Overheard Somewhere . . .

by Little Miss Attila on April 18, 2009

“Here’s your coffee.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m afraid to open my laptop; I’ve been extolling the virtue of high-speed rail to a largely libertarian readership.”

“You might want to woman up, then.”

“Fine. Can I have a cup of coffee, first?”

“Your call. Say, did you know that Joe Biden has tested positive for steroid use?”

“You can’t believe everything you read on the web.”

“Tell me about it.”

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Ric Locke April 18, 2009 at 1:00 pm

Pah. I’m not a libertarian, I’m an engineer. If you don’t know what the inputs are and what the environment is, you aren’t making proposals, you’re indulging in daydreams. And if you can neither run the numbers nor understand and believe those who can, you are dangerous to yourself and your neighbors.

It’s not the proposals in and of themselves. I myself would like to see high speed trains, just for the Kewl Tech® that would have to be employed. But I can do some of the numbers, and the numbers say BOONDOGGLE in bright red with parentheses around them. If they did not, General Electric, General Motors, and the H. B. Zachry Construction Company of San Antonio, Texas would already have the rights-of-way and roadbeds done and be welding rails. The same is true for “light rail” and subway/Metro/BART systems.

For short distances, the automobile takes you from exactly where you are to exactly where you want to go, and can do so using multiple routes; for long distances, airplanes are much faster and less prone to vandalism and accident. The only thing more constrained as to route than a train would be a marble in a pipe. It goes from where it starts to where it ends, and the people using it have to adapt to that, and if something happens along the route it’s dead, unusable. My wife intended to take the Flyer from LA to Fort Worth a few years ago. She ended up sleeping on the floor in the LA train station for three days because of a mud slide in San Bernadino. Now go to the San Jose Mercury News’s page, with all the animations of what the California system would look like. See it traveling down the concrete canyon, with overpasses for the cars? Now imagine a bored teenager with a half-brick. Along comes the train at 300 MPH… Yeah, we can fix the engine and bury the engineer. How long will it take to put up wire fences so it can’t happen again? And how sure can you be that it won’t happen again, given that wire-cutters are cheap at Orchard Supply Hardware? Anybody using the 405/Harbor Freeway knows to keep a wary eye out for people crossing the overpasses, because it doesn’t have to be a rock or a half-brick — a leftover taco splattered across the windshield will kill you just as dead, if it means you can’t see where you’re going.

And that’s a minor issue. Finding rights-of-way through the NIMBYs will mean massive Kelo-ing of private property. Creating a smooth, level route with plenty of room for gentle curves will have the environmentalists spitting nails and lying down in front of earth movers. On and on and on.

It’s a silly idea. Truth to tell, it’s even silly in Europe, because if you give a European enough disposable income he’ll have a car in a heartbeat, just like here, or Colombia, or Afghanistan for that matter. The only people it appeals to are admirers of the Kewlness who don’t think it through and controller-wannabees who salivate at the thought of making every traveler pass through a checkpoint, and the first group are (generally inadvertently) empowering the second.

Regards,
Ric

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