Rogue Columnist

On National Train Day

Saturday is National Train Day with events scheduled in all 50 states, including in Seattle at the beautifully restored King Street Station (above). I was a guest on this topic today on KUOW's The Conversation With Ross Reynolds, but time being what it is, much more needs to be said. Some of this may be familiar to Rogue readers, but it can't be stated often enough.

1. Seattle is better served by passenger rail than most American cities. It is the terminus of two long-distance Amtrak trains, the Coast Starlight and the Empire Builder. I've ridden both and they are the best way to see the country. In addition, it is served by the Amtrak Cascades, a regional corridor with multiple trains a day south to Portland and Eugene and north to Vancouver, B.C. You can enjoy a relaxing, spacious ride alongside spectacular scenery, have a meal or adult beverage, and work using onboard wi-fi. Sound Transit operates commuter rail via its Sounder service north and south in the metropolitan area. Finally, Seattle has both light rail and one streetcar line with more to come. Phoenix is by far the largest American city with no passenger rail service at all (although it has — WBIYB — light rail).

2. Passenger rail is the most environmentally friendly way to move large numbers of people, an advantage that matters even more if we're going to reduce greenhouse gases associated with climate change. Cars are terrible polluters, but so are airplanes. Trains also help ease congestion on highways and airline routes, as well as reducing the safety costs associated with cars and freeways. Commuter rail helps ease the horrible traffic of rush hours that impedes productivity, belches pollution and causes costly wrecks.

Freeway to hell II

I thought my 2010 post on the proposed South Mountain Freeway was all that needed to be said, not that it would stop this abomination. But the great thing about Phoenix is how it continues to inspire new material.

Thus, the newly released "environmental impact statement" on the $2 billion project claims that if it isn't built Phoenix's air will grow worse. I am not making this up. Here's the "logic" behind the claim: “In some instances, impacts under the No-Action Alternative would be greater than those that would occur under the action alternatives. As a specific example, energy use — in terms of annual fuel consumption — would be greater.” The Arizona Republic's Sean Holstege writes, "It is a key finding, because many freeway opponents have argued that building nothing, the only available planning alternative, would be better for the environment. All the environmental consequences are typical of freeway projects and can be mitigated, the report found."

First, a little background. Building new freeways is essential to perpetuating the sprawl hustle of the Real Estate Industrial Complex. Without them, empty land on the fringes would be worth much less and be more valuable for agriculture or even as empty desert. It's an old racket, with the added benefit being that the cost, through sales taxes, falls most heavily on the working poor.

Magical thinking

James Hamilton on the Econobrowser blog recently offered a post titled, "The Death of Peak Oil." It pivots off an article by Colin Sullivan wondering if it has "gone the way of the Flat Earth Society." Sullivan continues, "Those behind the theory appear to have been dead wrong, at least in terms of when the peak would hit, having not anticipated the rapid shift in technology that led to exploding oil and natural gas production in new plays and areas long since dismissed as dried up."

Hamilton does a capable job of dismantling Sullivan. Comments from the expert readership of the Oil Drum do excellent mop-up. Still, the exchange seemed an opportune time to re-examine where we stand on several fronts amid what I had termed the Great Disruption. This blog shouldn't be a church. It is not a prisoner of any closed-loop ideology. I don't have all the answers. We should always remember the exchange John Maynard Keynes had with a man who demanded to know why his position on a certain issue had shifted. Said Keynes, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

After all, no less an authority figure than the President of the United States has assured us that America has a one-hundred-year supply of natural gas and his administration is fast-tracking all manner of fossil-fuel production. Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to bring tar-sands oil from Alberta to the refineries of the Gulf Coast seems a given. The housing industry is coming back, even in the overbuilt suburbs of places such as Phoenix and California's "Inland Empire." The recession slowed "job sprawl," but hardly stopped, much less reversed it. New freeways are being built. American life is going on much as before 2008. Could it be that all the notions of a "great reset" in the wake of the crash were magical thinking?

The big merger

Here's Arizona's "positive business climate" at work: The combined American Airlines/US Airways will move its headquarters to Dallas-Fort Worth. That pretty much says it all.

