Why High-Speed Rail is Right

Excerpts from a commentary by Robert Yaro, Co-Chair, America 2050

Across the water in Great Britain, the new conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has won great attention for his cost-cutting ways as he slashes funding for health care, police, prisons, housing, and even defense.

But one area has remained immune to Cameron’s sharp blade: the country’s emerging high-speed rail system, including the line under development running from London to Birmingham. In fact, Cameron is expanding funding for the system.

Cameron understands what apparently few of his conservative colleagues here do, which is that investing in high-speed rail is part of a sound investment in the country’s future. And while Great Britain is a different country than the United States, its conditions and challenges are not as different as one might think. High-speed rail can work in the United States, as it will in Great Britain.

Some commentators have suggested that only socialist or authoritarian countries such as China are building these systems. But as the actions of Prime Minister Cameron show, countries such as the United Kingdom, with conservative, market-oriented leadership, are moving forward with HSR investments. The long-term mobility and economic benefits of HSR are far too great to abandon the program.

In Britain, as in Japan and several other countries, these projects are being pursued as Public-Private Partnerships (“P3s”) in which private investors are providing a quarter or more of the total capital costs, and projects are running on a break-even or profit-making basis under private management. This is a line of action that has not been fully explored or explained in the press or within most political debate.

What matters is that when fully realized, a national network of HSR routes serving the nation’s megaregions, including the Northeast, has the potential to provide the same kind of backbone for a 21st century national mobility system that the interstate highways did in the late 20th century. In so doing, it could provide a foundation for a dramatic expansion of the economy of most of the country, underpinning America’s competitiveness and livability for decades, as the Interstates have over the past half century.

These investments must, of course, be complemented by new capacity in key highway corridors, airports, seaports, broadband, water, and other infrastructure systems. But along with these other investments, HSR could create a framework for metropolitan and megaregion growth and development that will allow us to compete successfully with the other industrialized and industrializing countries now making similar investments.

Growing the Future

Given the setbacks HSR has had in Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio, it may seem like a lost cause. But it is important to put those setbacks in perspective.

Several times before in American history – beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s national development plan in 1808 – American presidents have produced visions like the one promoted by President Obama for the nation’s future infrastructure development, usually organized around the latest cutting-edge transportation technology. For Jefferson, it was canals; for Lincoln it was railroads; and for Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower it was limited-access highways. In virtually every case, nay-sayers and political detractors fought these investments, and in some cases delayed their implementation by decades. In every case, however, these visions were largely realized, often a generation or more after first being proposed.

Franklin Roosevelt’s proposal for a national limited-access highway system, for example, which he first put forward in 1938, took 18 years to be realized. And that only happened when President Dwight Eisenhower embraced the idea. Even Ike had trouble convincing a reluctant Republican Congress to enact a gas tax to pay for his proposed National Defense Highway Act. (And this only happened when Ike cloaked the idea in the national defense concept.) And when they did finally pass this legislation, the Congress cut the amount of the President’s proposed gas tax so that it was not adequate to build Ike’s envisioned coast-to-coast interstate system.

Only when portions of the system began to be built did broad public support force Congress to enact the additional gas taxes needed to complete the President’s bold vision. We all know how the story ends, with the Interstates being completed over 30 years and their subsequent transformation of the nation’s landscape and economy over the next 60 years. Ironically, although the National Defense Interstate Highway System was never used in the nation’s defense, it did underpin a five-fold increase in GDP after 1956 that enabled the US to sustain the defense budgets needed to win the Cold War.

America is poised for a transformation of similar magnitude, underpinned by a series of nationwide networks of high-speed rail lines focused within megaregions. It may take a generation or longer for President Obama’s vision to be realized, but the process has begun. There will be setbacks along the way, like the one last week in Florida, but with the support of people of good will, who care about the nation’s future, it will happen.

Click here to read the full commentary.