In Defense of High-Speed Passenger Rail

On July 23, two bullet trains collided in Wenzhou, China, killing at least 40 people. This tragedy prompted a rare apology from the governing Chinese Communist Party, and drew international criticism of high speed rail as a whole. For some observers, China’s high speed rail system symbolized the overreach of a nation in an unsustainable economic bubble, and the bureaucracy that has made the system both expensive and dangerous.

Others have questioned the economic feasibility of passenger rail in general, noting that in the United States, only the Amtrak line from Boston to Washington is profitable. According to this criticism, the United States – unlike Europe, Japan, and China – is very sparsely populated, which means that there will simply never be enough passengers to make the system profitable. In recent months, the prospect of a high speed rail network in the United States has been pilloried from the right and left alike. In California, the only serious high-speed rail project in the country has been criticized as wasteful spending by a state that is already in dire fiscal straits.

In a scathing review, The Economist claims that high-speed passenger rail could ruin America’s envy-of-the-world freight train system, with which it would most likely share its tracks. Having worked in logistics myself, I am sympathetic to The Economist’s concerns. But this isn’t a good argument against high-speed passenger rail; on the contrary, it is a reason to invest more, in order to build a separate network for passenger trains which can travel at much higher speeds.

What of the argument that the United States is too sparsely populated for passenger trains to ever be a profitable mode of transportation? After all, it’s undeniably true that large cities in the United States are much farther apart than large cities elsewhere, and therefore fewer people will want to use the trains. My response to these arguments is that the critics are using the wrong metric. Why must high-speed passenger rail systems be profitable in the first place? We have a terrific Interstate Highway System which, with the exception of a few toll roads, generates no revenue whatsoever. Yet almost no one suggests that the Interstate Highway System was a bad investment for the United States.

Fine, say the critics, but since we have such a great highway system why do we need trains? America is a nation that loves to drive. But a passenger rail system would not be in competition with highways, if it is designed correctly. Relatively few people choose to use highways for long-distance travel between major cities anyway, opting for air travel. Some critics point to the slow passenger lines that currently exist and how unpopular they are, suggesting that high-speed passenger lines would be an even bigger waste of money. But this criticism loses sight of what makes such a system appealing in the first place: Slow passenger rail systems are disliked by travelers precisely because they are slow; they offer neither the speed of air travel nor the independence of highways.

Finally we come to the standard libertarian criticism of public expenditures: Why should the government invest in a high-speed rail system at all? Airport congestion imposes economic costs on society: wasted time in airport terminals, delayed business meetings, and people choosing to drive instead of fly (which causes more highway congestion and traffic fatalities). Since the public is indirectly footing the bill for these problems anyway, why not redirect the money to high-speed rail, which would actually relieve some of the airport congestion by taking some of the customers?

The United States needs a high-speed passenger rail system. After years of neglect, America’s infrastructure is rated only the 16th best in the world. As air travel becomes evermore unpleasant and congested, high speed rail will become a necessity for traveling between cities. By the middle of this century, the United States can have an incredibly efficient three-tier travel system: For short-distance travel (less than 50 miles), we would have our Interstate Highway System complemented by a network of intelligent self-driving cars. For medium-distance travel (50-500 miles), we would have a network of high-speed rail, which would pick up and drop off passengers near the center of large cities. For long-distance travel (more than 500 miles), we would have our airports, which would be much more efficient due to the fact that there would be fewer passengers clogging the system with short-haul flights that would be better addressed by trains.

High-speed rail is not some trivial boondoggle to be mocked for its unprofitability; it is the central public transit challenge of the 21st century. If the United States begins the undertaking now with the same commitment which President Dwight Eisenhower brought to the Interstate Highway System 55 years ago, it can have a state of the art network of passenger trains by the middle of the century. Neither technology nor economics is an obstacle; only the political will stands in the way.

The Future of Energy: Solar Power Is Coming

The amount of energy the earth receives from the sun each year is more than 10,000 times the total energy needs of all humans on earth. We cannot effectively harness even such a paltry fraction of the sun’s energy yet. In 2008, less than 0.02% of the global energy supply came from solar energy. In most parts of the world, solar energy is simply too expensive. Carbon-based energy such as oil and coal still provide a cheaper alternative, even while harming our environment. Solar energy currently costs about 38 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with only 5 cents per kWh for oil and less than 1 cent per kWh for coal. Government taxes and subsidies typically reduce this cost disparity slightly, but not enough to make solar energy viable for most people.

Fortunately, this will soon change. Photovoltaic solar cells are typically made of silicon: the same material in computer chips. Engineers cannot shrink the solar panels in the same way that they can shrink transistors, because solar panels need to have a large surface area to absorb as much sunlight as possible. However, they can make the panels themselves more efficient and shrink the thickness of the panels. As a result, solar energy appears to be on a Moore’s Law-like trajectory of its own. Approximately every 18 months, the total solar capacity doubles and the cost falls by 20%. Up until now, this hasn’t been noticeable because it is such a small portion of our overall energy supply. Doubling a small number is still a small number.

