That seems the unifying theme from his column today, since his arguments against high speed rail do not make a lot of sense. Samuelson tries to tell us that trains might be useful in Japan and Europe, but they won't work in the United States. He tells readers that: "Densities are much higher, and high densities favor rail with direct connections between heavily populated city centers and business districts. In Japan, density is 880 people per square mile; it's 653 in Britain, 611 in Germany and 259 in France. By contrast, plentiful land in the United States has led to suburbanized homes, offices and factories. Density is 86 people per square mile." The density for the United States as a whole would be relevant if the plans were to build a train network going from Florida to Alaska, but that is not what is on the agenda. Instead, the issue is about deepening and improving the network in relatively densely populated parts of the country, like Ohio (277 people per square mile), New York (402), and New Jersey (1134). The population densities of much of the United States are very comparable to the regions in Europe through which high speed rails travel. The distances for many trips is also comparable. The distance from Midwest cities to East Coast cities will typically be around 500-700 miles. Trips of this distance can be managed in 4 hours or less using technology that is 40 years old. Traveling downtown to downtown in this time is very competitive with air travel from suburban airports. Samuelson also bizarrely compares long-distance train with the 140 million daily trips to work each day. He then compares President Obama's goal of replacing 1 million cars by train travel with the 240 million on the road. Of course most people do not travel between cities every day, so it's not clear what the point of the comparison is. And, most of the 240 million registered cars in the country are not driven to work every day. Robert Samuelson doesn't like trains. He told us that this morning in his column. He didn't tell us anything else.
--Dean Baker