RSS FeedMatthew Yglesias ยป A Country After the Blogosphere's Heart
It’s really remarkable to ride a train across Germany. Last summer, I took the ICE from Berlin to Muenster (actually connected to a RB in Hamm for the final leg) and saw solar panels on top of farmhouses and rows of wind generators on hills, and we whizzed along smoothly in a fast train.
When I arrived back in Missouri in August, we drove from St. Louis to Kansas City, a shorter distance that took longer than our trip across journey. We saw strip malls, the occasional combination truck stop/McDonalds or Subway, and a lot of abandoned buildings. Zero wind generators, zero solar panels.
Fifty-five minutes, Frankfurt to Cologne on a day trip last year for me and the wife. Used to take about 2 and a half hours in the car on the speedy autobahns. Can’t understand why it has taken my countrymen in the states to come around to high speed rail.
And in our village between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden there are many houses sporting solar panels on the roofs. Wind generators everywhere.
Soon we will walk through town and eat dinner outside in the village square. The big question is Italian or Tapas? No chains here, so I guess I can’t ask for advice.
I wonder whether the size of the U.S. poses an additional barrier to HSR here. Not the obvious problem of Chicago and Los Angeles being farther from each other than Paris and Moscow, and with a lot less in between, but the very uneven density in the U.S. and there being a single nation-state spanning the continent. If the Northeast were a separate, roughly Germany-sized country of German density, it could spend Federal funds on HSR that would benefit all areas of the country. In the U.S., it doesn’t make sense to build HSR anywhere west of the Mississippi except for the West Coast and the “Texas Triangle”, so you have 40 Senators loath to spend a nickel on it. HSR is by its nature a regional project, and the size of those regions matches nicely with the size of France, Germany, Spain, etc., but poorly with the size of the U.S. as a whole or with the size of individual states. I guess IL, IN, OH, WI, MN, and MO could have parallel legislation and funding and execution of a Midwest HSR system, but this is a lot more complicated than being able to do HSR within a single political entity.
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