LaHood Looks For Rail World Answers In Spain

Ray LaHood is over in Spain, snooping around their high speed train system for ideas. Today he took a jaunt on the AVE from Madrid to Zaragosa and then hung around in a railway control center with the transport minister for a while. Tomorrow he’s meeting with prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the guy who’s has really been the force behind Spain’s recent investment. Maybe Zapatero will whisper some secret clue in his ear about how to get things in the US moving on the, um, right track.

The NY Times has seized the news peg of this visit and posted a story highlighting the successes of the Spanish rail program. Even for those of us who have already read several dozen stories about the successes of Spanish rail, it’s still worth reading. A few choice passages:

“Spaniards have rediscovered the train,” said Iñaki Barrón de Angoiti, director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris. “The AVE has changed the way people live, the way they do business. Spaniards don’t move around a lot, but the AVE is even changing that.” [...]

Here in Lleida, a town of 125,000 in northeastern Spain surrounded by plains that produce half of the country’s apples and pears, the inauguration of a high-speed route to Madrid in 2003 cut the journey to the capital to two hours from five and a half, and the extension of the line to Barcelona last year halved that trip to one hour.

Ángel Ros, the Socialist mayor of Lleida, said the AVE had transformed the town. The number of tourist visitors has increased by about 15 percent, he said. Demand for business conventions has risen 20 percent each year, and the city is building a 50 million euro ($70.5 million) convention center. The 13th-century town hall is in the midst of a 100 million euro public works project to transform the area around the railway station with gardens, bridges, a shopping center and parking lot.

“The AVE is a high-end railway, and simply by virtue of being on the route, your city becomes a high-end destination,” Mr. Ros said. [...]

“High-speed rail is good for society and it’s good for the environment, but it’s not a profitable business,” said Mr. Barrón of the International Union of Railways. He reckons that only two routes in the world — between Tokyo and Osaka, and between Paris and Lyon, France — have broken even.

There are doubters though:

Critics say the money being channeled from other infrastructure priorities toward high-speed rail would be better spent improving Spain’s interurban transit system and collapsed cargo network, or building affordable trains that travel at lower speeds. [...]

“It doesn’t make sense to make trains inaccessible to middle- and low-income Spaniards,” said Joan Herrera, a lawmaker for the Initiative for Catalonia Green Party. “Meanwhile, our cargo transit system is a disaster,” he said, referring to the preference of many companies to ship by road in Spain because the cargo railways are poorly maintained.

Given the hefty public investment, experts and officials say, effective public relations and rigorous planning are crucial to success. Stations should be in the city center, they say, using ticketing systems as efficient as the trains. The Madrid-Barcelona AVE, for example, has been criticized because two stops on the route are well outside the towns they serve.

A smart article, except for some crazy musings at the end about how trains=cowboys, or something like that. The conversation about all this in Spain seems very lucid in contrast to our own,  where the political system is so debilitatingly gridlocked that we can think in the smallest terms. Keep in mind that this a $150 billion project for a country with an economy one-tenth the size of ours. So if we were doing things on the Spanish scale, we’d be devoting more than a trillion dollars to passenger rail. Imagine what that debate would sound like in Congress and on talk radio.

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