Back to the future

In this piece, "Sarah Goldhagen has a plan to upgrade the nation's aging infrastructure," from the Boston Globe, but based on an earlier piece in The New Republic, Sandy Golden makes some important points about transportation infrastructure. From the Globe article:

What, exactly, is infrastructure? For Goldhagen, it's everything we build that is meant to serve the public: highways, streets, bridges, tunnels, sidewalks, transit systems, utilities of all kinds, parks, soccer fields, even public schools and colleges. She says we need to think of it all as one integrated whole, and then ask who's taking care of it. No one, it turns out. ...

"The problem," she says, "is that our political world is organized into towns, cities, states, and the federal government, but the practical world is organized differently. We are now a nation of metropolitan regions. The way we govern doesn't fit the way we live."

Metro regions are chopped up into many municipalities, none of which can accomplish much by themselves. They may even bleed across state lines. No branch of government has either the funds or the power to deal with infrastructure - except for one: the federal government.

Goldhagen admires examples where private initiative has produced public benefits, as in the creation of the new Millennium Park in Chicago. But she thinks privatizing can't be a solution. She cites the classic economist Adam Smith, who wrote that since public works aren't usually profitable, they have to be funded by "the sovereign or commonwealth" - that is to say, by central government. But federal spending on infrastructure has been dropping for years. She notes that elected officials usually have limited terms and, therefore, short-term ambitions. But infrastructure is a long-term project.

A couple weeks back, Parade Magazine, the Sunday supplement distributed in newspapers across the county, including the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, featured a cover story on reinvesting in railroad-based transportation. See "A Better Way to Travel." From the article:

Can We Catch Up?

While U.S. railways have languished, the rest of the industrialized world has been building up its high-speed rail systems.

FRANCE
Last fall, Parisians celebrated the unveiling of a new 200 mph TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) linking Paris to the German border, where it meets up with Germany’s own high-speed InterCityExpress. In April, an experimental TGV run on the Paris-Strasbourg route hit 357 mph, while French fans lined the tracks, cheering.

SPAIN
High-speed trains have run between Madrid and its southern cities for more than a decade. Soon they will cover the 375 miles between Barcelona and Madrid—the distance between Washington, D.C., and Boston, a 7-hour trip—in 21⁄2 hours. There’s even talk of a rail tunnel to link Spain with Morocco, beneath Gibraltar

.JAPAN
The pioneer of the bullet train, Japan has developed a 360 mph magnetic-levitation, or maglev, train that rides a cushion of air. Propelled by the electromagnetic force of magnets, these trains are designed as complete transportation systems.

CHINA
Given its vast distances, China has committed a quarter-trillion dollars to its railway service. A trip from Shanghai to Beijing—the distance from Chicago to Baltimore, 18 hours by Amtrak —will eventually take 5 hours.