High-speed rail

Mikel Ortega/Wikipedia

High speed rail car, Spain

Re "How Not to Plan for the Future" (editorial, April 21):

Investing in high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor may make sense because it has a population density sufficient to generate enough riders to sustain the billions of dollars required to build, maintain and operate the system. Given the current federal spending freeze on high-speed rail, I believe that the time is right to consider seeking private capital to help shoulder the substantial investment needed to achieve true high-speed rail along the corridor.

Under this kind of a public-private partnership, high-speed rail projects would be evaluated by private investors based on the full costs of installation, maintenance and operation, as well as on economic benefits to riders--rather than blithely following the costly "build it and they will come" philosophy.

If we're able to achieve this partnership in the Northeast corridor, it could serve as a model for how to modernize our nation's crumbling infrastructure.

Richard G. Geddes is an adjunct scholar at AEI.

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About the Author

 

R. Richard
Geddes
  • Rick Geddes is associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. His research fields include private infrastructure investment through public-private partnerships, postal service policy, corporate governance, women's property rights, and antitrust policy. He is a Research Associate at the Mineta Transportation Institute, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Australian National University in Canberra in the fall of 2009, and a Visiting Researcher at the Australian Government's Productivity Commission in the spring of 2010. His research focused on Australian public-private partnerships in both positions. Geddes teaches courses at Cornell on corporate governance and the regulation of industry.

    In addition to his teaching and research at Cornell, Geddes served as a commissioner on the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, which submitted its report to Congress in January 2008. He has held positions as a senior staff economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Visiting Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School, and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

    In 2008, Geddes received the Kappa Omicron Nu/Human Ecology Alumni Association Student Advising Award. His published work has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy, and Managerial and Decision Economics, among others.

  • Email: rrg24@cornell.edu
  • Assistant Info

    Name: Brad Wassink
    Phone: 202-862-7197
    Email: brad.wassink@aei.org

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