China Stimulus (217 mph):
U.S. Stimulus (Napa Valley, Wine Train):
Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.
Bullet Train/Wine Train
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[comment using 'gravy train']
There real story here is the no bid contract. The actual project is for flood control which requires moving the train. That doesn’t make for such a catchy headline though.
David Clausen:
It doesn’t really matter. We both know that something like the bullet trains in China would be impossible to do in the United States, short of spending trillions of dollars.
We simply live in a society where the social costs of doing things are too high, that it isn’t really worth for us to do anything that isn’t social. Cool new music, yeah sure. High speed trains, nope. “Promoting Social Justice”, yeah sure. Building new power plants, not really going to happen. “Innovative” new “Financial Products”, sure. Investing and competing in exportable industrial goods, pshaw!
In our society, the costs of political rent seeking, public relations, etc., make it cost prohibitive to do anything that isn’t political rent seeking or public relations.
critic: Air travel is faster and more efficient without the TSA… post-TSA, who can say?
David Clausen said
The actual project is for flood control which requires moving the train. That doesn’t make for such a catchy headline though.
Doesn’t matter for tea bagger like Alex…All tea baggers just need an excuse to deride Obama. Now if a republican had spent money on Wine Train, that should be considered as for national security.
From my time living in China, I would gladly have my taxes raised to have a high speed rail system across the United States. I’ve lived in the United States almost my entire life, and I am “connected” with a couple metropolitan areas. In China, I felt like I was connected with the entire country. If I wanted to hop on a train from Beijing (way up north) to Kunming (way down south), no problem. Cut out all this “jobs bill” bullshit and completely ridiculous military and Medicare spending so we can get some high speed rail in here.
Martin writes:
“So unlike Alex to be envious of an absolute government run economy.”
Government run economy… like in Nappy Valley California?
NIMBY RULES! GET ON THE LITIGATION EXPRESSS!
property rights are probably too strong in this regard.
re: Chinese Trains
definitely feel the same way… and the security circus consists of just one or two metal detectors and a hard stare from a Chinese officer.
Affe,
Yeah…the same tea baggers who never bothered about national deficit when republican was in power and all of a sudden are very “concerned” now.
It’s better to be a teabagger than a teabaggee.
In case you missed it, there were major invasions that had to be paid for. Eventually we get expelled from the countries we occupy so those are not permanent government programs.
It would have been nice if there had been a handful of principled democrats to help oppose the invasions, but to quote a wise man (Ricky Bobby), “That just happened!”
Brad, do you live in this place we call reality? Can you read the words that you are typing? Does space-time not apply to you? Your inane comment is the equivalent of DEMANDING evidence of a Bull Moose party convention in 1896.
CThorm, No its not equivalent. Your excuse will not cover the hypocrisies of tea party/current GOP. I know that “tea party” was founded recently…but do you have any date of any large gathering/convention of GOP’ers in all of time period b/w Jan 2001 – Jan 2009 opposing deficit?
My second question can definitely be answered without considering the time space thingy… give me example of one GOP/tea party member (nationally recognizable) calling/have called Bush as socialist for increasing spending. Just one?
woops, meant to write tea party* movement, seriously didn’t mean to make that mistake
Hahahahahahah What a joke the US is now – we mustn’t build anything the terrorists don’t want us to build.
“Wouldn’t a single bomb, causing a few hundred casualties and destroying a section of track, shut down high speed rail forever? Public confidence could never be restored.”
Wouldn’t a single plane, hijacked and flown into a building and causing a few thousand casualties shut down air travel forever?
Are you posing this question in good faith or are you just trolling? Because I would like to see some actual evidence for the question you are proposing before I can even take you seriously.
High Speed Rail would be an easy target for terrorists. Just plant a small bomb somewhere along the hundreds of miles of exposed track and detonate it with a cell phone as the train approaches. The train derails, hundreds or thousands are killed and maimed, the line is disabled until the damage can be repaired, and everyone in the country is afraid to get on a train.
High Speed Rail makes no economic sense in the U.S. The California HSR project will almost certainly never get built. It’s far too expensive. California is broke, the federal government is broke, and private investors would be foolish to commit tens of billions of dollars to such a foolhardy scheme.
