My basic position on HSR is very simple: there are some corridors where it works well and can be self-sustaining, and that’s great. The northeastern United States is one of them, the route from Los Angeles to San Diego is probably another, and there are a number of Chicago-centric corridors that would profit from more passenger rail investment, if not true HSR. There are many other corridors where I’d be perfectly happy to see private entrepreneurs take a gamble, and I don’t think the federal government should bar state policymakers from making the case for HSR in other regions. But as a general rule, I’d sooner see investment in intrametropolitan transportation, and particularly in relatively low-cost ideas like bus rapid transit.

George Will’s latest column on HSR is an overreach. HSR advocates really do tend to have aesthetic distaste for sprawl, but they also believe, rightly in my view, that enabling, not mandating, higher density levels through looser building restrictions would be good for the economy and the environment. I don’t think this is about collectivism per se, as Will suggests:

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.

But there is something to this idea — consider Paul Weyrich and William Lind’s 2007 call for a “retro” conservatism, that would place greater emphasis on cultural stability. There are many Americans, mostly on the left, who believe that dense communities aren’t just productive, but rather that they are in a sense more virtuous. All that said, I’m not a fan of characterizing all progressives with this broad a brush, in part because I wince on the frequent occasions when I see all conservatives painted with an equally broad brush. My conservatism is rooted in a very basic and to regular readers mind-numbingly familiar set of ideas about the virtues of the trial-and-error process and institutions that are small enough to fail. I share many other views and cultural preferences that are common among conservatives — e.g., I love the movie Red Dawn and I’m comfortable around firearms — but, like most humans, my instincts flow from my experiences, habits, and friendships, and that kind of thing isn’t easily summed up. One could believe, for example, that it is automobiles that encourage conformity, as walkable urban spaces encourage an even greater anarchy of experience: the range of things one can do, and the identities one can embrace and shed, in a place like New York or the walkable neighborhoods on the east side of Los Angeles is at least as great if not greater than what you’d find in Plano, Texas, where my sister and her husband lived an auto-centric life a while back.

It turns out that Will had positive things to say about HSR shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks. I have to say, I don’t see this as hilarious hypocrisy, given that he was criticizing HSR efforts in places like California and Florida, and he was praising Midwestern governors for holding the line in a difficult fiscal climate. Those of us who want to pare back government would find ourselves in an awkward spot if we were all for funding HSR while calling for deep cuts everywhere else. Granted, one could make the case that long-term investments are appropriate, but the value proposition offered by HSR is doesn’t seem so strong in the Milwaukee-Chicago corridor, for example, that it demands priority over all other potential investments.