If I were in Congress, I'd vote against it.

Budget Deals and Other Things

Funding for the Environmental Protection Agency has been saved in the latest federal budget deal. So has funding for Planned Parenthood. And apparently, I can now report, the National Endowment for the Arts. But President Obama realizes that he needs to come up with new cuts going forward in preparing the 2012 federal budget, and so he plans to propose cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. In ticking off the Democrats, he hopes that these cuts will make defense spending cuts and upper-income tax increases more acceptable to the Republicans.

Sure, when hell freezes over.

The spending cuts we're likely to get will continue, as they have for thirty years, to affect mostly the poor and the middle class. We'll be seeing more tax cuts for the rich and more programs and amenities wiped out. Far from heralding a golden progressive age, Obama's presidency looks to be the final act in destroying the amenities and services that make a country worth living in.

By the way, I saw the Johnny Depp-Angelina Jolie movie The Tourist yesterday, and I particularly took note of the high-speed train scene where their characters first meet. I grew envious of the sleek passenger cars, the comfortable seating, the elegant dining car . . . and, of course, wanted to blurt out, "Why can't we have this in America?"

Because the people in charge of America are in no mood to provide decent public services for its citizens, especially anything that reeks of too much "government spending" and "socialized medicine" or "socialized transport."

For more than twenty years now, I've always voted in favor of my own economic interests, particularly my interest in seeing better schools, modern intercity passenger rail, and, of course, single-payer health insurance. (Like Ed Schultz, I'm a single-payer guy.) Not all of the candidates I vote for win elections, but who cares if they do? Because no matter whom I vote for, no matter who wins, I lose!

And as far as I'm concerned, I think the game is almost over. That's when everybody loses. Except the rich, of course.

Although, when I think about it, maybe high-speed trains are an imperfect fit for America. The Tourist showed a high-speed train - the same kind of train President Obama hoped to get built in Ohio before John Kasich intervened - from Paris to Venice. Somehow, the idea of such a sleek, elegant train connecting Cleveland to Cincinnati - by way of Columbus - seems laughable.

Euro Envy

Conservatives have continuously tried to figure out why liberals could possibly want to sink money into projects like bullet trains. What could be the reason for wanting to build high-speed rail in an car-crazed culture like ours?

Is it because trains would be more cost-efficient? Well, conservatives like to present statistics that, to them, clearly contradict the idea that trains cost less in the long run. As David Weigel reported in Slate.com, conservatives like to point out that Amtrak received, for example, $2.2 billion in federal subsidies in 2010 and carried 28.7 million people, at about 13 cents per passenger, with some annual cost estimates pegged closer to 30 cents. Highways got $42 billion in funds in the 2010 fiscal year with many more people using them, for a cost at 1 to 4 cents per driver. The estimate puts costs at between 1 cent and 4 cents per driver. Weigel points out, though, that Amtrak riders bear more of the burden for the railroad's costs, with 62 percent of Amtrak's operating expenses coming from fares, with the motorists bearing less than 50 percent of the burden of the cost of highways through gas taxes and tolls.

Conservatives also cite the cost overruns of building the lines, with transportation consultant Wendell Cox estimating that the canceled Florida high-speed project would run over budget at a cost of up to $2.7 billion with taxpayers bearing the burden. In canceling the Ohio rail project, Governor John Kasich cited a $12 billion difference between the construction costs and the operating costs that he said would be made up in new taxes, because it was unrealistic to expect enough riders to cover enough of the gap. Then conservatives have to deal with the reality that rail transit lines, when offered, build up a sustained ridership over time. While they may never make money, neither do police departments; like the police, mass transit is a social good. Amtrak ridership, by the way, was at an all-time high in 2008, dropping somewhat the following year in part, no doubt, due to the recession.

Nevertheless, despite the obvious reasons why liberals support high-speed rail, the right keeps believing that trains are a wasteful boondoggle. What's the right's explanation, then, for why liberals want a high-speed rail network for the United States? George Will, of course, suggested that liberals are assaulting the personal freedom offered by automobiles by forcing people to take mass transit and follow timetables around which to plan their personal lives. But Wendell Cox sees a different reason . . ..

