A Powerful Argument for U.S. High-Speed Rail

[marmar]

from the Infrastructurist:





A few weeks ago Ryan Avent laid out an extremely thoughtful position on the state of American high-speed rail. All serious followers of this ongoing discussion, of which this site has many, will want to read it in full. For the rest, my summary will have to suffice.

Avent’s strongest point is that high-speed rail investments are held to a different standard than other transportation projects. The first response to a proposed rail project these days is that it’s too expensive and won’t pay for itself. But if economic efficiency is the ultimate goal, then all types of transportation should have to pay for their infrastructure. That means drivers should cover the cost of road maintenance and construction (which they don’t), and that means raising the gas tax (which we won’t).

In addition to keeping our roads cost efficient, we’d also want them to be travel efficient. To Avent, that means establishing congestion pricing. To others, it might mean HOT lanes. Regardless of its precise form, achieving travel efficiency means paying more money so that highway traffic can continue to flow at a steady pace.

Making these two simple adjustments would dramatically alter the cost of driving. Yet the adjustments shouldn’t seem at all unreasonable to high-speed rail critics; in fact, they ask the exact same thing of bullet trains: to pay for themselves, and to justify their high ticket cost with steady flow. Simply put, we ask our rail projects to achieve a higher standard than our road projects. As Avent writes:

What do we think would happen in a world — demanded by those who take economic efficiency seriously — in which drivers pay significantly more to travel from one end of the corridor to the other? Run the models on that, and the calculus in favor of HSR looks quite compelling.

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The complete piece is at: http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/01/06/a-powerful-argument-for-us-high-speed-rail/