Much is wrong with this deal. It continues the extreme consolidation of the airline industry into four giant carriers, limiting customer choice, reducing competition and damaging local economies. Where do you think the $1 billion in promised "savings" will come from? Largely from cutting jobs and eliminating operations. Anyone who thinks the combined carrier will maintain its existing hub at Sky Harbor, so close to DFW, has spent too much time in the sun. When Northwest merged with Delta, the modern and efficient Delta hub at Cincinnati was closed, resulting in thousands of lost jobs. American's takeover of TWA did the same in St. Louis. In these and numerous other cases, the airlines had leaned on local governments to build airport capacity, only to be thrown away to make the latest numbers work for another merger. These mergers almost never deliver as promised, even long-term for shareholders. For cities and workers, they are a cancer. Good full-time jobs have been killed and not replaced. Airline industry employment today is lower than in 1995 even though passenger revenue miles have soared.

The US Airways that Doug Parker has spent years trying to sell traces its roots to Ed Beauvais' post-deregulation startup America West Airlines. It was very much Phoenix's airline, closely tied to growth at Sky Harbor. And through upturns, downturns and bankruptcy reorganizations, America West persevered even as Parker took over as CEO and used it as a vehicle to buy long-suffering US Airways. Even then, the headquarters remained here.

World-class city

Sackcloth was donned and teeth were gnashed on Facebook with the news that Taz Loomans was decamping from Phoenix for Portland. Loomans described herself as "an architect, a writer and an advocate for sustainable building practices and community-oriented design in Phoenix. I love living in Central Phoenix and taking part in the coming of age of this city." She was one of the people who gave hope to the Resistance. Now, however, she writes:

During this emotionally turbulent year, I have had the privilege to travel quite a bit. In fact, as I write this, I am in the Bay Area on a new years trip. I visited some world class cities this year such as Barcelona, Chicago, Portland New York and now San Francisco.

These trips have also changed me and the way I look at the world. Whereas before I was happy to help build Phoenix into a world-class city, I now want to find out what it feels like to live in a world-class city. Before, I wanted to help bring bike lanes, urban gardens, community and walkability to Phoenix. Now I want to live a life where those things are a part of the culture and are woven into the fabric of the city. In my travels, particularly this year, I’ve found that there are quite a few places in the country, and no doubt in the world, where this is true.

I’m moving not so much because I’ve lost faith in Phoenix, but rather because different things are important to me as I go through a personal evolution...But it’s still a tough place to build on previous progress and get to the next level. The city’s penchant to tear down old buildings and build new ones in their place is a perfect metaphor to how Phoenix always seems to be starting from scratch (apropos, perhaps, because of it’s name), and just can’t seem to build enough sustained momentum to become a world class city.

Phoenix rail: Next steps

Newer readers to this blog might wonder why the parenthetical "WBIYB" is always inserted after the first reference to Phoenix light rail. It stands for: We Built It, You Bastards. A reminder of the hysterical, ignorant and too often thuggish opposition to a transportation technology that had proved successful around the country. I received death threats and demands that I be fired for columnizing in favor of light rail at the Arizona Republic. Well, you bastards, we built it and it is a big success, aside from the distortions that suppress transit-oriented development. Such a big success that Mesa (!) is building the line deeper into the city — and you can thank former Mayor Keno Hawker for having the foresight to persuade his colleagues to help fund one mile into the city; otherwise, Mesa would have been cut off from a system it now embraces.

It's a tough slog. The Legislature and governor are hostile to anything but freeways. The great crash slowed funding from Prop. 400 to a trickle, and even then most of it was going to build transportation infrastructure appropriate to the 1960s rather than today, including the misbegotten Loop 303 and South Mountain Freeway. While these will enrich a few connected developers, they are engines of sprawl, congestion, pollution and expansion of the heat island. Most Phoenicians can't imagine a lifestyle that doesn't revolve around long single-occupancy car trips.

Even so, the 20-mile starter line is expanding not only into downtown Mesa but also toward Metrocenter mall. An ambitious new line is being prepared to run west from downtown to a park-and-ride at 79th Avenue and Interstate 10. The West Line/Capitol Line is widely misunderstood in the media, but it would be an important step to creating a much more robust light-rail system.