"A lot of this has to do with Euro-envy," he says. "People like to talk about how much better Europe is . . .. The fact is that we live in a dispersed society, and there's no set of circumstances where people are going to leave cars and take rail transportation."

"Euro-envy?"

Okay. You got me. I'm envious of French, German, and Spanish citizens who can travel through their countries at over 200 miles an hour without any of the bother or inconvenience of driving to a city and finding a place to park once they get there. I'm jealous that they can relax and enjoy the trip instead of getting caught in traffic jams while we toodle along on a passenger rail system that is archaic, underfunded, and threadbare. There - I've said it - I envy Europeans!

But hey, why stop there? I envy the Brits for having a multitude of public radio stations at a time when Republicans want to shut down NPR! I'm jealous of their single-payer public medical insurance while we labor under a health care "reform" law that makes us buy insurance from private companies without a public option! I'm jealous of the fact that French kids know more about philosophy than American kids know about geography! I envy all the gun restrictions in the U.K. that make the seediest parts of London safer than the nicest neighborhoods in New York! I'm jealous of the Europeans's lower infant mortality rates and their lower incarceration rates! I envy the fact that the Germans have three times as much vacation time as we Americans! Do I have a bad case of Euro envy?? You better believe it!!

By the way, I have to clarify something I said last week about the BBC's music radio stations; yes, there are five of them, but two of them broadcast on digital audio broadcasting, which cannot be received with an ordinary radio. Digital audio broadcasting (DAB), a high-quality broadcasting system, has been used and tested in several countries, and it was introduced in Britain in 1990. The British achieved 65 percent coverage of listeners with DAB by 1997, and a majority of broadcasters were using it as of 2006. And here in the United States? We have high-definition radio, which is less technologically sophisticated and less widely available than DAB in Britain.

Yes. I'm jealous.

Stinking

Lowell Weicker, the last Republican (unless I'm supposed to count Joe Lieberman) that Connecticut would ever send to the Senate, found himself embarrassed at having to defend the misogynistic planks of the 1984 Republican national platform to the media. "It's a pain in the ass to explain," then-Senator Weicker admitted. "No Equal Rights Amendment, no exceptions for rape or incest [with regard to abortion] . . .. On women's issues, it's a stinkeroo."

The smell of that platform would pale in comparison to the foul stench emanating from Republican efforts in the U.S. House of Representatives to cut Planned Parenthood funding, out of distaste for the organization's association with abortion. The argument from the Grand Old Patriarchs that federal funds for Planned Parenthood encourages abortion is intellectually dishonest. Under the Hyde Amendment, named for the late pro-life Illinois congressman Henry Hyde, there is no federal funding of abortion under any circumstances. (So what's this "No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act" about?) But Planned Parenthood provides various health services for women who would have a hard time finding other clinics offering such services - vital services like Pap smears and breast examinations, among other things, as well as advice on contraception. The haughty, self-righteous denunciation of Planned Parenthood by Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) as a place where babies are "exterminated" and where abortion is taken lightly drew a sharp, courageous, and emotional response from Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) about the abortion she once had to have to save her life despite her deep misgivings about the procedure.

"I lost a baby," Speier said while admonishing Republicans for graphically describing abortion. "But for you to stand on this floor and to suggest, as you have, that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous."

The Republican majority was unmoved. They voted to cut off Planned Parenthood funding, with a vote of 240-185.

But that's not the only fetid business from all this budget cutting. The House has also voted to end funding for public broadcasting (more on that later), ban the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, and block funding for the health care law. Might makes right, don't it? :-O It also causes a horrid smell.

Did the House vote to defund everything in their quest for $61 billion of cuts? No - it voted to continue Army sponsorships of the National Association of Stock Car Automobile Racing.

But - on the bright side - the House rejected funding for a General Electric engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane, which the Pentagon doesn't want because it's satisfied with the Pratt and Whitney engine the F-35 also uses. One Republican attempted to keep funding for the GE engine to preserve jobs at a GE plant in his home state, despite his own opposition to wasteful government spending, but failed. The Republican in question is Speaker Boehner. (Aside: There is a God!)

