Ronald Utt’s paper “America’s Coming High Speed Rail Financial Disaster” is a compelling read. For full enjoyment read the source here.  Otherwise savour these quotes:

• In addition to the billions of dollars in capital costs that the federal and state governments will incur the President has committed the nation to providing a perpetual stream of substantial subsidies.  As a result, the HSR program could come to rival the some entitlement programs in how much it will contribute to out-of-control annual federal deficits.
• With apologies to futurists, people in the construction industry and rail buffs, investing $13 billion (or even $8 billion) in passenger railroads is a little like building a bridge to the 19th century.
• In essence, the federal government is paying massive subsidies to achieve minor benefits for a  tiny fraction of the travelling public.
• However extravagant this commitment to jazzed-up 19th century technology may be, the ultimate costs of bringing HSR to the 13 corridors already approved by the FRA will be staggering.
• The supposed benefits do not even begin to justify the exorbitant costs.
• One purpose of the review was to address the contention that passenger rail in other countries, especially HSR, operates at a profit (i.e., without subsidies). For 1995–2006, the study found that the governments of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, and Austria spent “a combined total of $42 billion annually on their national passenger railroads.”  The $42 billion that these six countries spent on just passenger rail in 2006 is roughly proportionate to the $54.8 (most of which was funded by user fees) that the government of the United States spent on all forms of transportation, including highways, rail, aviation, water transport, and mass transit.
• Despite Europe’s huge investment in passenger rail, its market share declined from 6.6 percent in 1995 to 6.1 percent in 2007.
• This last point is of some importance because one goal of the HSR scheme is to shift travel from largely unsubsidized commercial aviation to heavily subsidized trains. Yet the same scheme in Europe seems to have failed over the past dozen years, despite massive government subsidies.
• Today, several of the restructured, privatized Japanese passenger rail lines run at a profit, but only because they were acquired at a fraction of their capital costs and the government absorbed much of the system’s debt (circa $300bn).
• The point of reviewing the recent U.K. experience is not to criticize the rail reforms that the U.K. undertook, but to note that regardless of organization, ownership, and the intensity of the reform effort, building and operating a system of passenger rail service still requires massive public subsidies.
• Although the entire French passenger rail system receives an estimated annual government subsidy of approximately $10 billion (compared to the annual estimated subsidy of $22.8 billion for the somewhat larger German passenger rail system, which also includes an HSR component) the HSR service between Paris and Lyon—one of 11 TGV lines and 267 miles of the system—is believed by some to be one of only two HSR routes in the world that generate enough revenue to cover both capital and operating costs.
• Since opening, the [Taiwan] system has lost $2.1 billion, leading The China Post to describe the situation as a “hyper-modern technology [that] was meant to be a source of pride, but instead has turned into a rich source of embarrassment.
• Spain opened its first HSR line in 1992. Since 2003, it reportedly has spent more on rail than on roads.  Despite this commitment, the EU reports that rail in Spain accounts for only 5.1 percent of ridership, almost 2 percentage points below the EU-27 average of 6.9 percent for all surface transportation modes