Explanation of this affirmative
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HSR should be bipartisanObama administration committed to HSR; current budgets have included funding; bipartisan support is best to support the programLahood 2011 (Hon. Ray, Secretary of Transportation, US Dept. of Transporation, THE FEDERAL RAILROAD ADMINISTRATION’S HIGH-SPEED AND INTERCITY PASSENGER RAIL PROGRAM: MISTAKES AND LESSONS LEARNED (112–65) HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION DECEMBER 6, 2011 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/ committee.action?chamber=house&committee=transportation And we are in it for the long haul. We will not be dissuaded by the naysayers, by the crit- ics, some of whom you are going to hear from later on today. We are not. High-speed rail is in America, coming to America, and expanding in America. There is no going back. The dollars to support all of this were included and paid for in every budget that President Obama has submitted to Congress. All of this was included in the President’s outline for a long-term transportation bill which charted a course in proposed funding for the next 6 years. All of this was included in our push for high-speed rail projects as a part of the American Jobs Act. And all of this is anchored in our shared history. We have always met tough challenges by doing big things. We have always done big things. And transportation has always been bipartisan, always. When I was here, sitting where you are sitting, I was voting for two trans- portation bills. Both of those bills passed with over 400 votes in the House. There are no Republican or Democratic bridges. There are no Republican or Democratic railroads. We have had a rich history in this country of bipartisanship when it comes to transportation, because transportation puts people to work. It puts friends and neighbors to work. That is why it has been bipartisan. Our blueprint for building high-speed rail is the same as Amer- ica’s blue print for building the interstate system. We are right at the point where America was at when we started the interstate system. We didn’t know where all the lines were at. Do you think they knew where all the lines were at when President Eisenhower signed the interstate bill? Of course not. Do you think they knew where all the money was coming from? Of course not. Fifty years later, we have the best interstate system in the world because peo- ple had a vision. When the United States first started going from planning to pav- ing, we didn’t know where all the routes were going to be. We didn’t know where every penny was coming from. But President Ei- senhower set a goal. He had a vision. Through 10 administrations and 28 sessions of Congress—that is when I say, ‘‘High-speed rail is coming to America,’’ because through 10 administrations, 10 Presidents, and 28 sessions of Congress, we got it done. That is what America has always been about. We didn’t invest when times were good. We have a proud history investing when times were tough, because transportation puts peo- ple to work. Through boom years and bust years, through eight re- cessions, we built the best roadway system in the world. And we should do no less for high-speed rail. Members of this committee, our parents and grandparents dreamed big, planned big, built big so we might have the chance to lead. What the previous generation did for us is left us an inter- state system. State of the art. We should do no less for the next generation. I am not going to benefit from high-speed rail, but I have four grown children and nine grandchildren. They will. We should do what generations did for us. Think big, build big, and leave the next generation of transportation high-speed rail. I am happy to answer your questions, Mr. Chairman. **Solvency Arguments**No solvency: Obama must adapt to policymaking framework to successfully implement HSRPast actions have been unsuccessful; successful implementation will rely on multiple factorsPerl 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) 5.4. Conclusion: agendas, capacity and the politics of major policy change While the substantive results of the Obama administration’s redirection of the US transportation policy will not be known for years to come, this bold attempt to shift priorities offers an oppor- tunity for more immediate insights into the politics of major trans- port policy change. What the launch of an American high-speed train development program following 40 years of policy stalemate reveals is the essential role of administrative and technical capac- ity in enabling a policy paradigm shift to be implemented quickly, when the political leadership that introduced it maintains its greatest reserve of political capital. Momentum in implementation was the key to transforming the UK’s macroeconomic management during the Thatcher government’s tenure as depicted in Peter Hall’s model of policy paradigm shift. Margaret Thatcher and her colleagues in government succeeded in transforming Great Britain’s economic paradigm during the 1980s through the policy equivalent of a blitzkrieg. They swept into power, captured the key positions in government (e.g., Whitehall) where policy goals were pursued, and left the subsequent disarma- ment of resisters to ‘‘mopping up’’ operations across the civil ser- vice. In this case, policy and politics aligned so that those in control of the ‘‘powering’’ efforts in British economic policy could empower qualified experts to puzzle through implementation of the monetarist paradigm. But circumstances are not always as clear cut as the policy context that Mrs. Thatcher took charge of in 1979. In part by institutional design (i.e., federalism and the sep- aration of powers) and in part by the specific nature