Thread by @asymmetricinfo

Hey, guys, I know what you're thinking: When's Megan going to tweet storm her article about high speed rail?

Your prayers have been answered, my little chickadees. It's happening right now.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

This was a fun and anxious one to write. Fun, because I am the daughter of a hardcore train buff who spent decades working on New York's infrastructure. Anxious, because I knew that my Dad would read it.

(He liked it! Phew!)

It is from my father that I gleaned much of my understanding of why American infrastructure is so #@$! expensive and slow to build, compared to the rest of the world.

Answer: too much government.

No, this is not some knee-jerk libertarian attack on the state. I'm not That Kind of Libertarian. I believe government has a role in infrastructure. I am fine with government provision of roads, rail, etc.

And as my father's daughter, I loooooooove trains.

The problem with American infrastructure at its deepest level, is not that the government is involved. It is that too many governments are involved. Federalism is a fine system in many ways, but it's a bad way to do transportation.

My Dad used to estimate that adding federal money to a project would add an average of five years to the completion date. Coordination is hard. Compliance with multiple levels of government regulatory requirements is hard. Splitting authority is hard.

Also, lobbying small governments is easier than lobbying big ones. If you read NYT piece from Brian Rosenthal on why NYC's 2nd Avenue subway, you may have noticed the insane union featherbedding, the incredibly high union wages, the unbelievable number of consultants underfoot

All of those things are functions of 3 facts:

1) Wealthy NYC can afford to pay for all this above-market-priced activity
2) Having so many levels of gov't involved creates a lot of lobbying pressure points
3) Consultants ensure regulatory compliance & insulate you from lawsuits

Dad's favorite example of how $@#!ed up US infrastructure is is the Southeastern High Speed Rail Corridor. The SEHSRC isn't actually high-speed rail; it is a plan for exceedingly modest improvements in rail speeds in the southeast, mostly through upgrades on existing railbed

The Southeastern High Speed Rail Corridor was proposed in 1992. You will be thrilled to learn that in September 2017, the Department of Transportation announced the completion of the project's Tier II Draft Environmental Impact Statement. csengineermag.com/deis-completed…

25 years for a tiny project! How could it take so long?

Many levels of government means many levels of lobbying, and many veto points at which pressure groups can mess up your project.

Also, the US regulatory review process is bound up in both red tape and legal veto points.

As Dad likes to point out, if George Bush had come into office announcing that his main goal was shoring up the levees around New Orleans ... if his administration had prioritized it over everything else ... they would still have been mired in the EIS process when Katrina hit.

It is not absolutely impossible for us to build quickly--we crashed through the regulatory thicket at Ground Zero, and again in New Orleans after Katrina.

But it takes an emergency to get the political will, because all those veto points are jealously guarded by the pressure groups that use them.

We also much more than other countries on legal liability rather than regulation, which has its merits, but means that projects do a lot of defensive work aimed at forestalling (or winning) lawsuits, and we have to get through the suits themselves, which are slow & costly.

America has other obstacles to high speed rail, notably geography; rail functions best at part of a network, but our major cities are, comparatively speaking, really spread out.

There's a cluster in the NE corridor, a cluster in Texas, and a cluster (sort of) in CA. Three clusters a thousand miles or so apart doesn't create much of a network.

Now, as to objections:

Q: You Republicans just hate progress! If we'd listened to naysayers like you, we'd never have gotten to the moon!

A: If we'd listened to naysayers like me, we wouldn't have spent hundreds of years bleeding patients to cure bacterial infections.

Sometimes when people say things won't work, it's because they lack vision. Other times, it's because those things don't, you know, work.

Also, the last presidential candidate I endorsed was Barack Obama; I would have endorsed Clinton had my employer at the time permitted it. I am definitely not a Republican, nor a Trump supporter.

Q) Well, fine, you're right-wing! And right-wingers hate high speed rail!

A) It's fair to say I'm a right leaning libertarian. However, I am also my father's daughter. I love high speed rail. If we're going to spend government money on boondoggles, I vote for trains.

But HSR is just a really, really hard push in the US. Texas is the best use-case: reasonably flat, and reasonably cheap land in between major cities. NE corridor has the highest need, but not the political will to tear down all the stuff you'd need to tear down to build the track

Q) Fine, you may not personally oppose it, but stupid Republicans do, and they're the reason we can't have high speed rail!

A) The peg for this column was California. Where Democrats control the whole government. Did the Republicans use secret mind-control rays to kill its HSR?

No! No, Democratic interest groups killed HSR in California! Groups that wanted the project to employ many, many people at above market wages. NIMBYs who wanted it to run anywhere but through their back yard. Environmentalists who wanted complicated reviews. Etc.

That's just the reality: if Democrats want HSR, they are going to have to take on their own interest groups, because it is Democratic interest groups that disproportionately either drive up the cost of construction, or protect veto points that affluent homeowner groups exploit.

Q) How come you didn't mention that it's STUPID to build HSR in American because you can't just dump people in the middle of town with no way to get around; in most US cities you need a car, so what's the point of taking a train?

A) I didn't mention this because it's stupid

Astute readers will have noticed that this equally describes something called an "airport", which is rarely located within walking distance of wherever people want to go. That's why they take a taxi, or drive. There's no reason they couldn't do so from a train station.

HSR is aimed at largely replacing air travel. Few people check the family minivan into the cargo hold on their Dallas-Chicago flight.

Robust public transit at endpoints would make HSR somewhat more attractive, but only somewhat. It can be viable without it. The main obstacle isn't lack of public transit options, but construction costs and the ponderous pace of American regulatory & eminent domain proceedings

And secondarily, the fact that American geography makes it hard to develop the kind of dense *network* of passenger rail options that other countries have. Instead, American passenger rail has to share tracks with our robust, world-class freight rail system.

Yes, we used to have passenger rail everywhere in America, but in most of America, rail simply cannot compete with cars traveling on highways, or airplanes. In Europe, where densities (and congestion) are higher, it can.

Q) Some variant on calling the left commies for wanting us to have a Euro-weenie rail-based transportation system rather than the convenience and freedom of cars.

A) You know what? Rail in Europe is pretty nice. & HSR would work really, really well in the northeastern corridor.

Northeastern professionals don't prefer the Acela to flying or driving because they've got ideological blinders on; they prefer it because it's more comfortable than flying and faster and more convenient than driving.

Q) Stop arguing with the conservatives! I'm not done arguing! What's *your* plan for reducing emissions, if not rail?

A) [Whispers] High speed rail is cool. but it isn't really that green.

It takes a lot of power to make trains go that fast.

HSR can theoretically be an environmental win if you're pulling people off airplanes, which are an environmental disaster. But you have to pull a lot of people off those planes, which is to say, those trains need to run full.

Otherwise, the energy cost of building all that physical plant (steel is a carbon monster) & accelerating a big, heavy train car to hundreds of miles an hour eats the environmental benefit of pulling a few passengers off a (lighter, smaller) airplane.

Normal speed rail is definitely superior to air travel, and to car travel at moderate passenger loads. But HSR--which really needs its own tracks, or at least, tracks which are not shared with freight, is very dependent on high passenger loads to show clear environmental benefit

There are places where it's a clear environmental win. But again, they're limited in the US, which, for reasons of geography, just has a harder time doing certain environmental stuff than Europe. (HSR is one example of this, but not the only one)

To sum up: high speed rail can be green, and unlike many of my fellows on the right, I view AGW as a major threat that the government should be taking steps to mitigate. And high speed rail is definitely cool as hell. Nonetheless, it's probably not for us.

Which brings me to the end of my tweet storm. You can read the column here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…