Welcome to TBO.com. Skip directly to: our Keyword Search, Section Navigation, Content.

TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

TBO.com - Tampa Bay Online

About This Blog:

The Jax Files is an interactive, quick-hitting blog devoted to any and all things Pasco, whether whole-heartedly, tangentially or merely psychologically.

Tom Jackson:

Tom Jackson is in a 12-step program for recovering sports writers; as part of his rehabilitation, he writes a column centered on the people, politics, passions and peculiarities of Pasco County. Email

Pasco County Links:

Most Recent Entries

Monthly Archives

The Jax Files: With Tom Jackson in Pasco

Pasco County News | Breaking News

High-speed boondoggle

Posted Feb 14, 2011 by Tom Jackson

Updated Feb 14, 2011 at 06:53 PM

From our perch up in Pasco County—where we, too, suffer our own misguided rail-centric preoccupations—we wonder how it is possible there isn’t a single mayoral candidate in Tampa willing to see (and condemn) the proposed high-speed rail link to Orlando for the unquenchable, tax-dollar-swilling boondoggle it is. While we’re on the subject of clear-eyed realists, Gov. Rick Scott is correct to resist federal plans to open this sinkhole of public debt.

Nonetheless, we commend to the next mayor’s reading pleasure Washington Post economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson’s Sunday piece, “High-speed rail is a fast-track to government waste,” in which he meticulously excoriates city-to-city rail.

Samuelson’s complaint, in a nutshell:

There’s something wildly irresponsible about the national government undermining states’ already poor long-term budget prospects by plying them with grants that provide short-term jobs. Worse, the rail proposal casts doubt on the administration’s commitment to reducing huge budget deficits. The president’s 2012 budget is due Monday. How can it subdue deficits if it keeps proposing big spending programs?

High-speed rail would definitely be big. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has estimated the administration’s ultimate goal - bringing high-speed rail to 80 percent of the population - could cost $500 billion over 25 years. For this stupendous sum, there would be scant public benefits. Precisely the opposite. Rail subsidies would threaten funding for more pressing public needs: schools, police, defense.

Samuelson also explodes the subsidy myth promulgated by HSR pushers:

Rail buffs argue that subsidies for passenger service simply offset the huge government support of highways and airways. The subsidies “level the playing field.” Wrong. In 2004, the Transportation Department evaluated federal transportation subsidies from 1990 to 2002. It found passenger rail service had the highest subsidy ($186.35 per thousand passenger-miles) followed by mass transit ($118.26 per thousand miles). By contrast, drivers received no net subsidy; their fuel taxes more than covered federal spending. Subsidies for airline passengers were about $5 per thousand miles traveled. (All figures are in inflation-adjusted year 2000 dollars.)

The payoff paragraphs are at the bottom:

It’s a triumph of fancy over fact. Even if ridership increased fifteenfold over Amtrak levels, the effects on congestion, national fuel consumption and emissions would still be trivial. Land-use patterns would change modestly, if at all; cutting 20 minutes off travel times between New York and Philadelphia wouldn’t much alter real estate development in either. Nor is high-speed rail a technology where the United States would likely lead; European and Asian firms already dominate the market.

Governing ought to be about making wise choices. What’s disheartening about the Obama administration’s embrace of high-speed rail is that it ignores history, evidence and logic. The case against it is overwhelming. The case in favor rests on fashionable platitudes. High-speed rail is not an “investment in the future”; it’s mostly a waste of money. Good government can’t solve all our problems, but it can at least not make them worse.

Now, if we could just get our elected officials and candidates throughout the Tampa Bay area to embrace the wisdom (through cost-control) and flexibility of designated bus lanes, or bus rapid transit, as a superior alternative to commuter light rail, we’d really be getting somewhere.