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发帖数: 29846 | 1 by Thomas Sowell
01/31/2012
California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt.
But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack
Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system.
Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were
teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But the beauty of politics is that it
is all other people's money, including among those other people generations
yet unborn.
The high-speed rail system proposed for California has been envisioned as a
model for similar systems elsewhere in the United States. A recent story in
the San Francisco Chronicle used the high-speed rail system in Spain as an
analogy for California.
Spain is about the same size as California, and has a similar population
density -- and population density is the key to the economic viability of
mass transportation, from subways to high-speed rail.
It so happens that I have ridden on Spain's high-speed rail system. It was
very nice, especially since I did not have to pay the full costs, which were
subsidized by the Spanish taxpayers.
While the Spanish government has been subsidizing the passengers on its high
-speed rail system, the European Union has been subsidizing the Spanish
government. Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can
all live off somebody else. Spain's high-speed rail system is not even
covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up
the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty
in the high-speed trains in Spain.
That is what happens when you don't have the population density required for
passengers to cover the operating costs. You would need the hordes of
Genghis Khan riding the high-speed rail system to cover the additional costs
of the rails and the trains.
An economics professor at the University of Barcelona says that Spain "has
not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment."
The most famous high-speed rail system is that in Japan, one of the most
densely populated countries in the world. The "bullet train" between Tokyo
and Osaka has 130 million riders a year. Tokyo alone has more than three
times the population of San Francisco and Los Angeles put together.
In California, an element of farce has been added to the impending economic
tragedy, if the envisioned high-speed rail system actually materializes.
The first leg of the system is planned to run between Fresno and Bakersfield
. If those names don't ring a bell with you, there is a reason. They are
modest-sized communities out in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, well
removed from San Francisco or Los Angeles.
You can bet the rent money that high-speed rail traffic between Fresno and
Bakersfield will never come within shouting distance of covering the
operating costs. Some people have analogized putting such a rail line
between these two towns to the infamous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska.
Why are they doing it? Because they can.
If they began this project where they want it to go -- between San Francisco
and Los Angeles -- they would run into so much opposition from the
environmentalists, and from local politicians influenced by the
environmentalists, that the delays could take the high-speed rail advocates
beyond the time limit for using the federal subsidy money. But the green
fanatics have not yet taken over politically out in the San Joaquin Valley.
The only reason for even thinking about building a high-speed rail line
between Fresno and Bakersfield is just to get the project underway with
federal money, making it politically more difficult to stop the larger
project for a similar rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
In other words, they are going to start wasting money out in the valley, so
that they will be able to waste more money later on, along the coast. This
may not make any sense economically, but it can make sense politically for
Jerry Brown and Barack Obama.
An old song ended, "You've been running around in circles, getting nowhere -
- getting nowhere very fast." On high-speed rail.
Dr. Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of "
Applied Economics" and "Black Rednecks and White Liberals." |
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