Few if any of these cuts will pass the smell test in the Democratic Senate, which has vowed to restore them. (I have no idea how the F-35 cut will be received in the Senate.) Meanwhile, Florida's senior senator, Democrat Bill Nelson, hopes to do an end run around Florida governor Rick Scott's stinky decision to kill the Tampa-Orlando high-speed rail line. Nelson has insisted that most of the money to pay for it comes from the federal government, and that Floridians themselves would have to pay little to get the train up and running. A metropolitan planning organization in Tampa and a rail authority in southern Florida, Nelson told his constituents, have volunteered to step forward in place of the state to accept oversight of the project and the federal funds, with lawyers researching how to achieve it. To that effect, Nelson has met with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to keep the project afloat.

Nelson - who's vulnerable in his bid for re-election next year - cites the number of jobs this rail project will create and how much economic activity it will bring to Florida. Talk about creating jobs obviously registers with voters these days, and so Nelson is trying to define the high-speed rail line in those terms. There's only one problem. Because it would take awhile for the Tampa-Orlando high-speed trains to actually start running, Nelson has to talk in future tense.

People want jobs now.

That's a bad situation . . . and it stinks.

Railroaded

When the incoming governors of Ohio and Wisconsin refused federal money for high-speed rail projects citing potentially heavy operating costs and, in Wisconsin at least, a preference for highway improvements, I thought to myself that at least there was still Florida. Not . . . any . . . more. Yesterday, the Sunshine State's new governor, noted Medicare ripoff artist Rick Scott, canceled the proposed Tampa-Orlando high-speed rail line that was announced with such great fanfare only a year ago, insisting that Florida can't afford it. (This, by the way, comes on top of his decision not to implement the new health care law until and unless its constitutionality is settled once and for all.) What do high-profile Florida politicians who support the rail line think? Who cares, most of them lost at the ballot box in November.

The governors of these three states are all Republicans, raising the obvious point that the Grand Old Party has an utter disregard for any sort of mass transit projects. (Florida's earlier attempt at high-speed rail was canceled by Republican governor Jeb Bush.) But it's become obvious that incompetence with passenger rail is an American, not a partisan, phenomenon, and that we're no better at it than we are at stopping gun violence in our cities and schools, educating our children, or dealing with climate change. Consider Illinois. As soon as Scott canceled Florida's high-speed rail project, Richard Durbin, Illinois's senior senator and the Democratic whip in the U.S. Senate, wrote to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a fellow Illinoisian and a Republican, requesting that money intended for the Florida project go to the Prairie State's high-speed rail project.

How fast will Illinois's passenger trains go? 110 miles an hour.

Wow, how cutting edge is that? Not very. Florida's Tampa-Orlando line would have had trains going twice as fast, and trains in France and Japan already run at such speeds. California's high-speed rail project is so far the only one still on track (no pun intended) that's designed for speeds taken for granted in those countries and in others. Even Amtrak's Acela has a top speed of 150 miles an hour, though it rarely reaches it and never actually sustains it.

I give up. If I want to ride a bullet train, I'll have to wait until I go overseas, which is as likely as Scott changing his mind on the rail issue. But even if there were genuine high-speed rail in this country, it begs the obvious question: Where would I ride such a train to? I can't afford to travel anywhere these days. And quite frankly, the lack of a high-speed train between Tampa and Orlando doesn't concern me. I'd rather be in hell than in Orlando . . .. Wait! Orlando and hell are one and the same! :-p

Kaputnik Moment

I found proposals for the 2012 federal budget - particularly cuts in federal spending for home heating assistance for the poor and Pell grants for college students - to be appalling. I wouldn't have been so appalled by the cuts if they had been proposed by the Republicans; given their history of budget priorities, that would be expected of them. But these proposed cuts came from the White House's $3.7 trillion budget blueprint!

You know, when I voted for Obama in 2008, I thought I was voting for a Democrat. Now I know how all those budget hawks who supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 felt when they were thought they were voting for a conservative.

President Obama did try to appease his base with increases in education spending as well as increased spending on high-speed rail projects and alternative energy, but the attempt to trim the deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade by freezing various spending programs at current levels without reforming social programs like Medicare hasn't impressed anyone. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) finds the plan too timid, as does House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). And Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell couldn't resist a jab at Obama's plans for spending money on rail transit and clean energy as money for "trains and windmills," as if they were toys. In McConnell's home state of Kentucky, where almost no one uses any kind of public transit and where the economy depends on coal mining, trains and windmills probably are thought of as toys.

