Public Transportation and Smart Growth

Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations" made that observation over 235 years ago, and is as true today as it was then. In the days of Rail passenger service, no one built a rail line to haul passengers, the line was built to haul freight and States REQUIRED the trains to haul passengers in exchange for the right to use eminent domain to take land for the rail line. Thus when Planes and cars came into wide spread use, the Railroads were glad to end passenger service and turn it over to the Government in the form of Amtrak.

Streetcar lines were as bad, much cheaper to built do to electric drive (which can takes curves and grades no steam locomotive could) but most streetcar lines were built to take people to housing developments, the profit from the housing development helped pay for the Streetcar lines (and when it came time to rebuilt such lines, most lines failed and were taken over by whatever municipality they were in). Buses filled a niche, but without the use of free use of paved highways (that the buses did not have to pay for) none of them would have been profitable (and Greyhound is marginal to this day, if it was not for cities building bus terminals Greyhound would be out of business).

Planes are the most subsidized, both by the Federal Government in the form of building runways for Jets Fighters that can also be used by passenger planes, AND by local government building the infrastructure for the air port.

Thus, unless these foreign companies can convince they home government to subsidize building high speed rail in the US (and that is NOT an impossibility, many of these companies they home government do NOT want to fail, thus such subsidizes to keep the companies running are already part of their "profit structure&quot , none of these programs will get beyond planning.