High Speed Rail is no panacea

Richard Florida loves trains. He loves them so much he advocates for trains when little evidences shows they will help achieve the goals he desires. He argues that our current system has reached the end of its useful life: 

It has led to overinvestment in housing, autos, and energy and contributed to the crises we are trying so hard to extricate ourselves from today. It’s also no longer an engine of economic growth. With the rise of a globalized economy, many if not most of the products that filled those suburban homes are made abroad. Home ownership worked well for a nation whose workers had secure, long-term jobs. But now it impedes the flexibility of a labor market that requires people to move around. My own research shows that the most innovative, most productive, and most highly skilled regions have rates of homeownership of 55-to-60 percent, while those where homeownership exceeds 75 or 80 percent are economically distressed.

I could buy the argument that homeownership harms labor mobility a makes economic transition harder. And I’m sympathetic to Florida’s argument that we over-subsidize homeownership. But I don’t think the data is saying that Florida thinks it is saying. The productive, highly-skilled regions Florida favors are dominated by San Francisco, San Jose, Austin, San Diego, New York, and Los Angeles. I don’t think policy, such as heavily subsidizing trains, as Florida later suggests, is going to turn Detroit or Cleveland, into San Diego or San Francisco. One reason these cities have lower home ownership rates is that, except for New York, they have pretty climates that people flock to and they have serious naturally imposed growth boundaries. They limit the supply of housing, increase the price, and make it more difficult to buy a home.

Florida goes on to describe what he see as the fix. High speed rail: 

Infrastructure is key to powering spatial fixes. The railroads and streetcar, cable car, and subway systems speeded the movement of people, goods, and ideas in the late 19th century; the development of a massive auto-dependent highway system powered growth after the Great Depression and World War II. It’s now time to invest in infrastructure that can undergird another round of growth and development. Part of that is surely a better and faster information highway. But the real fix must extend beyond the cyber-economy to our physical development patterns—the landscape of the real economy.

 

That means high-speed rail, which is the only infrastructure fix that promises to speed the velocity of moving people, goods, and ideas while also expanding and intensifying our development patterns. If the government is truly looking for a shovel-ready infrastructure project to invest in that will create short-term jobs across the country while laying a foundation for lasting prosperity, high-speed rail works perfectly. It is central to the redevelopment of cities and the growth of mega-regions and will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars. High-speed rail may be our best hope for revitalizing the once-great industrial cities of the Great Lakes. By connecting declining places to thriving ones—Milwaukee and Detroit to Chicago, Buffalo to Toronto—it will greatly expand the economic options and opportunities available to their residents. And by providing the connective fibers within and between America’s emerging mega-regions, it will allow them to function as truly integrated economic units.

It is hard to take this argument seriously. Why will an inflexible, uneconomic, transportation system help the economy? High speed rail does not quickly move goods or ideas. Goods are moved by freight rail, and our freight rail system is the best in the world. Ideas are quickly moved by the internet.

High speed rail quickly moves people. But where is the evidence that high speed rail will help the economy? Japan has high speed rail and the building of high speed rail didn’t help Japan out of its economic malaise.

Florida recognizes that high speed rail might be expensive, “truly national high-speed rail system runs somewhere between $140 and $500 billion. That’s a lot of money, but measured in 2009 dollars, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System cost $429 billion to build—which makes it look like something of a bargain.” There’s a major difference however—the Interstate Highway System paid for itself through gas taxes. High speed rail will never pay for itself. It doesn’t pay for itself in Europe, which is better suited than the U.S. for high speed rail.  Plus, Florida’s estimate of the cost of nationwide high speed rail is low—it will cost $100 billion in California alone.

It’s too bad that people like Florida don’t look at actual performance. For example, there good arguments that rail in Los Angeles should never have been built. In L.A., the push for rail has forced transit ridership down. 

As Randal O’Toole writes about rail in L.A. and is equally applicable to Richard Florida, “how many miles of rail costing how many billions of dollars will be needed before rail advocates finally concede that rail transit is a failure?”

U.S. freight rail is the world’s best

According to The Economist, the U.S. has the best freight rail system in the world, and high-speed passenger trains could ruin it.

It is too bad that romanticism about trains makes people loopy when they advocate for increased public funding of passenger rail. Passenger rail doesn’t work in America, and it’s about time we quit trying, instead of the Administration flushing billions down the toilet. Personally, I wish that we could just buy rail advocates Railworks Train Simulator and they can enjoy the romance of trains for their homes and not burden taxpayers with the outsized cost of their schemes.

Rare earth elements aren’t rare—if you are willing to dig for them

From Foreign Policy:

Today, however, rare-earth mining is almost nonexistent outside China, which came to dominate the market in the 1980s and ’90s by cutting world prices and now controls as much as 97 percent of the supply of some of the elements. The United States’ only major rare-earth mine, a complex in Mountain Pass, California, that was once the world’s leading producer of the minerals, shut down in 2002.

But the limited supply of the minerals in the marketplace is the result of economics and environmental concerns, not scarcity. Even with iPads flying off the shelves and high-end electric cars on showroom floors, the world consumes only a tiny amount of rare earth — about 130,000 metric tons of it a year, or just over a tenth of the amount of copper produced last February alone. Market forecasters expect the global trade in rare earths to reach $2 billion to $3 billion by 2014, but even that amounts to barely 1 percent of today’s iron market. And rare earth elements aren’t actually worth very much at the mine — most of their market value is added in the refining process.

Larry Summers says that Obama’s environmental policies are harming the economy

Of course that’s not how Larry put it, but it is exactly what he said:

In a speech at a U.S. Energy Information Administration conference, Summers said passing legislation would help reduce uncertainty that may be discouraging businesses from investing and hiring.

 

"The cheapest stimulus program in the world is enhanced confidence," Summers said.

 

The Senate has struggled to strike a compromise on a bill that would reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and boost alternative energy without unduly burdening businesses that are slowly recovering from a recession.

…

Summers said uncertainty over the timing and scope of energy legislation was hindering businesses from making major investments in projects, such as building new power plants, restraining hiring when the economy desperately needs jobs.

Why is there uncertainty? Because Obama is pushing policies that would increase the price of energy and make it more difficult to do business in the United States. Also, his EPA is busying regulating greenhouse gases and the results aren’t necessarily predictable.

So what is there a lack of confidence (in the context of what Summers is talking about)? Obama’s policies. In other words, Obama’s policies are harming the economy.  

Obama’s automobile hypocrisy

I really dislike hypocrisy in politicians. Many, like the President, will tell the rest of us to do one thing while they do something else. Obama’s limo is a good example. In the video below, he explains why he can have a hybrid limo. His answer is that the Secret Service says that a hybrid’s performance isn’t good enough. That’s funny, because he’s willing to foist a new fuel economy mandate on Americans that will lead to more traffic deaths, but he doesn’t want to reduce his own safety.

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Horrifically bad NY Times articles about Spanish trains

Wow this is a bad article. It appears that the reporter only talked to one source for all of her information about train travel in Spain, a marketing professor named Josep Valls. As a result, the article contains this  paragraph:

Spain’s high-speed train sector seems well positioned to expand. All AVE [Alta Velocidad Española] lines turn a profit and have easily survived price wars waged by airlines, Mr. Valls said. What is more, trains require fewer employees and far less costly infrastructure than do planes.

While I’m pretty sure these trains do not, in fact, turn a profit, but is indisputably wrong is that trains require “far less costly infrastructure than do planes.” This could only be true if you don’t consider the train tracks. Generally people consider train tracks necessary for trains. There is no way flying requires more costly infrastructure than 325 miles of train tracks from Barcelona to Madrid, for example.

I hoped this article would have some interesting information, but it had none.

Sometimes even Mother Jones gets it right

Every once in a while environmental groups get an environmental issue right. Now if they only would have fought ethanol subsidies from the beginning, we might not have wasted billions upon billions trying to support an unsustainable industry.  Here’s the conclusion from a recent post on the Mother Jones website:

Bottom line: corn ethanol is no greener than gasoline. In fact, it’s almost certainly less green, and at the very least, there’s no urgent need for the U.S. government to pay billions of dollars to subsidize its production. Too bad Iowa is the first state on the primary calendar every four years, isn’t it?

Now if only Mother Jones would see that subsidies are wasteful—both financially and environmentally.  Then we really might be on to something. 

