LA Times: Put CA First In Line for HSR Stimulus Funds

There seems to be a growing consensus that when it comes to doling out federal HSR stimulus money, California should get the lion's share. Earlier this summer The Business Insider suggested CA get "all" the HSR funds, arguing that if the money was spread too thin, nothing would actually get built and we thus wouldn't have much to show for the stimulus spending, whereas giving it "all" to California would help produce an actual bullet train.

Now the state's largest newspaper has joined in the "give it to California" chorus, with this editorial in today's LA Times:

Last November, voters passed a bond measure(2008) approving $9.95 billion to fund a high-speed train line from San Diego to Sacramento. They couldn't have known it then, but the timing was fortuitous. Months later, as part of the stimulus package, Congress dedicated $8 billion to pay for high-speed rail projects across the country. California is the only state where voters have already approved funding for a bullet train, and it has the most state-of-the-art proposal, with the most planning work completed, in the nation. Because the funding is meant to stimulate the economy as quickly as possible, officials at the Federal Railroad Administration are expected to give priority to applicants that can start hammering rail spikes soon. So when the California High-Speed Rail Authority submitted its application on Friday, it had powerful arguments on its side.

First off, I am really pleased to see the Times connecting the Yes vote on Prop 1A to economic stimulus. This blog repeatedly framed Prop 1A in precisely those terms last fall, and it is one of the chief reasons for building high speed rail. While we can and should debate the best way to build that train, we cannot let ourselves forget the broader context - an economy in tatters, with even former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, chief architect of the wrecked economy, predicting 10% unemployment before much longer. California desperately needs jobs, and HSR is a damn good way to provide it.

The Times goes on:

The authority is applying for $4.7 billion of the $8-billion federal pot, yet there will be heavy political pressure to spread the money across a broad geographical region rather than giving so much to a single state. Even so, there are strong reasons to award California an outsized share.

It is undeniably parochial for The Times to argue that Washington should send tax money to California for a project that would boost the local economy. But nobody has to take our word that the Golden State should be first in line. In addition to the timing considerations, there is the important matter of ridership -- for the rail program to be successful, it should focus on projects that can move the most people. America 2050, a Washington-based public planning think tank, studied regions with the highest potential ridership for high-speed rail, ranking them by city pairs (routes between two cities). A line connecting New York and Washington was ranked the highest, but three of the top 10 city pairs would be connected by California's bullet train, including L.A. to San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose. If federal officials want the most bang for their stimulus buck, they should look west.

Actually, I don't think it is parochial at all. California is 1/10th of the nation's population, and is responsible for 13% of its GDP. We are a major part of the national, even the global economy. If California does not have an economic recovery, neither will the nation as a whole.

And one reason for California's crisis is, as the Observer noted in a long article today, a fatal dependence on sprawl. For California to have a truly lasting economy recovery, we will need to provide transportation solutions that encourage urban density, reduce dependence on oil, and provide a Green Dividend (economic growth through reallocation of money previously spent on oil).

In short, if the US is going to have economic growth in the coming decade, California must have growth and recovery. And if California is going to have growth and recovery, California needs to build high speed rail to reshape the way we move people around, and how we pay for doing so.

So if anything, the LA Times editorial, while generally excellent and welcome, is actually understating the case. California ought to expect to get much of the federal HSR stimulus - not just for our own sake, but for the nation's sake as well.

Spain's Transport Minister Makes Progressive Case for HSR

Although most Americans who know anything about high speed rail associate the trains primarily with France and Japan, it is Spain that has had some of the most dramatic success with high speed rail this decade. The AVE (Alta Velocidad Española) trains have attracted significant numbers of riders in a nation whose geography and population densities are quite similar to California, and operating profits from the existing lines have been plowed back into expansions of the system.

But there are bigger picture reasons to embrace HSR, as Spain's Minister of Transportation José Blanco López explains:

Someone could think that we, the political representatives in charge of looking after the public interests by assessing the opportunity costs of each choice, would be tempted to follow the easy path on those crucial crossroads. But this is not the case.

Maybe Spain, with the socialist party at the head of successive governments, is the best example of how a mindful combination of courageous decisions on difficult times, the power of a cabinet lead by egalitarian principles and the supportive effort of the taxpayers, can lead a country to new heights of economical and social progress.

Our high speed rail network reaches now several edges of the Iberian Peninsula, and connects some of the most important cities of Spain with the most sustainable transport mode and in a fast, safe and clean way: Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, Seville and Valencia at the end of 2010. Its next objectives will be Galicia, the north coast, Portugal and France.

The effort under way is so big that, by 2012, Spain’s HS network will be the longest one in service in Europe. And only eight years later, by 2020, another historic landmark will be achieved when more than 90% of the country’s total population will have a HS train station at less than 31 miles away.

Sure, López is selling the PSOE as a good steward of a tough economy, but he raises the key points in how we consider high speed rail. HSR opponents have not offered any explanation of how they will grow the economy and provide economic recovery to the people of California. Whereas we who support HSR have history on our side. We built the Golden Gate and SF-Oakland Bay bridges during the Depression. We built Boulder and Shasta Dams. We built the Central Valley Project and countless other key pieces of infrastructure during the worst economic downturn in history. That spending, far from hurting the economy or making the Depression worse, provided job growth in the short-term and provides jobs and savings to this very day.

López explains that in Spain they too have had to battle conservative Hooverites who opposed AVE expansion:

Spanish conservatives even raised doubts and sowed distrust about a high speed system which finally yielded priceless benefits to the whole society.

’Boondoggle‘, ’Loss-making whim‘, ‘Monument to bad territorial planning’… Shielded behind overly simple, short sighted cost-benefit analysis, critics complained with those arguments against high speed projects over years, until the success of each one of the new corridors proved them wrong and showed that in troubled economic times, the best investments for a society are the ones which improve equality. Today, like we did over the last 20 years, we have to express our conviction in a brilliant future for high speed rail in Spain, with the extension of the network to each edge of the country, building a multi-node web in which each city is a centre. A network which draws territories together and grants equal opportunities to each citizen, no matter where he lives. A network which ties us strongly to Europe.

Now more than ever, we have to look towards the future and we shouldn’t slow down our pace, because each new high speed line carried out will be at the same time a retaining wall against the economic crisis and a lever to get the society ready for the incoming recovery.

López's article is produced in conjunction with this week's Labour Party conference in Britain, where the current British governing party is hoping to use high speed rail as part of its strategy to stave off electoral catastrophe in the spring 2010 election. Julian Glover, writing in the Guardian, makes the case:

High-speed rail can be justified as green if we sort out non-fossil fuel electric power, but the case is really as much social and economic. The unspoken aim of British politics is to make all of Britain middle class, and the middle classes travel – and will do so more and more. It's best if they go by train. Faster journeys are a bonus; the gains are as much about reliability and capacity – good links between Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, as well as to London.

Transport routes north from the capital are full, or soon will be. England's great cities cannot enrich themselves in isolation and the harder it is to get between them, the poorer they will be. Rail investment is a progressive cause, if we don't want to see London as a sort of Singapore, a first world island isolated from – and perhaps one day refusing to fund – an impoverished hinterland.

We can say the same for California. High speed rail is essential to providing economic growth and prosperity to California in the 21st century. Driving and flying aren't going to be affordable for much longer, as the great gas price spike of 2008 showed. Since most jobs are going to be created in the urban centers, those who don't have the ability to live there, and other regions of the state, will be locked out of prosperity.

Those who oppose HSR are those who believe that the economic system of the latter half of the 20th century will persist forever, with a transportation system that hasn't evolved past 1985. They offer no arguments for how we will solve the gridlock on the freeways and the airports that would come with population growth, except presumably to spend twice as much money expanding those instead of building HSR. They offer no arguments for how we will wean California off of carbon emissions, to which transportation is a key contributor. They offer no real arguments at all about how California will generate jobs and economic opportunity - they just assume it will materialize out of thin air.

For the rest of us who have to live in the real world, we cannot put blind faith into a magical economic recovery based on a 20th century model whose failure has produced the present crisis. There is no reason for us to sit on our hands and refuse to follow the proven, successful model laid out by nations such as France and Spain, which have used high speed trains to provide sustainable economic growth and to try and battle a global recession.

And of course, Californians have already decided to reject the "lower your horizons and suffer" model being offered by HSR deniers. Californians knew what they were doing when they voted to build a high speed rail system in their state, and knew what they were doing when they voted to put Barack Obama in the White House, a president who understands the value of HSR and plans to fund it.

Still, we need to constantly remind ourselves and our fellow Californians of why we did that in November 2008, especially as the HSR deniers and those who would put small, parochial concerns over the needs of the state as a whole try and block HSR from getting built.

Labor Day Open Thread

In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, it's worth keeping in mind that HSR in California is projected to create 160,000 construction jobs and 450,000 permanent jobs. Even if you quibble with the numbers, it's worth considering that California desperately needs new jobs, and anything that can produce long-term sustainable growth and employment should be embraced. The current recession has reversed all the job gains of the 2000s - fewer people are employed in California in July 2009 than in January 2000, which is an even more worrisome stat when you consider that we have 3 million more people living here than we did at the beginning of the decade.

