Again With the Tomorrowland Technology!

The announcement of the Los Angeles to Las Vegas corridor as an additional high speed rail corridor says a couple of things. First off, it says that it really helps to have the Senate Majority leader being from your state. Second, it is perhaps the final nail in the maglev coffin.

I'm unsure as to how I feel about this. On one hand, yo have to walk before you can run, and just getting some "high-speed" rail is a big step. Particularly in those places where no rail exists today, just a 120mph train makes a difference.

But by the same token we're playing catch up. It's a position we're certainly used to playing before (rail technology in the early 1800s, space travel in the 1960s), but those periods were marked by a huge cultural commitment to surging forward. And while you might get the sense that there is that mandate if you're reading this blog or the blogs on the right, I wonder what the rest of the country, "real America" as the former governor of Alaska might say, thinks.

Something I always thought was interesting about transportation technology is that most of the major innovations came first for individual transportation, and were adapted for more people. Someone was riding a horse by himself before he attached a carriage to it. Wilbur flew solo before jets started carrying dozens of people. But new transit technology is different. The economies of scale necessary to produce a high speed vehicle almost guarantee that a product would not be economically rational unless the vehicle could carry many passengers. I'm not blaming Maglev's downfall on this phenomenon, but I do think maglev technology had a lot of unique problems in its adaptation to human transportation.

The astronomically high costs of Maglev have served as an effective deterant to construction in the United States. It's worth noting that the last time we were playing catch up, against the Russians during the space race, we spent as much as 5.5% of the entire federal budget on NASA. Obama's entire DOT request in FY 2010 is less than half of that, around 2%. If we're serious about this stuff, let's put the checkbook where our mouth is.