issue: Transportation & Infrastructure

How America Led, and Lost, the High-Speed Rail Race

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

How did America get to where it is today, a country with the slowest and most threadbare intercity passenger rail service of any advanced nation?

Not so very long ago, we were not in this humiliating position. In fact, we operated trains that amazed and impressed the rest of the world. These trains were called streamliners, and their very names – Silver Meteor, Flying Yankee, Rocky Mountain Rocket, Denver Zephyr – connoted speed and luxury. In the period between 1935 and 1950, the 10 fastest scheduled passenger trains in the world were all U.S. streamliners.

One of the great racetracks of this period was the New York Central Railroad’s four-track mainline between Buffalo and Cleveland. Paging through an old timetable, I counted 42 daily passenger trains running on this line in the 1940s. Such trains as the Commodore Vanderbilt, Fifth Avenue Special and the extra-fare choice of tycoons and Hollywood starlets, The 20th Century Limited, routinely topped 90 miles per hour on straightaways and averaged 60-65 mph, including station stops.

The 187 miles between Buffalo and Cleveland were covered in 3 hours then. Today, the sole passenger train traveling this route, Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, takes 3½ hours, if (and this is a big if) the train is on schedule.

The Rise and Fall of American Rail

What differentiated our streamliners from contemporary trains in Europe and Asia was advanced technology. American railroads and equipment suppliers had not only pioneered the diesel-electric locomotive in the 1930s – a quantum leap over from the old steam locomotive – but introduced lightweight cars with better wheel sets, couplers, braking systems and lower centers of gravity to negotiate curves at higher speeds.

The interiors of these streamliners abounded in creature comforts – wide double-paned windows, recessed fluorescent lighting, luxurious reclining seats and the first air-conditioning found in any commercial transport.

Streamliners attracted customers by the carload. In fact, they made money. Wall Street consultants Coverdale & Colpitts surveyed 58 streamliners in 1948 and found that they grossed $98 million and netted $48 million after out-of-pocket costs, for a return of 49 percent.*

And then almost as quickly as the streamliner era flourished, it ended. There were a number of reasons for the rapid decline of rail passenger service, but the overwhelming factor was the explosion of government funding for new highways and airports. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower signed the Interstate and Defense Highways Act. First estimated to cost $27 billion, the Interstate system took more than 30 years and $200 billion to complete. At the same time, state and local governments bankrolled airport construction, while Washington subsidized air carriers by fixing artificially high rates for U.S. airmail contracts.

The twin impact of airways and roadways was devastating on American railroads, which, after all, were private companies that paid property taxes and ticket taxes on their operations. For example, between 1956 and 1969, a total of 28,800 miles of interstate highways were opened to traffic. In the same period, 59,400 miles of railroad were taken out of passenger service.

From 2,500 daily intercity trains in 1954 (that’s excluding commuter service), fewer than 500 trains were left when the National Railroad Passenger Corp., or Amtrak, took over intercity rail service in 1971. Outside of the Boston-Washington Northeast Corridor, America’s passenger train had virtually disappeared.

American Technology Goes Abroad

So carelessly tossed away by our policymakers and politicians, the American streamliner did not simply die during those dismal decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, it rose from the ashes as its key technological features moved overseas, welcomed by a visionary group of railroaders.

An all-electric test train ordered by Louis Armand, head of the French national railway, shattered world records with 208-mph speeds in March 1955. This achievement proved the capacity of rail equipment using overhead electricity for propulsion to operate far above 100 mph on a sustained basis.

The French experiments inspired Japan’s Minister of Transport Shinhi Sogo. In 1956, the same year that President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highways Act, Sogo began planning a rail line without sharp curves or up and down grades that would permit streamlined, all-electric trains to run at extremely high speeds with utmost safety

To operate the Shinkansen, or “New Trunk Line,” between Tokyo and Osaka, Sogo actively imported technology from America, including the two-axle trucks of the Budd Manufacturing Co. and dynamic braking pioneered by General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division. To top it off, the Japan ordered the most advanced computer used outside of military applications (built by yet another American company, Bendix) to operate the line’s signal and dispatching systems.

Remarkably, the U.S. government gave Japan foreign aid – money purportedly going to an underdeveloped country – to build a rail infrastructure far superior to our own. Opened in time for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the first Shinkansen train traveled at a maximum of 125 mph. The latest-generation Shinkansen runs at 188 mph, and its ancestor is in a museum.

Japan wasn’t alone. After developing moderately high-speed trains on mixed freight-and-passenger lines, France opened Europe’s first all-new railroad between Paris and Lyon in 1981. This route featured the now-famous TGVs, or “Trains of Great Speed.” Six thousand of 20,000 rail miles in France are now covered by TGV trains. High-speed service has expanded into Belgium, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland and Spain in Europe and in China, South Korea and Taiwan in Asia.

Playing Catch-Up

Compared to these developments, we’re still in the horse-and-buggy stage. Amtrak’s self-declared high-speed line, the Northeast Corridor, does not even qualify as high speed by world standards. The Acela Express is designed for 150 mph, but only goes that fast for about 25 miles in Rhode Island.

Overall, Acela trains average only 67 mph between Boston and New York. South of New York, Acela operates at an average of 77 mph and can’t go faster than 125 mph anywhere because the overhead electric wires are obsolete and can slip off the train’s pantographs at higher speeds.

This is what happens when you starve a business for 60 years. It becomes stunted. Our passenger rail system is stunted today not because of some inevitable law of economics or natural outgrowth of competition. It’s stunted because of longstanding government policy that thoughtlessly, absentmindedly, let some wonderful American-made technology slip away.

This piece is an excerpt from Mark Reutter’s keynote address at the High-Speed Rail Summit last week in Erie, Pa.