Yes, yes, you say, Obama's domestic spending cuts are all too bad, but he has to prioritize his own goals and make concessions to the Republicans who control the House to get anything done. Yeah, how's that working out so far? I'd rather see Obama act like Harry Truman and fight the opposition to the bitter end, as Truman did against the Republican Eightieth Congress of 1947 and 1948. Chris Matthews suggested that possibility once, and Pat Buchanan replied with a stinging rejoinder. "Chris," Buchanan said of Obama, "do you see any of Harry Truman in this guy?"

Buchanan has a point. I don't even see any of Harry Reid in this guy.

So, we won't get much in the way of high-speed rail spending, we won't get any clean energy programs, and we'll get even more draconian domestic spending cuts when the negotiations are completed between the White House and Congress and the smoke clears.

Three weeks ago, Obama spoke of a Sputnik moment. This budget is our Kaputnik moment.

In that spirit, to sum up our national predicament, I present a video clip of the failed Vanguard TV3 "Kaputnik" satellite launch of December 6, 1957.

All Aboard The Train

We passenger rail advocates had a very good day yesterday. I don't know if we'll have many good days ahead, but yesterday was a very good day because of the announcement of two major rail projects involving the Northeast.

First, an alternative idea has been announced in the effort to build a new rail tunnel between New York City and New Jersey. Amtrak is planning to build a $13.5 billion tunnel that will connect New Jersey to Penn Station in Manhattan and will mostly follow the route of the tunnel canceled by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, but it will involve more of a federal role and will spare New Jersey taxpayers any cost overruns. And, it will connect Amtrak and NJ Transit's trains with other lines rather than end a block or two away under Macy's. This is actually not a new idea, as it is a revised version of a 1999 proposal to build two tunnels from New Jersey, one connecting with Grand Central Terminal and the other connecting to Penn Station. The Grand Central proposal was abandoned in 2003 due to infighting between NJ Transit and its commuter rail counterparts serving New York and Connecticut over sharing Grand Central access.

The tunnel that will now be built was originally scuttled in favor of the Access to the Region's Core (ARC) tunnel killed by Governor Christie. As Paul Mulshine reported in the Newark Star-Ledger, the ARC plan "pleased no one except the NJ Transit executives and the contractors who would have gotten the work." Connectivity was a major complaint among the ARC tunnel's critics, because it led to a separate station near Macy's and was derided as the "tunnel to Macy's basement." Christie probably looks like a hero now, having canceled the ARC tunnel and forced the pursuit of a more cost-effective alternative. He's in favor of the Amtrak plan.

Speaking of Amtrak, here's the other big story. Vice President Joe Biden went to Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia to announce that the Obama administration will press for a re-authorization of the federal Surface Transportation Program with an expanded mission that includes high-speed intercity rail, committing the government to a $53 billion, six-year plan to get such a system started. It looks like this country is finally prepared to commit itself to modernizing passenger rail before the end of this decade, not unlike the commitment to the moon landing project of the 1960s. But Republicans in Congress are still wary of more government spending, and some anti-rail politicians are convinced that our primary transportation focus must be on highways. Commitment from the executive branch to a national goal doesn't guarantee success. If you disagree, I have a national health insurance card from the Clinton years I'd like to show you.

I want to believe this is for real this time. Biden seems to. But online readers of newspapers like the Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, which was the primary source for this blog entry, not only don't believe it, they don't want it. The arguments are the same - it will bankrupt the country, it will lead to higher taxes, it's an expensive toy - and they don't take into account the massive government subsidies given to aviation and highways. I hope this project gets under way soon. Because the Northeast Corridor Acela train, while sleek and comfortable, averages 60 to 80 mph between Boston and Washington despite its 150-mph top speed . . . and trains in other countries go faster than that.

It was a new day yesterday for American passenger rail advocates, but it may be an old day soon if not much happens.