Job creation has to be one of the state's top priorities. The best kind of jobs program during a severe economic contraction is exactly what we did during the Great Depression - put people to work building long-term infrastructure. In the 1930s that meant dams and bridges. In the 2000s and 2010s that will mean, among other things, high speed rail.

This isn't going to be cheap. But does anyone have a better idea of how to create jobs? Or are we just going to give up and not try to produce economic recovery at all, just wallow in misery and refuse to undertake proven efforts to address the problem? Especially given that almost all observers expect unemployment to remain high for some time, it is vital that we use government to create as many jobs as possible. The up-front costs are sizable, but they will be repaid many times over during the rest of the century, and as I've repeatedly pointed out, it's a lot cheaper than doing nothing.

The New York Times' Second Punch on HSR

Yesterday we looked at Edward Glaeser's silly attack on HSR in the New York Times' Economix Blog. Today we have another attack on HSR in the New York Times - this time from Eric Morris at the Freakonomics Blog. Ryan Avent summed it up well via Twitter:

Eric Morris closes HSR series by referring readers to Randal O'Toole. You know, in case you thought he and Glaeser were aiming for an honest critique.

Sure enough:

Certainly neither Glaeser nor I pretend to have the last word on this topic. We are looking to start some debate, not finish it. So if you want to learn more on the pros of true HSR, check out the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s site, or this report for the views of an articulate critic, the Cato Institute’s Randall O’Toole.

Either Morris is joking or is even more in the tank against HSR than we ever thought. Randall O'Toole as a credible source on passenger trains?!?! This is the same guy who thinks riding a train is more harmful than driving an SUV and whose difficulties with facts and evidence has been well documented.

But it's not just the company Morris keeps that damns his blog post. Morris has a rather interesting justification for his work on HSR planning:

I have extensive experience planning, designing, constructing, financing, and operating HSR networks; these have spanned the nation and have been terrifically elegant, with state-of-the-art locomotive technology and thousands of miles of flat, straight track to keep speeds high.

However, those HSR systems were built from electricity, not steel. And while the HSR currently being proposed will cost tens of billions, the cost of my HSR network was comparatively modest: perhaps $30 in fixed costs for the purchase of the computer game Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon, plus negligible variable costs for the power to run my computer and depreciation on my mouse button. The sum total of the utility I experienced from this kind of HSR paid for those costs many times over.

That's like saying I can run a street gang because I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. How ridiculous do economics bloggers for the NYT not named Paul Krugman have to get before we stop taking them seriously?

The primary problem that afflicts Morris's attack on HSR is the exact same problem that afflicted Edward Glaeser's articles as well: they persistently refuse to examine HSR costs in context:

Costs in the real world are quite different. HSR is an exciting idea, and if we could make it appear by magic wand it’d be a terrific addition to our transportation network. But everything has a price, and the way things currently stand, the projected costs look like they outweigh the benefits. If the thought of some ominous budget numbers lurking on a piece of paper in far-off Washington doesn’t move you, consider the opportunity costs of this spending, in terms of health care, education, the economy, defense, or a (more effective) method of slowing global warming. Or if you want to keep the money in the realm of transportation, it could go to address what I consider to be the more serious problem we are facing: moving people around within our cities, not between them.

There are innumerable flaws with this analysis, which is actually the heart of Morris's post. Morris claims to speak of opportunity cost, but where is the estimate of how much it will take to expand roads and airports in California to handle the passenger loads that HSR will handle? Estimates for that range from $80 billion to $160 billion. But nobody aside from Morris Brown thinks California HSR will approach even the lower range of that estimate.

Morris appears to think that air travel will continue to remain cheap, plentiful and affordable. A kind of perpetual 2007. Last year we talked quite a bit about the airline crisis - how rising oil prices have jeopardized the easy air travel that we have come to expect here in the US. Airports in smaller cities have begun bribing airlines to maintain service, and cities like Fresno and Bakersfield have struggled to maintain the airline service they still have.

For Morris to basically ignore the problems of the airlines he has to ignore the all-important question of whether oil prices will remain at the same price they're at now. There is ample reason to believe they will not. Even during a severe recession gas costs at least $3/gal across most of California, the threshold that once crossed in 2006 helped burst the housing bubble. Once growth resumes, whenever that might be, oil prices are widely expected to rise again, especially considering the steady increase in global demand.

HSR is not the same as ongoing expenditures for health care or education. Like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Shasta Dam, it is a piece of infrastructure that enables economic activity to continue and grow well into the future. It enables health care and education spending to continue, rather than become strangled by gridlock.

And yes, Eric Morris, HSR will help intracity transportation just as it will provide intercity transportation. In California HSR will be used by commuters within regions just as it will be used by commuters between regions. The HSR route will serve as a transit spine for the state, with its key nodes (SF Transbay, SJ Diridon, LA Union Station) becoming the centerpieces of local rail. HSR is a rising tide that lifts all transportation boats.

Unfortunately, Morris is so in thrall to Randall O'Toole's anti-rail jihad that he won't stop to consider these aspects. Instead he uses the same arbitrarily limited and therefore insufficient scope to mislead readers about the true costs of projects. The Golden Gate Bridge might not have penciled out in the first 5 years from its opening in 1937, but hardly anyone today would argue the Bay Area is better off without it. 30 years from now, when Californians travel around their state on high speed trains, they too will wonder why anyone thought building it was anything but a sensible and farsighted idea.

Glaeser's Final HSR Attack - For Now

Edward Glaeser published the fourth and final entry in his anti-HSR series at the New York Times' Economix Blog. Glaeser suggests he will come back to the topic before long, to address the criticism of his flawed use of a Dallas-Houston HSR line (which, although being planned by Texas is not one of the current federal HSR corridors). In this entry, Glaeser chose to attack the argument that HSR would help spur greater urban density and limit sprawl:

A third possible benefit of rail is environmental. Can high-speed rail bring people closer to city centers and thereby reduce carbon emissions?

My work with Matthew Kahn on the greenness of cities suggests that each household that moves from Houston suburbs to the central city reduces carbon emissions and creates $164 of global-warming-related benefits each year. Each household that switches from suburb to city in Dallas creates $133 of benefits annually. Those benefits represent both reduced electricity usage (associated with smaller urban homes) and reduced driving.

But there is little evidence documenting that rail has strong positive effects on land use.

Glaeser, however, doesn't actually explain this supposed lack of evidence. His examples, MARTA in Atlanta and BART here in California, are limited. Glaeser says BART has had some positive effect on density, but "the effects are still modest." What Glaeser doesn't understand is that the Bay Area has a series of anti-density zoning rules in the most dense and favorable areas near BART stations - as anyone who's witnessed the battles in Berkeley over downtown development can tell you. Without those restrictions we might well have seen much more TOD along the BART corridor.

Of greater absurdity is Glaeser's lame attempt to argue that HSR wouldn't cause urban growth by looking at Eastern cities, making claims that are unsupported by the evidence:

Philadelphia is the more natural beneficiary of high-speed rail access to Manhattan; there are already people who live in Philadelphia and commute to New York. Yet even in this most propitious setting, the coming of Acela seems to have had little impact on the population decline of Philadelphia or growth of Wilmington. Perhaps the absence of any trend break in population growth around 2000 just reflects the incremental nature of the Acela investment, but there is little here to bring confidence that rail lines revitalize cities.

Ryan Avent continues his thorough demolition of Glaeser's arguments, including a refutation of the above nonsense:

Meanwhile, the blithe use of population change in Philadelphia as a proxy for economic benefit is a little silly. For one thing, it would seem to ignore actual trends. Since 2000, the rate of population decline in the city of Philadelphia has sharply diminished.

From 2000 to 2001, the city's population declined by 15,000. From 2003 to 2004, by contrast, population fell by just over 7,000. And from 2007 to 2008, Philadelphia lost a mere 1,200 people.

Just using Glaeser's fly-by-night statistical methods, it seems as though the introduction of the Acela has in fact materially slowed population decline in Philadelphia. And obviously there are other variables which show that Philadelphia has enjoyed a serious economic rebound over the last decade.

The rest of Avent's post is worth reading in its entirety. Avent closes with a point that is worth remembering for the inevitable moments when we see Glaeser's work repeated:

Glaeser seems to believe that in coming decades congestion costs will cease rising; otherwise he'd build future increases into his model. He seems to think that the addition of over 100 million new Americans need not lead to any new infrastructure investment; otherwise he'd compare the economic benefits and life-cycle emissions of rail investments to alternative investment plans.

I think those beliefs are daft and indefensible. And four posts into his high-speed rail series, Glaeser hasn't given any of us reason to think that his analysis is worth taking seriously.