* “Streamliners Earn More Than Ever,” Railway Age, March 4, 1950.

Making Haiti the World’s First Wireless Country

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Channeling my inner Rahm: never waste a good crisis. The earthquake in Haiti was, and continues to be, tragic. However, at least one entrepreneur sees an opportunity to rebuild a critical part of Haiti’s infrastructure and probably make a few bucks in the meantime:

John Stanton, founder of Voice Stream and former chief executive of T-Mobile USA, wants the Haitian government to forget about rebuilding its copper wire communications network. Instead, he thinks Haiti should go mobile. … Stanton called for the Haitian government to create an all-wireless nation with more robust networks for the population of nearly 10 million and to build an economy centered on mobile technology.

Should Haiti choose to open up some wireless bandwidth, Stanton claims that he’ll put up $100 million of his company’s money. While the idea has merit, implementation involves a few caveats, one of which comes from PPI-alum Rob Atkinson, now president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. He notes, “This could be a good strategy for as long as 20 years even, but I just don’t see it as an ultimate strategy because at a certain point you need fixed wire for services that require more bandwidth.”

Furthermore, there’s a question about competition — Stanton is angling for the first-mover advantage and trying to seize the initiative where he sees opportunity. But as with any government contract (even Haitian ones after a massive natural disaster), there’s the worry that a single-source supplier will distort the upside while dragging its heels on the outputs.

But on the whole, the idea tracks closely with what Mike Derham and I advocated in a PPI Policy Memo on Haitian reconstruction. We said that Haiti should embrace cell phone technology as a vital tool in facilitating capital flow:

Sub-Saharan Africa has adopted programs like M-PESA to allow people to use their cell phones as checking accounts. The time and effort necessary to establish a similar system in Haiti would be worthwhile. Credit can be transferred to individual phone numbers — including from overseas — and that credit can then be used for purchases from other phone owners who have a similar plan (including prepaid) from their provider. Cell coverage is one of the few institutions that covers all of Haiti. It is also an institution that has worked through the crisis, and that the American military is working to make sure stays running.

Wireless technology should a vital institution in Haiti, and Stanton’s offer should be evaluated seriously with that in mind.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ifrc/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Public Transit: Good for Your Wallet

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, a Canadian research organization, came out with an interesting new study (PDF) that makes a strong pocketbook case for high-quality public transit.

The study looked at seven major U.S. cities with high-quality public transit systems: Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

The study’s findings shouldn’t surprise public transit aficionados. According to Litman, residents of cities with good public transit tend to own 10-30 percent fewer vehicles and drive 10-30 percent less than they would in more automobile-oriented communities.

But the study also calculated what exactly good public transit meant for residents’ wallets:

[P]roviding high quality public transit service typically requires about $268 in annual subsidies and $108 in additional fares per capita, but reduces vehicle, parking and road costs an average of $1,040 per capita. For an average household this works out to $775 annually in additional public transit expenses and $2,350 in vehicle, parking and roadway savings, or $1,575 in overall net savings…[emphasis added]

Those results don’t even take into account the other benefits a city can derive from a high-functioning transit system: a decrease in pollution, less congestion, fewer traffic accidents, and improved public fitness and health.

What’s striking about Litman’s study is that its conclusions are something that transit-using city-dwellers tend to grasp intuitively. Commuters know firsthand the benefits of not having to rely on a car to get around the city — not having to deal with parking, congestion, gas, upkeep and insurance costs, etc.

But as Litman points out, most American cities offer only basic public transit services that are used mainly by people who have no other alternatives. In cities with good public transit, even affluent residents use the system, as they recognize its benefits. It all points to a fairly obvious upshot: cities should place public transit higher on its list of funding priorities.

Studies like Litman’s also bring up another important dimension in all this: political will. Americans love their cars but — especially in tough economic times — would they love them as much if they were informed that a strong alternative would save them an average of $1,500 a year? Something tells me a citizenry informed of the considerable savings from a good Metro or bus system could be nudged toward supporting more robust funding for a well-developed transit infrastructure.

Champion Enterprise, Not Paternalism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following piece was written for a conference on progressive governance being held this week in London by the Policy Network, an international think tank dedicated to promoting progressive policies:

For many on the left, the near-collapse of America’s financial system during the winter of 2008-2009 was irrefutable proof of the failure of free market ideas. The new consensus — let’s call it the anti-Washington consensus — was solemnized by business and political elites in Davos last month. Fittingly enough, French President Nicolas Sarkozy delivered the eulogy for neoliberalism.

The Anglo-American model is dead. Long live state capitalism!

Not so fast. In America at least, popular attitudes have not lurched in a more interventionist or social democratic direction. If anything, there’s been a backlash against the emergency measures the Obama administration has undertaken to unlock credit, bail out big banks holding worthless securities, reduce home foreclosures, and keep big U.S. auto companies afloat.

That has perplexed and frustrated Democrats, who believe the government should get more credit for again saving capitalism from the capitalists, just as it did in Franklin Roosevelt’s day. But Wall Street’s fall from grace doesn’t automatically translate into rising public receptivity to a more active state. Anti-business and anti-government attitudes can and do co-exist easily in the American mind.

President Obama maintains, quite plausibly, that Washington’s decisive intervention kept the economy from tumbling into the abyss. But unprecedented public deficits, the government’s effective takeover of large finance and auto companies, and, yes, Obama’s push for comprehensive health care reform, also seem to have resurrected old fears about “big government.”

