Later On

Bruce Selcraig writes in Miller-McCune:

On March 11, 2004, at the height of the morning rush hour in Madrid’s stately Atocha train station, 10 improvised explosive devices, like those used in Iraq and Afghanistan, ripped apart four commuter trains, killing 191 people and injuring some 1,800 in the worst act of terrorism in Europe since the explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in 1988.

Today, the Atocha station feels about as removed from that horror as one could imagine. Much of the spacious, high-ceilinged waiting area has been transformed into a walkable, indoor forest, with giant ferns, palms and lily pads; famed Catalan cellist Pablo Casals wafts through the sound system. My teenage son and I are waiting for the AVE high-speed train to Barcelona, the most recently opened high-speed rail line in a much-praised system that Spain inaugurated in 1992. The experience is more like visiting a museum than grabbing a train. There are no hour-long lines. Our shoes remain sensibly on our feet.

As we stride single file onto the eel-like, German-made Siemens S-103 train, which seats 402 and will take us to Barcelona in 2 hours and 38 minutes, it’s hard not to be impressed. On board the AVE (for Alta Velocidad Española, but also, coincidentally, bird in Spanish) the colors are generic corporate blues and grays, with Wi-Fi, croissants and a flat-screen TV beckoning. Within minutes we’re hurtling through the high plains and olive groves of Don Quixote land. A small digital sign in the business car flashes our top speed: 300 kilometers or 186 mph.

Unlike in America, no freight trains or conventional passenger trains compete for these tracks, which are fenced-off and raised on concrete ties. With few stops, the electrified AVE trains on Spain’s four major routes maintain a 99 percent on-time record, according to RENFE, the state-owned company that operates the trains. RENFE puts its euros where its mouth is by offering passengers on the Madrid-Seville route a total cash refund if the AVE is more than five minutes late. With seats as cheap as $60 roundtrip, the Madrid-Barcelona trains have proven so successful that RENFE says it now has lured away nearly 50 percent of the Iberia Airlines traffic on that popular 375-mile route.

Spain’s success story with high-speed rail goes well beyond merely transporting people.

One hundred miles south of Madrid, the once-dispirited town of Ciudad Real (pop. 73,000) has been able to attract more professors to its University of Castilla-La Mancha campus because the AVE, which arrived in 1992, has reduced the commute from Madrid to 50 minutes, rather than two hours by car. “The school is here because of the AVE,” José María Menéndez, head of the civil engineering department, told The Wall Street Journal. “Without it, it would be impossible to attract the high-level staff we need.” Full trains of “Avelinos” now bring hundreds of professionals from Madrid to Ciudad Real’s new information technology firms, regional hospital and international airport.

In Zaragoza, an alluring city of 700,000 halfway between Madrid and Barcelona, Socialist Mayor Juan Alberto Belloch told me he was initially concerned that only the rich would benefit from the fast train, but the AVE created an unanticipated type of middle-class tourism. Day-trippers from Spain’s two largest cities now come for shopping, major soccer games and religious shrines, arriving in about 80 minutes by AVE instead of three hours by car. Here, too, the AVE has attracted high-tech firms, new housing, shops and a stunning new train station. “Socialist, conservative … we all agree on AVE,” Belloch says.

AVE ridership has grown on every route, and there are plans to build another 6,213 miles of high-speed track by 2020. If those plans can survive Spain’s stout recession, the country will be second only to China in the amount of high-speed rail track, and 90 percent of Spain’s 47 million people will live within about 30 miles of an AVE station. It’s a success story that has had President Obama effusing over Spain’s trains at the White House.

Yet there are those in America who insist Europe is so different politically and culturally that the U.S. may never be able to duplicate what seems to occur so naturally there. Behind the politics and ideology, however, are the financial facts of high-speed rail. Those facts are complicated and open to parsing in many different ways — ways that are often inflected by the political ideology of the parser. Still, a few are clear: All forms of mass transit are subsidized. Overall, high-speed rail is far more cost effective than its opponents claim. And high-speed rail could become a significant part of America’s transportation mix with far less investment than has been poured into highways and airports.