Arizona merry-go-round

I was supposed to be on KJZZ's Here and Now with Steve Goldstein on Wednesday but we were pre-empted by POTUS. So let me run through a few Arizona observations:

As of Wednesday, the state was still counting ballots. If this were happening in a banana republic, it would be one thing...but in a supposedly advanced nation? This affront to democracy is not mere incompetence but a huge opportunity for mischief — not the virtually nonexistent vote fraud the GOP claims, but official vote suppression and disenfranchisement of "those people." Once upon a time, the Secretary of State's office was a sleepy but efficient place, presided over forever by Wes Bolin and his assistant, Rose Mofford. It has become increasingly politicized, especially in 2004 when Jan Brewer was both Secretary of State, overseeing the election, and head of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign. Ken Bennett is no less an ambitious political animal. This is a scandal crying for investigative reporting and reform. Also, how could you re-elect Joe Arpaio? No wonder Gov. Fright Mask is musing on another term.

• • •

For the first time, Arizona has no Democratic statewide officeholder. This is a profound change from what had been a majority Democrat state when I was little to a competitive state for both parties for many years. One-party rule is never healthy, but it is particularly bad when the One Party denies facts and reality. The Big Sort is at work — even progressives who read this blog talk about their plans to leave. So is the outsized organization and leverage of the LDS with no counterweights in the Latino community or elsewhere (Arizona once was a big union state, yes). The Sinema congressional win is fine, but her campaign was hardly progressive. Unless widespread Hispanic voter suppression took place and Carmona stages a win, this election confirms the worst. Arizona is a solid member of the New Confederacy.

Charlotte

The first thing Americans, and especially the national media, need to know about the location of the Democratic National Convention is that it is being held in Charlotte, N.C., not Charleston, S.C. In historic and genteel Charleston, as Fritz Hollings said, there are two kinds of people: The ones who don't wear shoes, and the ones who look at you like you don't wear shoes. Nor are Monticello and the University of Virginia located in Charlotte. Those are in and near Charlottesville. Such is the confusion that has long maddened local chamber of commerce bots. Charlotte is banks and NASCAR and churches. Lots and lots of churches. Billy Graham was born here. It's not in the mountains, like Asheville, or near the ocean, like Wilmington, but on the flat, boring Piedmont in between.

I come by my Charlotte knowledge having served as executive business editor of the Charlotte Observer, from 1996 through 2000, in its Knight-Ridder glory days, and have visited many times since. When I reluctantly left big-city Cincinnati for the job in Charlotte, I thought I had landed in Hooterville with a skyline, specifically one gigantic tower, the NationsBank Corporate Center, and a tiny little office core beside it. In the years since, downtown Charlotte has grown substantially and can boast an impressive, if totally modernistic, skyline.

The main reason is the banks, and specifically two bankers. But more about them later.

Growthgasm!

The SanTan Village shopping center in Gilbert. 

The big news back home is that Gilbert is now among the top 100 U.S. cities in population. When I worked as a columnist at the Arizona Republic, I would term these highly-played announcements as "growthgasms," an old Arizona obsession in focusing on merely adding people. A closer look at the data show that, in the metro Phoenix depression, they are faking it. Gilbert grew by 1.7 percent in the first year after the 2010 Census. That compared with 90 percent from 2000 to 2010. Any way you slice it, population growth has slowed dramatically in a place that values it above all else.

People are moving much less today because of the bad economy. But the Austin suburb of Round Rock clocked 4.8 percent in the same year and Austin itself grew by 3.8 percent. Denver increased 3.3 percent. Phoenix, which was kicked back a notch to the nation's sixth-largest city added less than 24,000 people, keeping it 67,000 behind No. 5 Philadelphia. Houston, No. 4, added nearly 46,000 residents. Yes, Phoenix was 7th in the top ten in adding raw population, but the numbers were nothing like those seen every year in the 1990s and 2000s, and by percent are below anything seen since the early 1950s and the advent of widespread air conditioning.

Gilbert is technically a "town," allowing it a runaround from many of the responsibilities of cities in the eyes of the state government. And for those who live there, I suppose it's very pleasant: New housing built around large garages in "master planned communities," more than 81 percent white, affluent, heavily Mormon, a fakey little "Old Town," well-financed schools, endless motoring, right-wing politics, chain restaurants, a sham "downtown" (all private property) at the SanTan Village shopping center and relatively low crime. The endless walls facing even modest thoroughfares are telling.

