High Speed Rail: An Antithesis or An Extension of the American Dream?

[Simfan34]

I’ve long wondered what exactly I’ve believed- politically, that is. I’ve made some positions, like my (wavering) support for Jon Huntsman, clear, but I’m not sure I’ve articulated them all. If I had, you would notice a number of idiosyncrasies. For example, I strongly believe in “traditional” marriage, that all should be married if possible, and I abhor divorce.  At the same time, I support civil unions for homosexuals (perhaps marriage, I’m not sure of that).  I’m not sure what my underlying philosophy is, and I want to figure it out.  Over the course of this thread, a number of essays will emerge of me detailing my beliefs and trying to understand them and my reasons for doing so. Perhaps I’ll emerge with a new viewpoint or two.
 
First, let me list a couple of assumptions I have of my political beliefs. They are:

Fundamentally Statist in a socio-political sense. I hold that the human capability for poor decisions frequently manifests itself and overrides that of good sense. It angers me at times when I see the kinds of people who vote, and their underlying reasons for their choice, or lack thereof. I may vehemently disagree with opebo, for example, but I can respect his viewpoint and I certainly know he’s put serious thought into it. The lack of knowledge most people have of the world around them makes them, in my mind, unable of seriously running a country, or choosing those who should.

Deeply Pragmatic.  I dislike those who continue with a certain viewpoint regardless of what the results are. I believe in doing what works, even if you disagreed with it initially. I have no love for ideologues, most of whom are those who really don’t know what they’re talking about. Intelligent ideologues like Ron Paul are very rare, I think.

Economically Liberal.  I believe in the free market, and I believe in capitalism’s ability to create wealth and produce goods and services efficiently… but it has its flaws.  They are not what you think they are. Efficient regulation can solve the typical problems, but I have other concerns.

More to come, as I have to leave.

[ilikeverin]

Statism! *high five*

[TJ in Wisco]

Deeply Pragmatic.  I dislike those who continue with a certain viewpoint regardless of what the results are. I believe in doing what works, even if you disagreed with it initially. I have no love for ideologues, most of whom are those who really don’t know what they’re talking about. Intelligent ideologues like Ron Paul are very rare, I think.

What do you think about pragmatic ideologues (ie. someone with some set ideology unalterable by the political landscape, but willing to work within that landscape by whatever practical means are available toward achieving that end)? That's what I consider myself.

[white trash heroes]

Deeply Pragmatic.  I dislike those who continue with a certain viewpoint regardless of what the results are. I believe in doing what works, even if you disagreed with it initially. I have no love for ideologues, most of whom are those who really don’t know what they’re talking about. Intelligent ideologues like Ron Paul are very rare, I think.

Because of course, it's not like belief in `Pragmatism` is uniquely american. Or that what we think works is skewed by background/historical interpretation or anything. We all live in a historical vacuum (well, maybe in a sense).

[wormyguy]

Deeply Pragmatic.  I dislike those who continue with a certain viewpoint regardless of what the results are. I believe in doing what works, even if you disagreed with it initially.

You're the one who insisted that drugs always have to be banned, regardless of what the effects of drug prohibition are, right?

[white trash heroes]

Fundamentally Statist in a socio-political sense. I hold that the human capability for poor decisions frequently manifests itself and overrides that of good sense. It angers me at times when I see the kinds of people who vote, and their underlying reasons for their choice, or lack thereof. I may vehemently disagree with opebo, for example, but I can respect his viewpoint and I certainly know he’s put serious thought into it. The lack of knowledge most people have of the world around them makes them, in my mind, unable of seriously running a country, or choosing those who should.

Sure, I think I could agree with that. But the implication you seem to be making by using such a label is that somehow those who would 'lead' are any better...

Economically Liberal.  I believe in the free market, and I believe in capitalism’s ability to create wealth and produce goods and services efficiently… but it has its flaws.  They are not what you think they are.

That's interesting. How so?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Deeply Pragmatic.  I dislike those who continue with a certain viewpoint regardless of what the results are. I believe in doing what works, even if you disagreed with it initially.

