In what apparently is a one-man effort to prove that ridiculous and uninformed HSR denialism can be a bipartisan phenomenon, Michael Lind wrote an article in Salon yesterday titled Goodbye, bullet trains and windmills. In it, Lind attempts – and fails – to make a case against sustainable infrastructure from the center-left. But his total ignorance of the evidence makes this article one we can easily dismiss. Still, because Lind likes to position himself as a “liberal,” this may get some traction, so it’s worth spending the time to debunk.

The short take is this: Lind ignores evidence showing a shift away from driving, ignores the economic benefits to sustainable mass transit, and totally ignores the first-world success of modern bullet trains. He sets up a strawman that bears little resemblance to reality, and appears to be primarily interested in attacking the left from the center, despite the fact that HSR makes sense from a practical, bipartisan, and non-ideological perspective.

Unlike most conservatives and libertarians, most progressives support large-scale public investment in transportation and energy infrastructure to prop up aggregate demand in the short run and enhance national productivity in the long run. They are right to do so. Unfortunately, the progressive movement in the U.S. tends to focus its advocacy on the wrong infrastructure projects.

The center-left consensus favors massive government investment in an uneconomical form of transportation — fixed-rail, in the form of light rail or high-speed intercity passenger rail — and in uneconomical renewable energy sources: solar, wind and biomass. Why these particular infrastructures, rather than others? The answer is the fusion, in the last decade, of two previously distinct post-’60s activist movements on the left: urbanists, who despise suburbs, and Greens, who despise automobiles and airplanes. Many liberals have unthinkingly treated the goals of these single-issue movements as their own. But one can be a liberal in good standing — by, for example, supporting a living wage, universal social insurance, and government-backed manufacturing policy — and still reject the infrastructure agendas of urbanists and greens.

Right here you see that Lind is way off the rails. HSR is extremely economical – it pays its own operating costs, something that cannot be said of freeways or many airplanes (the airline industry is heavily subsidized by the government).

Further, it’s a proven success to the demonstrated failures of sprawl and dependence on oil. I don’t have any specific dislike of sprawl – I grew up in it and still don’t mind it, even if I don’t choose it for myself. And I love – absolutely love – to drive. But sprawl is no longer an economically viable solution for California’s land use and housing needs, as the current housing bubble collapse and recession demonstrate. And all anyone needs to do is look at the rising price of gas from 2003 to the present to know the costs of our dependence on oil. People who are stuck in traffic or make long commutes (many times both) pay significant costs that they wouldn’t pay with electrified passenger rail. As the Center for Neighborhood Technology has shown, households in sprawling suburbs have higher housing and transportation costs than their urban neighbors, and have less economic security as a result.

High-speed rail is the transportation technology of the future — and always will be. In his 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson called for a national system of high-speed trains. Nothing happened. Then in the 1970s President Jimmy Carter repeated the call. Nothing happened. Then in 2009, President Barack Obama dusted off a bizarre map from the Carter administration, which for some reason had a high-speed connection between Houston and New Orleans rather than Houston and other Texas cities, and proclaimed that this was his plan. Then something finally happened — but not much. The federal government announced modest funding for relatively short high-speed rail routes that might, if they are ever built, get tourists to Las Vegas and Disneyland slightly more rapidly than before.

This is dishonest history. Not only does it totally ignore the dramatic success of HSR around the world during this period – more on that in a moment – it also fails to explain why previous HSR plans failed. To say “nothing happened” is to deliberately distort what actually happened.

The 1960s: HSR was indeed planned and government research was undertaken to test systems. But as inflation rose during the Vietnam War, and as passenger rail systems went bankrupt one by one, HSR was placed on the back burner. Funding was gutted by the Nixon Administration, an early example of Republican attacks on HSR that will be repeated – and that Lind ignores.

The 1970s: HSR was again revived under Carter as a result of the oil shocks of that decade. But then Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, pledging a restoration of the pre-1970s way of life. He too gutted funding for research and development of alternative energy and alternative fuels.