And that is the core problem with Glaeser's approach. He didn't consider the alternative costs, including the cost of doing nothing. He did not assess the benefits of the jobs HSR will create, or the role of the trains in creating new transportation patterns that can enable new kinds of economic growth over many decades. Glaeser's posts consistently and arbitrarily used a set of factors that gave readers a limited and incomplete sense of how HSR will actually play out in context. It would be nice if the NYT would give space to someone like Ryan Avent who can explain the benefits of HSR with respect to the evidence. Apparently that's too much to ask.

Squeaky Wheels

This blog has paid a lot of attention to the debate over high speed rail on the Peninsula here in 2009. So much so that I'm sure folks sometimes wonder whether this is actually the Peninsula HSR blog or whether Clem's is. (In case anyone was wondering - Clem's blog is still the best place for Peninsula HSR discussion by quite a distance.)

That is a function of two basic factors. The first is that I simply don't have as much time to do HSR research as I did in 2008. While I'd like to have had time to develop a new platform for the blog, do some original research, and generate more original discussions, that time simply hasn't existed for me. That's the story of work in 2009 - one is either overwhelmed with it or has none and is desperate to get it. So I remain dependent on other news sources to generate posts here at the blog, with occasional help from folks who send in tips and story ideas (and thanks to you who do that!).

And that leads into the second factor: what remains of the state's media has spent more time on the Peninsula HSR battle than on any other aspect of the project. And that's because squeaky wheels get the grease. Peninsula NIMBYs have worked their media contacts quite well, aided by the existence of several online news outlets in the Menlo Park and Palo Alto communities. Whereas the Innovation Place project struggles to get public attention, the folks filing absurdist lawsuits get plenty of coverage. (And am I the only one who has noticed how these people are working at cross-purposes? If you succeed in giving Union Pacific veto power over the corridor, then a tunnel will never happen.)

Some of this is due to the ingrown bias of the media in this state. Having become familiar with NIMBYism over the decades, they are willing to make it sound as if the only thing that is newsworthy about the HSR project is the folks on the Peninsula who are flipping out about it.

Don't get me wrong - those NIMBYs do have very real power. They represent, alongside State Senator Alan Lowenthal, one of the primary threats to the project's viability. They have the money, skills, and tactics needed to block the project.

But we should not mistake that as a sign of their relevance to the overall project, the mistake John Horgan made in yesterday's Mercury News in his assessment of Quentin Kopp's recent op-ed:

Local folks foresee high-speed rail and Caltrain combining to produce precisely that sort of devastating and grim scenario here, particularly in vital downtown areas, although Kopp and other HSR types have stated that four tracks, not six, would be used on the Peninsula. But even that remains to be seen...

Kopp concluded his essay in a conciliatory tone, noting that engineering and design solutions are "achievable and can be adopted here at home to preserve the character and healthy environment of our communities while supplying California with a sustainable transportation alternative to gridlock."

Let's hope he's right. There is no area of the Golden State with more at stake than this one.

It's that last line which I find so stunning. There are plenty of areas of California with more at stake than the Peninsula. The Transbay Terminal is a key element of downtown San Francisco's transportation plans. San Jose will experience significant new growth - of the desirable centrally located urban in-fill sort. Southern California will have a revolutionized transportation network that will help ease congestion and fuel the growth of more mass transit options.

But if you want to find a part of the state with more at stake than any other when it comes to high speed rail, you need to look not amidst the wealth of the Peninsula. You need to look in the Central Valley. Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield will be utterly transformed by high speed rail. Cities that are struggling with some of the state's highest unemployment rates and some of the world's highest foreclosure rates will have the opportunity to enjoy major and sustained economic growth. HSR will take these cities, currently and unfairly seen as backwaters in a state focused on the two coastal megalopolises, and give them the chance to participate in the 21st century economy. Fresno and Bakersfield will be less than 2 hours away from downtown SF and downtown LA. That's a reasonable commute time, meaning workers in the SF and LA areas can afford to live in the Central Valley, where housing is currently quite affordable. That will in turn bring new jobs and other opportunities to those cities that at present lack other options.

Ultimately, of course, it is the state as a whole that has an enormous amount at stake with the HSR project. It is essential to our future economic security, our energy independence, our strategies to reduce pollution and address global warming, and to our efforts to seed and support urban infill density that we build the high speed rail project as laid out in the voter-approved Proposition 1A.

Squeaky wheels may get all the attention, but it should not lead us to ignore the rest of the train.

What's Up At The New York Times?

That's the question Ryan Avent is asking in the wake of the Times' blog attacks on HSR:

The New York Times has now turned loose writers at two of its economics blogs to make weak arguments against the construction of high-speed rail lines.

I have been following Ed Glaeser's attempt to do a back-of-the-envelope assessment of the costs and benefits of a hypothetical rail line (catch up here and here). Now, Freakonomics' Eric Morris seems to want to get in on the act, via a lame post comparing the effects of high-speed rail with the fruits of "cash for clunkers."

Let me just begin by pointing out how utterly ridiculous this comparison is. The Obama administration's vision for high-speed rail essentially involves a multi-decade effort to significantly upgrade transportation infrastructure along several of the country's most economically important metropolitan corridors.

"Cash for clunkers," on the other hand, is a $3 billion, roughly two-month program of automobile purchase incentives.

Avent goes on to explain his quite sound reasoning as to why it is totally absurd to compare these two programs. "Cash for clunkers" is a program that is designed to produce immediate economic stimulus through the sales of a few thousand cars, offering the possibility of some extremely minor environmental benefits. HSR is a long-term restructuring of intercity and interregional passenger transportation, a permanent piece of infrastructure whose benefits will be with us for many decades to come - just as the Golden Gate Bridge and Shasta Dam are still providing us with economic activity 70 years later.

Both programs are valuable, but for utterly different reasons. To compare them is to confuse them - and to confuse the reader.

Avent also pointed out that both Glaeser and Morris's anti-HSR work consistently downplays the impact of global warming on the US economy:

I'm led by this to believe that Morris does not actually understand how global warming works -- that it is due to the slow accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over time. The only way we'll ever feel any greenhouse savings from any policy is over a considerable amount of time, which is why wonks discuss carbon reductions in terms of what we might be able to accomplish by 2020 or 2050.

Does Morris think that next year will be cooler thanks to "cash for clunkers"? I certainly hope not.

What Avent is identifying here is that these two economists, Glaeser and Morris, are not offering an assessment of the long-term needs of the US economy and transportation system. Economics as a field of study particularly suffers from a belief that acting on global warming is of less importance than providing economic growth. It's a false dichotomy - HSR is a perfect example of how one can do both at the same time - but it is what the New York Times has given its blogs over to promoting in recent weeks.

American economic policy, and much of American economic thinking, have become dominated by near-term concerns. The next month, the next quarter, the next year. Maybe the next four years if you're lucky. Longer-term policy is rarely discussed in the economic press and while it may get some ink among academic economists, the writing we see many economists offer for public consumption treats long-term infrastructure spending as wasteful, unnecessary, or both.

Hence the ingrown biases and flawed methodologies of both the Glaeser and Morris posts. HSR doesn't make sense in a short-term time frame. We all know that. Keynes may have noted that in the long run we're all dead, but many of us have quite a long way to continue running. It makes sense that we will want to secure sustainable economic prosperity and work to solve those broader forces that challenge that, such as global warming.

For the last 30 years US economic policy has emphasized the short over the long, the next few years over the next few decades. Even though the New Deal provided the basis for long-term growth and unprecedented national prosperity, that kind of big-picture economic policy work has been eschewed for a debate over how to best float the next asset bubble. 30 years of short-term fixes and neglect of the long-term strategy has produced a series of ever greater bubbles and successively more catastrophic results of that bubble's inevitable burst.

HSR pencils out when the full context is assessed. The fact that the NYT bloggers so persistently refuse to provide that context suggests they believe it is important to ensure HSR does not come out well in their writing. Avent again:

This exercise is, as best I can tell, an effort to show that investments in high-speed rail are not worthwhile, from an economic or environmental standpoint, based on extremely pared down models and faulty assumptions, with the goal of influencing how their readers view the high-speed rail initiative.

It's simply irresponsible. Times readers deserve to be better informed.

I have no idea why the Times has chosen to not provide better information to its readers. But that is what they have done. As we in California know, this is par for the course. In 2008 reporters frequently repeated the largely baseless criticisms of HSR and ignored or downplayed its more proven benefits. They share the right's skepticism of government programs, and while we all want government to be closely watchdogged - including those governments involved with the HSR project - there's a difference between honest oversight and a stacked deck.

The New York Times, when it comes to HSR, is playing with a stacked deck. But at least we in the blogs know how to identify which are the marked cards.

Edward Glaeser Continues His Assault on HSR

Part 3 of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser's series on HSR costs and benefits is up at the New York Times' Economix Blog. This week's entry focuses on the environmental impact of trains, and "other social benefits" that are rather nebulously defined. Parts of his entry are less objectionable than in the past, but overall Glaeser's approach to HSR, based on an arbitrarily limited set of factors, continues to produce anti-HSR conclusions that lead me to wonder if that was his goal all along.