You're the one who insisted that drugs always have to be banned, regardless of what the effects of drug prohibition are, right?

[Simfan34]

The State of California, after several voter referenda, has chosen to invest in an ambitious high speed rail network that would connect all of the state’s major cities. . With speeds of up to 357 miles per hour with the French TGV system, high-speed rail offers a quick, efficient, and energy-conserving method of transportation far different than the steam locomotive that comes to mind when the word “train” is mentioned. A myriad nations have built high speed rail networks—Japan, France, Germany, and more recently Korea, Russia, Spain, and China. If anything, the planned Californian system is bold. By the state’s own estimates, the system would carry over 40 million passengers a year on its 800 miles of rail at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour—rivalling the best Asian and European networks (Report to the Legislature). In its first year alone, the project would raise nearly a billion dollars of revenue for the state and three times that by 2035 while creating 600,000 construction jobs and 150,000 permanent jobs and, assumedly, an untold multitude more due to its positive economic effects (Report to the Legislature). Eventually, its planners hope, over one hundred million people would use the system each year. This, without a doubt, is an ambitious scheme that, if what its proponents say is true, will do nothing less than totally revitalise and revolutionise the state’s fortunes, truly bringing California into the 21st century as a globally competitive economy (the world’s eighth largest), with one of the world’s most ground-breaking transportation systems, so they claim.

 But with the state in a financial crisis without an end in sight, the project’s rising costs and apparently diminishing returns call California’s commitment, and the need for such a commitment, into question. The estimates for the total cost of the network have soared while passenger estimates for the network have dropped—meaning less revenues at a greater cost. Meanwhile, right-wing activists contend that the project represents an unnecessary expense, and, indeed, a deliberate assault upon the suburban lifestyle, and the insular and domestic values that it represents, that has predominated in California and the United States for the past half century (Solnit 66). In that vein, to what extent do high speed rail initiatives, and in particular the one in California, constitute an erosion of suburban norms and the sprawl culture? Is such thinking an invalid train of thought or does it sincerely constitute a serious challenge to those norms and cultures, and indeed, is it such a bad thing in the first place? As we see in David Owen’s article “Green Manhattan”, density can lead to more sustainable and resource-efficient lifestyles; this largely is the result of a car-free lifestyle  But as Owen also notes, urban-centric living has been deemed both unhealthy and contrary to American values by luminaries as vaunted as Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson preferred the rural hinterland, which he saw as being able to maintain freedom to “the thousandth and thousandth generation.”  Towards the end of his essay “Green Manhattan”, David Owen makes the point that each suburban tract home, which he terms “the standard object of the modern American Dream,” is nothing short of a “mini-Monticello” (Owen 123). The comparison is apt. Jefferson’s anti-urban rhetoric encapsulates the modern sentiment of scepticism towards the city and its cosmopolitan ways, detached from “mainstream, small-town” America. “Cities,” Jefferson once wrote, “are pestilential to the health, morals, and liberty of Man,” a line of thought not at all removed from conservative thinking today (Owen 112). For him, it would be the wilderness that would give America the room for democracy to develop. Such a rolerole is today played by the suburbs, but authors such as Rebecca Solnit and Robert Bullard contend that rather than further those values, suburban living results in inequalities and de facto segregation. What role, if any, shall high speed rail play in exacerbating or mitigating such problems, if we do conclude that high speed rail erodes suburban norms ?  These are the questions politicians, policy-makers, and urban planners will have to ask themselves in the coming decades.

