Comment by holograham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by holograham | Hacker News Reader

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> Only when being installed. When operating, the true cost per passenger mile is much lower than for interstate highways and cars. It's best to avoid misleading economic comparisons.

Installation costs would be included in your cost per passenger per mile (though likely amortized over the usable lifetime or augmented with maintenance/upgrade costs). But overall I agree with you that perhaps the cost per passenger per mile works out favorably for high speed rail for trips of a certain length (I address that in a different point). I am just pointing out factors the author glossed over.

> False choice. Cities have sophisticated, multi-level rail and surface mass transit systems for a reason -- they make economic sense.

What false choice? I am pointing out that traffic around cities is NOT predominately inter-state traffic but local commuter traffic. I agree that city transit can be very cost effective and eliminate local road congestion. However this is all ancillary to the high speed rail argument. High Speed rail is not used for local commuter traffic which I am characterizing as 50 miles or less. High speed rail (and the national funding associated with it) will not solve local city congestion.

> I have to ask -- who are you working for? Your arguments are all paper-thin, easily torn to pieces. Roads and cars are democratic? More democratic than a seat in mass transit?

I work for a software company as a developer :) So clearly I am the authority on high speed rail. I disagree that my arguments are "paper-thin" and easily torn to pieces. As far as my democratic statement I will expound as it was used in a context that your quote eliminated. High Speed rail is useful for longer distance travel where speed (time) matters. The frequent (daily/weekly) users of this system are skewed towards the very wealthy who have commutes/business travel that travel distances where high speed rail is cost effective. Thus using federal subsidies (which are pooled for the entire population) to fund a service for a fraction of the population is a hard sell in a democratic government. Roads are an easier sell since most citizens own (or could own) a car and have travel needs that fall within the radius where car (or local mass transit) is cost effective.

You need to realize that, if high-speed rail and the other discussed modes of transport compared poorly to highway travel in economic terms, governments would stop supporting them. The opposite is true -- alternatives to highway travel in individual cars are becoming much more popular, except in the U.S., where car ownership isn't a choice, it's a religion.

> You need to realize that, if high-speed rail and the other discussed modes of transport compared poorly to highway travel in economic terms, governments would stop supporting them.

I am sorry but this argument is not gonna fly. Saying that governments are infallible and make perfect decisions or trend toward perfect decisions is simply not correct.

And assuming you mean democratic governments this makes even less sense.

> Saying that governments are infallible and make perfect decisions or trend toward perfect decisions is simply not correct.

In that case, I'm glad only you said it -- I never did. Government is the art of the possible, and politicians generally know how to avoid being thrown out of office. Avoiding decisions that have no public support, choosing only those that have some public support, that's something politicians are good at. It's the political version of crowdsourcing.

> And assuming you mean democratic governments this makes even less sense.

You serious? Finding out what the voters want is even more important in a democracy than it would be in a totalitarian state. Political opinion sampling is why France and Japan have high-speed rail, and it's why the U.S. doesn't.

"Maintaining a positive perception amongst your constituents" has almost no relationship to "doing what the voters want."

I would disagree with your comments about finding options that have public support. Consider net neutrality. Who in the broad public outside those companies is in favor of the telecom companies extracting a toll from the content networks? Yet it remains a topic because politicians know they can get funding and connections from those companies if they can force through the legislation. Public support is not a core part of modern governance, partially because the public does not hold politicians on either side of the aisle accountable.

not to get into the nuances of how modern democracies work but thinking that politicians are constantly crowdsourcing the best ideas and using that information to guide them is an incredible naive view of how modern democracies (usually democratic republic with additional branches that contain a mixture of elected and appointed officials).

Politicians in a modern democracy do indeed need to stay elected but that is typically independent of what a true, unfettered democracy would produce. Some of this is by design -- a pure democracy would be largely unworkable. At best too fractured and at worst everyone would vote for more benefits and less (no) taxes at the expense of national debt for a future generation.

Mostly politicians vote for what keeps them in office. Which as we see in the US is typically special interest groups and powerful lobbists.

True crowdsourcing occurs in free market economies. We could go there :) The libertarian would say if high speed rail was so in demand and made such economic sense then why arent companies scrambling to take advantage of a market inefficiency to make gobs of money?

You're right, government officials never support programs that are economically inefficient. Especially large, sexy programs that get tons of media coverage and often get a politician's name associated with them. Nope, those are the first to get the ax when it's determined that there are more economically efficient, less sexy alternatives.

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