However, if this trend continues, solar energy will be able to supply virtually 100% of the earth’s energy needs by 2035. Some observers are even more optimistic, predicting that solar energy will cost about the same as carbon-based energy by 2015. They theorize that after 2015, the capacity of solar energy could increase much more quickly, as consumer demand for solar energy makes it very lucrative and the industry explodes. Other observers are more skeptical; some question whether solar energy is really on Moore’s Law-like pattern of exponential growth at all, suggesting that this recent trend could be caused by other factors.

I think it’s quite clear that solar power will continue to grow at an exponential rate, since manufacturing solar panels requires many of the same techniques that drive the reduction in cost of computer chips. But I wouldn’t count on the industry suddenly exploding in popularity as soon as solar energy becomes slightly cheaper than oil and coal. It’s important to remember that solar energy is not a commodity like oil that can be traded globally. The costs will be much lower in deserts and other sunny areas. By the end of this decade, we may see the American Southwest and Southern Europe starting to switch to solar power, while other regions lag behind, using oil and coal for much longer.

Moving away from fossil fuels will be the single most important step we can take to stop making climate change worse (although much of the damage will already be done, and will continue to accumulate for decades after the switch). An international economy that was not reliant on oil would be much more stable for global security. Many of the biggest potential threats to international stability come from oil-rich regimes, where money from oil exports often funds extremist groups or large militaries that destabilize the region. Furthermore, solar energy prices would be much more predictable than oil. Unlike oil, there would be no maximum amount of energy available; new solar panels could always be added and older panels could be improved, ensuring that the price continued to drop. They would drop at a roughly consistent rate, rather than fluctuating wildly from one year to the next as oil does. Eventually, the energy cost in nearly all products will be virtually eliminated, as solar energy becomes cheaper and cheaper.

Most people look back over recent history and find it difficult to imagine that energy prices will ever go down - just look at gas prices today compared to a decade ago! But in reality, the past decade is an exception, caused by the rapid development of China and India just as we reached peak oil production. In the long term, the broad trend has been for energy costs to decline. Solar energy will ensure that that trend continues for decades to come.

PREDICTIONS:
By 2025 – In the United States, solar energy is cheaper than oil on average, on a per kilowatt-hour basis.
By 2035 – The global oil trade is less than 25% the size that it is in 2010 (approximately $2.1 trillion), adjusted for inflation.

The Future of Education: Effective Distance Learning

The year is 2025. Moseka, a 5^th grade Congolese girl living in Kinshasa, uses her tablet computer to access her interactive learning software from the cloud. It is capable of accessing any book in the world, watching high-definition videos of her instructors, and tracking her progress. Her tablet is a lower-end model – only a thousand times more powerful than the iPads of 2010. She doesn’t worry about it breaking; they are as cheap as scrap paper, and only slightly thicker.

Although Moseka is fluent in French and English as a result of her lessons, she still prefers to learn in her native Lingala. There is an entire library of online courses available in Lingala, complete with ratings from previous students and parents. Unlike the online classes in the United States of the late 1990s and 2000s, which were largely inferior to in-person education, Moseka’s classes are among the best of the best. Many of the best educators in the Congo (as well as everywhere else in the world) have become celebrities in their country, reaching thousands of pupils at a time. The old model of online education, which was mainly confined to reading text on a desktop computer screen and submitting homework assignments digitally, has mostly been replaced by interactive software and tablet computers which make the classes much more productive and engaging. Moseka doesn't have any physical textbooks; she can easily access them from the cloud on her tablet whenever she needs them. These e-books are not merely electronic copies of books that exist in the physical world. They are full of video clips, learning games, and customization.

Like most of her friends, Moseka has only ever seen schools in old American cartoons. This is not because of her location; she has lots of friends in the United States and Europe who have never set foot in a school either. What is the point of going to an old building to learn from a local teacher, she wonders, when she can learn whatever she wants to learn, whenever she wants, from some of the best instructors in the world? Her parents and friends all seem to agree, as do the governments of most nations. Nearly everyone has access to a good education now. Ubiquitous computing has eliminated the need to waste money on school buildings, and created the economies of scale necessary for the cost per pupil to drop to nearly nothing.

However, Moseka’s education is not impersonal just because her instructor has many students. Large class sizes are mostly irrelevant now that brick-and-mortar schools are a thing of the past; in fact, Moseka likes having a huge network of classmates whom she can turn to for help. Whenever she gets stuck on her lessons, she first turns to some older girls to help her (and likewise, she helps her younger brother with his schoolwork). If she is still confused, she can ask her class for help. With so many classmates, someone else is almost always having the same problem…and someone almost always knows the answer. Intelligent software can easily match these students with one another.

Moseka is excited about her future. In much of the developing world, her generation will be the first that has the opportunity to use their abilities to change the world. She wants to be a teacher, confident that she’ll be just as successful as the teaching superstars who instruct her today. And due to the new education paradigm, she very well might be.

PREDICTIONS:
By 2025 - Youth literacy rates exceed 90% in both Sub-Saharan Africa (up from 72% in 2008) and South Asia (up from 79% in 2008). Gender disparities in literacy have mostly disappeared; the global female youth literacy rate is no less than 98% of the male youth literacy rate (up from 94% in 2008).
By 2025 - Fewer than 75% of students in the United States physically attend a school on a daily basis.