   California, with its thirty-seven million residents, is by far the most populous state in the United States. It is home to two of its leading cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and some of the world’s most innovative and prominent companies: Apple, Google, Chevron, Wells Fargo, and many others. It is an international tourist destination and business hub. And yet it suffers from antiquated infrastructure and limited transportation options, the result of years of neglect and limited investment. Surely, to remain competitive, California should address these concerns swiftly, boldly, and comprehensively, to ensure that its economy and its citizens’ quality of life does not suffer further than it already has due to other pressures. California today faces both a fiscal crisis and an economic crisis, much as the nation faces as a whole—albeit on a greater scale than the nation at large—crises with two very different, and indeed almost converse, solutions. One calls for an increase in revenues, and the other an increase in stimulus (which entails a decrease in revenues). In this managerial balancing act, California needs an investment that would both provide it with a direct monetary return and an economic multiplier effect that brings in futher returns on the investment, therefore in effect addressing both crises. That investment, the state has have decided, is high speed rail.

   But in the eyes of many  this bright future is not to be, a broad group of skeptics ranging from small-scale farmers to academics at some of the nation’s leading think-tanks. By challenging almost every fact about the project, from the cost estimates to passenger projections, the seemingly uncontroversial project has proven highly contentious. Taking the lead against the project are conservative publications like the National Review and the Wall Street Journal; in a piece entitled “Burn Down the Suburbs?” in the Review, the author Stanley Kurtz, for example, argues that high-speed rail is part of an Obama Administration scheme to marginalise and eventually roll back the country’s suburbs under the guise of a pro-urban “regionalism”, which Kurtz defines as being “the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation.” In that vein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Will wrote in his piece “High Speed to Insolvency”,  

Seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism … So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

More than any practical concern of cost or ridership or obviously overpriced gasoline, that some people adhere to such an argument  is perhaps the major stumbling block to high speed rail in the United States—that high speed rail is inherently un-American, left wing conspiracy or not. Whether it be that moving people between two fixed points is economically impractical, that the United States , and similarly California, has too low a population density to justify high speed rail, or that, much as Will argues, that there is something about it that just doesn’t fit with the individualistic and self-deterministic American identity, most arguments against high speed rail center themselves upon the fact that it simply is an alien concept, that would either prove an expensive boondoggle, or, more substantively, an unraveller of the status quo.

[Simfan34]

While the United States is no longer a nation of small towns or farming hamlets, the banner of the anti-city locale has been thoroughly taken up by the suburb, as a place where, as Will writes, the open, car-centred suburban society “[encourages] people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates.” The freedom to go hither and tither, a freedom contradicted and constricted by such methods of transportation.

   But is that such a bad thing? The sprawl-based model has dominated for the past half century or so, predicated on easy access to new homes and helpfully low gasoline prices. But what if that was to change? Many American cities have found themselves lost in a mire of deindustrialization and urban blight, but what stops the suburbs from experiencing the same fate? It may be what befalls “conventional suburban America if sprawl and auto-based civilization die off with oil shortages and economic decline,” notes Rebecca Solnit in her article “Detroit Arcadia” in Harper’s Magazine (66). Her words certainly skew towards the catastrophic, but they reflect certain inescapable facts, namely, that the relative (and perhaps absolute) position of the United States in the world, with the rise of emerging economies such as China and Russia, is, or shall soon be, in a period of decline, and that the amount of oil in the world is steadily decreasing. High speed rail would certainly mitigate those effects, but is that not exactly what its critics contend it will do—destroy the suburban status quo?  Kurtz writes that “The ultimate goal of the movement led by [the Administration] is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen through outright annexation by nearby cities, they’ve developed ways to coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence.” By limiting their access to these new methods of transportation, not building stations in them, the government totally, if not nefariously, destroys crucial links that these suburban regions have with the nation around them—much like how interstate highways decimated downtown cores half a century ago.