Phoenix 101: San Diego

I never went to San Diego as a child. Nobody I knew did. Up into the 1970s, Phoenix's orientation was Los Angeles, and even that required a long drive across implacable desert. Part of this was due to geography. The Southern Pacific Railroad turned slightly northwest after crossing the Colorado River at Yuma and headed to LA. San Diego, although founded in 1769 and enjoying one of the finest natural harbors in the world, was initially bypassed by the railroads because of the imposing mountains and canyons to its east.

At the turn of the 20th century, sugar baron John Spreckels financed a railroad to connect the city with the SP at El Centro. It was one of the most difficult lines to engineer and build, including passage through Carrizo Gorge. Eventually, Spreckles was forced to sell the San Diego & Arizona to the SP, but the line never made much money. The Santa Fe Railway built south to the city from Los Angeles.

In high school, we took a couple of choir trips to San Diego. It was pleasant and sleepy, even though it was slightly more populous than Phoenix. Fast forward into the 1980s, and San Diego in the summer had become Phoenix West, with many thousands of Arizonans vacationing there, mobbing the place and not making friends. Advances in automobile technology and Interstate 8 had caused the big shift. By that time, I was living in San Diego and one of the first things I learned was not to tell anyone where I was from. One of my friends who knew the truth would derisively call me "Zonie Boy" when she wanted to get under my skin.

Tucson drifts

What's the biggest danger facing Arizona's second city? According to Roger Yohem, writing in Inside Tucson Business, it is that the Old Pueblo will become Portland-ized:

Many of Portland’s traits infatuate Tucson’s bureaucrat copycats. To start with the obvious, Portland has a modern streetcar system that serves downtown. The real cost of Portland’s trolleys, infrastructure and tracks can be hard to gauge since much of it was taxpayer subsidized through government grants and tax gimmicks. But based on various public records, the consensus puts the initial cost at $25 million per mile. For $200 million, Tucson’s streetcar system will cost $50 million per mile. When subsidized by taxpayers, perhaps every city is entitled to pricey public transit.

I have no idea who this mammal is, but he perfectly encapsulates the retrograde ignorance that holds Arizona back. And he is an example of the endless streetcar hysteria that has enveloped the city since it began work on a (sit down, now) 3.9-mile line scheduled to open in 2013. Oh, the socialism! The Islamo-fascist-madness!

Opportunity costs I

The Navy has its heart set on building 55 littoral combat ships. So far, each is costing around $700 million. That's about half the annual federal subsidy for all of Amtrak. For one ship. And although it looks "like Darth Vader on the sea," as the New York Times put it, one doesn't have to be an amateur naval historian, although I am, to see this craft could be sunk by the ghost of Billy Mitchell flying a 1920s bomber. This is another deeply troubled defense program, plagued by cost over-runs and likely not just to disappoint but actually put our security at risk. Imagine how we could be using this money, or the trillions we're spending for wars in Afghanistan or Iraq — and there, as Everett Dirksen would say, we're talking real money. Such an exercise lets us better understand the opportunity costs of the course we're pursuing into decline.

One important effort should be retrofitting suburbia for a high-cost energy future, which is inevitable no matter how much we frack or use the dirty oil from our good friends to the north. Of course, most of American suburbia was built for the car. Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since World War II. Place-making and civic design were lost. Massive, cheap, look-alike construction, laid down on an industrial scale, has continued and metastasized, bigger and uglier, decade by decade. All this was heavily and stealthily subsidized by taxpayers and federal policy,  encouraged by a brief moment in history when gasoline was cheap and America was less populous. Jim Kunstler rightly calls it "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." Now it's a built environment whose time has come and gone. Exurbia is done. Much of the rest of suburbia will face ever-greater stresses.

Could some of it be saved and improved? Yes.

Mesa rising?

Something is happening in Mesa. Light rail is being extended three miles along Main Street from Sycamore to Mesa Drive, reaching downtown and putting it within walking distance, on a decent day, of the Arizona Temple. A brewery is coming to Main Street. Pioneer Park might get a botanical garden, pushed by a citizens committee that also proposes extending light-rail to Gateway airport. (Building an inspiring city hall would be nice, too). Officials brought in 50 developers to show off potential downtown sites. Council members actually expressed hesitation about some senior housing projects, worried they would get in the way of efforts to attract market-rate, transit-oriented residential development downtown.