Before getting into the meat of his analysis, Glaeser took a moment to defend himself against criticism, including from this blog, about his choice of a Dallas-Houston HSR route:

As in the previous two posts, I focus on a mythical 240-mile-line between Houston and Dallas, which was chosen to avoid giving the impression that this back-of-the-envelope calculation represents a complete evaluation of any actual proposed route. (The Texas route will be certainly far less attractive than high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor, but it is not inherently less reasonable than the proposed high-speed rail routes across Missouri or between Dallas and Oklahoma City.)

This is a totally misleading comparison. It's not Texas vs. the NEC, or even Missouri vs. the NEC. Although the blog post is headed with an image of a California high speed train, Glaeser never once mentions the California route. Nor does he mention the other federal HSR corridors, many of which connect cities with denser populations than the Sunbelt cities he insists on examining. Glaeser's entire argument is basically an examination of Texas HSR, and not of the actual national HSR plan. So his entire exercise is somewhat suspect in my mind.

Glaeser's focus is on carbon emissions, and here he isn't quite wrong:

If I assume, relatively arbitrarily, that one-half of the rail riders used to take cars and one-half used to take planes, and that there is no extra travel generated by the rail line, then each 240-mile train trip eliminates 113 pounds of carbon dioxide for each passenger in our atmosphere. These estimates suggest that trains are green, which differs from the studies, which include the emissions from building the rail system, cited by Eric Morris at Freakonomics.

Which confirms some of what we have been saying on this blog for quite some time. The CHSRA's own studies have predicted that 12 billion pounds of carbon emissions per year would be eliminated. Obviously one can and should debate those numbers, but that's pretty compelling stuff, and it's good that Gleaser understands the role HSR can play in reducing emissions.

Glaeser doesn't stop here. I think it is a sound concept to try and place the reduced emissions in a broader context. But Glaeser hasn't really done this in an effective way:

Combining reduced carbon emissions, reduced congestion and reduced traffic mortality provides an extra $21.63 million worth of benefits a year from the rail line, which increases the $102 million benefit minus operating costs figure from last week to $124 million, which is still far less than the $648 million estimated cost per year of building and maintaining the infrastructure.

The environmental and mortality benefits of rail are real, but the magnitude of the social benefits from switching modes seems is quite small relative to the cost of the system.

I'll let someone else check the numbers here. What bugs me is that yet again Glaeser assesses this on its own. What of the cost of doing nothing? How much savings would the trains be over the costs of building new roads and airports to handle any increased demand?

Also left unstated are the other economic benefits of rail. What of the jobs it creates? And the tax revenues those jobs create? What of the green dividend - the new economic activity created by freeing people from congestion and oil dependence?

Once again Glaeser fails on this. He uses an unrepresentative HSR line and assesses it outside the full context, without discussing the true costs and the true benefits.

Note: I am currently in Pittsburgh, PA for the Netroots Nation meeting of progressive bloggers. My posting may be a bit sporadic, but I hope to keep up with the one-a-day ideal.

Yesterday was a travel day for most attendees, as it was for me, and thunderstorms caused major delays at airports here in the northeastern US. Some were stuck on their landed planes, sitting at the gate, unable to deplane because of the possibility of lightning striking the metal jetway. Friends of mine who came to Pittsburgh from nearby eastern cities frequently remarked how much easier this would have been had there been a high speed train available - one that can operate in a thunderstorm.

Will the New York Times Provide A Fair HSR Assessment?

The Economix Blog at the New York Times is launching a multi-part series on high speed rail, beginning with this post by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. As a general rule I tend to dismiss any analysis of passenger rail that thinks a Simpsons episode has any role to play in the assessment (but then I did live through the endless and ultimately self-defeating debate over the Seattle monorail project, so perhaps I'm biased). But Glaeser has a high-profile soapbox to make his assessment, and as he is promising a fair analysis, it's worth taking this seriously.

Glaseser's basic approach can be gleaned from the following quotes:

I would be delighted to share the president’s optimism about high-speed rail, but if benefits do not exceed the costs, then America will just be living through a real-life version of “Marge vs. the Monorail,” where the residents of the Simpsons’ Springfield were foolishly infatuated with a snazzy rail project oversold in song by Phil Hartman’s character.

Economics doesn’t have any inherent opinion on trains, but it does strongly suggest the value of cost-benefit analysis, which may be the best tool ever created for evaluating public investments.

Already Glaeser is off to a bad start. By framing HSR as presidential optimism bordering on hucksterism and demanding a "cost-benefit analysis" he is assuming HSR is guilty until proven otherwise. HSR is cast as an unproven, almost mythical concept. Nowhere in this introductory post does Glaeser mention other HSR systems around the world, all of which generate operating surpluses and have successfully met their ridership goals (although it usually takes several years to reach that point).

In fact, as Glaeser lays out his methodology for the series, it seems that the numerous other HSR projects aren't going to put in an appearance at all:

I will spend the next three blog posts on the major costs and benefits of high-speed rail. The costs include up-front construction and operating costs. The benefits include direct benefits to riders, indirect benefits include reductions in carbon emissions and traffic congestion, and any indirect aid that rail gives to local economies and to national economic recovery.

I'm not quite sure how a credible analysis can be given without looking at the experience of other HSR projects around the world. But even if we were to limit our study to the US - flawed methodology, but let's play along - Glaeser's metrics leave quite a lot out.

Glaeser is likely going to assume that the cost of doing nothing is zero, as he gives no indication that the construction and operating costs will be compared to the construction and operating costs of new freeway lanes and new airport terminals and runways that will be needed to handle future traffic. We spent virtually all of 2008 on this blog reminding people that the cost of doing nothing is NOT zero - that any assessment of HSR's costs must be done in the context of the costs of alternatives.

This is almost never done for passenger rail, let alone HSR. The default assumption, even among academics (and especially among economists) is that the cost of not building passenger rail is always zero. Rail projects are usually framed as a new, novel, and probably unnecessary cost. It gets held to standards and metrics no other form of transportation is ever held to, especially automobile transportation, whose costs are not only far from zero, but are far higher than the cost of HSR.

The list of benefits of HSR also seems unusually limited. Glaeser doesn't include the savings on oil consumption, or the financial benefits of reduced pollution. He does plan to mention "indirect" benefits, hopefully to be measured along the lines of the green dividend, but he apparently isn't going to examine the benefits of greater urban density that HSR will encourage.

Granted, this first post is like the introduction of a dissertation - doesn't really offer much in the way of hard analysis. But what analysis is advanced here isn't exactly encouraging:

The up-front costs of rail are primarily the cash outlays, and these are perhaps easiest to quantify. The Government Accountability Office’s summary of building costs in Europe range from $37 million to $53 million a mile. The Japanese lines cost from $82 million to $143 million a mile. (Higher costs in Japan reflect difficult earthquake-prone terrain and expensive land.) Cost estimates in the United States range from $22 million a mile, for a Victorville, Calif., to Las Vegas route, to $132 million a mile for connecting Baltimore and Washington.

These figures are all debatable, but anyone who thinks that the G.A.O. got it wrong needs to come up with alternative figures that are equally plausible. As such, the cost of a 240-mile line, like the one that could connect Dallas and Houston, would probably run about $12 billion, but it could be as cheap as $6 billion or as expensive as $24 billion, and these are the numbers that we have most confidence about.

Actually, what is most in need is a clear definition of what makes a cost estimate "plausible." We need to see the logic and methodology behind an estimate. Land, labor, materials, etc - these costs can be estimated, and even though the estimates sometimes vary, there should always be a measurable reason for the variation - different assumptions about how land values will change in coming years, etc.

One reason I am so persistently critical of the "omg California HSR will cost $80 billion" claims are that those estimates are never explained. They're numbers pulled out of thin air. If someone sat down and looked at every single expenditure, questioned the assumptions, gave their own estimates for those expenditures, explained the reason for giving a different estimate on each piece, and then totaled it up and said "hmm this is higher than predicted" then that analysis would be quite welcome.

Unfortunately there's just something about passenger rail that seems to make some people think that it's perfectly fine to just pull numbers out of thin air and pass them off as if they are reasonable and credible. I don't know if that's Glaeser's plan, but what he's offered here isn't exactly encouraging.

So we will watch the next posts in the series (to be published once a week) with interest, but with skepticism. It's hard to shake the feeling that we're playing with a stacked deck on this one.

Quentin Kopp: HSR is "Organic Green"

Responding to a silly Examiner editorial espousing neo-Hooverite claims about the high speed rail project, former CHSRA chairman Quentin Kopp has an op-ed today defending the HSR project against claims it is "pork":

The latest editorial suggests that federal stimulus dollars to the high-speed rail project are attributable to backroom, smoke-filled dealings with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Such leaps of logic would be silly and worth a chuckle or two if not so dangerous in misinforming California residents. On the contrary, federal stimulus dollars will provide needed impetus to our dreary economy. Moreover, California is in the pole position for those critical dollars thanks to decades of vital work by the California High-Speed Rail Authority....

