For me, it was like a dream come true. I had written to Barack Obama during the 2008 elections, asking him to strongly consider making construction of an American high-speed rail system a priority. While he did not mention it during the campaign, once he was in the White House, he, Vice President Joseph Biden, and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood created a framework for such a system. The "recovery act" provided $8 billion as a starter package. Some 30 states and multi-state compacts submitted projects totaling over $50 billion, competing for the actual funding available. Meanwhile, California voters had already passed a $9.9 billion HSR measure. Florida and a midwest compact had been planning a system for some years. It seemed like the American dark age of rail was finally coming to an end!
Perhaps my ecstasy was premature. While the business community would benefit from HSR, just as it benefits from other transportation and communication advances, there exists a substantial industrial grouping that sees no advantage to themselves in allowing Americans another choice besides automobiles and airplanes for intercity travel. This group, consisting of the oil, auto, airline, and highway corporations, swung into action. They quickly crafted a masterful fear campaign. After all, it had been done before. When Texas considered building an HSR system a decade ago, Southwest Airlines funded a successful anti-rail message. Now the stakes were higher; it wasn't just Texas anymore.
Groups rapidly formed, which pumped an unceasing flood of letters into newspapers, denouncing HSR and its costs and impacts. Absurd claims were made about its costs, with made-up numbers that bear no relation to the experience of countries which have actually built HSR, usually being many times higher than actual cost figures. Using Karl Rove's concept of "attack your enemies' strengths" (for example, his hit campaign against John Kerry's military record, which bordered on doubting any soldier's claim to bravery), the anti-rail fanatics called into question rail's environmental and energy-saving advantages. Europeans would laugh at any of these claims, since they have experience with HSR and pay the taxes to support it. But Americans have no such experience and so are fertile ground for believing rail opponents' outright lying.
Rail opponents cite that HSR will take land, it will create noise, it will use energy. All these things are true, but they are also even more true of road and air travel. Opponents never state an alternative for handling growth (particularly in California), other than feeble references to fixing potholes and building more freeways. Those latter proposals are particularly funny since what the anti-rail people are basically saying is "rail is socialist, it will cost taxpayers money... so let's spend yet more taxpayer money on roads!"
Newly elected Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida killed their states' high-speed rail programs with fanfare, as if they were doing their voters a favor. The Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, turned down a $800 million federal HSR grant on the basis that his state might be on the hook for a mere 1% of that total, $8 million per year, in operating subsidies. He completely ignored the vast sums the federal government had given his state for highways, and that the state's taxpayers are on the hook for the very substantial operating costs of these roads.
The anti-rail campaign in California particularly has now reached a fever pitch. Accusations that rail supporters are Communists hell-bent on stealing hard-working folks' money is a major component, singing a very old song remarkably effective at getting Americans to turn against great ideas.
Journalists, smelling blood, eagerly jumped on the anti-rail bandwagon, even those who supported it before there actually was a program. It is always easier to write vitriolic articles opposing something than reasoned pieces supporting something. That makes great firebrand journalism, but lousy social policy.
This is how the corporate sector gets its way. Meanwhile China is experimenting with 300 mph (500 kph) trains. America has stopped marching into the future because of the endless whining of a small group of corporate interests who will be damaged by HSR. This is a prescription for stagnation and eventual collapse. We have forgotten Peter Schumpeter's concept of "creative destruction" in which obsolete companies and their technologies go away and are replaced by new systems. We have forgotten that private business does not do everything. Business requires infrastructure but it cannot risk its own capital providing it. That's why governments everywhere provide roads, airports, sewers, water lines, courts, schools, street lighting, sidewalks, ports, air traffic control, weather satellites, and the scientific research that makes all possible... the list goes on and on. We have fallen victim to the corporate/Republican propaganda that government is purely parasitic. Meanwhile, the very same people claiming that HSR is "another government boondoggle, let private industry do it if it really is so good" continue driving on their taxpayer-funded roads and flying from publicly-owned airports. I have yet to see a single rail opponent propose privatizing roads or airports he uses.
Without a change in course, this once-great country is toast... and deservedly so, for being so stupid, selfish, and greedy as to be unwilling to invest in our collective future the way past generations did. Shame on us.
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