Lind also left out what happened to President Bill Clinton’s HSR plans – when Republicans took over Congress in 1994, HSR plans were once again gutted.

When it comes to the present administration, Lind is extraordinarily dishonest in how he describes the HSR plan of President Obama, framing it as “Vegas to Disneyland” when in reality it is Chicago to St. Louis, Cleveland to Cincinnati, San Francisco to Los Angeles, among others. He deliberately makes the plan sound hokey and unrealistic.

High-speed rail in America is perpetually discussed and never built. There are two explanations. One, known as the “Roger Rabbit” theory, after the conspiracy theory about the decline of mass transit found in the movie “Roger Rabbit,” holds that a conspiracy of oil companies, automobile manufacturers and real estate interests took over the U.S. government around World War II and killed off trolleys and passenger trains. The less dramatic but real reason is that federal and state officials repeatedly have concluded that the costs of high-speed rail proposals outweigh the benefits.

Once again this is flawed. The “Roger Rabbit” conspiracy may or may not be true as a plot against rail, but we do know that in the 1950s and 1960s subsidies were shifted away from rail and toward roads and airports. Passenger rail starved. Since that time, HSR has suffered not from a cost-benefit analysis – which would show HSR is a good investment given the savings over alternatives – but from a bias against rail, a bias that claims cars and planes are better, always will be better, and than anyone promoting rail is either nuts or wasteful. It’s blind faith, not hard analysis.

A train is a kind of expensive, pre-modern bus or truck caravan that can never change its route because it is fastened to the road. As nations grow more affluent, their people prefer the convenience of personal automobile transportation to the inflexibility of mass transit. This chart shows that the countries whose inhabitants rely the most on mass transit are poor ones — Russia, China, Mexico. People in rich countries like Germany and Japan are much less likely than people in poor countries to use mass transit. Mass transit is used least by the inhabitants of the U.S., Canada and Australia, where low population densities make long-distance air and car travel more practical than passenger rail at any speed.

This is beyond ignorant – it’s deceptive. He makes it sound like rich countries never use HSR – when there is massive evidence that HSR is a dramatic success in rich countries including Germany and Japan, as well as France, Spain, China, and many other places. He also makes it sound like nobody uses the trains or buses in the US, which is also untrue – Acela trains are packed, ridership is very high on Amtrak California trains, LA’s Metro Rail and SF’s Muni trains and buses are packed day after day.

It’s as if Michael Lind had to invent an alternative reality to bolster his arguments, because the reality we live in bears no resemblance to what he claims exists.

The tiny minority of Americans who regularly use mass transit rely chiefly on buses, not rail. Despite all the subsidies showered on Amtrak, private, unsubsidized bus service from Washington to New York is far less expensive than train travel. One-third of the people in the U.S. who take mass transit every day, and two-thirds of those who commute by rail, live in the New York metro area. In the unlikely event that other metro areas in the remote future become as dense as the New York region, more fixed rail transit might become practical. Until then, those who favor mass transit should favor cheaper and more flexible bus rapid transit, even if buses are less glamorous than bullet trains.

Well this where Lind’s biases show. He calls it “unlikely” that other metro areas would become dense. In fact, the Bay Area core is already quite dense, as is much of the LA core. And that density is only going to grow, partly because of public choice, partly because of the aforementioned uneconomic nature of sprawl. Oil prices will continue to rise – something Lind also fails to mention – and will continue to drive people to live more densely.

Of course, he makes the usual call for BRT over trains, which makes no sense since trains are actually more economical – usually with a comparable if not smaller cost of operation and the ability to serve more riders.

So what would Lind propose?