Don’t politicize high-speed rail and lambaste it in some overarching dissatisfaction with the U.S. stimulus bill. “Track to Nowhere” may be an easy, sophomoric chant, to which millions more will chant back, “Build, baby, build.” Construction of a high-speed train system constitutes the premiere opportunity for California to lift itself into the 21st century. I’ll put my faith in independent residents of California who understand the benefits of high-speed rail, not as a partisan policy position but as a nonpartisan solution for our state’s stressed transportation system.

Kopp is right to put his faith there, in the same voters who were bombarded with right-wing distortions and lies about HSR in 2008 and still voted to approve HSR and $10 billion in bonds. Voters understand very well the need for economic recovery, for sustainable transportation, for high speed trains. Republican, right-wing claims that this is "pork" have gained hardly any traction at all with the public. But kudos to Kopp for pushing back against the nonsense anyway.

Now Is The Perfect Time To Build A Railroad

What do the Golden Gate Bridge, Shasta Dam, and the Central Valley Water Project have in common? They are all products of the Great Depression. At a time when both California and the federal government were strapped for cash and suffering the effects of a major economic downturn, government decided to use infrastructure projects to provide economic recovery in both the short and the long term. Each project continues to provide economic activity 70 years later. Each has paid for itself many times over.

Last fall we spent a lot of time on this blog debunking the New Hoovers who claimed that now was the wrong time to build high speed rail - that despite the clearly successful model of the big 1930s infrastructure projects, California should embrace austerity and follow a different path, even in spite of the need and economic benefit of high speed trains. Here in the summer of 2009 we find that this attitude persists. However, as the enormous scale of the recession has become undeniable, the New Hoovers have had to find another reason to argue against infrastructure projects. As Dan Walters shows in the Sacramento Bee today, the state budget mess is providing the new excuse for New Hooverism:

Is this the time to launch construction of a high-speed railroad line between Northern and Southern California that will cost at least $40 billion, much of it from bonds to be repaid from a state budget that's already gushing red ink?

Yes, say its fervent advocates, contending that a bullet train, similar to those in Europe and Japan, will reduce air and auto congestion, reduce greenhouse gases and generate many billions of dollars in economic benefits.

Walters doesn't give his opponents or HSR much credit. He ignores the effect of those "many billions of dollars in economic benefits" - does he think that the state of California or its budget can afford to turn down the jobs and tax dollars that come from the HSR project? Construction workers' pay is taxed, as is their spending. HSR saves travelers time and money, creating a Green Dividend that fuels economic growth through the savings that sustainable mass transportation creates.

Instead he seems to be arguing from an embrace of misery. His preferred solution to the economic crisis appears to be lowered horizons and mass suffering. To Walters, the budget crisis means that all plans and projects that would spend money must be shelved. Presumably they'll await economic recovery, but that recovery will not occur without those infrastructure projects. Since the phrase "economic recovery" appears to be banned in Sacramento, among both politicians and the media that cover them, it isn't surprising that Walters embraces misery for misery's sake. Suffering and pain will somehow produce recovery - that's the neo-Hooverite model that Walters espouses in his column.

Most of Walters' column is devoted to rather weak attacks on the HSR project that suggest he is simply not very familiar with the key details of the project:

Bullet train advocates have been touting California as qualifying for a significant portion of the $8 billion set aside in federal stimulus money for transit because of the bond issue.

Recently, however, the feds decided to place the Los Angeles-Las Vegas high-speed route promoted by Nevada interests, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in the California system. It raises the specter that huge sums would be spent to make it easier for Californians to spend money in Las Vegas casinos.

In fact, the LA-Vegas HSR project does not appear eligible for HSR stimulus money. Nevada's application for stimulus funds was limited to $1 billion to study maglev from Primm to the Las Vegas Strip, a project that Senator Reid no longer supports. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has repeatedly stated the SF-LA HSR route is the most likely to receive HSR stimulus funds.

The criticism continues, however, questioning both whether a high-speed rail system makes transportation and economic sense and the route adopted by the California High-Speed Rail Authority, especially running trains over the unpopulated Pacheco Pass between San Jose and the Central Valley....Meanwhile, opposition to the Pacheco Pass route appears to be growing because it would mean routing trains down the bucolic San Francisco Peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose. The alternative would be to run trains over the Altamont Pass along Interstate 580 into the Stockton-Tracy area, a more heavily traveled commuter corridor.

But since the alternative route, over Altamont Pass, would have bypassed San Jose entirely, the Pacheco route actually has far more people living along it than Altamont. The fact that nobody lives in the Pacheco Pass itself is actually an argument FOR that alignment, as it means fewer stops for a train whose purpose is to whisk travelers from the Bay Area to Southern California in the shortest amount of time possible. If the goal was to design a commuter railroad, then Altamont would indeed be a preferable choice - which is exactly why the California High Speed Rail Authority plans to develop Altamont as a high speed corridor.

Environmental activists in Palo Alto are complaining about the impact on their city and, somewhat mysteriously, language appeared in still-pending revisions to the 2009-10 state budget that makes allocation of $139 million in high-speed rail planning funds contingent on "alternative alignments" being considered. Advocates of the Pacheco Pass route consider that to be a poison pill and will try to get it removed before a final budget is enacted, if that ever occurs.

Peninsula NIMBYs are a nuisance to the project, and are putting their own personal aesthetic values in alliance with neo-Hooverism in order to block economic recovery. Their opposition is unsurprising and annoying, but it's not a reason to doubt the economic value of the project.

While $9 billion of the voter-approved bond issue is to be used for the system, if and when it is ever built, the remaining $995 million can be spent on local mass transit systems on the assumption that they will improve access to high-speed rail.

There is a suspicion among those who chart the erratic course taken by the bullet train project that when push comes to shove, its only tangible fruit will be those local projects.

Only someone who has paid just passing attention to the HSR project would consider its course "erratic" - the CHSRA is well along the path of finalizing environmental documents, determining the project-level design, and has already built working relationships with the leading HSR experts around the world. Winning voter support for the project AND the $10 billion in bonds it needs to get started was no small accomplishment. And with President Barack Obama and most of the Congress on board, HSR is far from a pipe dream. It is a real plan with a bright and viable future.

But it's understandable why those who have chosen to deny the future would choose to deny the value and viability of the HSR project. For people like Dan Walters, the state's economic and budget crisis means we must lower our horizons and suffer until somehow, apparently through magic, we have economic recovery. For the rest of us, who believe economic recovery is desirable and that it can be produced through infrastructure as it was 70 years ago, the high speed rail project is a necessary part of the project to rebuild California. It's a shame Dan Walters, who has spoken so insightfully in other venues about the need to rebuild California's broken political system, chooses to eschew vision and planning in favor of a morose neo-Hooverism.

Our predecessors did not listen to that kind of talk when planning the Golden Gate Bridge or the Central Valley Project. Nor should we.

Private Sector Still Interested in HSR

by Robert Cruickshank

Although some still seem to believe that the recession and state budget problems make HSR undesirable, that view isn't held by some of the most important figures - Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood (who at least in his public statements has turned out to be WAY better than I ever imagined) and the companies that would build and operate high speed rail in the US. The recession is bad, is likely to persist for some time, and runs a very real risk of taking another downward lurch. But as this Reuters article makes clear, there is still demand and capacity out there to build HSR:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, speaking to policy experts and reporters, said rail would be a strong opportunity for outside participation with the Obama administration taking early steps financially and politically to advance new train corridors to compete with short-haul air and highway travel.

"Companies involved in (overseas) high speed rail are in the U.S. right now," LaHood said, noting that several states are vying for a piece of an $8 billion downpayment in federal rail funding from February's economic stimulus package.

"I think you'll see private investment in high speed rail -- from Europe and Asia, not just the U.S.," he said.

LaHood also said broadband expansion would be a good bet for private interests but was less optimistic about attracting near-term investment from outside government in U.S. road projects due to recession.

This is quite significant - not only because it suggests that HSR demand is robust, but that there is more interest in funding it than in funding roads. The fact that Ray LaHood is picking up on this suggests that the Obama Administration is aware of this and might be willing to plan its transportation priorities accordingly (although first they'll need to resolve the battle over the Transportation Bill, subject of tomorrow's post).

LaHood is joined by industry leaders such as Alstom and SNCF in this assessment:

Hitachi and Kawasaki Heavy Industries are leading train manufacturers.

Leading global players also include Canada's Bombardier, Germany's Siemens and France's Alstom....

Alstom's U.S. president, Pierre Gauthier, told Reuters in an interview the company concentrates on providing trains and signal systems but would not preclude other forms of investment in U.S. rail if a market develops.

"When you have this and good service, I think Europe has shown that people use this a lot," Gauthier said.

One of the key questions being asked right now as we look at the wreckage of the global economy is what will drive growth that can get us out of this crisis? Mass transit, including high speed rail, is obviously part of the answer. Neither California nor the US can afford to fall behind yet again. We wasted the prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s on more freeways and kicked high speed rail down the road. Now that we are in an economic crisis brought on partly by that failure to embrace sustainable transportation, we would be fools to miss a chance to use HSR to both rebuild our economy and put it on a much more sustainable and prosperous long-term footing.