The "city with wide streets and narrow minds" is actually attracting higher education: the A.T. Still University branch offers osteopathic medicine, dentistry and health care; Benedictine University is expected to open a campus downtown. This is on top of the downtown branch of Mesa Community College and ASU Polytechnic. When metro Phoenix saw itself in the running for a new Apple campus, which not surprisingly went to Austin instead, it's no secret the company was looking most at Mesa. The Mesa Arts Center has stopped trying to compete with Phoenix and is doing well with, among other things, community festivals.

Could this be Mesa, Arizona? A city more populous than Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Minneapolis, etc. with nothing to show for it? Something seems to have changed.

The exit interview

The urbanist Yuri Artibise left Phoenix last year, returning to Vancouver. It's part of a continuing brain drain, although to be sure such assets as ASU continue to bring in new creatives. I don't know where the tally stands, but I fear Phoenix continues to lose more than it attracts. Architect Taz Loomans recently conducted an interesting "exit interview" with Artibise. It made me realize that it's been five years since I got the first inkling that the Arizona Republic would take away my column, which would eventuate in me leaving town. So I thought I'd use Loomans' questions as a test for myself.

What do you miss most about Phoenix? My good friends. (I tried to select one "most"; for more, see my additions in the comments section).

What did Phoenix have that Seattle doesn’t? It is the repository of so much of my history, so many of my hopes. My mother and grandmother, long dead, are so alive on the streets of Willo, Roosevelt and Storey. The church where I was baptised is still going, as is my grade school, still in its inspiring, grand building, and enchanting Encanto Park. Union Station, where I spent countless hours as a child watching trains and dreaming of far-away places. The streets I worked as a paramedic, learning too much too young. The different mountain vistas that always orient me. Phoenix is the home of my heart, a place so mangled, mismanaged, raped and pillaged, but still worth fighting for. No matter how long I am gone, when I return I can drive the streets and walk the neighborhoods as if I had never left. The ghosts of the Hohokam still speak to me on winter nights when the cold wind blows from the High Country and the peculiar acoustics of the valley mingle train whistles and voices of the beloved dead.

Phoenix 101: Maryvale

In the late 1950s, my uncle bought a house from John F. Long in Maryvale — and I mean he bought it from John Long himself sitting in a trailer on land that would become Phoenix's first major post-war suburb. My uncle was pretty much Long's target demographic: A veteran of World War II and Korea, young with a family and a good job. Tens of thousands more did the same thing. His house was a sparkling new ranch with an "all electric kitchen" and a pool. Every time we visited, I felt inferior, us living in a down-on-its-heels Spanish period-revival house, built in the 1920s with a gas range, just north of downtown. My mother sniffed that his commute faced the sun coming and going. But how I wanted to live in Maryvale. It was the future. Except it wasn't. Now our old house is restored and valuable in one of the state's most desirable historic districts. Maryvale is a linear slum.

It wasn't supposed to turn out that way. Long named the district after his wife and loved it until he died. He was unapologetic about building affordable starter homes for ex-GIs and his company tried to support Maryvale even as it began an inexorable decline. He took the model of Levittown, the "planned communities" built by William Levitt in the northeast in the last 1940s and 1950s. But Long added his own twists, such as the distinct Phoenix ranch house and abundant pools. Like its model, Maryvale was defined by curvilinear streets with cul-de-sacs and walls, providing a sense of privacy. Sometimes the newness could be jarring: I remember walking with my uncle through cabbage fields — across the street (until these were obliterated by more houses).

Hell on wheels

High-speed rail is dead in America. In Slate, Will Oremus does a postmortem that isn't as clueless as most of what one would find in the mainstream media. It makes some points familiar to my readers: The Obama plan wouldn't have been genuine high-speed rail, except in Florida, merely higher-speed; the funds were insufficient and dolled out helter-skelter across the country rather than focusing on corridors likely to bring success, etc. I would add that the Florida HSR was foolish from the get-go, aimed at a suburbianized, car-crazy state, rather than, say, California, the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast Corridor, where train travel is already popular and in demand.

In any event, this is a catastrophe for the nation.

On a general level, it is another sign that America just can't do great things any longer. It's an emphatic indication of the nihilistic paralysis of our politics, with one of our major political parties captured by extremists whose mission is pure destruction. It highlights yet another blow to the commons. It's a lost economic opportunity. High-speed rail would have created tens of thousands of jobs, for operating and not just construction. It had the potential, properly done, to seed new industries here to build the trains. It is exactly the kind of infrastructure spending that would stimulate an economy that as things stand faces years of high unemployment and stagnation. From an environmental standpoint, rail is much less destructive than cars and moves far more people with a small carbon footprint.