One likely reason is the sheer, pharaonic scale of government spending to rescue the economy: nearly $4 trillion when you add the Federal Reserve’s efforts to pump liquidity into financial markets, aid for failing banks, last year’s $787 billion “stimulus” plan, and another $100 billion jobs bill for this year. And many in middle America are barking mad that political elites have used tax dollars to shield economic elites from the consequences of their own greed and ineptitude. This is especially true of the independent voters who helped Obama to win a solid majority in 2008, but whose defection over the past year has fueled Republican victories in elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and, most shockingly, the liberal bastion of Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is growing again, by a gaudy 5.7 percent of GDP in the last quarter of 2009. There’s been little crowing at the White House, however, not when many small businesses still can’t get credit, people continue to lose their homes, and unemployment remains stuck in double digits.

For Obama and the Democrats, the central economic challenge is not to sell some new model of state-managed capitalism to a public already worried about government spending and overreach. It’s to rebuild the American economy’s capacities for brisk innovation and job creation. That will require striking a careful balance between new regulation and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

With Wall Street again reaping huge profits (and dishing out fat bonuses), some sort of financial regulation likely will pass soon. The key tasks here are reducing moral hazard by ensuring that no financial institution becomes too big or interconnected to fail, raising capital requirements to curb excessively leveraged speculation, and creating transparency in the trading of exotic financial products like derivatives.

But what the country needs even more is a progressive opportunity agenda that emphasizes technological innovation, small business creation, American competitiveness, fiscal discipline, better schools, and middle-class jobs. Such an agenda would include the following elements:

An aggressive infrastructure initiative. Washington must reverse decades of neglect and double or triple spending aimed at modernizing America’s aging and inadequate public infrastructure. Even that, however, won’t be nearly enough, which is why progressives are calling for a National Infrastructure Bank to leverage private investment in high-speed rail, intelligent transportation systems, a smart electricity grid, and next-generation broadband.

A big boost for clean and efficient energy. The United States needs to put a price on carbon, which would raise billions to invest in developing clean fuels and technologies. Unfortunately, Obama’s “cap and trade” proposal is languishing in Congress, a victim of Republican obscurantism on climate change.

More exports. Obama wants to double U.S. exports, but the White House has not pushed Congress hard to pass the U.S.-Korea trade pact. Nor has it confronted China and other Asian nations whose currency manipulations keep U.S. (and European) goods at a competitive disadvantaged.

Fiscal restraint. America’s heavy borrowing from abroad weakens the dollar and deepens our reliance on foreign creditors. To maintain the nation’s fiscal integrity and independence, Obama must walk a fine line between winding down our enormous public deficits and debts and continuing to pump up domestic demand. The key is to reduce the unsustainable growth of public health care costs, which is why Obama is right not to give up on health care reform this year.

An entrepreneurial climate. Over the last three decades, firms less than five years old have accounted for nearly all net job creation in the United States. U.S. progressives should embrace policies that foster innovation and entrepreneurship: more public spending on research, a light-handed approach to regulating and taxing new enterprises, fiscal discipline to keep capital costs low, dramatic improvements in education and preferences for skilled immigrants.

In the ideological hothouse of Washington, it’s natural for Democrats to argue that the financial crisis has discredited market fundamentalism. But the antidote isn’t more government, it’s a progressive model for innovation-led growth that champions individual enterprise and middle class aspiration.

China and the Cyber Threat

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

James Fallows of The Atlantic has an excellent piece on China and the cyber threat (as well as some other points on the Chinese military). A few excerpts about cybersecurity:

China has hundreds of millions of Internet users, mostly young. In any culture, this would mean a large hacker population; in China, where tight control and near chaos often coexist, it means an Internet with plenty of potential outlaws and with carefully directed government efforts, too. In a report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission late last year, Northrop Grumman prepared a time line of electronic intrusions and disruptions coming from sites inside China since 1999. In most cases it was impossible to tell whether the activity was amateur or government-planned, the report said. But whatever their source, the disruptions were a problem. And in some instances, the “depth of resources” and the “extremely focused targeting of defense engineering data, US military operational information, and China-related policy information” suggested an effort that would be “difficult at best without some type of state-sponsorship.”

[…]

[Cyber authorities] stressed that Chinese organizations and individuals were a serious source of electronic threats—but far from the only one, or perhaps even the main one. You could take this as good news about U.S.-China relations, but it was usually meant as bad news about the problem as a whole.

[…]

This led to another, more surprising theme: that the main damage done to date through cyberwar has involved not theft of military secrets nor acts of electronic sabotage but rather business-versus-business spying. Some military secrets have indeed leaked out, the most consequential probably being those that would help the Chinese navy develop a modern submarine fleet. And many people said that if the United States someday ended up at war against China—or Russia, or some other country—then each side would certainly use electronic tools to attack the other’s military and perhaps its civilian infrastructure. But short of outright war, the main losses have come through economic espionage. “You could think of it as taking a shortcut on the ‘D’ of R&D,” research and development, one former government official said.

And Fallows adds one general extraordinarily striking cautionary note that has little to do with China, but that all policy makers should pay attention to:

[N]early everyone in the business believes that we are living in, yes, a pre-9/11 era when it comes to the security and resilience of electronic information systems. Something very big—bigger than the Google-China case—is likely to go wrong, they said, and once it does, everyone will ask how we could have been so complacent for so long. Electronic-commerce systems are already in a constant war against online fraud. [emphasis added]

The entire piece is worth your time, but those are the big highlights. From my perspective, I’ve seen first-hand how the Pentagon is well-aware of the threat and is devoting substantial assets to detect and disrupt the intrusions. I’m not just talking about the NSA’s new cyber command either — cyber is the hot, new frontier and that creates incentives for every agency under the sun to grab a few million smackers from the budget for working the issue. But where’s the line between effective cyber defense and too many agencies tripping over one another?

