A Cost-Benefit Analysis for High Speed Rail
In the first of a series of posts to the NYTimes' Economix Blog, Edward Glaeser explores the value of high-speed rail in the US.
"Large infrastructure projects are complicated things that all have hundreds of consequences, some good and some bad. It is easy to come up with good and bad side effects of high-speed rail: More people coming into a centralized train station might reduce long car trips associated with sprawling airports (that’s good), but increase congestion in the city (that’s bad).
"These ideas are so cheap that unless they are seriously quantified they have no place in the debate. Serious accounting, not clever debating points or soaring rhetoric, is the critical ingredient in good public decision-making."
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Cost-benefit applies only to rail...?
Why do rail projects always need to be subjected to these kinds of cost analyses, but never highway projects...? Has suspicion about anything to do with rail transport somehow found its way into the genetic makeup of Americans born and raised in this nation's car culture...?