Where can Congress start cutting spending? One obvious answer: high-speed rail.
The Obama administration is spending billions of stimulus dollars for rail projects that make no sense and that, if they’re ever built, will be a drag on taxpayers indefinitely.
When incoming Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio cancelled high-speed rail projects, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood refused to let them spend the dollars on other transportation and sent the funds instead to California and other states.
Walker argued that Wisconsin didn’t need $810 billion for a 78-mile line between Madison and Milwaukee because there’s already a transportation artery — Interstate 94 — that enables people to get from one city to the other in a little more than an hour.
Kasich’s rationale? “They tried to give us $400 million to build a high-speed train that goes 39 miles an hour.” Train boosters countered that its top speed was 79 miles per hour — about the same as many drivers on Interstate 71.
High-speed rail may sound like a good idea. It works, and even makes a profit, in Japan and France. If they can do it, why can’t we? A look at some proposed projects gives the answer.
California is spending $4.3 billion on 65 miles of track in the Central Valley, which is supposed to be part of an 800-mile network connecting San Diego and Sacramento. Its projected cost was $32 billion in 2008 and $42 billion in 2009, suggesting a certain lack of precision.
Or consider the $1.1 billion track improvement on the Chicago-St. Louis line in Illinois. It would cut travel time between the cities by 48 minutes, but it would still take over 4½ hours at an average speed of 62 miles an hour.
None of these high-speed projects are really high speed. Japan has bullet trains that average 171 miles per hour, France’s TGV averages 149 miles per hour. At such speeds, you can travel faster door-to-door by train than by plane over distances up to 500 miles.
In contrast, Amtrak’s Acela from Baltimore to Washington averages 84 miles per hour and the Orlando-Tampa train would average 101 miles per hour. That makes the train uncompetitive with planes on trips of more than 300 miles.
Now take a look at a map and see how many major metro areas with dense central business districts and large numbers of business travelers are within 300 miles of each other — not many, outside of the Washington-Boston Northeast Corridor. Our geography is different from France’s or Japan’s.
Moreover, to achieve the speed of French and Japanese high-speed rail, you need dedicated track so you don’t have to slow down for freight trains. To get dedicated track, you need a central government that is willing and able to ignore environmental protests and not-in-my-backyard activists. Japan and France have such governments. We don’t.
So we’re spending billions on high-speed rail that isn’t really high speed, that will serve largely affluent business travelers and that will need taxpayer subsidies forever. This should be a no-brainer for a Congress bent on cutting spending.