Richard Florida on HSR, Mega-Regions, and Our Economic Future

Over at The Atlantic, economic geographer Richard Florida has been writing about the economic impact of high speed rail. He believes HSR is a centerpiece of the long-term shift in America's economy - specifically in where economic activity is going to be concentrated. In a March 2009 article he argued that "mega-regions" would emerge from this recession as the location of most economic growth. Just as the "Long Depression" of 1873-1896 shifted the industrial economy from smaller towns like Rochester, NY and Lowell, Mass. to big cities like Chicago and New York, just as the Great Depression eventually produced a shift to suburbs, and as the 1970s stagflation produced a shift to the Sunbelt, the current crisis will accelerate a shift to 11 US "mega-regions". Two of them, "NorCal" and "SoCal", are here in the Golden State - and both are laid out exactly along the proposed HSR route.

The key insight of Florida's argument is that "mega-region" is more expansive than what we currently consider to be a "region." He argues that new technologies and proximity to dynamic economic centers will produce a new geography of growth:

New periods of geographic expansion require new systems of infrastructure. Ever since the days of the canals, the early railroad, and streetcar suburbs, we've seen how infrastructure and transportation systems work to spur new patterns economic and regional development. The streetcar expanded the boundaries of the late 19th and early 20th century city, while the railroad moved goods and people between them. The automobile enabled workers to move to the suburbs and undertake far greater commutes, expanding the geographic landscape still further.

Mega-regions, if they are to function as integrated economic units, require better, more effective, and faster ways move goods, people, and ideas. High-speed rail accomplishes that, and it also provides a framework for future in-fill development along its corridors. Just as development filled-in along the early street-car lines and the post-war highways, high-speed rail will encourage denser, more compact, and concentrated development with growth filling in along its routes over time. Spain's new high-speed rail link between Barcelona and Madrid not only massively reduced commuting times between these two great Spanish cities, according to a recent New York Times report, it has also helped revitalize several declining locations along the line.

What exactly does this mean for California? It means the integration of Modesto, Merced, Fresno and Bakersfield into either the NorCal or SoCal mega-region. Someone can work in Silicon Valley and live in Merced. Now, you might argue "that happens already." But there's a key difference using HSR - faster commutes at a lower cost. Freed from dependence on oil, workers will carry more take-home pay and can invigorate the economies of Central Valley cities. And companies that want to take advantage of the "knowledge economy" using the "creative class" of workers that Florida emphasizes can relocate to one of these mega-region towns, like Fresno, and attract workers from what we now consider to be a "reverse commute".

Already I'm sure this is setting off some folks' sprawl alarms. But as I have consistently argued before on this blog, there's no real reason that revitalizing Fresno or Bakersfield has to mean sprawl at all. HSR stations will themselves encourage greater urban densities. And sprawl itself was a product of the 20th century economic conditions that are dying, and in whose death the mega-region is emerging as the basis of future growth. Sprawl requires cheap oil, cheap credit and favorable land use laws. We're pretty much done with the first, done with the second (even when the credit crunch is over, credit will never again be as cheap as it was in the late 20th century), and laws like AB 32 and SB 375 are changing the third component.

Today Florida expands upon this point, responding to a point Seeking Alpha made about the resurgence of Baltimore and Philadelphia thanks to HSR, enabling those cities to tap into the prosperity and creativity of Washington DC and NYC:

Mega-region hubs are becoming more economically central to our spiky world. There's no getting around this. Chicago has in effect sucked up scads of economic functions that used to be done by other second- and third-tier Midwest cities. On the east coast, Baltimore and Philadelphia and, yes, Washington, D.C. have prospered because of transit connections, including relatively fast rail, which has allowed them to grow by hiving off pieces of economic activity attracted into the world city orbit of New York.

What we are seeing is the further deepening of the spatial division of labor: Suburbia is being stretched in a process of ever more intensive and expansive geographic development.

There's a lesson there for the industrial Midwest and for other regions of the country, North America, and the world. Those places that positon themselves for this new era of spiky, geographic growth and which have the infrastructure that connects them to major centers will prosper, while those that do not will likely fall behind even further.

In short, Florida helps us provide a very clearly argued explanation of exactly how high speed rail is vital to California's economic future. Whereas some in this state delude themselves that the 20th century model of automobile dependence and sprawl can still somehow produce growth, Florida says that is a recipe for turning California into Michigan - too deeply locked into an economic geography that is no longer able to provide economic growth.

California has to change if we are to thrive and prosper in the 21st century. High speed rail is an indispensible component of that shift.

The Acelafication of California High Speed Rail

Today marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. I'd actually been trying to build out a much bigger pro-HSR site using a dedicated URL, a Joomla! installation, and with neat bells and whistles. But it was taking months, and by March 2008, I gave up and decided to just whip something up on Blogger to fill what I felt was a big gap in the online world, a lack of a site dedicated to both the discussion and support of the California High Speed Rail project.

It's been an eventful year, to say the least. The dramatic gas price spike that showed Californians passenger rail was an essential part of our future infrastructure. The long fight over AB 3034. The constant efforts of HSR deniers such as the Reason Foundation to sow misinformation about HSR to the public. The passage of Prop 1A. And now the fight over whether there will be high speed trains on the Peninsula. We've covered all of it here, sometimes contentiously. I think we've all achieved something fantastic here, and I thank all of my readers and especially the commenters for helping keep this blog going.

Looking back on that year, two things have stood out to me that define this project:

1. The public as a whole supports high speed rail and wants it to happen.

2. However, the political conditions that produced 40 years of passenger rail stagnation, as well as California's broad 21st century crisis (an economic, environmental, and energy crisis), are still there, and the necessary political leadership to overcome those conditions and solve those crises does not yet exist.

President Barack Obama may be the game-changer here, as he is in so many other aspects of American life. His support for high speed rail is genuine, as he played the central role in putting $8 billion in HSR funds into the stimulus. His budget proposal includes $5 billion more for HSR. He could provide the leadership that has been lacking, and could help bring groups to the table to hammer out differences.

Such leadership is desperately needed right now in California and on the Peninsula in particular, where concern over above-ground structures - concerns I believe to be overblown and misplaced - have given rise to a de facto willingness to weaken the HSR project unless it is built underground. Way too much of the NIMBY commentary on the situation implies that HSR isn't necessary, and some of the old HSR denier arguments from the 2008 campaign - that HSR can't turn a profit, that the ridership numbers aren't credible, that the Peninsula doesn't really have any need for this anyway - have unsurprisingly been mobilized to attack the project.

This is but one example of some of the underlying political conditions that have produced passenger rail stagnation and economic crisis. Parochial self-interests have spent the last 30 years constructing any number of methods to veto policies they don't like, whether it's the 2/3rds rule or systematic abuse of the environmental review process to accomplish inappropriate NIMBY objections.

And some of it stems from an ongoing unwillingness to admit the need to change. The NIMBY attack on HSR is grounded in the assumption that the status quo is perfectly acceptable - a state dependent on carbon emitting, pollution spewing, fossil fuel burning methods of travel that are not physically sustainable or economically viable. That the physical landscape of Menlo Park can remain that way for all time.

Nobody here wants to destroy communities. But when some in those communities define the way things look in 2009 as a perfect status quo that must not be changed, then ANY change, no matter how sensible or beneficial, becomes viewed as a threat.

Such attitudes have led to the economic crisis we face, where an unwillingness to confront basic realities, stemming from a desire to cling as tightly as possible to a status quo that is quite clearly failing, has prevented necessary action.

Unfortunately we've been here before. In the early 1990s the Northeast Corridor High Speed Rail project was announced with much fanfare, and was promised to finally bring true high speed rail travel to the United States.

15 years later, we have the Acela. It's a workable system, a train that has over 40% of the market share on the NEC and a generally positive reputation among travelers. But it's also not what was intended. The Acela only achieves its true top speed of 150 mph in a few places; in many others it's held to 79mph.

What happened? To put it simply, stakeholders weren't willing to accept some changes in order to build the Acela properly. Some didn't want to give up land to straighten the tracks. Others were concerned about noise and speed. Some didn't want to spend money upgrading the infrastructure. The FRA wouldn't relax its inane weight rules. And in the 1990s, cheap oil lulled people into complacency, believing that passenger rail was a toy that had little practical use, that filled little practical need.

To me it is self-evident that if we're going to build a project, we should build it the right way. That if we ask voters to approve something - especially if we ask them to help pay for it - then it seems self-evident to me that we should deliver exactly what they approved. The City of Palo Alto and many others on the Peninsula appear happy to gut the HSR project by forcing it to run unacceptably slowly along the SF-SJ route, or to force an unworkable transfer to Caltrain at SJ Diridon that will significantly reduce ridership, or to bypass the state's third largest city (San Jose) just to make a small handful of residents happy.

That's just not right. We must build HSR the right way. We can build it in a way that meets the needs of everyone in California, but when NIMBYs refuse to compromise, they're implicitly saying that a flawed system or no system is preferable to one they don't like. They're happy to Acelafy our project.

