Beyond that, there are practical concerns, particularly that there are very few connections for which high-speed rail would actually shorten trip time. Shorter connections are almost always quicker door-to-door by car; factor in that cars take you precisely where you want to go, and leave when you want, whereas trains operate on a schedule and drop everyone off at a central location. Longer connections, conversely, are almost always quicker by plane. Even in the few intermediate routes where high-speed trains would make a difference, studies have shown the difference to be negligible, and in any event, even the fastest trains cannot avoid the most obvious problem associated with rail travel: once you arrive, you have no way to get around other than walk or rent a car, which you simply could have driven.
But liberals ignore the obvious, because to them, high-speed rail is not really about creating an efficient alternative method of transportation, it’s about control. Rail travel embodies a distinctly progressive preference for centralized coordination, collective movement, and public management. It gathers individuals into a common enterprise, fixes them to predetermined routes and schedules, and places the terms of their movement in the hands of planners, administrators, and public authorities. For many on the Left, this is not an incidental feature of rail, but part of its appeal, an emblem of an ordered society in which private choice yields, at least in part, to collective design.
The automobile represents almost the opposite impulse. A car is private, flexible, decentralized, and obedient not to a bureaucracy but to its owner. It allows a person to leave when he wishes, travel where he wishes, alter course without permission, and arrive not at some government-designated node but at his chosen destination. The car therefore expresses a social ethic quite different from that of rail: independence rather than coordination, spontaneity rather than regimentation, private discretion rather than administrative supervision. It is hardly surprising that progressives, who generally place more confidence in public systems than in dispersed private judgment, are drawn more instinctively to trains than to cars.
There is also an egalitarian aesthetic at work. Highways are vivid exhibitions of the variety produced by markets and personal choice. They display differences in taste, means, ambition, and status. Trains, by contrast, mute such distinctions. Passengers are conveyed together, under the same conditions, at the same speed, in a setting where individuality is necessarily narrowed by uniformity. This, too, helps explain the Left’s affection for rail. It is not only efficient movement they seek, but a mode of movement more congenial to their moral imagination, one less expressive of inequality and individual differentiation, and more social.
And, of course, there is the familiar progressive weakness for grand public enterprises whose romance exceeds their performance. Amtrak has long stood as a monument to the enduring American habit of subsidizing what the market will not sustain, while pretending that chronic insolvency is a mark of civic virtue. High-speed rail promises, on a vastly larger scale, more of the same: immense capital costs, permanent public subsidy, and the consoling illusion that inefficiency becomes nobler when it travels under governmental auspices.
So the problem with liberal enthusiasm for high-speed rail is not that it is malicious. It is that it is romantic. It mistakes a fashionable symbol of modernity for a serious answer to America’s actual transportation needs, and it does so while ignoring the regulatory and political culture that makes such projects prohibitively costly in the first place. In a country as large, dispersed, and car-dependent as ours, high-speed rail is not so much a neglected necessity as a perennial fantasy, kept alive less by practicality than by the refusal to admit that not every admired foreign idea belongs on American soil.
