High Speed Rail--High cost, little benefit
Image via WikipediaThere's no better example of excessive government spending than the $53 billion President Obama allocated for high-speed rail in his 2012 budget.This project is an expensive boondoggle which would be even more expensive under Obama's project labor requirements which are a gift to his union supporters. These funds should not be approved by Congress and previous funding should be recinded before it is spent.
Shockingly, in a response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Crossroads GPS, a nonprofit advocacy group, the U.S. Department of Transportation admitted this week that it has performed no cost-benefit analysis -- routine comparisons of costs of infrastructure projects versus their benefits -- of constructing a high-speed rail system.
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Obama's goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail by 2037.
High-speed rail is not faster, cheaper or easier than building more freeways or expanding the overburdened air traffic control system, services that users are generally prepared to pay for. Few transportation experts believe that passengers will be prepared to pay for high-speed rail.
Even on the heavily traveled Washington-Boston corridor, rail receives government subsidies and loses nonbusiness customers to buses. A ticket on a regional Amtrak train from Washington to New York this morning costs $147 (price of the faster Acela: $186), compared with $25 for Bolt Bus -- and the bus comes with free wireless.
Ticket prices for high-speed rail would be even more expensive, further limiting its customer base.
High-speed rail proponents have overstated its benefits. Transportation jobs can be created through expansion of highways, using private funding from tolls rather than taxpayer dollars. And high-speed rail is unlikely to relieve traffic jams, because they occur within cities, rather than outside them. High-speed rail is expensive, it reaches only small segments of the country, and it cannot substitute for most highways.
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There is no benefit to the program, but there is plenty of costs.
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