In China, High-Speed Rail Cuts into Air Travel

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As our recent policy paper on high-speed rail (HSR) noted, China has emerged as one of the global leaders in HSR, recently unveiling the world’s fastest train — with top speeds of 245 piles per hour — and proceeding apace on a plan to build 8,000 miles of ultraspeed lines by 2020.

A story from Bloomberg (h/t Infrastructurist) puts Chinese HSR’s success into perspective:

China Southern Airlines Co., the nation’s largest carrier, and Air China Ltd. are slashing prices to compete with the country’s new high-speed trains in a battle that Europe’s airlines have largely already ceded.

Competition from trains that can travel at 350 kilometers per hour (217 miles per hour) is forcing the carriers to cut prices as much as 80 percent at a time when they are already in a round of mergers to lower costs. Passengers choosing railways over airlines will also erode a market that Boeing Co. and Airbus SAS are banking on to provide about 13 percent of plane sales over the next 20 years.

“There’s no doubt that high-speed rail will defeat airlines on all the routes of less than 800 kilometers,” said Citigroup Inc. analyst Ally Ma. “The airlines must get themselves in shape, increase their profitability and improve the network.”

As the lede states, HSR has had a similar effect in Europe. A few years ago, Air France dropped its five daily trips between Paris and Brussels as a result of the growing popularity of high-speed rail among travelers. The same thing happened with the routes between Paris and Stuttgart.

Not that the airline industry in China is necessarily hurting. The country’s explosive growth has led to an urgent need to expand all sorts of transportation infrastructure. This year, some 25 airports will begin construction, including a second one in Beijing. China ordered 160 Airbus airplanes in November 2007.

China’s experience offers an instructive model as we embark on our own push to revitalize our aging rail infrastructure. As travel demand has increased, HSR has offered greater choice, reliability, and price competition for Chinese consumers. Is there any reason why China can provide that kind of infrastructure upgrade for its travelers and we can’t?

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/peoplezchronicles/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Missing from the Budget: High-Speed Rail

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

What happened to high-speed rail in President Obama’s new budget? You will recall the president sweeping down to Florida after his State of the Union address to announce $8 billion in federal stimulus awards for rail projects that, he promised, will spark jobs and prosperity. Vice President Biden described the awards as “seed money” for developing a high-speed passenger rail system throughout the country.

That was last week. This week the administration unveiled its 2011 budget, which includes a miniscule $1 billion for high-speed rail (HSR). There are several ways to think about this request:

  • It’s 2.4% of the $41.3 billion the administration requested for highways.
  • It’s 0.026% of the overall budget and 0.08% of the projected deficit.
  • It’s not enough even to help Florida complete the proposed Tampa-Orlando high-speed line that the president enthused about last week, not to speak of laying the foundation for a nationwide network of high-speed trains promised by the vice president.

What’s going on? Timidity appears to have struck the administration as it moves from soaring promises to hard decisions about how to develop and finance a major civic work that could take decades to complete.

To get high-speed rail up and running, PPI has advocated a program that focuses on two or three corridors with dedicated rights of way. We specifically recommended funding the Tampa-Orlando line as a demonstration project of the speed and convenience of modern trains operating at twice the speed of conventional Amtrak service.

Although the administration did give some stimulus funds to Florida ($1.25 billion), it did not give enough ($2.6 billion) to fund the construction cost of the 88-mile Tampa-Orlando segment. Florida DOT is now trying to figure out how to plug the gap, which also threatens private investment in the project.

Instead of concentrating on a few select corridors, the administration sprinkled rail stimulus grants across 22 states, mostly for new sidings and signals that will marginally improve passenger train speeds on shared track with freight railroads.

One could argue that spending money on such upgrades would lay the groundwork for later HSR corridors, but the administration hasn’t bothered to make such a claim.

Rather, in its budget report to Congress, the administration blithely states that $1 billion of HSR spending will “sustain large-scale, multi-year support for high-speed rail” and is sufficient “to fund promising and transformative projects.”

That’s bunk. Most experts believe that developing a high-speed rail infrastructure serving key intercity corridors in the Midwest, California, the Northeast, and elsewhere will cost $200-300 billion over the next 30 years.

This would require a funding source of about $7 billion to $10 billion a year, with contributions coming from federal, state, and local governments, together with private investment from companies seeking to service and operate the lines.

Last year, Congress realized that developing high-speed rail requires more than the administration’s lowball figure. That’s why the House and Senate rejected the White House’s $1 billion request for high-speed rail in the 2010 budget and instead authorized $2.5 billion in spending.

The additional rail funds represented one of the few times last year that bipartisan support was found in Congress. One would think that the White House would take the hint and request at least $2.5 billion in the new 2011 budget.

In our HSR policy memo, we wrote that “the administration needs to remain engaged, proactive, and forward-thinking in shepherding high-speed rail to completion.” It’s frustrating that the administration is not exerting leadership in this vital piece of infrastructure-building that promises the very thing that’s at the top of voters’ minds – jobs.

Obama’s Budget: Recognizing the Link Between Food Systems and Jobs

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama’s 2011 budget contains a few notable things for progressives to cheer. One of the items that jumped out at us was its support for an intertwined effort to boost healthy foods and food jobs – an idea that we championed in a December policy paper.

The budget includes $400 million for the Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Treasury to finance community development institutions, nonprofits, public agencies, and businesses with strategies for tackling the healthy food needs of communities. Funds will also be available for expanding retail outlets and increasing availability of local foods.

But even more impressive is the language that the administration uses to describe its food initiatives. In summary after summary, the link between food and jobs keeps popping up.

From the “Spur Job Creation and Revitalize Rural America” fact sheet:

The Budget helps lay the foundation for job creation and expanded economic opportunities throughout rural America by…[n]urturing local and regional food systems and expanding access to healthy foods for low-income Americans in rural and urban food deserts.

From an OMB paper on job creation:

First, to support the Rural Innovation Initiative, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) plans to set aside funding to foster rural revitalization through a competitive grant program. Second, the Budget supports local and regional food systems through many USDA programs including the Business and Industry guaranteed loan program and the Federal State Marketing Improvement Program.

From an OMB summary of the USDA budget:

Promotes economic and job creation opportunities for rural America by focusing on five core areas: access to broadband services, innovative local and regional food systems, renewable energy programs, climate change, and rural recreation.

Taken together, these spending decisions on food systems and job creation reveal an administration in tune with the idea of a holistic approach to our economic, social, and health problems. Following a glum January for progressives, the budget offers compelling reminders of the progressive governance that we expected from the administration.

The Administration’s Missed Opportunity on High-Speed Rail

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama flew down to Tampa, Florida, yesterday to wield his stimulus bat for “transformative” passenger train development and struck a mighty bunt for high-speed rail.

All the hoopla by the administration (e.g., DOT Secretary Ray LaHood describing the $8 billion in grants as “an absolute game-changer in American transportation”) doesn’t change the fact that of the 29 projects awarded, only two – in Florida and California – qualify as high-speed rail by world standards.

Call the rest by what they really are – “higher speed rail” or “improving Amtrak on-time-performance rail.” The best of those projects, a $1.1 billion upgrade of the existing rail corridor between Chicago and St. Louis, will permit Amtrak trains to achieve 110-mph maximums and 70-mph averages between the two cities – far below the 125-200 mph standard set by the International Union of Railways.

Several corridor projects funded yesterday won’t even achieve 100-mph speed maximums because they are limited by the curves and grades of existing railroad rights of way that cannot easily, or cheaply, be modified for HSR service.

A Tiny Step Toward True HSR

Let’s look first at the two projects that PPI recently argued should have served as templates for the administration’s HSR program.

Florida may actually get by 2015 what is running daily in Europe and Asia – “bullet trains” on dedicated track that rocket between major cities. The administration awarded the Florida Department of Transportation $1.25 billion to start a long-planned line between Tampa, Lakeland, Disney World and Orlando. Utilizing a new right of way and electrically propelled trainsets, the line is expected to operate at 168-mph top speed. Construction of the railway later this year would employ at least 15,000 workers.

But with the apparent aim of spreading stimulus cash to all corners of the country, the administration handed Florida less than half of the $2.6 billion needed to complete the 88-mile line. It is unclear how this funding gap will be overcome. One possibility is that Florida will receive funds from the $2.5 billion in HSR projects allocated by Congress for fiscal year 2010.

California’s HSR project was the other big winner yesterday, with $2.25 billion (of $4.7 billion requested) to purchase land and complete environmental reviews for a 200-mph line between San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco/Sacramento. The overall cost for this project is estimated at around $50 billion. Even though California voters approved the sale of $9 billion in bonds for construction, the project needs a lot more money to come to fruition. Does the Obama administration have a plan to make sure the project is sustainable over the long term and that some segments are opened for revenue service in the near term?

If properly funded, the Florida and California projects hold promise of starting a true HSR infrastructure, with all of the economic and environmental benefits described in the PPI policy memo. But instead of insisting on advanced rail technology elsewhere, the Obama administration has settled for modest state projects with humble goals.

Aiming Low

Take the $598 million awarded to the states of Washington and Oregon to add sidings and improve signaling on the rail line between Seattle and Portland, which is owned jointly by freight carriers Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

The administration’s fact sheet reports that passenger train travel time “will be reduced by at least 5 percent and on-time performance will increase substantially, from 62 to 88 percent.” Currently, Amtrak trains require 3½ hours to cover the 186 miles, a pokey 53 mph average. Reducing train time by 5 percent means saving all of 10 minutes.

Likewise, the $400 million in stimulus funds going to establish train service between Cleveland and Cincinnati would permit “speeds of up to 79 mph,” according to the administration’s fact sheet, while track upgrades between Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., will “increase top train speeds to 90 mph.”

There is no doubt that President Obama is committed to upgrading intercity passenger rail. But yesterday he placed his feet squarely in both the visionary camp and the slow-speed Amtrak camp, spreading federal funds far and wide rather than focusing on two or three corridors that would give us trains equal to those in Europe and China.

Vision of a State: Ultra-Federalism in Afghanistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama’s provocative, considered decision to send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan was a major moment in his presidency. By the president’s own description, the deployment is a means to an end. However, since his speech, there has been too little discussion about what we hope to achieve after security is delivered in Afghanistan.

The fact of the matter is that, assuming we achieve broad-based security in the region and “degrade” the Taliban, any successful democratic system in Afghanistan will need to be sui generis—in a class unto itself. This new goal should recognize the critical difference between a written constitution (a document) and a culture of constitutionalism (a way of life). As Thomas Jefferson once wrote of America, “Where is our republicanism to be found? Not in the constitution, but merely in the spirit of the people.” Afghanistan today possesses a perfectly serviceable written constitution, with a bicameral legislature, provincial government, an independent judiciary, and a strong executive branch. The question is whether it also possesses constitutionalism.

America’s non-military assets—including our aid budget and the Pentagon’s “civilian surge”—should make constitutionalism our ultimate goal in Afghanistan. To achieve constitutionalism in Afghanistan, we should aim at what might be called “ultra-federalism,” following the model of the United States Constitution. In designing America’s Constitution, the Framers built from our inheritance prior to 1787: thirteen states with existent, different constitutions; dramatic cultural, economic, and demographic contrasts; and legal and cultural misgivings about a strong central government. Over the decades, as America evolved—as slavery was prohibited and the Civil War was fought, and as the New Deal swept through the country—our constitutional values, like a vine, wrapped around the knottiest ethnic and historical features of our landscape.

The governing principle? We should avoid the naïve goal of perfecting a political system from scratch on the basis of abstract concepts; instead, only a pragmatic, syncretic approach—sampling from different systems for what works best—will achieve a resilient, native design that will be endorsed by the citizens it will govern.

“Ultra-federalism” in Afghanistan should mirror and embrace the country’s unique and disparate elements. The new system should include established practices and political values that accept and incorporate the ethnic divisions between the country’s major and minor ethnic groups: the Pashtuns and Tajiks (both historically Iranian), Hazaras, Uzbeks, Aimak, Turkmen, Baluch, Nuristani and other small groups. Constitutional law should embrace not only Pashto and Persian, the two official languages of the country, but Uzbek and Turkmen, which are spoken in the north, and, to the extent possible, the 70 other dialects throughout the country. As far as tribes go, the Pashtuns alone have at least seven tribes, the Durrani, Ghilzai, Jaji, Mangal, Safi, Mamund, and Mohmand, which generally distribute authority to elders through patrimony. Those power structures ought to be recognized and brought into the ultra-federalist system, just as the pre-existing American states were incorporated into the 1787 Constitution.

Afghanistan is 99 percent Muslim, and Afghanistan’s constitution already embraces Shari’a law; however, an ultra-federalist culture would constantly seek to discover and bridge gaps between local systems for administering justice and the official machinery of the state courts. Finally, the ultra-federalist system ought to recognize and incorporate discrete issues certain tribes present for the federal government. For instance, the Ghilzai generally use a flat political structure that pointedly avoids a paramount chief. Such local decision-making processes should be welcomed into the ultra-federalist system.

Finally, as far as the familiar democratic goals of rule of law, recognition of human rights, and free and fair elections go, it is essential that we be practical in our attempts and circumspect about our goals. To trumpet absolutist aspirations for a “democratic” Afghanistan by implanting new institutions (such as nationwide elections) will result in charades like the flawed and corrupt election in August and the bankrupt run-off in November. Instead, we should establish reasonable benchmarks that aim for democratic participation (a process that can grow) instead of only participatory democracy (a binary outcome that sets us up to fail).

But ultra-federalism won’t only be about accepting the givens; it should also be about pushing initiatives that will help constitutionalism take hold culturally. These include reducing Afghanistan’s shameful illiteracy rate of 70 percent, so people can understand laws and participate politically; launching an all-out war on corruption, in part by nurturing an independent bar of trained, competent lawyers; and making militias and warlordism both unacceptable and illegal.

All of these efforts should be considered and adopted by Afghanis through a series of new local and national loya jirgas—the traditional elder-driven, tribal-based, deliberative structure that approved Afghanistan’s 2003 constitution.

The security earned through President Obama’s new strategy needs a larger end: a stable Afghanistan that will, in turn, help make the world safer for America and our allies. The broader aim of ultra-federalism will help build a robust Afghan state that will withstand the Taliban and grow, eventually and on its own path, into a democracy Afghans can truly call their own.

Public Transit Fans, Rejoice

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Obama administration this week announced that it would be changing the rules governing funding of transit projects. The shift would loosen the criteria for using federal funds to finance light rail, bus routes, and other public transit projects.

Under the Bush administration, federal rules called for evaluating new transit projects largely by how much they cut down on commuting times and how expensive they were. The Transportation Department is essentially reversing that guideline, broadening the assessment criteria for projects by evaluating whether they promote “livability” — their effect not just on commuting times but also on the environment, community, and the local and regional economy.

The Federal Transit Administration hands out about $2 billion a year in federal money to cities and states for transit construction. That might not seem like a lot, but small, barely covered rule changes like these can actually have tremendous, on-the-ground impact. As a Wall Street Journal story on the DOT’s announcement noted, more than 80 cities will now see their prospects for federal funds to shore up and expand their transit systems brighten, and manufacturers and infrastructure firms focused on urban transit will also get a boost. No less important, this could lead to the revitalization of urban areas that receive a jolt from a shiny new transit tram or Metro system.

The announcement, made by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood at the convention of the Transportation Research Board, a division of the National Research Council, is in keeping with the administration’s broader push to get agencies to collaborate more closely on projects and policies that would promote walking, biking, and public transit.

In the coming days, there’ll be a lot of stock-taking going on as pundits assess Obama’s first full year in office. While everyone will be eyeing high-profile and contentious accomplishments, changes like this will be overlooked. It’s a shame because this is exactly the kind of smart-growth, post-carbon policy that got progressives excited about an Obama administration.

A Game Plan for Infrastructure

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A Game Plan for InfrastructureIt’s a sign of the times when “our bridges and roads are falling apart” gets cited as an issue more pressing than college football’s annoying Bowl Championship Series (BCS) on ESPN.

And, while the president hasn’t fulfilled his promise to set up an eight-team playoff yet, he’s taken the issue of infrastructure head-on. The administration’s focus on infrastructure investment is good for both long-term growth and generating jobs through the quick start-up of “shovel ready” projects.

However, one-time disbursements like those outlined in the Recovery Act or the president’s announcement earlier this week fall short of fixing more fundamental issues.

On the heels of Obama’s speech at Brookings on Tuesday, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) is at the same venue today pushing a much more sustainable approach.

Ellison is a co-sponsor on Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D-CT) National Infrastructure Development Bank Act, a good start on developing sustainable infrastructure funding the country so desperately needs.

DeLauro and and Ellison’s bill builds on the work of a bipartisan commission chaired by former Sen. Warren Rudman (R-NH) and titan of finance Felix Rohatyn. The bill envisions $5 billion a year from the federal government to capitalize the bank and a government debt guarantee of up to $50 billion.