We see these problems anytime efforts are made to address our multifaceted crisis. Obama wants to restore higher tax rates on the wealthy to pay for his economic recovery plan? Oh god no, can't have that! Solar energy companies want to build a solar plant in a sunny desert spot, but need to build power transmission lines through open desert to get there? Oh god no, can't have that! We need to build a high speed train along an existing rail corridor? Oh god no, can't have that!

If the underlying political problems did not exist - a state government hamstrung by the 2/3rds rule, a small but vocal group of NIMBYs who are expert at hijacking planning processes, a lack of political leadership on passenger rail - then we wouldn't have these crises at all. HSR would have been built long ago, California's budget would be in the black, and the US would not be staring economic Depression and the massive effects of global warming in the face.

The reason I am such a strong advocate of California high speed rail is because I understand that things must change if our state is to survive this crisis. HSR is just one aspect of the changes that need to be made. And that requires fixing the underlying problems that have produced the crisis and threaten to strangle the HSR project.

The big picture has been lost. If people truly believe that an above-grade trackway is more of a problem than mass unemployment and global warming, then maybe we're in a bigger crisis than even I imagined. If a small group of NIMBYs can block HSR, what's going to happen when we try and build wind turbines or tidal energy projects?

One year later, I am encouraged that Californians as a whole understand the need for passenger rail. But I am concerned that even HSR supporters have lost sight of the big picture, and aren't sufficiently willing to challenge the failed assumptions, rules, procedures, and practices that have brought us to this crisis point. Palo Alto is a warning shot across our bow. Unless we find away to remind Californians of the stakes, of why HSR is such a vital part of the solution to our multifaceted crisis, it will be turned into another Acela, rendered less effective and less viable because we did not have the courage to face down those who created this crisis, and those who believe there's no urgent need to do anything at all to solve it.

On to the Senate!

The stimulus battle now shifts to the US Senate, where high speed rail could have a very, very good week - but will have to navigate some rough waters to get there. As Yonah at the Transport Politic notes, the Senate version of the stimulus has $2 billion for HSR:

To make grants for high-speed rail projects under the provisions of section 26106 of title 49, United States Code, $2,000,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2011: Provided, That the Federal share payable of the costs for which a grant is made under this heading shall be 100 percent.

I very much like the 100% federal share, since it's not looking like California is going to be able to do much matching of federal funds in the immediate future. The Senate version also includes much more flexible - and possibly much better - language on transportation capital projects than the House:

“For an additional amount for capital investments in surface transportation infrastructure, $5,500,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2011… That the Secretary of Transportation shall distribute funds provided under this heading as discretionary grants to be awarded to State and local governments on a competitive basis for projects that will have a significant impact on the Nation, a metropolitan area, or a region… That a grant funded under this heading shall be not less than $20,000,000 and not greater than $500,000,000…”

These funds can be used for highways, bridges, public transportation, New Starts and Small Starts projects, and rail projects. No such open-ended funds under the discretion of the Secretary of the Department of Transportation are provided in the House bill. The bill does not specify a preference for transit or highways and presumably Secretary Ray LaHood would decide if this provision makes it into the final bill.

This is where the choice of Ray LaHood at Transportation may make or break things. If the Senate language stays in place, then LaHood could potentially implement an Obama shift away from highways and toward rail. But the language might also allow him to maintain a misguided emphasis on roads, in the name of "immediate stimulus" even though there are billions of dollars of shovel-ready transit projects out there as well.

There's also plans afoot to boost transit infrastructure spending significantly even beyond what's already in the bill. Charles Schumer planned to offer a $6.5 billion transit amendment but apparently, as The Transport Politic reports, that may be pulled in favor of a $20-$30 billion infrastructure amendment, heavy on transit, that will be proposed by Democrats Ben Nelson of Nebraska and our very own Dianne Feinstein.

What could we do with some of this money? In the comments to Saturday's post Rafael makes some very good suggestions for ways to bring federal stimulus money directly to California high speed rail:

TJPA and CHSRA should submit a joint request related to SFTT so everyone can save face and get it all built. In particular, there is no reason not to ask for a slice of the transit stimulus funds to help pay for the bus depot + ramps, the underground pedestrian passage to Embarcadero BART and the fraction (2 of 6 platform tracks, i.e. 1/3) of the trainbox + DTX tunnel reserved for Caltrain. The HSR project needs to chip in the other 2/3, but TJPA must not cook the books to misrepresent the fraction of the total construction cost related to heavy rail operations.

Straight HSR feeder projects such as the BART extension to Santa Clara and Caltrain electrification should seek federal funding from the transit, rather than the HSR portion of this bill. Grade separations should be characterized as highway improvement projects, since they add zero functionality to the railroad.

That all makes a lot of sense, and would be a clever way to maximize the stimulus impact on HSR even when using money not specifically earmarked for HSR. For this to happen there needs to be a lot of coordination among different players in California, which one would hope can happen given Dianne Feinstein's oft-stated commitment to HSR. There are leaders in this state with the ability to bring together a consensus around federal stimulus for HSR. Let's hope they will make their voices heard over the coming week. We certainly plan to do so ourselves.

Why the Transit Stimulus Fight Matters

Over at Grist Ryan Avent looks at the politics of the stimulus and makes some interesting conclusions about what this could mean for projects like high speed rail:

Think all news is bad news during this epic recession of ours? Think again -- over the past three months, real wages have increased 23 percent, an enormous gain. At a crucial period for many working families, paychecks are going a lot farther than they did back in the summer.

The explanation is simple: wages are flat, prices are down. The labor market operates on a bit of a lag, so while the recession affected oil demand and prices very quickly, layoffs and falling wages are emerging more slowly. Eventually, the weak economy will catch up to workers (those who still have jobs), and spending power will decline.

But this is important to remember given the trends of the past decade. When economies are growing, oil prices rise. This means that even while wages are growing, it's difficult for consumer spending power to keep up, unless we reduce the intensity of oil in our economy.

It's a point I've repeatedly made - oil prices have declined only because of the weakening economy. When the economy grows again, oil prices will rise again and eat into wages, jeopardizing the recovery. To break that cycle we must move away from oil. High speed rail is a key part of that overall strategy, which is why it and other forms of mass transit must be included in the stimulus.

Avent goes further to talk about the politics of the stimulus:

The lack of transit spending is unquestionably political, and not logistical, in nature.

The possibility remains that the Congressional leadership and the Obama administration are waiting for the 2009 transportation bill overhaul to adjust spending priorities, and indeed, that vote will be hugely important for the future of the nation's infrastructure. There may also be scope for funding in Obama's energy bill. But there is reason for concern here.

The security of our economy and our environment depend upon a sea change in transportation planning. That transit and rail were so easily sacrificed in stimulus negotiations should send us a message -- now is no time for transit supporters to ease up on their legislators. We'll need to fight until the money is in the pipeline.

Emphasis mine. The story is that transit funding WAS in the stimulus until someone either in Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or Barack Obama's office took it out. All three have at one point or another expressed commitment to support HSR and mass transit, so this goes to prove Avent's point - that we have not yet won a victory for sustainable transportation in Washington DC, and that we must continue the fight to ensure that we do win. Otherwise transit and HSR funding might get thrown overboard again in the name of political expediency. We must show our leaders that it is actually costly for them to do so.

UPDATE: Elana Schor at Talking Points Memo explains that mass transit and passenger rail got the shaft in order to make room for more tax cuts, quoting Oberstar:

The reason for the reduction in overall funding -- we took money out of Amtrak and out of aviation; we took money out of the Corps of Engineers, reduced the water infrastructure program, the drinking water and the wastewater treatment facilities and sewer lines, reduced that from $14 billion to roughly $9 billion -- was the tax cut initiative that had to be paid for in some way by keeping the entire package in the range of $850 billion.

Stupid. Just stupid. Tax cuts do not grow the economy; in this environment they will be put in the bank either as savings or as debt service. If they felt that strongly about cutting down infrastructure projects to pay for tax cuts (which is already poor policymaking) then roads and not rail should have been the target.

What this shows is that the new leadership in DC - in both the Congress and the White House - are not committed to mass transit and passenger rail when the going gets tough. Just because it's easy to say on the campaign trail shouldn't mean it's easy to abandon once in power.

Republican Budget Stalemate Hurts HSR Project

At yesterday's CHSRA board meeting the effect of the state's budget crisis on HSR became clear - unless Republicans stop obstructing a budget solution, the Authority may have to suspend planning and design work, and terminate contracts with consultants and engineers whose accumulated expertise on our HSR project has become vital.

The California High Speed Rail Authority's budget for the current fiscal year, which ends in June, included $29 million from the sales of high-speed rail bonds authorized by voters in November. But because of the state budget crisis, the credit crisis and the poor market for bonds, the state treasurer has not sold any of the rail bonds.

That's left the rail authority without cash at a time when Californians are eager to see the 800-mile fast train system built. At an authority meeting Thursday, officials said they had halted payments on engineering and design contracts in progress and are holding off on awarding new contracts.

