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[quote user="ICLand"] [quote user="Bucyrus"] When you say, “There is no such thing as creating "productive territory" when a subsidy is required to build into it ahead of market demand,” how would that analysis apply to the push for a national system of publicly funded HSR today? [/quote] It's a different area, at least for me. I don't consider HSR "railroading," and so I leave my comfort zone to enter areas of social policy. I generally don't think that governments make good choices in general when it comes to spending other people's money for precisely that reason: it's other people's money so who cares? Kind of like Land Grant railroads, I suppose. But, it is a specialist's argument, pitting the economics of HSR against the costs of covering more and more countryside with asphalt. I don't know enough about the trade-offs to offer an educated opinion. One of my former colleagues was a consultant on the Shinkasen, the first of its kind, and he thought it was a great project, and I did too but that was from an engineering standpoint. Social costs and benefits are more in the political arena, for better or for worse. [/quote] I understand what you mean.  I don’t regard HSR to be railroading either.  But even if HSR is not a part of railroading, the proponents of HSR including the FRA have made it clear that they intend for HSR to share the existing private corridors of the class-1 freight railroads.  They say this will be necessary because wherever HSR wants to go, the freight railroads already have the most appropriate corridors to get there.     <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p> In some cases, this corridor sharing may involve track sharing, but even where HSR will have its own dedicated track, the construction and operating complexities of adding HSR to the freight corridors will be enormous.  And since adding HSR to the freight corridors will require improvements that will redound to the benefit of the freight railroads, there will have to be complex cost sharing agreements between the private freight railroads and the government.  There may also be outright grants to the private railroads for some of upgrade work such as new bridges, elimination of grade crossings, etc.  And like all government grants, there will be strings attached.    So, it seems to me that this will be quite analogous to the public/private partnership of the government land grants made to the pioneering railroads, and all the complexities and unintended market consequences that flowed from that partnership.
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