The St. Louis Post Dispatch characterizes high speed rail as a “bridge to the 19th century,” in noting its opposition.
I couldn’t have said it better, though I tried in my Wall Street Journal Oped (“Runaway Subsidy Train”). As usual, some of the best lines in this article fell on the “cutting room floor,” as editors can allow only so many words. The two most important points were:
- Significant community opposition is developing. Within the last 10 days there have been community and neighborhood protests against new high speed rail lines in France, Italy, Spain and Hong Kong. Further, opposition to the greenhouse gas belching Mag Lev (magnetic levitation) extension from Shanghai to Hangzhou (China) has blocked that project. There is a burgeoning opposition to the swath that high speed rail will cut through the communities on the peninsula south of San Francisco.
- A traveler using high speed rail from Orlando to Tampa who gets caught at a rental car counter line might not save any time over driving even if the train reached the speed of light.
The biggest problem with high speed rail is that it requires huge expenditures of public funding in a market (intercity passenger transport) that does not require subsidies. Much of the impetus comes from generous donations to political campaigns by vendors who live off public funding and by a naive cadre of virtual sheep who believe anything that runs on rails walks on water.
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while there is justified opposition....
much of the opposition is privately funded by petroleum companies.
We encountered such "manufactured" resistance here in the Portland area. Plans were drawn to bring light rail, across the Columbia River to Vancouver, Washington. This would have alieviated a major source of congestion. (there are only two crossing points between two metropolitan areas). A vast media, and astroturf campaign was funded by those that feared such a project. (convenience store, and fuel supplier companies). Their motto was "say no to the Crime Train". They trotted out fabricated statistics, from unnamed sources, and motivated the less informed, and easily frightened in the community. Only after the proposal was soundly defeated, did the rouse get revealed. The reality is, that rail keeps fuel prices low, in places were it services.
Now, these high-speed rail proposals reek of profiteering. I have to agree with that completely. But that's not because it's high-speed rail, it's because government contracts are not being properly vetted, and contracting companies haven't been evaluated for the cost vs. price.
What you encountered in Portland, sir, . . .
. . . was not "astroturf". PDX city hall is notoriously in the pocket of land developers, who easily cajole the gov't into subsidizing projects that enhance the value of favored pieces of real estate. But when ordinary citizens raise their voice to protest the hijacking of their tax funds they are called "astroturfers".
The petroleum companies don't give a whit about a light rail project that they know will actually *increase* fuel consumption (due to increased congestion from the underinvestment in local freeways). The companies that do care are the manufacturers who are being forced out of the metro area because trucks can't make timely deliveries to their plants and their workers can't find affordable housing.
Your "astroturfers" are simply the working class people who value their jobs more than they value the ability to take a train to a downtown restaurant on Friday night.
You have to dig deeper.
a little data-mining, peels back the layers of astro-turf. A quick couple of searches brings up the primary source of the "Crime Train" stories. What I noticed, was ORTEM.ORG. A suspicious website, with no contact information, no identity information, or direct access to contributers. I'm always suspicious of organizations that "forget" to identify whom is responsible for the content. However, a WHOIS search, reveals all.
ORTEM.org is an organization founded, by a gentleman named Randal O'Toole. Randal has been an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank:
The Cato Institute, Brought to you by:
Altria Corporate Services Inc. (Formerly Philip Morris)
American Petroleum Institute
Comcast Corporation
Fedex Corporation
Microsoft
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company
Visa USA INC.
WalMart Stores Inc.
and
A number of foreign and domestic car companies
You'd be surprised how many people believed like you did. They thought they were "independent thinkers", even though you were merely towing the company line.
Why Not Fly Southwest for $49?
Most of these HSR lines aren't ever going to be built, and the capital costs per projected rider are obscenely high, and no lobby pro or against can do anything about that. What's worse, if you're trying to get from SF to LA, or from Columbus to Chicago, you can a cheap flight on Southwest.
The rail improvements that would make sense, like upgrading the Northeast Corridor between NY and New Haven, which has demonstrated rail demand on the ground, and congested skies above, are too practical for enviro-dreamers who like fancy showcase projects.