"Unfortunately, I have quite a backlog of bills that need to be paid, but no money to pay them," said Carrie Pourvahidi, deputy director for the authority.

The article is a bit misleading on this. The credit crisis and the poor market for bonds are part of the issue. But the state budget crisis is THE central issue. The crisis has led Treasurer Bill Lockyer to refuse to try and sell authorized bonds, and led the Pooled Money Investment Board to stop all infrastructure spending. To the extent that the market for California bonds isn't good because of the budget crisis, it's because the bond markets are concerned that the state may default on its debts.

And why is that a possibility? Because Republican politicians - from legislators to Arnold Schwarzenegger - continue to block a budget solution. I usually try to keep my more partisan comments to Calitics but we cannot escape the fact that it is Republican obstruction alone blocking a solution. Democrats have compromised far more than the media reports - agreeing to nearly $8 billion in spending cuts that have their labor allies VERY angry with them. Speaker Karen Bass agreed to most, but not all of Arnold's demands on cutting environmental and labor protections. But Arnold vetoed the Democrats' solution, and Republicans refuse to budge.

That won't stop HSR deniers from using this manufactured budget crisis to blame HSR. They've done it before - when the CHSRA wasn't funded as a result of the summer budget delay, pushing back the release of the 2008 Business Plan, HSR deniers said it was a sign the CHSRA was a flawed agency unfit to manage the project. It is likely we will see the HSR deniers use thus cash crunch story for the same purposes.

Arnold has proposed giving the CHSRA the funding they need:

On the other hand, the governor's early state budget proposal for the 2009-10 fiscal year includes $123.8 million for high-speed rail, just a half million dollars short of the agency's request.

But if he keeps blocking budget deals, this doesn't really matter. If consultants and engineers are let go, they may decide to take their expertise elsewhere in the country or in the world, and we will not easily replace them.

The big picture involves conservative anti-government ideologies. One reason the HSR deniers oppose the project is they refuse to accept that government can plan and implement this kind of project effectively, even though HSR has been successfully built by governments around the world. By starving government of revenue they are able to "prove" their case with a self-fulfilling prophecy. They opposed Prop 1A and HSR, so they starve the Authority of funds and then say "oh wow they can't manage money!"

California Republicans need to recall their Constitutional obligations to this state and provide it with a balanced budget that protects Constitutionally-guaranteed services - and respects the will of the millions of Californians who voted their endorsement of HSR by approving Prop 1A on November 4.

New Republic: Obama Needs A Bigger HSR Commitment

The New Republic's Senior Editor John Judis has a column out today concerned that Obama's stimulus is too modest and doesn't adequately prepare a new basis for American prosperity - and that high speed rail should be at the core of the solution.

First, his assessment of the problem:

Still, I worry that the president elect is underestimating the problem he and the country faces.

We may not simply be facing a steep recession like that of the early 1980s, from which we can extricate ourselves in a year or two, but something resembling the Great Depression of the 1930s....There's much to like in Obama's plan. But there are two important ways he may have to go further. Most economists agree that what finally pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression was military spending for World War II....I am not suggesting that the United States start a world war in order to solve the world's economic problem. But I am suggesting a strategy that could be called the fiscal equivalent of war.

It would consist not merely of updating or repairing the nation's infrastructure, but in undertaking massive new investments that would expand the scope of American industry, and address other urgent problems in the process: global warming, over-reliance on petroleum, and the need to revive America's domestic manufacturing capabilities--not just to provide jobs, but also to provide tradeable goods that can reduce the country's current account deficit.

This blog has made similar arguments since March of 2008, so it's good to see a prominent political magazine getting into the act. This economic crisis is as serious as it gets, but Obama has not shown he grasps that. The stimulus is laden down with tax cuts for business and block grants to state DOTs for transportation projects - which in most states are highway projects.

So Judis argues Obama needs to more centrally embrace a much bolder economic stimulus - high speed rail.

One area that is ripe for such investment--and that is not, from what I have seen, a declared priority of the Obama administration--is high-speed rail....Investing in high-speed rails would be very expensive, but unlike tax cuts--the benefits of which can be siphoned off in the purchase of imported goods--the money spent would go directly to reviving American industry and improving the country's trade balance. That doesn't just mean jobs creating dedicated tracks or new rail stations: Though the U.S. abandoned train manufacturing decades ago to the French, Germans, Canadians, and Japanese, this kind of production could be undertaken by our ailing auto companies or aircraft companies--if the federal and state governments were to place orders. And building trains that would run on electricity would be a paradigmatic example of the "green jobs" that Obama often touts.

What Judis is explaining is a key value of both HSR and the stimulus. If we are going to spend nearly $800 billion, shouldn't we be taking steps to ensure that money stays here in the US, building things that will provide long-term value?

So far Obama has been making the consistently wrong moves on the stimulus, and even members of his own party are expressing concern and criticism. It's time for the president-elect to offer the bold solutions he promised in the campaign, and putting HSR at the center of a Green New Deal as John Judis suggests would be an excellent way to start.

UPDATE: The Judis article is getting lots of coverage around the blogs: Matt Yglesias, Atrios, and Ryan Avent, to name a few. Yglesias and Avent seemed too willing to accept that HSR can't be built quickly - the beauty of Judis's argument was that we needed to accelerate how quickly we can build sustainable transportation infrastructure. Environmental rules are good, and surely there are ways we can improve them to help get good projects built more quickly. Too often those rules are posited as working against mass transit. They ought to be working together.

The New Hoovers Are Still Trying to Kill HSR

As we repeatedly explained at this blog during the campaign, the New Hoovers have it in for high speed rail. HSR is a necessary part of California's economic recovery, but Republican politicans - from Arnold Schwarzenegger to GOP legislators - are bent on using this economic crisis to achieve the dismantling of government that they could never get during normal times. They have used the 2/3rds rule and the governor's veto power to prevent a balanced budget from being enacted. As a result California has had to borrow money to pay for basic operations, but the strain of that borrowing has nearly exhausted our short-term borrowing capacity.

As a result of Arnold's most recent budget-blocking action the Pooled Money Investment Board had to cut off all funding for infrastructure projects - throwing a whopping 200,000 people out of work. As an AP article explains that action jeopardizes HSR planning efforts:

The state treasurer says the high-speed rail board won't be able to tap any of that money until lawmakers pass a balanced budget.

Without an agreement to close the budget gap, the treasurer won't be able to sell any bonds and won't allow the board to get a loan to tide it over until the bonds are sold. The state's loan fund, the Pooled Money Investment Account, is needed for other state operations, said Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for Treasurer Bill Lockyer....

Carrie Pourvahidi, one of the rail board's deputy directors, said the board is counting on getting $29.1 million from the Pooled Money Investment Account to pay for its operations in the first half of 2009.

Without that money it would have to shut down in late January or early February, she said.

[Mehdi] Morshed said he doubts any federal money could be allocated quickly enough to fill that void.

"If we can't pay our bills, we would just have to stop spending, which means we would have to tell our contractors to stop work. Then, hopefully, later on, when we have the money, we can pick it up," he said.

As you may remember we just went through this mess - during the summer Republicans blocked passage of a budget for three months, delaying the delivery of the updated Business Plan until just after the November election. When the state is out of money the CHSRA cannot continue its planning operations. This current delay - again caused by Republican intransigence - could cause consultants to leave the HSR project:

But if the state does not resolve its own fiscal problems in time to keep the board operating, even a short-term shutdown could prompt some of the engineers, planners and environmental consultants who have been working on the project to abandon it for more reliable clients, he said. That could cause delays.

"The federal government's going to pump billions into infrastructure nationwide," Morshed said.

"Then everybody's going to scramble for the people who are going to deliver those projects. Whoever has their hands on somebody, they are in better shape than the other person. If we lose some (consultants), we may lose them for good or a very long period of time."

Arnold Schwarzenegger needs to get his head out of his ass and sign the Democrats' budget plan. Otherwise California is going to suffer for quite a long time - the infrastructure projects Arnold championed in his Newsweek op-ed will be severely weakened and compromised by this ongoing crisis. Not to mention the effect of California being thrown into an outright economic depression which HSR is supposed to help alleviate.

Federal aid will still be necessary to complete the project and while that looks more promising, New Hoovers in Congress are beginning to stir in their own opposition to infrastructure stimulus spending:

House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said he has "grave reservations about taking $1 trillion from struggling taxpayers and spending it on government programs." He suggested tax cuts as a better alternative to kick-start the economy.

As far as I can tell Republican politicians in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. are, instead of trying to help resolve one of the worst economic crises we've faced in 75 years and help build for our future, are using the crisis to settle old scores and trying to reverse what remains of the New Deal.

Canadian author Naomi Klein described this phenomenon as the shock doctrine. And it's now threatening to cripple the HSR project California voters approved last month. Things were bad in the 1930s, but at least our government wasn't being held hostage by a clique of ideologues determined to score points even at the expense of the economic security of millions of Californians, of the state's future prosperity.