After four decades of White House policy ranging from indifference (Carter, Clinton) to hostile neglect (Nixon, Reagan, two Bushes), America’s woebegone passenger rail system had become, by Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, a tired cultural punch line. As Obama took his oath, chances were good that Americans who didn’t live along the Pacific Coast, in the upper Midwest or between Boston and Washington, D.C., rarely saw, much less used, a daily passenger train. Of the 32 most developed nations, none has a lower percentage of inter-city rail riders than the United States — a mere 0.3 percent compared to Japan’s world-leading 27 percent. Unthinkable in Europe, America has metro areas with more than a million people — such as Nashville, Tenn., Columbus, Ohio, Phoenix and Las Vegas — with no inter-city passenger rail of any kind, at any speed.

Over the last 20 years, this rail ridership gap between America and the rest of the industrialized world has only widened, as China, South Korea, Japan, France, Italy, Germany and Spain committed hundreds of billions of dollars not just to seamless networks of conventional trains (that is, those that travel at speeds below 125 mph) but to the construction of sleek, electrified, high-speed trains that can exceed 186 mph. From Shanghai to Madrid, from right-wing to socialist, governments taxed their citizens and granted subsidies or entered into private partnerships to fund their fast trains, convinced they would not only speed up regional travel, but also reduce carbon emissions and oil dependence, relieve traffic congestion, rejuvenate dying towns and create millions of jobs. In virtually every developed nation except the United States, although there may still be pitched political battles over immigration, foreign policy and soccer, hardly anyone argues about the wisdom of their fast trains.

Less than three months into his presidency, Obama announced his plan . . .

Continue reading. It’s a long and informative article. Note particularly this later section:

. . . The Heritage Foundation’s Ronald Utt is typical of many rail critics. Often citing the work of other right-leaning think tanks such as the Cato Institute or the Reason Foundation, Utt dismisses high-speed rail as a massive waste of money that “pander[s] to key constituencies: environmentalists, rail hobbyists, and labor unions.” Yes, Utt is bothered by the prospect of high-speed trains that provide real middle-class jobs to American workers who might belong to unions, a threat to the country, one surmises, only surpassed by the unbridled political might of … rail hobbyists.

Back on Earth, one wonders why fiscal watchdogs fail to see the full picture on federal transportation subsidies. Aviation not only receives billions for basics like Federal Aviation Administration operations, airline security, noise mitigation funds for homeowners, and air service to small communities, but airports themselves benefit from tax-free financing on everything from cargo buildings to retail stores — not to mention that the FAA covers 75 to 95 percent of airport planning and development costs in outright grants.

Still more curious is why anti-rail critics don’t concede the fact that our nation’s highways are subsidized with every gallon of gasoline we buy, yet — despite conventional wisdom to the contrary — they rarely pay for themselves. (The federal gas tax has remained at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that will produce more than $40 billion in highway construction and maintenance funds — the Highway Account, part of the Highway Trust Fund – annually through 2011.) How can they fail to have noticed a much-publicized, man-bites-dog study in 2008 from the car-loving Texas Department of Transportationthat boldly stated: “There is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their true cost, but most roads … pay for considerably less.” (In fairness, one possible motivation for the iconoclastic Texas study could be Republican governor and White House-aspirant Rick Perry‘s open love of toll roads.)

The Highway Trust Fund was actually depleted by 2008 and required its own congressional bailout of some $8 billion, but fans of concrete can hardly say they’ve been shortchanged over the years. Since 1983, mass transit has only received about one-eighth of those highway taxes, and none went to true high-speed rail because, to date, the U.S. has no true high-speed trains. (Why the federal highway fund is empty is another story. Failing to index the federal gas tax to inflation was a “colossal error of judgment,” writes Melissa Lafsky on The Infrastructurist, noting that Congress, motivated by “political gain rather than public good,” hasn’t the guts to raise the tax on such a daily meat-and-potatoes item for most Americans.)

That silent pervasive tax at the gas pump (including state taxes) has made America’s interstate highway system the envy of the world, yet the colossal appetite for highway funding — most states, like Texas, prevent their highway gas taxes from funding anything but roads — has crippled passenger rail in America. There’s no quicker way to make a rail fan weep than to imagine a portrait of an America that funded passenger rail slowly but surely for the past 30 years with, say, just 20 percent of the highway funds collected annually. Thanks to the 2009 stimulus bill, there will be an injection of billions of dollars into U.S. passenger rail, but whether that represents the start of a rail renaissance or a one-time fiscal anomaly may depend, weirdly enough, on how many tourists want to take the train to Disney World. . .