US President Barack Obama is pitching his US$8 billion high-speed rail program to Americans as a jobs generator that will revitalize the domestic rail industry, but the full picture is more complicated.
Building ultra-fast trains will not create the kind of high-tech, high-paying jobs Americans covet any time soon. Indeed, many of the projects receiving high-speed dollars through Obama’s program are not what most of the rest of the world calls “high speed” and those projects that are truly high speed will have to rely on overseas companies with the experience building, supplying and operating the sleek, modern trains of Europe and Asia — an expertise that the US lacks, say rail experts.
That was not the picture Obama painted in his State of the Union speech on Wednesday night, when he touted US$8 billion in new railroad grants funded by the federal economic stimulus law.
He said they would “create jobs and help our nation move goods, services and information,” and in the next breath lambasted companies who “ship our jobs overseas” and called for slashing their tax breaks.
There are good economic reasons to build high-speed rail, say transportation experts. The trains can move people between cities roughly 160km to 800km apart more swiftly and efficiently and with less environmental damage than either cars or airplanes. Trains that operate on electrified tracks also don’t rely on imported oil.
The jobs to design and make the rail cars and engines, signaling and track for the fastest trains will mainly go abroad to the European and Asian companies, however, because it would take time for the US to develop its own domestic high-speed rail industry, rail experts said.
There will be US manufacturing and engineering jobs for slower trains often described as “higher speed” or “mid-speed.” Much of the domestic high-speed work, however, will be the kind of construction and earth-moving work typical of highway projects, they said.
European and Asian high-speed trains average more than 177 kph and some reach top speeds of around 354 kph. There is nothing equivalent in the US.
For the US to decide to build high-speed train systems using primarily US companies “would be like Bangladesh deciding they want to have a space program and only use technology they have developed and manufactured themselves,” said Anthony Perl, chairman of the National Research Council’s intercity rail panel.
The technology gap between true high-speed trains and the slower trains in use in the US is equivalent to the gap between the planes flown by World War I flying aces and today’s jets, said Perl, an American who teaches transportation policy at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
“There will be some jobs that come out of it, but unless people are prepared to double the cost and take at least twice as much time to ramp up the capacity to supply this high-speed technology in the US, it’s not there,” Perl said.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate