George Will's Case For High-Speed Rail

Sarah Goodyear notes that though George Will decided this week that high-speed rail is a plot to brainwash people into becoming socialists, he himself was an HSR advocate just ten years ago. This, for example, is a very sensible point:

Two months ago this columnist wrote: "A government study concludes that for trips of 500 miles or less — a majority of flights; 40 percent are of 300 miles or less — automotive travel is as fast or faster than air travel, door to door. Columnist Robert Kuttner sensibly says that fact strengthens the case for high-speed trains. If such trains replaced air shuttles in the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, Kuttner says that would free about 60 takeoff and landing slots per hour."

Thinning air traffic in the Boston-New York-Washington air corridor has acquired new urgency. Read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay on the deadly dialectic between the technological advances in making air travel safer and the adaptations to these advances by terrorists.

I think this is very sensible. I also think it's perfectly fair for Will to have changed his mind or to decide that the Obama administration's HSR initiative doesn't fit his idea of what our rail policy should be. But earlier this week, Will was saying that HSR investment is so obviously addled that liberals must be lying about their reasons for supporting it, leading him to his brainwashing hypothesis. But surely a person who used to be a pro-rail conservative should be able to at least imagine the possibility of sincere disagreement on this subject.