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Yes, the numbers are complicated and there are a lot of caveats. $200 million comes from the Wilson Quarterly article and is a very rough estimate of a full HSR buildout of the 10 corridors.

Your comment goes very much to my point about how investing (at all and to what extent) in some corridors is more cost-effective than others. My larger point is that we shouldn’t put rail in its own category and fund it independently. We need to view investments in rail as part of a larger transportation picture that includes other investments that accomplish the same transportation and emissions reduction goals at a lower price.

Hiding inside this throw-away line is quite a lot of deceptive framing.

The lower grade of deception is that the phrase “a full build out” seems to be used to imply building each corridor as an Express HSR corridor. However, if there is any corridor where the benefit of building an Express HSR corridor as opposed to an Emerging or Regional HSR does not justify the additional cost – the answer is to build a Regional HSR corridor at under half the cost or an Emerging HSR corridor at a fifth of the cost instead.

The higher grade of deception is that there is no indication what this means in terms of annual costs. Some of the largest price tags are for the improvements that have the longest life, such as establishing new alignments or correcting flaws in existing alignments.

An even broader deception is treating the Northeast Corridor as if it is a typical case, when it is quite evidently the most highly atypical case.

However, the broadest deception is involved in this assertion: “In the coming years, the U.S. will have to seriously examine whether a fully-scaled high speed rail network is worth the price tag.”

That is simply a lie. All that is necessary is to evaluate each corridor in terms of whether it is worth the price tag. There is no reason why any given Express HSR corridor needs to be networked, since, on the one hand, the primary transport task it serves is 200 mile to 500 mile trips, not cross country trips, and on the other hand, there is no obstacle to running out beyond the end of the 220mph corridors onto the 125mph Rapid Rail corridors in the “Regional HSR” tier.

It is never necessary to seriously examine whether a fully-scaled, Express HSR network is worth the price tag. If each corridor is worth the price tag, the network is, automatically, and if a corridor is not worth the price tag, it should not be built, irrespective of “the network”.

And if adjusted to, “in the coming years, the US will have to seriously examined whether a 100mph nationwide “Higher” Speed Rail network is worth the price tag – its still misleading. Because we have a gaping hole in our balance of trade generated by importing 2/3 of our crude oil, and a matching gaping hole in our strategic defense implied by that import oil dependence. If oil supplies are seriously disrupted, with our current transportation system, our ability to move both critical goods and forces across the country will be severely compromised.

So we have to seriously examined TODAY whether we need a fully-scaled 100mph electric freight rail network, and the answer when we do so will be, “yes, of course, we have needed it for a decade or more, and only the prostituting of our national interests on behalf of Big Oil has prevented us from facing up to that fact.”

That’s exactly what it means. We rely today on airplanes and cars, which run on oil, and we don’t have a lot of it. High-Speed Rail runs on electricity, which comes from coal, or uranium, or sunlight, or water, and we have a lot of those things. As a short-term investment, high speed rail is not exactly cost effective. But if oil should rise in price dramatically the next few decades, spending a few billion now will save us hundreds of billions in the future.