High-speed trains or effective highways?

Russ Steele

Ellen and I took a quick trip to Truckee today to check out the snow pack and have a great lunch at JAX Dinner in Truckee. They have some great home made potato chips!  I also wanted to check out the Truckee COOP  weather station that was used in a Forest Service Study of Global Warming in the Tahoe and El Dorado National Forests. More on the missing COOP in another post.

On thing this is very evident from our trip -- I-80 is falling apart.  Our teath chatter all the way from SR-20 to the Downtown Truckee exit, except where Caltrans had done some repairs this last summer.  Why are we sepending huge sums on high-speed rail when our highway infrastructures is falling apart?  Fixing the highway produces lots of jobs for a broad rage of business. 

This discussion of the rail vs highway issue is from the National Journal Transportation Blog  High-Speed Rail vs. Modal Neutrality
 
Isn't it curious that an Administration devoted to the principle of  multi-modalism is so obsessively determined to promote a single mode of its own preference -- that of high-speed rail? All three governors who rejected the federal HSR grants --- Govs. Walker, Kasich and Scott --- told Sec. LaHood that their states could badly use that money for more urgent needs of fixing roads, bridges and transit systems and, in the case of Gov. Scott, rebuilding Florida's ports in anticipation of the Panama Canal expansion. Yet Sec. LaHood turned a deaf ear to those requests, insisting that the stimulus money must be spent on high-speed rail --- even though money spent on other modes could have been just as effective in creating jobs. After justly condemning "stove pipe" mentality and modal biases in federal decisionmaking it is ironic to find  the Administration ignoring its own principles of modal neutrality in such a blatant manner.

Exit Question:  Should we continue to pursue high-speed rail and let our higway infrastructure collapse?