( cross-posted on my own blog )
Not that this should come as that much of an extreme shock to the brave souls who still follow American politics while being able to hang on to their affinity for actual logic, but the mood of 2011 when it comes to investment to the state & national infrastructure is currently being responded to with a resounding cut the budget! Cut it now, cut it all, cut it forever!
The latest politician of mention to endorse the notion that we need to hang on to our 20th century infrastructure in the 2nd decade of the 21st is newly crowned governor of Florida, Rick Scott. Mr. Scott has rejected over $2 billion in federal money to build a high speed rail line along Interstate 4 from Tampa to Orlando. It would be the first “high speed” rail line in the United States outside of the Washington-New York-Boston megalopolis. It would create construction jobs, reduce traffic, potentially increase tourism, and definitely decrease pollution. However since the rising Tea Party-esque tide of “every single federal dollar from the federal government is absolutely, entirely, unequivocally evil”, the money has been rejected. Mr. Scott joins new governor entrants John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin in the club of grasping onto crumbling infrastructure.
The rail line between Tampa and Orlando, while being short, would have helped showcase the vision of what high speed rail could become in this country:
The 85-mile Tampa-to-Orlando segment, on which trains would travel as fast as 170 miles per hour, was to be the showpiece of that initiative — in part because the government already owned much of the right-of-way along the route, which would allow it to be built relatively quickly, and because the fast-moving train would contrast with slow-moving traffic along Interstate 4.
Of course, there’s already real-world and existing examples of high speed rail in action. France, for instance, sees the annual number of passengers riding their high speed network of trains hovering around 100m+ – and the network is not even finished yet. Lines connecting the existing network to Italy, Spain, and Germany are still under construction or are being planned at present. If comparing oneself to France makes one feel bad since the French remain the butt of so many political jokes, there’s also an extensive rail network in Germany that America can only dream of at present. Let’s not even begin to get into the herculean effort underway in China to modernize their existing rail network and implement high speed rail.
No, let’s not consider anywhere else in the world, the present, the future, or the reality that fossil fuels are at elevated prices that will look like bargains in 20 years. Let’s instead be mired in the way things are, and answer the call of petty politics:
Mr. Scott’s decision left Democratic as well as Republican lawmakers saying Wednesday that they had been taken by surprise, particularly given that Florida’s unemployment rate is about 12 percent. The rail line had been expected to create thousands of new jobs.
Representative John Mica, a Florida Republican and the new chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told reporters Wednesday that he had tried but failed to talk Mr. Scott out of turning down the project.
Mr. Mica said the “federal government has done everything” it can, including agreeing to put up 90 percent of the rail link’s financing. He added that it “defies logic” that Mr. Scott would cancel the rail line before the state had received bids on the project.
At the cost of our future infrastructure, the new governor of Florida has scored his political points with the Tea Party and similarly-minded all-government-involvement-is-bad thinkers. The thousands that would have been put back to work by this project are probably thrilled as well. As are all the companies and places of business that those workers would have spent their cash. In fact, I’m sure the future tax coffers of Florida itself are also celebrating their slimmed-down future.
To defy infrastructure upgrades, when your infrastructure clearly and badly needs it, defies logic. Suburbia connected by endless freeways is gradually becoming a harder and more expensive proposition as the price of a gallon of gasoline creeps past three dollars, with sights set on four and more. Suggesting that high speed trains won’t work in the United States because our country is too large is in many ways an even bolder example of not getting it. By that logic, air travel should have never gotten off the ground and the roadways between the major cities should still be dirt and traversed by horses.
Locked in the quicksand of partisan bickering, and being way more open to spending limitless amounts of money on waging unnecessary wars, it’s very likely we’ll still be looking for our trains in the 2020′s, too.