On the surface, at least, it wouldn’t be bad to redirect some of the highway lobby efforts into high speed rail. That assumes we can get them interested enough (e.g. big construction projects, with lots of concrete and steel, etc.)

On the other hand, this might be akin to kids in “boom cars” giving up on blasting out rap and heavy metal music for a few days in exchange for classical. To some ears the music is arguably “better”, but at the end of the day, your eardrums are still being assaulted with unwanted sound.

Look, if we in the US ever get serious about building HSR (and $8 Billion dangled in front of the states is not what I call serious) then there will be a lot of money floating around, a lot of pies, and a lot of fingers in each pie. There’ll be consultants, construction companies, neighborhood groups, NIMBYs, YIMBY’s and assorted cranks all jockeying for a chance to influence the process.

Will they all be looking out for their own interests? Yes. Will these interests coincide with the public good? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.

I do know that there’s no returning to the 1950′s, where planners rammed projects (highways) through with little or no regard for the consequences of population displacement, land use, decisions, etc. Saying “ah, but this is for HSR” won’t fly. Like it or not, the rules of participatory planning, formed during the “Freeway Revolts” of the 1960′s and 70′s, will apply to HSR development in the US.

Look at it in historical terms. There was nothing that specifically said that the federal government should begin its involvement with high-speed divided intercity highways by spotting close to $70 million for the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1938, other than that the stars aligned. Unlike its equally congested northeastern neighbors, Pennsylvania had a plan and a readily available and very good right-of-way. And it was a plan that aligned with Washington priorities. President Roosevelt wanted a national tollway system, and the Bureau of Public Roads Chief, ardent tollway opponent Thomas McDonald, nonetheless liked other aspects of this particular project and was not going to spend political capital on stopping it purely over tolling.

The PA turnpike was just one of many examples of places that desperately needed new roads at the time, but they were far ahead of other places in their planning and engineering. Likewise, as far as choosing rail projects today, there’s a lot to be said for the money to go to schemes that are surveyed and ready to go because those are more likely to be the projects that are delivered successfully. In political terms, getting a quick and acceptable result is the key at this stage of the game. The PA Turnpike was a shovel-ready project that went from federal subsidy to opening in two years because PennDOT had already taken control of the right-of-way and done the planning (and of course Cornelius Vanderbilt had already basically cleared and graded the right of way 60 years earlier). That kind of availability and convenience and timeliness is important, and the only additional rail-specific consideration we need to deal with now is making sure it connects to existing public transport networks rather than standing alone.

The possibility of greater funding of passenger rail, especially HSR, has attracted great interest from corporate suppliers on the one hand and cities and states with potential routes on the other hand.

Their lobbying efforts could help convince Congress to keep increasing the appropriations in coming years. This could help solve the main problem of HSR in this country, which is, as Yonah was quoted as saying, “They can’t get anything off the ground.”

As for corruption, Deep Throat in Watergate had advice that applies here: “Follow the money.”

If we follow the money, we find it flowing by the hundreds of billions to the military industrial complex, and I suspect there is corruption, with Halliburton no-bid contracts and many others.

We also see tens of billions flowing to support highway construction, and I suspect there could be some on-going corruption involved.

Lots of money goes to the War on Drugs and the prison industry, and I promise you there’s plenty of corruption there.

Recently about a trillion dollars was loaned or given to banks, brokerage houses, insurance companies and the like, and as Al Capone said, “Those guys are all crooks.”

So if you have ‘only one life to give’ to the study of CORRUPTION, don’t waste it looking at a lousy $8 billion trying to get people to do something about high speed rail projects for the first time in our lifetimes.

It went:

zOMG! People are trying to influence how the Federal Government spends billions of dollars!
… which is a silly place to begin. All it actually is evidence of is something we already know – that we have a political system where interests that want to get Federal funding have to fight for it. It tells us absolutely nothing about whether a particular lobbying effort is spending money to promote or frustrate the public interest.

A short introductory section about the change in the environment facing capital investment in intercity rail placed after having framed the issue as “quite possibly special interest dollars trying to hoodwink the public”

Then a section of quote salad on planning, that threatens to actually be useful in terms of pointing out the need to establish a coherent framework of standard to allow inter-operation of sets of corridors as they expand and interconnection – but then getting diverted into the foolish notion of a top-down national network design.

Then comes the section on the troubled past, which lapses into all of the classic blunders in reporting on economic issues that Dean Baker so incisively dissects when they happen in the WaPo and NYT – eg, “A sobering Government Accountability Office report this past spring has served as the conscience of the debate. It identified more than $1 billion already spent by governments at various levels on just 11 high speed rail proposals currently in the environmental review phase.”. Another “zOMG!” Dr. Evil moment – One BEEEEELLYON DOLLARS!!!

$1b over the course of 16 years is, after all over $60m PER YEAR! $62.5m/year is nearly 0.2% of federal highway spending in 2006! Somewhere around $0.20~$0.25 per person per year!

Then back to the lobbying after not having done any coherent analysis of the public benefit of what is being lobbied FOR, finishing with inside the beltway he said / she said dueling quotes.

Chicago politics is well-known for the illegal variety (bribery, kickbacks, electoral fraud, other sorts of machine politics)–and while Obama and his administration have not been implicated in any of this sort of stuff, as the troll above demonstrates, Obama’s Chicago background provides lots of fodder for political opponents to take cheap shots.

The Bush Administration didn’t have any significant issues with the sort of illegal graft described above. What it DID do, in spades, was engage in things like blatant cronyism (appointing obviously incompetent people to important posts); turn nonpolitical administrative posts into de-facto political ones, making all sorts of decisions based on ideological concerns rather than on the proverbial facts on the ground. And I’m not even getting to the attempts to exercise executive power in ways that are extremely questionable. Whether this constitutes “corruption” or merely incompetence or excess, is an interesting debate–but the result was disasterous nonetheless.

And the fact remains that the Bush Administration was beholden to petrochemical interests, and ideologically opposed to anything resembling a transfer of wealth to the impoverished–both of which combined to make the administration highly hostile to public transit, especially rail.

I love the blog, but some of the political statements in recent posts are cringe-worhty. “Though President Obama’s Administration is far less biased towards corruption than its predecessor”. I think the Bush administration was one of the most disastrous in living memory, but I don’t know that corruption was one of its major flaws. For that matter, I see no great proof that the Obama administration is any more or less corrupt than the average. It also seems a bit premature to judge either way.