GOING NOWHERE FAST

President Obama has promised an $8-billion federal investment in high-speed rail, plus $5 billion more over the next five years. That's just $13 billion in all, and for that, Obama promises to start building ten different rail corridors, each between 100 and 600 miles long.

It sounds lovely, but before you go to sleep with visions of bullet trains dancing in your head, it's worth examining the numbers more closely:

• Any real-life high-speed rail system on the scale Obama is promising would be vastly more expensive than the $13 billion he has committed.
• In fact, it would require close to half of the $787 billion contained in his recently passed stimulus package.

We know this because high-speed rail systems in other nations were not built, and are not operated, anywhere near so cheaply as Obama suggests:

• In the past decade, Taiwan built a single 215-mile high-speed passenger route for $15 billion.
• Germany, France, and Italy, often cited as advanced railroad nations, subsidize their rail systems heavily: Between 1995 and 2003, Germany spent $104 billion on subsidies, France spent $75 billion, and Italy spent $64 billion, according to a 2008 study by Amtrak's inspector general.
• Rail ridership in Europe far outpaces that in the United States, but in spite of these huge subsidies, trains have lost a significant portion of their market share to automobiles since 1980.

[People prefer cars - they're just an affection of the affluent. Oops, forgot: Americans are supposed to restrict our life style so other nations will like us more. {Me, I'll keep my cars.}]

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