of anomalies that open a window that could legitimate radical change, the Uni- ted States proved a much more challenging context in which to reinvent transportation policy. The institutional design of US government is intended to restrict the exercise of government’s authority in pursuing any kind of ma- jor change. And while the Great Recession of 2008 did open a win- dow for some changes in economic goals and instrumentation, the Obama administration misread, or misunderstood, the context in which their preferred policy changes would have to unfold. Although the financial sector and the automotive industry had been brought to the brink of collapse, and were thus powerless to resist new policies, the railroad sector was in a different position. US railroads were among the strongest corporate components of the nation’s transport sector, if not the economy as a whole. They did not need, or receive, a bailout, and the freight railroads also owned the infrastructure that would be critical for imple- menting many ‘‘bullet train’’ projects. Not only were there credible organizations within the railroad subsystem that could resist the new passenger train policy goals, but there was also a dearth of experience in government about how to effectively implement these goals. And after 40 years of policy stalemate over what Amtrak’s mis- sion and mandate was supposed to be, the capacity to plan and execute passenger train reinvention, as opposed to preservation, was in very short supply across the United States. The ability to tap into global expertise was constrained by the ‘‘Buy America’’ provisions of the ARRA, which had become the legislative vehicle for policy change. Capacity was further constrained by designating state departments of transportation as the high speed train project proponents. While this division of federal and state government la- bor had worked in implementing road, transit, and aviation pro- jects, the states were among the least experienced policy actors to be called upon for implementation leadership. Their reliance on Amtrak and freight railroads to actually deliver policy outputs created considerable momentum for displacement of goals, from high-speed trains toward services that looked indistinguishable from services Amtrak currently provides. This lack of capacity fur- ther politicized the implementation process. The more that pursuit of a new high-speed train agenda ap- peared aimed at creating additional Amtrak services, the more that well known and high profile skeptics of Amtrak succeeded in crit- icising the President’s policy as offering nothing more than ‘‘old wine in new bottles.’’ Such critiques proved persuasive in three states where mid-term elections had brought Republican gover- nors into office who were not disposed to advance the President’s agenda in any case. The relationship between the ambition for pol- icy change and the capacity to advance it is thus revealed to be a critical factor in influencing both the administration and the poli- tics of paradigm shifts. At a tactical level, this episode of rewriting the policy agenda re- veals the importance of identifying policy actors who are either vulnerable or already disposed to adopting new goals and then for- mulating a policy that will bring them together in the service of those goals. Those new to power need to target policy opponents who lack the authority to resist change. In this case, the automo- tive sector would have made an ideal candidate to be assigned the goal of designing and building high speed trains in return for the billions of dollars of federal grants that were being used to bail them out. The fact that General Motors had once had an active rail design practice, and had even built a ‘‘Train of Tomorrow’’ in 1947 to show the potential of modernizing passenger trains would have made a good point of departure. Next, while Amtrak’s expertise in passenger rail reinvention might appear limited in global perspective, especially following the shortcomings of the Acela project, it offered the most experi- ence that the United States had available. Rather than leaving it to state governments to negotiate with Amtrak and freight rail- roads on an ad hoc basis, with the typical displacement toward ‘‘business as usual’’ goals, the nation’s passenger railroad could have been assigned a greater role in directing and planning high- speed train development, with clear direction to meet the Vision document’s more ambitious goals. And at the strategic level, a fo- cus on developing the human resources to carry forward a serious reinvention of the passenger train could have met short term stim- ulus goals of getting Americans into education and training for jobs with a future, while laying the groundwork for the much higher capacity that would be needed to meet the new policy goals in future. From a theoretical perspective, this episode of a transport revo- lution in the making raises the question of whether there is a min- imum ratio between capacity in powering and capability in puzzling that is necessary to advance policy change. If the ratio is more balanced, and if both power and capacity are relatively high, then the path to paradigmatic change opens up. But if the power to adjust policy goals is much greater than the capacity to implement them, then political conflict appears to escalate, leading to bitter fights over financing and launching new projects. Assessing how much capacity can be created to puzzle through such a radical change in America’s transportation options will require more evi- dence to see where the Obama vision for high-speed rail takes gov- ernment, industry, and American society. 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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