Peak oil for smart people

You will find nothing "for dummies" on this site. But let my try to cut through the wonk: We face a high-cost energy future. I usually try to phrase it this way to avoid the stigma that the oil industry's well-paid/well-placed propagandists attach to the term "peak oil." (Rather like "climate change" vs. "global warming"). America has done nothing to prepare for this future. It's going to get rough.

In fact, peak oil is well known within the oil industry (which I covered as a journalist). It means simply that half of this one-time gift of geology is gone. It doesn't mean "we're about to run out of oil." The clever conflation of these ideas has helped to confuse and distract even the dwindling number of Americans who are paying attention. The other bad news: When applied to a nation or world, peak means the "easy" oil is gone, and the remainder will be more difficult and expensive to recover and refine. National peaks go along with economic trauma. Hence, America hit national peak in the early 1970s, helping to cause the recessions and stagnation of that decade. These peaks are hard to predict in advance, clear in the rearview mirror.

The oil industry and our leaders know that we are headed for, or have reached, global peak. As with climate change, the debate is over details: Essentially when and what next. And as with climate change, the consequences will be profound. Not for nothing has the government kept then-Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force meeting minutes secret, and not for ideology's sake alone did we commit so much treasure to creating and sustaining the Army of the Euphrates.

The periphery

When you're talking Europe, the periphery (Greece, etc.) is ailing, while the core, especially Germany and Scandinavia, is doing well. In Phoenix, the situation is reversed. To be sure, the depression has clobbered huge swaths of Phoenix suburbia, left Pinal County circling the drain and driven a stake into the dreams of Superstition Vistas and Buckeye with 400,000 poor boobs from the Midwest. Glendale is underwater on its super mortgage to hucksters and Westgate is in foreclosure. And the compromised, local-yokel professional seers have once again pushed out their prediction of "recovery," this time to 2015. Still, what little economic activity that's happening is occurring in places such as Scottsdale and Chandler.

The news for the city of Phoenix is gloomy. What few companies are coming to the metro area are setting up shop on the periphery. Banner Health, which killed a hospital on the Phoenix Biosciences Campus that would have led to a quantum leap in its synergies, has teamed up with the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to establish a "world class" treatment facility in Gilbert. (The irony here is that Anderson is part of the Texas Medical Center in central Houston that should be the model for the Phoenix campus). ASU and the Mayo Clinic are setting up a medical school in north Scottsdale. Even as central Phoenix is clearcut with huge swaths of empty land, a big data center chose Chandler for a new operation, among the other new projects and expansions that the suburbs can boast. Even within the city, venerable law firm Fennemore Craig stabbed downtown (well, Midtown) in the back, relocating to 24th and Camelback.

As far as I can tell, this isn't even being discussed in the Phoenix mayoral race. Yet it's one of the biggest problems facing the city and metro area.

Did Phoenix light rail fail?

My first experience with light rail came living in San Diego in the early 1980s. One segment linked downtown with the border crossing at San Ysidro. It was popular and uncontroversial. "I didn't think one of these could run without graffiti all over it," I heard a visitor from then dysfunctional New York exclaim of the new, bright red trainsets. As a reporter, I wrote about the Trolley, especially the ambitious expansion plans. San Diego is the most Republican of California's big cities, but the light-rail system was begun under Pete Wilson, a mediocre U.S. senator, bad California governor, but stellar San Diego mayor (he was also, along with developer Ernest Hahn, the father of the spectacularly revived downtown). Today, the San Diego Trolley extends 53 miles on three routes.

Then I lived in Denver, where the city started a segment downtown. It too, was popular and widely embraced. Now it comprises 39 miles with another 12 due in two years. I was in Charlotte for the planning of the now-operating Lynx light-rail, a relatively modest 10 miles, but more is in the works. It was the first modern light-rail system in the Old South and, again, widely supported, especially by the business leadership and developers who built hundreds of millions of dollars of projects near the line. Similar success happened in other cities, especially Dallas (!), with its 72-mile system and clammoring of suburbs to get the next line.

The story didn't play out that way in Phoenix. Yes, we built it, you bastards. But it's also time to take stock.

