Revitalizing Northeast Mill Towns With High-Speed Rail

The Atlantic:

From New York's Pennsylvania Station, you can catch a northbound subway train toward the Bronx. Thirty-nine minutes later, it will pull into Pelham Pkwy, a dozen miles away. But imagine, instead, that you could hop aboard a Next Generation High-Speed Rail train and in thirty-nine minutes pull up in Waterbury, Connecticut. The aging industrial town would be more swiftly accessible from midtown Manhattan than much of New York City.
That's the alluring vision Amtrak unveiled on Monday morning. The national railroad passenger company imagines a high-speed network that, by 2040, would whisk travelers from New York south to Washington or north to Boston in just 94 minutes. It's the highlight of an ambitious, $151 billion plan to rework its northeast corridor to meet burgeoning demand. The price-tag alone makes the plan implausible. But for the beleaguered rail corporation, which Mitt Romney and Congressional Republicans have suggested privatizing, the vision amounts to an argument for its future relevance and unmet potential.
The report touts many prospective benefits, including creating construction jobs, shortening travel times, boosting productivity, enhancing safety, and mitigating environmental impacts. These benefits are quite real, but urban economist Ed Glaeser has argued that they aren't remotely worth the price. He calculates relatively modest gains in productivity, safety, and the environment and points out that a construction project stretched over decades is an ineffective counter-cyclical stimulus.
Glaeser does, however, acknowledge one potential benefit large enough to tip the scales. Large economic impacts from high-speed rail, he writes, come "only if it significantly increases the speed at which an area with cheap real-estate gains access to a booming place that doesn't have any comparable, closer available land area." That describes, almost perfectly, the relationship of Connecticut's rusting industrial towns to the burgeoning prosperity of New York City.

That is an interesting idea.  I'm already impressed by travel in the northeast with just the Acela service.  You can cover a lot of territory when traveling at 130 mph.  I wouldn't put much stock in the plan right now, with conservatives pushing cuts in government spending to go along with their enduring hatred of all public transportation.