High Speed Rails
Speed Economy
High Speed Rail will be equivalent to throwing government subsidies into a black hole – crushes the US economy
Utt, Ph. D. & Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, February 11, 2011
Advocates for more spending on passenger rail, including HSR, often point to Europe and Japan as role models and aspirational goals for American policy. This Euro-envy manifests itself in the promotional statements of America’s rail hobbyists and the foreign companies that hope to sell billions of dollars of equipment, consulting, project management, and engineering services.For example, in an April 2009 press conference, President Obama played the envy card, arguing, “Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It has been happening for decades. The problem is that it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.” Obama went on to extol HSR systems in France, Spain, China, and Japan and concluded, “There’s no reason why we can’t do this. This is America. There’s no reason why the future of travel should lie somewhere else beyond our borders.”[17]If one’s knowledge of European travel preferences comes from Time, The New York Review of Books, and Pink Panther movies, then the President’s statement would seem to ring true. Sadly, the reality is quite different. European and Asian governments have paid staggering sums to subsidize a mode of travel that only a small and shrinking share of their populations uses.[18]In its most recent report on European travel patterns, the European Commission noted that passenger rail’s share of the European market (EU-27) declined from 6.6 percent in 1995 to 6.3 percent in 2008, reaching a low of 5.9 percent in 2004. Market shares for autos and buses also fell over the period, while the airlines’ market share jumped. In effect, Europeans are adopting more American
High Speed Rail will be equivalent to throwing government subsidies into a black hole – crushes the US economy
Utt, Ph. D. & Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, February 11, 2011
Advocates for more spending on passenger rail, including HSR, often point to Europe and Japan as role models and aspirational goals for American policy. This Euro-envy manifests itself in the promotional statements of America’s rail hobbyists and the foreign companies that hope to sell billions of dollars of equipment, consulting, project management, and engineering services.For example, in an April 2009 press conference, President Obama played the envy card, arguing, “Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It has been happening for decades. The problem is that it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.” Obama went on to extol HSR systems in France, Spain, China, and Japan and concluded, “There’s no reason why we can’t do this. This is America. There’s no reason why the future of travel should lie somewhere else beyond our borders.”[17]If one’s knowledge of European travel preferences comes from Time, The New York Review of Books, and Pink Panther movies, then the President’s statement would seem to ring true. Sadly, the reality is quite different. European and Asian governments have paid staggering sums to subsidize a mode of travel that only a small and shrinking share of their populations uses.[18]In its most recent report on European travel patterns, the European Commission noted that passenger rail’s share of the European market (EU-27) declined from 6.6 percent in 1995 to 6.3 percent in 2008, reaching a low of 5.9 percent in 2004. Market shares for autos and buses also fell over the period, while the airlines’ market share jumped. In effect, Europeans are adopting more American