Jonathan Cohn points out
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/78154/republicans-oppose-hi-speed-rail-funding-stimulus">the curious opposition of Republicans to any improvement in our woefully inadequate rail system. As he suggests, this opposition goes beyond issues of cost; there’s something visceral about it. What would Dagny Taggart say?
It’s not too hard to understand, of course: in real life, as opposed to bad novels, railroads aren’t run by rugged individualists (nor should they be). In fact, passenger rail is generally run by government; even when it’s partially privatized, as in Britain, it’s done so with heavy state intervention to preserve some semblance of competition in a natural monopoly. So rail doesn’t fit the conservative vision of the way things should be.
I suppose there’s some echo of this attitude on the other side; people like me probably have a slight affinity for rail because it’s a kind of socially provided good. But I don’t think it’s comparably irrational: rail just makes a lot of sense for densely populated regions, especially but not only the Northeast Corridor. New York could not function at all without commuter rail, and Amtrak even as it is is crucial to intercity traffic — it’s not just a question of expanding airport capacity, we just don’t have the airspace.
I’d add an informal observation: on casual observation, rail makes even more sense in the digital age. I almost always take trains both to New York and to Washington, and consider the time spent on those trains part of my productive hours — with notebooks and 3G, an Amtrak quiet car is basically a moving office. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.
So let’s hope that ideology doesn’t get in the way of our steel-railed future.
More:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
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