Hold on, high speed rail

Both the NYT and Washington Post op-ed pages weigh in.

In the Times, Richard White, a Stanford history professor who identifies himself as a liberal, looks at the old transcontinental railroad as a caution against subsidies to high-speed trains today.

He then talks about assurances of how well high-speed rail will do in the Golden State:

Those assurances are based on rosy and widely ridiculed ridership projections. Critics, the most trenchant of whom are part of the Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail, say that only two high-speed rail routes run without operating subsidies: Paris to Lyon and Osaka to Tokyo.

He's not alone in noting that.

In the Post, columnist Charles Lane talks about "China's Train Wreck." Beyond the fact that high-speed rail in the Western world is iffy and dicey, in China, which President Obama has cited, it appears to be (shock!) the stuff of slipshod construction, graft, bribery and more.

The bad construction? So poor that Beijing has ordered top speeds to be cut 30 mph.

Now, if even more liberal types in California, where a Los Angeles-San Francisco line makes sense otherwise, are opposed to subsidizing it, then it may be a clunker indeed.