Trains? Yes Charles. Trains.

I'd like to follow up to a recent post I did promoting infrastructure investment. I think you would have to walk very, very far to find a person who doesn't believe China is the next world super power. All it took was a brief glance at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing games to fully come to the realization that within a generation, China will meet or surpass the US as a world super power. They've done in twenty years what took the US two hundred, and the British five hundred.

So, what is this up and coming super power spending its money on? Rail. Yes. That million year old technology. Last year, the Chinese spent fifty billion dollars on their rail network, and this year, they plan on spending twice that amount.

Want to guess how much the US spent in a comparable time period on its entire rail network? Remember, the US is a larger country that moves more goods. Twenty? Forty five? Nope, you're wrong. One. The US spent one billion on its entire rail network.

In addition, China continues to install modern, third rail, high speed electric line, Japan continues to open up hundreds of miles of Shinkansen (Bullet train) lines, and of course, the EU is criss-crossed nine ways from Sunday with high speed rail with an average transit speed of more than 200 MPH. Our answer? Acela. One ancient-tech high speed train, with an average speed of a paltry 86 MPH.

The Japanese system is perhaps the most impressive. It has an impeccable safety record, to start with. In forty four years, they have never had a fataility. Ever. In addition, 87% of Japanese trains are less than a minute early or late. Its rail is so good, and delays so infrequent, that if you ever are late, they give you a note to take to your boss explaining why. Its flagship line is the Hokkaido Shinkansen, which runs from Kyoto to the outskirts of Tokyo. Over the course of the last two years, it had an average delay of six seconds.

High speed rail is pretty much everyone's dream.

• It is cheap mass transit: The amortized cost is much less than the amount of road needed to carry an equivalent number of people, and if high grade alloy is used to make the track, the maintenance costs are very small.
• It's green. Mass rail gets people, and more importantly, freight, off the roads. Semi's pump more carbon into the atmosphere than just about anything short of coal power plants, and getting them off the road would be monumental.
• It employs a ton of people. Both the construction and the operation.
• If done right, it could stand to make people very rich.
  

Here's what I'm proposing. The US government should pledge money towards creating a high speed interstate rail system, with the focus on freight. They should then kill AMTRAK, privatizing the local routes, and allowing the states to develop their own intrastate and municipal rail systems, pledging a certain amount per resident to the states.

I really don't see the downside. Do you?