Amtrak at 40

On May 1, 1971, the private railroads ceased passenger service and it was taken over by Amtrak, the government-owned National Railroad Passenger Corporation. Dozens of trains that ran on April 30th ceased to exist. Hundreds of cities lost their trains. What remained is largely the bare-bones operation, outside of the Northeast Corridor, that still exists today. This even though the nation has added 100 million people, become much more densely populated, and oil prices will make the car- and airline-based future seen as inevitable in 1971 increasingly difficult to sustain.

Amtrak was created because of a massive grassroots campaign. It was also an effort to help save the bankrupt Penn-Central and the freight railroads in general. But it was also born in sin as a deeply flawed political compromise, dependent on a federal subsidy that few lawmakers would or will admit is necessary, and a political plaything depending on who controls Congress and the White House. Something had to be done. Whether Amtrak was the answer is open to debate. America once enjoyed the best and fastest passenger rail system in the world. It was killed by automobiles and airlines that were heavily subsidized by the federal government (and continue to be), even as the private railroads were taxed and regulated heavily. Nor were the externalities priced in: Pollution, energy consumption and the resulting geopolitical instability, sprawl and its environmental consequences, etc. After spending heavily on new streamliners after World War II, railroads saw passenger business steadily fall off to this subsidized competition. Some fought on with top-notch service, notable the Santa Fe. Others couldn't wait to kill their trains, notoriously the Southern Pacific.

Both served Phoenix in the 1960s. The Santa Fe ran a classy little train from Union Station to Williams Junction, where it connected with the road's premier transcontinental streamliners, including the Super Chief, El Capitan, Chief, San Francisco Chief and Grand Canyon Limited. The SP operated three trains in each direction until the mid-1960s: the crack Sunset Limited, the Golden State and the remnant of the once grand Imperial. By 1970, only the Sunset survived, a raggedy thing that usually had a couple of coaches and a vending-machine car (a decade before, the Sunset routinely had 14 cars, including sleepers and full-service diner). Cities such as Cincinnati and St. Louis had dozens of trains, right up to the eve of Amtrak. After Amtrak, cities usually had one train, often at inconvenient hours (Phoenix had service until the mid-1990s, when the state government refused to help upgrade the northern main line of the SP).

No way to run a railroad

No other issue personifies the dysfunction at the heart of America — or as they would say on Twitter, #AmericaFail — as much as the inability to move ahead with high-speed rail. The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress never made a serious effort. The $13 billion initially offered is nothing compared with what's needed. By comparison, China is spending $100 billion a year. Much of the money here would go to higher-speed rail, not the 155-mile-per-hour-plus systems that qualify as genuine high-speed rail. And the choice of Florida for the nation's first HSR line was always misplaced: Florida is a car-culture, suburbanized state, especially in Orlando and Tampa, the destinations of the line, with little appreciation or habit of taking trains. HSR would better be tried in rail-friendly territory, such as California or the Pacific Northwest, or making the Northeast Corridor true high speed. Then Americans could see how well such a system would really work. Now, with Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida refusing the federal money, and the GOP-controlled House solidly anti-rail, it looks as if even this modest start will come to little.

The Republican fetish against trains and transit, so well articulated by George Will (and followed by priceless takedowns by Paul Krugman and Jim Kunstler) has always fascinated me. It was Abraham Lincoln who started the heavily subsidized transcontinental railroad. Republican presidents after him further subsidized more railroads through land grants. "Internal improvements" was a key Republican issue. No more. Republicans routinely refuse to even consider rail or rail transit as necessary options for the nation. They most of all wage war against Amtrak, keeping it too underfunded to succeed with frequent, convenient schedules (and it's still wildly popular). These "conservatives" had no interest in conserving what was once the world's most advanced passenger rail system. Is it that they represent the suburbs and exurbs, so are mindless creatures of car culture. Or is it the billions spent by the oil, auto and sprawl industries to ensure America stays mired in a 1970s transportation system? Indeed, the U.S. government gives oil and gas companies $41 billion a year, nearly 40 times Amtrak's annual budget. As usual, the fecklessness of Democrats enables the problem (oh, for a real opposition party).

In the real world, passenger trains are a major part of the transportation systems of advanced nations. The April edition of Trains magazine, a special report on HSR (not available online, alas), is quite an eye-opener.