Why Doesn’t the US Get to Have High Speed Rail?

German ICE train outside Koln. Photo by Maksym Kozlenko, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

As someone who voted for his first Democrat president last year, I have adopted some of their preferences for the provision of additional public services beyond what the United States currently provides.

At the same time, I don’t want to be entirely silly about why these services aren’t being provided already. After all, it isn’t like the United States provides nothing.

I. Food Stamps
Consider food stamps. The last expansion of SNAP was spearheaded and passed by a Republican president with significant Republican support. Why? And why do the same people balk at doing the same for health care?

There are some tactical reasons. A big reason behind the push to expand food stamps was to reduce the marginal implied tax rates on the working poor. Cutting off workers from food stamps entirely the second they started working a few hours to try to get out of poverty was bad policy. Expanding food stamps ameliorated this problem.

I think there is a deeper reason, however.

Food is cheap. In the United States, it is extraordinarily cheap to the point we have significant costs from obesity-related illnesses. Food is so cheap that even with comparatively meager SNAP payments, Fox News is able to find people buying lobster with food stamps to do exposés on.

I argue that a critical element of being able to sell the idea of food stamps to the public and Congress is that food is cheap. If it were more expensive, it would be harder to justify, and we might not have had the food stamps expansion we got.

II. Health care
Correspondingly, I submit that a critical reason behind the reluctance to pass universal health insurance in the United States is that it is really expensive. Democrats may find this reasoning perverse because the ruinous expense of health care is the reason they want everyone to get coverage in the first place. Nevertheless, I suspect the perceived unaffordability itself is an important barrier to selling the idea of public provision. If it were cheaper, there would be less resistance.

Perverse or not, please try to see the general public’s viewpoint in being reluctant to commit to buying expensive things. There’s an element of rationality to it that should be acknowledged. Demand curves slope down for a reason.

III. Local rail
Construction costs for public rail projects in the United States are ridiculously high. One might argue that this is understandable. Of course, building a subway in New York is going to be expensive. But why should it be a multiple of what it would cost in Paris? Paris is not an inexpensive city. France is quite regularly cited as providing a number of expensive worker protections and benefits. How is France able to provide this for its workers *and* provide cheaper subways for its people? France has a highly unionized workforce. How is France beating us? Why is all of Europe beating us?

I don’t know. I have looked a bit and haven’t found a treatment of the subject that I regard as adequate. Matt Yglesias tried to answer and came up with “Governing well is hard”, which may well be true but does not answer why it is harder to govern in New York than in Paris.

My current impression is a hand wave to the American legal system and the balancing of property rights of individuals versus the rights of the government to build where it wants, but I don’t know how much this actually adds to costs. There may be other things responsible too. What we do know is that costs are dramatically higher in the United States. We pay much, much more to get far, far less. Don’t marvel that the public looks at what it gets on its investment and spends only sparingly.

It’s standard practice for liberals to look at the lack of public rail as a result of bad preferences by Americans who prefer their cars. I would suggest instead that we consider that the American appetite for local public transportation is tempered understandably by its excessive costs.

If American cities could buy rail systems at European costs, they very well might. They might build systems that would put Europe’s to shame. But they can’t, so they don’t.

IV. High-speed rail
A graphic has been floating around Twitter for more than a year showing a cost-to-coast connected high-speed rail system in the United States.

I want her so fucking much pic.twitter.com/0xMMgW8pz1

— jon from garfield (@thisiscaramore) January 23, 2020

A lot of people who share my aesthetic sensibilities for public services seem to believe that building this would just be a matter of political will. It is not.

We have actually already started building the high-speed rail system pictured above. The segment was to connect the Bay Area to Los Angeles. This was a high-traffic route that would be a model for the country. It was heavily subsidized by the federal government, and construction started in a blue state where public support was high. California voters themselves voted for a $10 billion bond issue in a 2008 vote.

Almost immediately the project became delayed beyond imagination and over budget beyond belief. All the money budgeted and more has been spent, and there is no prospect for actually finishing the promised route let alone expanding it further. California voters got far less than they were promised and paid far more than expected. Here is a typical paragraph from a recent news story, shared not because it is special, but because it is typical of any number of stories that have run in the past decade on the project:

The authority, Annis said, has already exhausted most of its other sources of money for the Madera-to-Shafter work, for which the cost is now estimated at about $13.8 billion. That new estimate is about $1.3 billion more than what was forecast a year ago by the agency.

Consider the fate of that project along the most attractive of routes and scroll up to look again upon the dreamed-of high-speed rail map with sober eyes. When given everything one could have possibly wanted in a project, the result was abject, humiliating failure. Is it any wonder that the will to do the same thing except on a far larger scale in places with far less demand and far less public support is lacking?

By all means, let’s get some of the infrastructure we admire in other countries to the United States. I will be first in line to advocate for them. The path to convincing the public, however, is to reckon with our past failures and actually implement the fixes so that we can at least be cost competitive with fishing France. This should not be much to ask.