Al Gore finally gets called on the carpet

**Updated–See Below**

Al Gore’s Oscar-winning and Nobel peace prize contributing An Inconvenient Truth contains a number of important errors. But scientists didn’t call Gore on the carpet. That experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth about the honesty of many climate scientists. Yesterday Al Gore promoted a bold claim that seemed to be quite a stretching the truth again. He claimed that polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years:

“It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice felt when they saw this,” said former U.S. Vice President Gore, who joined Scandinavian officials and scientists to brief journalists and delegates. It was Gore’s first appearance at the two-week conference.

This was obviously crazy talk. Here’s a graph that shows the sea ice extent of Arctic ice for 2002 through 2009:

The red line is 2009’s data. As you can see 2009 was a bit lower compared to 2002-2006, but there was more sea ice in 2008 than in 2007 and more ice in 2009 than in 2008. This is still lower than the 1979 to 2000 mean sea ice extent, but the data do not point to zero Arctic sea ice in 5 to 7 years.

Unlike with many of Gore’s claims, the press called him on the carpet with this distortion. The Times reports:

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

Hopefully journalists will do a better job of fact checking Gore’s claims in the future. A week ago he tried to defuse the ClimateGate letters scandal by saying that the most recent emails were more than 10 years old. Al Gore is just not credible when it comes to matters of science.

**Update**

It appears that Al Gore had a basis for his claim.  The claim is still nuts, but at least in this case he wasn’t just making stuff up. The paper that Gore was likely relying on is here. The graph looks like this:

Federal laws stand in the way of stimulus jobs

Megan McCardle writes:

Every so often I’ll read some description of a project out of the olden days–the battle against malaria in Panama, the handling of the Great Mississippi Flood, or the creation of the WPA–and just marvel at how fast everything used to be.  The WPA was authorized in April of 1935.  By December, it was employing 3.5 million people.   The Hoover Dam took 16 years from the time it was first proposed, to completion; eight years, if you start counting from the time it passed Congress. 

 

Contrast this with a current, comparatively trivial project: it has been seventeen years since the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor was established by USDOT, and we should have a Record of Decision on the Tier II environmental impact statement no later than 2010.  This for something that runs along existing rail rights of way, and in fact, uses currently operating track in many places.

 

I imagine this all sounds like a nattering nabob of negativity.  If there are procedural hurdles to jobs programs and high speed rail, we should challenge them, not resign ourselves to subpar policy!  

 

Look, I may be skeptical that health care reform will be a net positive, but I do concede there’s some chance I’m wrong (and I will be glad if it is so).  But this is not merely unlikely; is is the next nearest thing to impossible, short of armed revolution.  Many of the procedural hurdles involve court rulings, concerning law which Congress cannot overturn in some cases (due process), or isn’t going to (civil rights legislation, civil service protections).  The obstacles arise out of things that individually, people, specifically Democrats, like: transparency, due process, environmental care, civil rights, unionism.  Cumulatively, they are devastating to federal productivity.  But it’s hard to get much support for repealing or altering them individually–which is what you would have to do.  Philip Howard has built a second career out of railing against the steady trend towards hyperproceduralism, of which this is a small part.

“One of the foundational components of the scientific method is the idea of reproducibility”

One of my concerns with some climate “science” is the lack of transparency and reproducibility of the results. For example, as two professors of computer science explain:

 One of the foundational components of the scientific method is the idea of reproducibility (Popper 1959). In order for an experiment to be considered valid it must be replicated. This process begins with the scientists who originally performed the experiment publishing the details of the experiment. This description of the experiment is then read by another group of scientists who carry out the experiment, and ascertain whether the results of the new experiment are similar to the original experiment. If the results are similar enough then the experiment has been replicated. This process validates the fact that the experiment was not dependent on local conditions, and that the written description of the experiment satisfactorily records the knowledge gained through the experiment.

The ability to replicate models and transparency is sorely lacking in in climate science. That’s the real lesson we should learn from the release of the CRU emails. Willis Eschenbach explains this well here. For example Eschenbach writes:

Science works by one person making a claim (hypothesis), and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists attack the work by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science.

 

This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry. This is an attack on the heart of science, by keeping people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct.