High-Speed Rail Is Locked in the Trunk of American Politics

Inspired by this Scientific American post, Despite the Stimulus, High-Speed Rail Still Rides the Slow Track in the U.S.

Every morning on my bike ride to work I cross over the platforms of Baltimore’s Penn Station, all crumbling grey concrete spotted here and there with bright blue modern signage and digital read-outs, which, at any train station, have always seemed to be sort of a way of saying that train platforms are supposed to look like a ruin. But, a functional ruin.

If I’m on time, there’s usually an Acela train sitting down there, seats full of loose expense accounts, about to embark on a trip to New York that’ll take about two hours, 15 minutes—18 minutes less than its conventional, slow speed cousin (the Northeast Regional).

If I nail the timing down just right—and one of the two is a bit off-schedule—there will be a Bolt bus loading on the bridge, which will take three and a half hours to get to New York, but cost $20 to the Acela’s $223. (And, mind you, my hour will never ever be worth $200.)

That Acela is the face of high speed rail in America in the year 2011. One line from Washington D.C. to Boston, max speed: 150 mph. Briefly. And with an estimated market share of just over half in the corridor, it’s safe to say that the Acela is still better than flying. (Again, I would never know.)

If you missed it, the Obama administration unveiled a plan to have 85-percent of the country connected via true high speed rail by mid-century, to the tune of $53 billion. 16,000 miles of track. Which is fantastic, and points toward a sort of American utopian reclamation of true communities, the reigning in of sprawl, an internet of humans. More: the uncooling of driving and the untoppling of the car-as-blood cell way of existing in America.

As the country in many areas starts to approach European-style interurban densities—or starts to approach what the Northeast looks like—then we should have a rail system to match. Because that’s what makes sense. Flying doesn’t when you’re traveling around a metropolis or proto-metropolis like Southern California or the eastern Midwest, respectively. A plan like the administration’s makes sense, and is certainly coming late. And remember, it was just a few years ago, in a different administration, that the ramshackle existing Amtrak service was being choked and facing the usual right-wing threats of full-on elimination.

That’s kinda key to why this is all so much of a mirage. One election and the mass transit polarity is switched. Of course, all kinds of different polarities were switched too but this is why big projects and big ideas in America are doomed from conception. If it can’t be done in one administration, don’t count on it being done. This is the fundamental rule of American democracy that the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas broke. It spanned three presidential administrations and two somewhat lesser ideological flips before getting dumped (and dumping America’s realest hope for a Higgs boson discovery.)

And with high-speed rail, we’re talking about 40 years, which is what? Around 20 house elections, 10 Senate and presidential elections? (I know those numbers are off, but that’s the ballpark.) Look at what happened in Florida. Construction on its high-speed rail line, one of the first in the country from the Obama plan, should have started this Spring. But a newly elected governor took a 180 from his predecessor and rejected $2.4 billion in federal money to build the thing.

With private investment sure to kick in the small remainder to finish the project, the state had no financial commitment. The move in Florida was 100-percent ideological. This is the kind of partisan assholery that’s taking over the country’s politics. And it’s just going to get worse.

From the Transport Politic, a site you should be following if you care about this stuff at all:

Indeed, while the Governor's decision may have been framed in a rhetoric of financial austerity, the hastiness of the announcement and its timing just after the unveiling of the President's high-speed rail proposal indicates that intercity rail, more than ever, has become a tool for partisan disagreement. Republicans all over the country, inspired by the refusal of federal funds for rail systems by Governors in Ohio and Wisconsin, have rallied against almost every such project. The House GOP budget, which would gut the rail program — as well as transit capital projects — is only a continuation of this crusade.

I can’t really say why exactly, but it has something to do with living in a sharply divided country that’s being forced even further apart in their ideas of what America should be by a media that makes great money exploiting that rift. But, anyway. . .

. . . the other big reason high-speed rail, or what you’d call a network of it, is a lost cause in America is that we don’t have the same kind of strong federal government that European nations have. And, as states, we’re not even all that united. So, imagine a high-speed rail system looking like chopped spaghetti separated by this or that state of dickheads. At best. Currently, that list of the dickhead states includes Florida, Wisconsin, and New Jersey.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.