More High-Speed Hijinks

I found the smoking gun on the real reason so many Republicans not only oppose subsidies for high-speed rail, but any funding for conventional passenger rail. It's been smoking for two years, but it's still hot. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, rhetorically asked in 2009, "Why should we subsidize an industry that will directly compete with the automobile industry, which is so critical to our area?" Ohio depends largely on auto-related jobs. So getting Amtrak is not about wasteful spending, it's not about government mandates, and it's not even about government control of mobility - Amtrak, as Paul Fussell noted in 1991, "does, after all, cut into the very profitable business of selling cars."

Airlines used to oppose subsidies for Amtrak because it cut into the similarly profitable business of selling plane tickets, but more and more airlines support Amtrak as a transportation alternative to clear the skies of so many airplanes, the congestion from which is making air travel more uncomfortable than it already is. But even the real reason for killing Amtrak, as expressed by Representative Jordan, doesn't hold water. President Obama is committed to a diverse transportation sector that includes railroads, aviation, and highways, and in that spirit he bailed out two domestic car companies to save the very jobs Jordan says a fully funded national passenger railroad would destroy. Jordan displays obvious ignorance of Germany, the country that invented the superhighway, with its well-maintained autobahns and its quality public transportation, including the InterCity Express (ICE) high-speed rail system.

In the new Republican House, congressmen who are actually more responsible for this issue are more sympathetic to Obama's long-term plan to put high-speed rail within reach of 80 percent of Americans by 2035. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee John Mica (R-FL) and Representative Bill Shuster (R-PA), who oversees a subcommittee devoted to railroads, endorse Obama's plan provided it includes private funds and focuses on only a couple of rail corridors. This would help by showing how effective high-speed rail can be in generating economic growth and improving the quality of life, encouraging other parts of the country to follow suit. But the bureaucratic hassles among state and local agencies that have to be navigated before any tracks can actually be set cause enough of a problem for high-speed rail advocates without the mostly Republican opposition.

I once noted that not all Republicans oppose modernizing our passenger rail system. It's only too bad that most of those who support it aren't in Washington.

Thanksgiving Transit

On this day before Thanksgiving, the busiest traveling day of the year in America (so we're told), the body scanner boycott that was expected to snarl airports and flights pretty much didn't happen. Most people are comfortable with the searches because they understand the importance of keeping the skies safe. Except that I personally don't know if full body scanners - placed in airports by politically connected security firms - are the way to go.

The controversy over the scanners, though, has only magnified the need for more transportation alternatives to flying, and that includes more passenger trains. Terrorists can't hijack a train and run it into a building, and to respond to the inevitable point that they can still commandeer a train and take hostages, there would have to be a lot of al-Qaeda commados to take over all of the cars. True, they can set of bombs in a train or derail it. But apart from the Madrid train bombing in 2004, such incidents are rare.

Michael Moore, incidentally, traveled from Florida to New York on Amtrak recently on a trip that took more than a day at a distance of a thousand miles, and he noted that a high-speed train could travel across the continent - three times the distance - in half the time. The train Moore rode had sleeping accommodations that would have been considered primitive on the original transcontinental railroad, yet the train was packed with riders, indicating a customer base for trains that Ohio governor-elect John Kasich insists does not exist.

Contrary to popular wisdom, not all Republicans are against high-speed passenger rail. Incoming House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica of Florida has supported it (find more information on the Sunshine State's high-speed rail project here), and that noted lefty Trent Lott consistently supported bullet trains for Amtrak, not to mention the mere existence of Amtrak as well. I actually wrote a letter to Lott when he was a senator, in which I thanked him for his support for the national passenger railroad.

Unfortunately, many Tea Partiers and Tea Party sympathizers have to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting a public works project many see as government intervention with and control over our freedom of mobility. France and Germany have enjoyed this cutting-edge rail service for years, and China has already started to build its own high-speed rail network. Japan inaugurated its bullet trains in October 1964 - the month my parents got married, to give you a personal perspective - in time for the Tokyo Olympics. Eurostar bullet trains link Britain with the continent through the Channel Tunnel. Meanwhile, we can't even build a commuter tunnel under the Hudson River. But with Florida and now Illinois gearing up to build trains that can outrun the Acela, we may soon have some rail projects with tangible results to demonstrate just how vital bullet trains can be for America.