But even Ellison and DeLauro’s idea can be improved upon. As outlined in Jessica Milano’s PPI policy memo, “Building our 21st Century Infrastructure,” an American Infrastructure Bank (AIB) seeded with a one-time investment at the federal level — a potential use for the TARP funds the president announced this week — and stakeholder buy-ins from the states would be a more effective way to fund a bank dedicated to financing infrastructure programs.

An infrastructure bank would offer a way to leverage much larger private sector investments from a strapped public budget. The bank would raise inexpensive funding for infrastructure projects by issuing debt on the capital markets backed by the U.S. government’s credit rating. By backing these bonds with the revenue or assets of the projects they are financing, taxpayers would not be left to pick up the bill. These projects would be determined according to strict criteria that promote economic development while being fiscally and environmentally sound.

After the President’s remarks on Tuesday, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania — an infrastructure bank supporter — said the president had “essentially” endorsed the idea of an AIB. But while the president sounded open to the idea this week, he hasn’t gotten behind the legislation needed to get it done. President Obama endorsed an infrastructure bank back when he was candidate Obama. But, much like his promise of reforming the BCS, this threatens to become another campaign promise that falls by the wayside. Now’s the moment for the president to come off the sidelines and lead a sustained drive down the field.

The Electric-Car Future Creeps a Little Closer

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Electric carTwo interesting dispatches from the electric-car front. The first comes from Denmark, which just announced a $40,000 tax break on each electric car, with free parking in downtown Copenhagen.

The announcement by the Danish government is certainly a splashy prelude to the climate change conference it’s hosting this month. Denmark is putting forth a $100 million plan to push electric cars to the masses and — with the help of Silicon Valley start-up Better Place — build an infrastructure of charging poles and service stations that can change out batteries in minutes. Better Place is working with Dong Energy, the biggest utility in Denmark, to modernize Denmark’s grid to allow cars to be charged overnight via wind power, when winds are blowing and power demand is low.

For all of the promise of the Danish effort, some challenges remain. Other than Renault, no automakers have yet to agree to make cars that are compatible with Better Place’s recharging stations. And there are doubts about the infrastructure, with questions still remaining about the standards for batteries. To help get the project over the hump, Danish local and national governments will be the first in line to buy the new cars.

From one of the world’s most eco-conscious cities, we go to one of the world’s most car-choked – in Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa just announced that the city plans to update 400 existing charging stations while adding another 100. Moreover, electric vehicle owners are set to receive tax rebates to construct home chargers and have access to high-occupancy vehicle lanes.

The city said it would streamline the regulatory processes for the charging stations, and suggested that it might revise standards and building codes to encourage more plug-in options. The city will also spend $6 million to purchase a fleet of electric vehicles.

Two takeaways from these reports: One is the idea that the electric-car future is predicated not so much on the automobile but on an infrastructure system that can support it. As Bernard Avishai wrote in Inc. magazine recently, the ecosystem that springs from the rise of the electric car, rather than the car itself, is what’s really going to revolutionize the economy.

The second is the very fact of these developments. There’s a concreteness to these advancements that gives one hope that when it comes to electric cars, we are no longer in the realm of fantasy. It may all still come to naught, but at the very least we are seeing encouraging signs of public commitment and private initiative coming together to help make innovative ideas into reality.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/27072829@N00/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

(h/t to Infrastructurist)

Drive Like a Jetson

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When you watch an episode of “The Jetsons,” what gets you isn’t so much that Elroy wore an antenna on his head or that the family spent their time in cars that levitated. What still resonates about the show is the extreme ease of transportation — they always just seem to get up and go. For many of us in the modern world, where gridlock and wincing at gas pumps are facts of life, the Jetsons seem spectacularly free of commuter woes. But it’s a cartoon.

Ambitious clean technology schemes have usually been condemned as the province of dreamers. But this week, a new organization threatened to convert Jetson-esque schemes for powering electric cars from futurism into reality through a network of charging stations and new fleets of affordable electric cars. The Electrification Coalition is a group of prominent companies who have committed dollars and workforces to creating the infrastructure to make electric cars. (We previously wrote about electric cars here.)

At a lavish launch in D.C. featuring New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) were some old — and new — captains of industry: Carlos Ghosn, the president & CEO of Nissan Motor Company; Frederick W. Smith, chairman, president & CEO of FedEx; Peter L. Corsell, the young and dynamic CEO of GridPoint, a successful company in Arlington that builds software applications that integrate, aggregate, and manage distributed sources of load, storage, and generation to connect utility customers to the smart grid.

The Future: Closer Than You Think

The coalition’s goals are at once ambitious but practicable. By 2013, they hope to put approximately 700,000 “grid-enabled vehicles” (GEVs) — vehicles with lithium-ion batteries that you can plug into either a 110-volt or 220-volt outlet to recharge — on the road. Through economies of scale and government tax credits and other incentives, the coalition thinks it can put 14 million GEVs on the road by 2020 and more than 120 million GEVs by 2030. Ultimately, they would like to have 75 percent of all vehicle miles traveled by 2040 be electric.

How to visualize this? Ghosn, Nissan’s CEO, put it crisply: “How do you imagine an electric car? There is no tailpipe, no emissions.” He repeated himself: “NO tailpipe.”

A full fleet of silent, tailpipe-less cars is ambitious and could lead even the sane to skepticism. Friedman moderated a panel with several of the coalition members and led with a question: “I want you to sell me on the efficacy and the reality of implementing this roadmap.” The coalition members answered quickly and confidently, relying on actual business plans, dollars invested, consumer habits and charging infrastructure already in place, and cars already in production.

David Crane, president and CEO of NRG Energy, said, “The service station of the future is in your garage.” Ghosn talked up the vastly improved efficiency of new lithium-ion batteries, saying, “We can make batteries today that were not possible 20 years ago.”

