Is High Speed Rail a Good Investment?

Harvard's Ed Glaeser weighs in with the first of three blog posts on the topic.  He urges serious cost benefit analysis, writing, "Large infrastructure projects are complicated things that all have hundreds of consequences, some good and some bad. It is easy to come up with good and bad side effects of high-speed rail: More people coming into a centralized train station might reduce long car trips associated with sprawling airports (that’s good), but increase congestion in the city (that’s bad). [Can anyone seriously be worried about more congestion in any U.S. central city?  Maybe NYC.  But only there, surely.  Chicago would welcome it, even though its central city is very robust.]

"These ideas are so cheap that unless they are seriously quantified they have no place in the debate. Serious accounting, not clever debating points or soaring rhetoric, is the critical ingredient in good public decision-making."

It should be interesting to follow these posts by Glaeser. Isn't his book due soon?

  

Sachin, July 29, 2009

New Jersey has LONG been awaiting the recently started direct rail into Penn Station. Right now trips take almost 2 hours back and forth from Northern Bergen County, whereas driving can take less than an hour at good times

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