Though Yonah Freemark is a believer in the potential of heavy public investment in fixed rail transportation, he worries that Richard Florida is promising too much when he suggests that high-speed rail is the essential tool for kick-starting transformative economic growth in the U.S. I strongly recommend reading Yonah’s entire post. Basically, Florida is suggesting that future growth will be concentrated in “megaregions” that link metropolitan areas together. Richard Wells described the “megaregions” framework in The American Prospect last year, and Alan Ehrenhalt offered gentle skepticism in Governing. My first encounter with the idea came from a National Geographic map of the Boston-to-Washington “megalopolis,” which Paul Krugman has dubbed “Acelaland,” and from the William Gibson novel Neuromancer, set in the “Boston-to-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis,” a superregional authority that governs the vast conurbation that crowds the eastern seaboard in a dystopian near future. Other megaregions include “Cascadia,” which links the major MSAs of the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, and the I-35 Corridor that links MSAs in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri.
Yonah makes a few points. Even if growth is concentrated in these regions, which seems likely given that the capture the vast majority of the U.S population in aggregate, this doesn’t necessary imply greater reliance on rail — indeed, megaregions might be less rail-friendly than dense MSAs that are relatively far from each other:
Moreover, there is some evidence that the megaregion actually produces relatively higher rates of automobile use than other development patterns. The Boston-Washington corridor has morphed into one continuous band of development — this is the definition of the megaregion — and the result is that people who don’t live in places directly adjacent to rail are likely to drive to get to other places in the area, and this will remain generally true no matter how fast the trains travel. Other development models based around high-speed rail, such as the French scheme which enforces urban cores separated by dozens or hundreds of miles of countryside, seem more likely to produce a switch from automobile use since there is simply put nothing for most people to see or do between the cities, and that’s where fast trains really show their benefits.
So even if high-speed rail enforces the megaregional form, are we sure that we want it?
And because the vast majority of travel in the U.S. is intraregional rather than interregional, Yonah suggests that the emphasis should be placed on urban and commuter rail rather than intercity HSR:
Without a comprehensive change in the way the entire transportation apparatus is funded in the U.S., high-speed rail will result in few of the “spatial fixes” Florida highlights as his future goal. Indeed, there is no immediate connection between intercity rail use and giving up private cars; I have argued before that fast trains do not automatically mean an increase in public transportation use to and from stations, in the same way as different airports have different percentages of commuters using cars to get to them depending on the travel offerings available.
Yonah raises another important point about HSR and our broader economic prospects:
There is evidence that in some places high-speed rail has led to further dispersal and in some cases increasing suburban sprawl. Faster travel times allow the creation of geographically larger commute markets. Just as important, fast trains have been around for decades in France, Japan, Italy, and Germany; whatever their merits, are those countries “more ready” for the 21st Century than the U.S. and other non-high-speed countries?
For many HSR advocates in the U.S., there is a conviction that France, Japan, Italy, and Germany really are more ready for the 21st century than the U.S. I tend to think that this view is wrongheaded. If we assume, as I do, that the key to economic growth is organizational capital — intangible assets, productivity-enhancing business practices, etc. — then the technological tools that matter are those that facilitate large-scale collaboration. Transportation is certainly a part of this, but it might come in the form of ride-sharing and other forms of paratransit that are greatly facilitated by location-aware smart phones and other leapfrogging technologies that allow us to get more use out of legacy infrastructure.
Rather than raise taxes to fund white elephant projects, I would recommend keeping money in the hands of private citizens who will figure out the best ways to get around — or, in the case of telecommuting, not get around, and spend more time making fewer trips in attractive rural or exurban locales. This isn’t to say that there is no place for HSR. But let’s make new HSR initiatives pay their own way.
I actually agree with Richard Florida and others than megaregions are a good and useful way of thinking about future patterns of growth and settlement. Yet I think this should encourage a polycentric view of travel and commuting, for which the automobile and other personalized forms of transportation are often a better fit than fixed rail.