FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY AND REGULATORY REFORM.

A series of articles on the folly of spending money on European-style high-speed electric passenger trains inadvertently make the case for the Cold Spring Shops "give them their head to 110" campaign.

Let's start with a Matt Yglesias suggestion fully in the tradition of economic stimulus by internal improvements.

It seems to me that an 8.1 percent reduction in defense expenditures in order to create a transformative nationwide new infrastructure program would be a no-brainer.

Of course the larger moral of the story here is that with government borrowing costs currently very low and large quantities of workers and other resources idle, it makes a ton of sense to borrow large sums of money to invest in useful projects.

Perhaps, somewhere, there is an analysis of the portion of the military budget that goes to pet projects in the districts of influential Members of Congress; thus a diversion of funds to carefully evaluated internal improvements might make the admirals and generals happier whilst providing the material conditions for productivity gains elsewhere in the economy. To perform such an evaluation, however, requires more careful accounting for government borrowing, in which some of the national debt is a liability incurred in the creation of an asset. Under current conventions, borrowing to cover student loan defaults is on the book exactly as is borrowing to build bridges.

Consider next a Randal O'Toole riposte to Mr Yglesias.

I’ve never met Yglesias, so he probably doesn’t know that I personally love trains and hate driving. But as an policy analyst, I have to put my personal preferences aside and ask a couple of questions that never seem to occur to Yglesias. First, what are the benefits? Second, what do you have to give up to pay the costs?

The answer to the first question is: negligible. High-speed trains will carry less than 10 percent of the number of passenger miles carried by the Interstate Highway System (all the cost of which was paid out of user fees), and virtually no freight (interstate highways not only carry 20 percent of all passenger miles but about 15 percent of all freight ton-miles in the United States).

Step One in the Cold Spring Shops campaign: identify overpass projects that will separate motor vehicles from trains at locations where the benefits to motorists, the freight railroads, and the passenger rail operators. (That difference in freight and passenger ton miles on the interstates reflects the success of the freight railroads at attracting container traffic: more gear-jammers can spend every night at home now, with the long haul on the freight railroads.)

Step Two: identify Passenger Rail routes that have the greatest potential to reduce road congestion. In the course of criticizing the big-ticket European-style fast trains, Robert Samuelson tells us where to look.

We are prisoners of economic geography. Suburbanization after World War II made most rail travel impractical. From 1950 to 2000, the share of the metropolitan population living in central cities fell from 56 percent to 32 percent, report UCLA economists Leah Platt Boustan and Allison Shertzer. Jobs moved, too. Trip origins and destinations are too dispersed to support most rail service.

That might be so, but California's regional rail and commuter rail services in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego are well-patronized, and Chicago's Metra has become the mode of choice for commuters, shoppers, and museum-bound families frustrated by the congestion on the expressways and squeezed by the parking rates that equilibrate supply and demand at Loop parking lots. (The parking rates are high enough that a family can recover its out-of-pocket cost for the train fares plus an aliquot share of the taxes it pays to subsidize their ride by avoiding the parking lots.)

Step Three: provide additional track capacity for additional commuter trains, including skip-stop limiteds, regional passenger trains, and freight trains. The freight railroads have seen the wisdom of cooperating with Passenger Rail authorities to run the commuter trains if that cooperation gets them more capacity for their moneymaking freight trains. In a proper system of income accounting, the return on those investments would be positive.

Only in places with greater population densities, such as Europe and Asia, is high-speed rail potentially attractive. Even there, most of the existing high-speed trains don't earn "enough revenue to cover both their construction and operating costs," the Congressional Research Service report said. The major exceptions seem to be the Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon lines.

President Obama calls high-speed rail essential "infrastructure" when it's actually old-fashioned "pork barrel." The interesting question is why it retains its intellectual respectability. The answer, it seems, is willful ignorance. People prefer fashionable make-believe to distasteful realities. They imagine public benefits that don't exist and ignore costs that do.

The essential infrastructure is those additional tracks to keep the freights moving and the passenger trains on time, and the grade separations to reduce the delay to motorists and the incidence of collisions.

High-speed inter-city trains (not commuter lines) travel at up to 250 miles per hour and are most competitive with planes and cars over distances of fewer than 500 miles.

With the delays inherent in flying, a conventional train topping out at 110 or 125 will beat the time of the car over any distance greater than 50 miles, if the frequency is convenient enough, and it will be competitive with planes over distances up to 500 miles, with the additional advantage that a train makes intermediate stops.

Amtrak's current passenger diesels, and the coaches they pull, are capable of running at 125 on the Northeast Corridor, in order that the Acelas not be obstructed.

Step Four: Modify or repeal the regulations that require special signalling and other safety appliances to permit train operation at 80 mph or faster. You streamline government, and you get your faster trains at a much lower initial outlay. And you don't lose that much in running time: can a regional rail train making stops spaced 30 to 50 miles apart really get to 200 for long enough to shave more than a minute or two off the schedule, compared to the train that tops out at 110 or 125?

Good, Fast, Cheap. I was under the impression you could have any two.