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- Current political climate not conducive to HSR implementation
**Politics DA Links**Obama Good—LinksEven if the GOP likes the idea of rail they’ll backlash to federal spending on it Weigel 11—political reporter for Slate Magazine (David, 3/8/2011, “Off the Rails: Why do conservatives hate trains so much?”, Slate Magazine, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2011/03/off_the_rails.html, AL) Libertarians, of course, have no problem with trains (see, e.g., Atlas Shrugged). They do have a problem with federal spending on transportation, as do many Republicans. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957; Amtrak took over the rails in 1971. Since then, conservatives will sing the praises of private rail projects but criticize federally funded projects that don't meet the ideal. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., for example, pushed a high-speed rail initiative through Congress in 2008. By 2010, he was denouncing "the Soviet-style Amtrak operation" that had "trumped true high-speed service" in Florida. In 2011, as the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, he is interested in saving the Orlando-Tampa project by building 21 miles between the airport and Disney World. This is about 21 miles farther than local Republicans want to go. Current political climate not conducive to HSR implementationObama, despite setbacks, is not backing off the HSR agendaPerl 2012 (Anthony, Political Science Department & Urban Studies Program, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada Assessing the recent reformulation of United States passenger rail policy Journal of Transport Geography 22 (2012) 271–281 www.elsevier.com/locate/jtrangeo) 5.3. Contested implementation and goal displacement Although implementation of the Obama administration’s pas- senger train policy has been under way for just over 2 years at the time of this writing, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that both politicization and goal displacement have been the initial results. Goal displacement can be seen in the degree to which states and freight railroads have gravitated toward the low end of high-speed rail objectives in their projects. And intensification of political conflict is evident in the respective actions of President Obama and Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida who were elected in 2010 and quickly canceled their states’ partic- ipation in already funded projects. First, we will examine the evi- dence for goal displacement in the grant-making process. The first federal high-speed grant awards were announced in January of 2010. Two hundred and fifty nine applications had been received from 37 states and the District of Columbia, with the funds requested totalling nearly $57 billion (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, 2010). The ARRA’s approach to accepting grant applications from state departments of transportation practically guaranteed that need would trump experience in the criteria used to evaluate proposals. Few states had experience with passenger trains, and because of such limita- tions, many states could make the claim that they needed a chance to start climbing the learning curve of passenger rail development. And the place where climbing inevitably began was at the bottom of the curve, with projects that took small steps toward improving, or introducing, relatively slow trains. This large number of modest proposals created considerable impetus to spread the $8 billion in stimulus funds far and wide. A total of 62 projects in 29 states and the District of Columbia were funded in amounts that ranged from $3.1 billion to $727,400 (American Association of State Highway and Transporta- tion Officials, 2010; Federal Railroad Administration, 2011). More than half of the available funds, $4.5 billion, were spread thinly among 21 states that had proposed incremental upgrades to exist- ing Amtrak operations or would launch trains that operated at speeds on the low end of the Vision document’s categorization and subsequent administrative guidelines that built upon it. This is not surprising, given that Amtrak had the greatest level of imple- mentation capacity and that the freight railroads had adopted a po- sition that mixing freight and passenger operations on the same tracks could be done only at speeds below 90 miles per hour (Ham- berger, 2009). This dispersion of funds into incremental upgrades left the President’s high-speed rail policy open to the same criti- cism that Amtrak had attracted over past decades – that govern- ment was wasting public money to preserve an obsolete and uneconomic transport option. Robert Samuelson, a pundit who has delivered longstanding criticism of Amtrak in the media, declared that ‘‘The Obama admin- istration’s enthusiasm for high-speed rail is a dispiriting example of government’s inability to learn from past mistakes.’’ (Samuelson, 2009, p. A15) After emphasizing differences between the interna- tional experiences in rail passenger reinvention and the US ap- proach, he concluded the worst failing of this new policy agenda was its intellectual dishonesty, because US high-speed rail represented: Amtrak writ large: the triumph of fantasy over fact. The same false arguments used to justify Amtrak (less congestion, pollu- tion, etc.) are recycled. Evidence and experience count for little. Obama and Biden pander to popular prejudices instead of rec- ognizing past failure. Boondoggles become respectable. (Sam- uelson, 2009) Relying upon the limited base of domestic experience and capacity in passenger rail, most states saw no alternative to pursuing incremental upgrades that would yield little difference from the train services that Amtrak had been operating since its inception. Only two projects that were funded by ARRA grants proposed results that would qualify as high-speed according to the interna- tional standard of