POLITICAL ECONOMY PARADOXES.

A recent U. S. News article addressing private-enterprise fast trains includes this from current Virgin Brightline chief Richard Branson.

“We decided, ‘Everyone in America uses cars because the rail network is run by the government – and they have nothing like what we have in Europe,’” Virgin founder and British magnate Richard Branson told the Miami Herald in April.

It's more precise to say that the Passenger Rail network, such as it is, is a government-tolerated tenant on privately owned railroad tracks, and the Europeans have nothing that can touch the North American freight network (even with Precision Scheduled Railroading driving some of the freight business away.)  Meanwhile, the road network has been the beneficiary of the public money.

But while other nations continued investing in train travel, including in multibillion-dollar high-speed projects, American passenger rail atrophied. The fall was dictated both by the rise of the interstate system and the free market: While tracks and other infrastructure are typically nationalized elsewhere, American railroads – unlike American freeways or American airports – are privately owned. (The passenger service Amtrak, which began in 1971, is government owned.) The short-term accountability to shareholders, says Rick Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association, has often precluded American rail companies from making transformative long-term investments.

Meanwhile, the short-term accountability to voters means that road socialism is going the way of all other socialisms, and the advantage the investor-owned trains of the Second Era of American Greatness had went away.  Not that the public money going into Passenger Rail, such as it is, has been terribly productive.

“We’re talking about nothing short of transforming transportation much the same way the interstate highway system did under President Eisenhower,” an exasperated then-Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood wrote in 2010. “Can you imagine if Ohio or Wisconsin or any other state had said, ‘No thanks – we don’t think that highway thing is going anywhere?’”

Given the liabilities called road repair or replacement the states are currently on the hook for, that might not be the best argument.

Federal funding ultimately was granted to California and to Illinois, where crews in 2010 began work on a decades-planned upgrade between Chicago and St. Louis. The proposal called for an increase from a current maximum speed of 79 mph to 110 mph. In 2013, the state also studied a possible 220 mph link from O’Hare airport to St. Louis and Indianapolis, a speed that would reduce the more than five-hour trips to about two. In December, after years of construction and complications implementing a new safety technology, Illinois officials projected the majority of the Chicago-St. Louis line would reach 90 mph by the end of this year, and declined to give a timetable for 110 mph.

Maybe the best thing for the government to do is to go away?  (Yes, the article does talk about the foolishness that is California's high-speed trains.)