Corsell of Gridpoint, the software designer for smart grids around the country, said, “We’ve learned that you can leverage technology…to give consumers benefits.” In response to the oft-raised concern about whether too many drivers charging their cars at once would burden the grid, Corsell said, “The power is there — we have all the power we need. You can incentivize people to use power at the right time by building technology into the car.” Other participants stressed that cars will essentially become “grid appliances” — simple technology will allow charging mechanisms in cars to be controlled through the Internet. In Chicago, one pilot program even pays drivers per day to hook their cars up to the Internet.

The Next Step

What’s needed is policy — leadership by federal and state governments to push electrification through incentives. In the short-term, the coalition’s policy goals include significantly increasing plug-in electric drive vehicle tax credits, establishing tax credits equal to 75 percent of the cost to construct public charging infrastructure, extending consumer tax credits for home charging equipment, and providing tax credits equal to 50 percent of the costs of the necessary IT upgrades for utilities or power aggregators to sell power to GEVs.

These common-sense but aggressive measures would put electrification within the free market by investing, as government can, in providing technology with the threshold it needs for manufacturers to achieve economies of scale. It’s now, not the Jetsons — and nobody will have to wear antennas on their head.

The Dutch Try Something New: A Kilometer Tax

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Netherlands has taken the plunge on a very good idea. The Dutch cabinet recently announced a new “pay-as-you-drive” tax plan.

The initiative, which is the first of its kind in the world and still awaits passage by Parliament, would introduce a three-cent tax for each kilometer driven in 2012, rising to 6.7 cents in 2018. But the tax won’t be uniform. It will be higher during rush hour and on cars that guzzle more gas. To somewhat balance out the new tax, the road tax will be eliminated and a new-car tax will be slashed.

Something like this has been proposed in the U.S. In February, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood broached the idea: “We should look at the vehicular miles program where people are actually clocked on the number of miles that they traveled.” But that trial balloon was shot down by the White House before it was barely off the ground.

It’s a shame because it’s a concept worth taking seriously. The National Surface Infrastructure Financing Commission, also in February, released a report (PDF) endorsing a vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) fee as the most viable approach to fund federal investment in our road infrastructure. Today, that investment is funded by gas taxes, but those haven’t been raised in years, and now generate about one-third of the funds necessary to keep the highway system from deteriorating further.

The tax would be adjusted based on factors like time of day, type of road, vehicle weight, and fuel economy. A GPS system would keep track of the information necessary to accurately charge taxes.

Aside from becoming a more stable source of infrastructure funding, the VMT fee would send market signals that could lead to quality-of-life improvements. Prices set higher during rush hour could prompt some people to make fewer trips, use more public transportation, do more telecommuting, and/or choose to travel at alternative times, easing traffic in the process. (A pilot VMT project in Oregon resulted in a 12-percent decrease in vehicle miles traveled.)

There are legitimate concerns about a VMT fee — privacy issues not the least among them (though those are addressed well here) — but the upside is too good for it to not be a part of the transportation policy conversation. Perhaps it will be once again if the Dutch experiment proves a success.

The Electric Car Ecosystem

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The second coming of the electric car — particularly in the guise of the highly anticipated Chevy Volt — has certainly received a fair amount of publicity in recent months. No wonder: the electric car represents America’s best bet to rejuvenate its auto manufacturing industry.

But while it’s exciting enough to dream of factories humming again and assembly lines pumping out the next generation of autos, the promise of the electric car goes beyond its immediate boost to the American car industry. A fascinating article by Bernard Avishai in Inc. details what exactly the rise of the electric car could mean to our economy:

Actually, here is where the dots connect and the news turns good. For the technical challenge of greening electric cars means entering a commercial landscape that mirrors the transformative industries of the 1980s and ’90s: computers and software, switching and networking, consumer electronics converging with cellular technology. This landscape is full of start-ups and medium-size supplier businesses that play to American strengths: entrepreneurship, originality, comfort with the virtual. We ought to stop thinking about the auto industry as a handful of great manufacturing companies superintending large, dependent suppliers — or, for that matter, cars as standalone objects. Rather, the electric car will be a kind of ultimate mobile device, produced in expanding networks for expanding networks; a piece of hardware manufactured by a burgeoning supplier grid and nested in an information grid interlacing the electrical grid. Building out these three networks will be more profitable, and a greater engine of economic growth, than building the cars themselves.

A word that pops up frequently in Avishai’s piece is “ecosystem.” Not in the environmental-ecological sense — though that obviously matters, too — but rather in the sense that a new complex of entrepreneurs, innovators, and manufacturers will likely spring up in response to the mainstreaming of the electric car. Reforming the grid, constructing a new electric-car-recharging infrastructure, making the next generation of batteries, building hardware and software for the smart cars: these and other ancillary industries have already been jump-started by the promise of the carbon-free car.

Where does government fit in? The Obama administration has already shown its commitment. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included $500 million for producers of electric drive components, $400 million for grants promoting plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles, and $4 billion toward the development of the smart grid. Avishai points out that when Obama signed the stimulus package, he was introduced by the head of Namaste Solar, a company of 60 employees — a subtle nod toward the idea that the green economy will be driven by thousands of new, smart companies that spring up to compete in the clean tech ecosystem. The players in the nascent industry also believe that the government has a role in establishing standards early on to bring stability to a free-for-all environment and remove some uncertainty for start-ups to jump into the fray.

And this doesn’t even get to the other obvious benefit of our car transformation: the reduction of carbon emissions as millions of gasoline-powered cars are replaced by the new breed of automobile. It all seems like a vision out of science fiction. What’s thrilling is, as Avishai reports, it’s already happening.