Even the part about airplanes being just as convenient as trains – is he joking? Most airports are located far FAR on the outskirts of the cities and are extremely inconvenient to get to and from, where as rail stations tend to be located right in the heart of their respective cities.
Since most people live in the suburbs, far FAR from the city centers where your trains would depart from, and since people and jobs continue to decentralize away from city centers and into the suburbs, this point isn’t terribly compelling. The Northeast Corridor is really the only part of the country that has cities that are big enough, dense enough, within the “sweet spot” for HSR range, and with sufficient mass transit connections to their central train stations, to make HSR even remotely viable.
Sigivald: “(And isn’t the 2009 deficit triple the biggest Bush one in 2008? Is it wrong to be more concerned when it triples, if you’re concerned about deficits at all?”
I don’t think that is correct. Here are the respective contributions to the deficit by Bush and Obama http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/09/business/economy/20090610-leonhardt-graphic.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html?_r=1
Not remotely compelling? That doesn’t make much sense, HSR has been successfully implemented elsewhere – Japan, Korea, Europe. Why wouldn’t connecting dense areas of the country such as throughout the Atlantic North-East bring similar benefits?
“a VAST majority of people affiliating themselves with the teabag movement had no interest in deriding deficits when Bush was in power.”
Uh… maybe… scale… MIGHT just have something to do with it ?
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/.a/6a00d834515c2369e201156ff0579b970c-pi
Oh, then there’s also this . Can you write to everyone reading this blog what the sign says at around 4:02 in the clip?
High-speed trains are not particularly interesting to terrorists in Western countries. Certainly not more than shopping malls and other large gatherings of people. (BTW In Madrid and London, regular (low-speed) commuter trains were attacked.)
Killing several hundred random travellers somewhere in a semidesert or empty meadows or even in suburbia is rather contraproductive for the prospective Caliphate; you do not get any worldly fame for killing a bunch of John Does, and the USA will not fold because of loss of 0,0001% of the population.
Now, slamming a full Boeing liner into a symbol of American power like the two towers or Pentagon or the White House … that is the jihadi’s American dream.
High-speed rail is extensively used in Spain, where ETA terrorists are active for decades. Turkey builds high-speed rail from Istanbul to Ankara, although it just defeated Kurdish rebels after a lengthy conflict.
Even Iran and Saudi Arabia are seriously thinking of high-speed rail, and these two countries have their fair share of lunatics.
Russians continue to ride their trains even after several Chechen attempts to derail them, at least one successful…
So, why should the sky fall just in the USA?
The train from Beijing to Xi’an takes about 12 hours. The train from Beijing to Kunming takes between 36 and 45 hours. Not exactly bullets. Given the terrain, I’m not sure bullet trains even would be feasible for most Chinese routes.
While I enjoyed the trains in China (we did soft sleepers), we enjoyed the planes even more.
Not remotely compelling? That doesn’t make much sense, HSR has been successfully implemented elsewhere – Japan, Korea, Europe. Why wouldn’t connecting dense areas of the country such as throughout the Atlantic North-East bring similar benefits?
With the possible exception of two routes (Paris to Lyon and Tokyo to Osaka) the costs appear to greatly exceed the benefits everywhere that HSR has been “implemented.” It’s just not a cost-effective form of transportation. It also appears to be highly regressive. It disproportionately benefits affluent business travelers at the expense of ordinary people.
Disclaimer: Wine Train Employee
The stimulus money did not go to the wine train. It went to a flood control project to protect the town of Napa. As part of the project, the Army Corps of Engineers decided that a lot of our infrastructure needed to be modified to prevent the flooding.
Learn more at:
http://winetrain.com/flood-control-facts
Nothing will ever get built in the US with all the political baggage the country carries. And everyone knows that high speed rail hardly works in countries with the population density to support the service. It could never work nationally in the US. It does make a good metaphor
Yet i have not been pass through such travelling experience. But i would like to have such cool experience of travelling by bullet train or wine train. I would like to know much about it. Thanks for sharing!
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