operating trains at or above 150 miles per hour. California’s Bay Area-to-Los Angeles bullet train received the single largest grant of $2.235 billion. These funds would supplement $9.95 billion in bond funds that had been approved by voters in a 2008 referendum. Another high-speed project in Florida, running from the Orlando International Airport to Tampa, received the sec- ond largest grant of $1.25 billion. Both of these projects would be stand-alone systems that would involve little input from Amtrak or freight railroads, and consequently were subject to considerable uncertainty. The potential costs and future revenues of pursuing a 90 mile per hour train improvement could be forecast by extrapolating from actual data on Amtrak’s experience. These same key parame- ters of a 150 mile per hour train project could be forecast only through making very approximate estimates from foreign experi- ence. And since the role of foreign suppliers in these projects would be limited as a result of ‘‘Buy America’’ provisions, the plausibility of such estimates was open to further question. And it was not long before such questioning magnified political differences over policy. Pro-market think-tanks such as the Reason Foundation, Heri- tage Foundation and Cato Institute had each previously declared Amtrak to be a policy failure, and were equally skeptical regarding the estimates that high-speed rail would do better. The Reason Foundation published influential critiques of the high-speed rail proposals that received ARRA funding. In California, a due diligence report alleged that forecasts for ridership and revenue had been in- flated and that construction cost estimates had been underesti- mated (Cox and Vranich, 2008). Since there was no actual experience to draw upon, these skeptical assessments adopted the most conservative projections of low revenue and high costs. In Florida, the Reason Foundation concluded that high-speed rail threatened the state’s budget with both cost overruns and ongoing operating losses (Cox, 2011). Such skepticism was espe- cially potent at a time when serious concerns were being raised about the rapid deterioration in America’s public finances. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Altman and Haas (2010, p. 25) warned that ‘‘. . . federal debt could equal total GDP as soon as 2015. . .. [and] If US leaders do not act to curb this debt addiction, then the global cap- ital markets will do so for them. . ..’’ This combination of uncertain estimates about high-speed rail costs and benefits coupled with imminent fears about America’s debt burden in a volatile world economy quickly turned fiscal conservatives into program opponents. Calls to end the President’s initiative thus found a receptive audience among three incoming Republican governors of states that had been awarded billions in federal rail grants. In Ohio, Governor-elect John Kasich wasted little time in putting the brake on high-speed train development. Eight days after his election, Governor-elect Kasich wrote to Governor Ted Strickland, whom he had defeated, serving notice that he would cancel the high-speed passenger train program and urging an immediate end to any spending on this initiative. He also wrote to President Obama seeking to transfer Ohio’s $400 million passenger rail grant to either highway or freight train infrastructure projects (Niquette, 2010). When neither Strickland nor Obama obliged the incoming Governor, he terminated Ohio’s passenger train project soon after inauguration. Governor-elect Scott Walker was more successful in getting Wisconsin to stop work on its $810 million passenger train development grant within 2 days of his election (Associated Press, 2010). In Florida, one of the two truly high-speed initiatives, the stakes and the conflict over rejecting Washington’s support were even more intense. Incoming governor Rick Scott based his opposition on the Reason Foundation’s negative evaluation, additional criti- cism supplied by the Heritage Foundation and a verbal briefing from the Florida Department of Transportation, according to a spokesperson (Zink, 2011). News coverage also revealed that Rea- son Foundation co-founder Robert Poole had served on Scott’s eco- nomic development transition team (Zink, 2011). Despite attempts made by state legislators and municipal government officials to re- verse the decision, as well as a legal challenge which went all the way to the Florida Supreme Court, Florida’s project was aban- doned. Tampa’s Mayor Pam Iorio lamented the signal that such a decision sent out: ...the message being sent to eight world-wide business con- sortiums across the globe and the United States is don’t bother ...As a mayor who cares about economic development and the encouragement of investment by the private sector, I can not understand or justify this stance. (Leary et al., 2011) Faced with these reversals at the hands of political opponents in key states, President Obama responded by raising both the stakes and the visibility of his commitment. The Department of Transpor- tation reallocated the returned high-speed rail funds to other states that had committed to other projects. And in the 2011 State of the Union Address, the President called for a national high-speed network that was even more ambitious than previous commitments: Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying – without the pat-down. As we speak, routes in California and the Midwest are already underway. (Obama, 2011) Although the details of such a plan still remain to be worked out, it was apparent that the President of the United States showed no inclination to back off his agenda for railroad redevelopment that embraced high-speed services, even in the face of setbacks due to the politicization of policy implementation in a time of mounting public debt. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.9 Mb. Share with your friends:
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