Yonah Freemark has written a very informative post about Rep. John Mica of Florida, the likely next chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. I recommend reading the entire post, but here’s what I found most interesting:

In previous statements, Mr. Mica has argued strongly for the development of true high-speed rail, with trains operating at very fast average speeds. In October 2009, he said “We cannot take the funding to be invested in high-speed rail – $8 billion in stimulus funds, $50 billion in the pending surface transportation bill – and try to fool people by giving them anything less than true high-speed rail service.” Only Florida and California are currently developing plans that would produce service of such quality. Similarly, he has criticized the Obama Administration’s Department of Transportation for being political in its decision-making about who has received rail grants.
From that perspective, Mr. Mica has been particularly upset about what he perceives as the lack of national investment in the Northeast Corridor, since for the reasons stated at the start of this article it would be the ideal route for high-speed rail in the United States. This week, the Congressman repeated his sense that the government had been remiss in its choices about investments. “I am a strong advocate of high-speed rail, but it has to be where it makes sense,” Mica said, according to the Associated Press. “The administration squandered the money, giving it to dozens and dozens of projects that were marginal at best to spend on slow-speed trains to nowhere.” He seems to feel that way about his own state’s project, which he has argued might be shortened from a now-planned (and virtually all funded) 84-mile route from Orlando Airport to Tampa to a 20-mile corridor between the airport and the Disney Amusement Parks.

This is, in my view, exactly the right way to think about HSR investment. And I’m particularly impressed by the fact that he is skeptical about a major HSR project in his own state. This suggests that Rep. Mica is the kind of public-spirited legislator who might be able to do a decent job in his new role.

One thing I’d like to note about the money the federal government is spending on HSR in Florida and California: there were other potential uses for the money in the transportation space that were vastly more urgent.

I recently asked Barry LePatner, one of the nation’s leading experts on infrastructure, for a very rough estimate of how much it would take to add redundancy structurally deficient and fracture critical bridges that carry a relatively large number of vehicles — that is, bridges like the I-35W bridge in Minnesota that famously collapsed:

If we merely focused attention initially on those bridges that carried in excess of even 25,000 vehicles a day, and estimated that these numbered 4,000 bridges in peril, and if we ascribed the cost to add additional structural members that took these bridges out of a fear of collapse if they incurred a failure (i.e., would have resulted in eventual collapse if not attended to) at an average of $15 million per bridge repair, the full cost would total $6 billion.

That sounds like money worth spending.