   But perhaps it’s time to move on. Perhaps these suburbs, rather than being the successor to the Jeffersonian wilderness of old, miniaturized country demesnes, have strangled, destroyed them. The very hinterland-cum-suburbia that Jefferson thought would prove incubators of democracy has, been perverted and turned inside out. Suburbia shuts its door to a disenfranchised mass, and as Robert Bullard writes in his essay “Smart Growth Meets Environmental Justice”, suburbanism “is linked to poverty and inequality, and heightens the separation of between income classes … exacerbates school crowding … accelerates urban income decline, concentrates poverty …” and the list goes on (3). Such is hardly the desired result of a society of “perfect equality”. Such disparities are furthered by the limited transportation options for the urban poor, a situation so stark that Bullard terms this “transportation apartheid,”  a terminology that would seem hyperbolic if not for the accompanying statistics—that blacks are six times as likely to use transit as whites, and with Latinos comprise 54% of all transit users (Bullard 37,38). After paving over 3900 miles of freeway in the three decades after World War Two, construction in California “ground nearly to a complete halt” after 1980, and less than 220 miles were being built in the succeeding three decades (Neuman and Whittington 17).  Congestion is rampant in both the air and the ground, with Los Angeles’ infamous traffic gridlock, and its airport being named one of the world’s worst by Travel and Leisure’s authoritative list (Potter 24). Just as the Interstate Highway System gave the affluent members of the middle class a ticket out of the crumbling city (provided one had a car), so high speed rail can be the link for inner city residents to engage with the nation around them, a chance for the city to once again be central in commercial, cultural, and social life of the nation. Perhaps high speed rail can afford a chance even to Detroit and its residents, who have been reduced to the status of “those people” as Solnit notes; metropolitan Detroit, as Bullard observes, leads the nation in suburban office sprawl whilst having next to no transport system and a large population without access to cars (Bullard 40).

If rail can give them a chance, it could give the people of California a chance, the people living in blighted Compton or the crime-ridden Tenderloin or decaying central Sacramento, just as much as those living in affluent Pasadena or Palo Alto or Napa, which would all be served  by the high-speed network (Report to the Legislature). It could help level the playing field- and is there anything un-American about that?

High speed rail, its proponents argue, is a modern, 21st century method of transportation, utilizing the most advanced technology in its field to move large amounts of people in comfort and efficiency. Its supporters tout its reliability and success abroad. Certainly, it has the chance to do all of that—and more. It can help reverse the destructive effects of suburban sprawl, which has all but paralyzed California’s metropolitan regions. For all its might, and importance California suffers from antiquated infrastructure and limited transportation options, the result of years of neglect and limited investment.  It can help restore balance to the Redwood forests and Sonoran deserts by swiftly moving people not only through, but away from them, halt the incremental spread of sprawl towards them and preserve that wilderness. It can provide a way out and up for the people of its inner cities by giving them a long awaited link to the world. High speed rail preserves, protects, liberates, and innovates. Are those not the very essence of American identity?

[Simfan34]

Works Cited

Amtrak. The Amtrak Vision for the Northeast Corridor: 2012 Update Report. Washington DC: Amtrak, July 2012

"Calif. retains economy that would be 8th largest." Bloomberg Businessweek. 2 2010: n. page. Print. <http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9JS1MLO0.htm>.

California. California High Speed Rail Authority. FACT SHEET: December 2009 Business Plan Report to the Legislature. Sacramento:, 2009. Print.

Potter, Everett. "America's Best and Worst Airports." Travel and Leisure. 2012: 24-26. Print.

Neuman, Michael, and Whittington, Ian. Building California’s Future: Current Conditions in Infrastructure Planning, Budgeting, and Financing. San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California. Print.

Will, George F. "High Speed to Insolvency." Newsweek 27 February 2011.

Owen, David. “Green Manhattan.” The New Yorker. October 18, 2004

Solnit, Rebecca “Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the post-American landscape”. Harper’s Magazine October 2005

Cronon, William “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”. Environmental History, Vol. 1, No. 1. January, 1996,  pg. 7-28

[dialectical fetishist]

i'll be interested to read yr thoughts, as i am with anyone - i could see us having some agreement over the flaws in capitalism though obviously i'm probably far more of a sceptic than yrself.

i'd consider myself a pragmatist though - i hope i've made clear my contention with much of modern left-wing thought, despite being 'of the left' in most senses.

[I left.]

I support high speed rail in America, but the fact that local/regional public transport is poor at best, non-existant at worst makes the inplementation and success outlook worse than in Europe.

You'd still likely need a car to get to the train.