Until then, consider yourself lucky if you at least have driving as a viable alternative to flying. Just watch out for those toll booths. Happy Thanksgiving.

More Derailings

If you're an American fan of passenger rail, it must feel like being an Irishman who likes erotic art; there's not much in your own homeland for you to appreciate. And thanks to two incoming Republican governors in the Midwest, there's going to be a whole lot less for rail fans in the United States to cheer about.

In Wisconsin, incoming Republican governor Scott Walker says he plans to refuse federal transportation money specifically meant for high-speed rail. Walker insisted that Wisconsin needs more money to fix existing roads and bridges, not build more railways. Walker plans to refuse $810 million for such a project, citing the burden between $7.5 million and $15 million it would place on taxpayers to pay for operating expenses. Walker sounds reasonable, though, in comparison to former congressman John Kasich, the governor-elect of Ohio. Kasich, who's also refusing federal rail money, also cited hard numbers - $17 million in taxes to pay for more than half of the $29 million cost of operating it - but added, "We don’t have any idea who would even ride the train. This is just the federal government wanting to spend money, and they've got it all wrong."

Kasich doesn't "have any idea who would even ride the train?" How about people who need to travel to Columbus from Cleveland or Cincinnati - or travel across Ohio - who don't want to put up with driving on Interstate 71 because it's too much of a hassle? How about people who want to take the train to transfer to an Amtrak train to take them to New York or Chicago? Mr. Kasich, do you have any idea about the cleaner air, less congested highways, and new jobs high-speed rail in Ohio would generate? Or how much more cost-effective it would by than more highway construction? Do you have any idea at all? About anything?

Kasich, a budget expert and former Wall Street executive, knows his numbers. But, like any other number cruncher, he knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Walker and Kasich would have gladly taken stimulus money for more highways, but Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican, put his foot down. Trains or nothing. And nothing is what the residents of those two states are going to get. One Midwestern governor, Pat Quinn of Illinois, is happy to see his counterparts in Wisconsin and Ohio refuse the railroad money. Quinn, a Democrat who was just elected to a term in his own right after completing the infamous Rod Blagojevich's second term, is eager to get more money fort his state's high-speed passenger train program, and Illinois's senior senator, Richard Durbin, has said his state will be happy to take the money Wisconsin and Ohio don't want. LaHood, also from Illinois, might be happy to oblige.

It's enough to make me want to move to Chicago. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie has killed the proposed passenger rail tunnel to Manhattan. And as if that weren't bad enough, negotiations between NJ Transit and Amtrak on a shared rail tunnel to New York City have broken down.

So, apparently, has common sense.

Transport Is a No-Go?

President Obama just came out with a wonderful idea on how to create more jobs and get the economy moving, the very sort of idea Chris Matthews has been calling for on MSNBC - spend more money on transportation infrastructure, creating what Matthews calls "the smell of construction." Obama wants to spend $50 billion on upgrading America's passenger rail network, highways, and airport runways and pay for it by closing tax loopholes. Now who could possibly be against spending money to create more job and improve America's transportation network?

Oh, right. . . .

John Boehner, of course, has slammed the proposal as more government spending that does nothing to stimulate the private sector - except provide contracting opportunities for the privately owned companies that would actually build all this stuff, though you won't hear Boehner admit that. The right-wing New York Post, on its front page today, lampooned Obama as a pothole President as dismissed his latest proposal as another government spending spree.

You know, back when Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991, Republicans were against a lot of items in that law. Many congressional Republicans were opposed to more mass transit spending, and President George Bush did not want to commit a lot of money to Amtrak. They were for more spending on highways. They argued in favor of more highway spending to allow Americans the ability to travel where they wanted and when they wanted by car. Of course, people mostly use they cars to get to places they have to go to - like work. But at least in 1991, Republicans were at least for something, not simply saying no to the Democratic congressional majority of the time. Now they don't even want to spend more money on highways, and they don't want to spend more money on aviation either.

What's going to happen when Interstate 75, which runs through Boehner's district, starts falling apart? What would be wrong with the proposed high-speed rail line that would serve the Cincinnati area, where Boehner is from, adding more jobs to his district? Boehner apparently wants to become Speaker of the House first before he answers those questions.