If fixed-rail mass transit is a transportation technology of the 19th century rather than of the 21st

Sorry, I just had to interrupt. You know what else is a 19th century technology? Automobiles. And flight. Perhaps Lind might want to look at successful 21st century adaptations of passenger rail? No, he moves on to his actual goal, the reinforcement of our dependence on automobiles:

what transportation investments make sense? The U.S. needs to reduce its imports and grow its exports by expanding its tradable goods sector. The emphasis should therefore be on lowering the costs of freight transportation, not on getting people out of cars and into trains. It is far more important to get goods from American factories, farms and mines to container ships bound for foreign consumers at lower cost than it is to cut five minutes off the daily commutes of office workers in New York and New Jersey. Focusing on freight infrastructure improvements means that, among other things, we need to build more highway lanes and in some cases new highways for the trucks that will continue to carry most freight. It also means paying for port expansion, freight rail modernization and upgrading our crucial but frequently ignored inland waterway system.

That’s his solution? Nothing about rising oil prices? Nothing about the massive economic costs of sprawl? More highway lanes and maybe a few freight improvements? He’s writing as if it’s permanently 1995, as if the last 15 years never happened, as if people were not bankrupted and forced out of their homes because they could not afford the long and expensive commutes any longer.

And passenger travel? Unless the U.S. shuts down immigration, the U.S. population is likely to grow to 400-600 million by 2050. If anti-sprawl campaigners try to prevent the construction of new roads to accommodate a few hundred million more Americans, they will fail. In addition to building more roads for passenger use as well as freight transportation, we need to build more airports in the U.S. to relieve congestion. Asphalt destined for highway and airport expansion lacks the gee-whiz factor of high-speed bullet trains, but it is much more important to the future of our economy. And asphalt has unimpeachable liberal credentials. Although Dwight Eisenhower gets the credit, it was Franklin Roosevelt who planned and lobbied for the interstate highway system that many of today’s urbanists and environmentalists denounce.

This is getting ridiculous. Lind started by claiming HSR is uneconomical, but has he looked at the cost of expanding freeway lanes to accommodate a population of 500 million? How does he propose to maintain affordable gas prices? How will we afford to maintain all those highway lanes? We already have serious problems with congestion and maintenance with a population of 300 million.

It’s not that we like HSR because we’re “gee-whiz” techies, or because we’re a bunch of Earth First Marxist wackos out to destroy suburbia. We like it because it works. Because we’ve been to Spain, or Japan, or France, and seen it work. Lind seems intent on making this some kind of ideological battle when it isn’t, and doesn’t need to be. HSR works on its merits, merits Lind totally failed to examine.

After all, if HSR was such a bad idea, why is China spending $100 billion this year alone to build a bullet train network?

Lind then goes on to bash wind power, and concludes with this:

The greatest economic crisis since the Depression shows no signs of ending soon. A major, long-term program of public investment is needed more than ever. But the public investments must pass the reality test. And the harsh reality is this: There isn’t going to be a significant high-speed rail system in the U.S. in the near- or medium-term future. There isn’t going to be a continental electric grid permitting solar panels on condo buildings in Berkeley, Calif., to power heirloom-poultry farms in Maine. Most Americans are not going to sell their cars and move back from the suburbs to the cities in order to live in tiny apartments or condos and ride the rails to work. These are romantic daydreams that Democrats could afford to indulge only as long as they were out of office and were not responsible for results.

Actually, Americans already are buying fewer cars and already are moving into cities to live in apartments and condos and ride the rails – or has he not noticed that as Richard Florida explained in his new book The Great Reset housing values in dense urban cores have held up well during this recession, significantly outperforming the suburbs?

Anyone who has ever traveled on the Shinkansen, or the TGV, or the AVE, or any other high speed train knows it is not a “romantic daydream” but a practical, hardworking, proven reality.

Lind’s parting shot is this:

During the Bush years, liberals took pride in describing themselves as “reality-based.” When it comes to transportation and energy, the American center-left needs to get reality-based in a hurry.

That’s just the point. We ARE reality based. We look at HSR’s success around the world, look at California’s own situation, density, geography, and travel needs, and see that we match up very well with Spain and other countries that have successful HSR systems. We are reality-based sometimes to a fault, not always engaging in the political framing and campaigning we need to be doing to ensure HSR actually does happen.

The only one not reality-based here is Michael Lind, who wrote an article about HSR that either ignores or flies in the face of mountains of contrary evidence disproving his flawed thesis.