The Harvard professor said in the New York Times that Texas high speed rail may prove to be a boondoggle. Don’t worry if his numbers are right or if the assumptions he makes about cost and ridership are debatable – if you dream of the day high speed rail connects the urban centers of Texas, you should be worried. Because even though Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser wrote in his piece that “the only way that America is going to get to the right answer on public investments is if numbers trump rhetoric,” rhetoric is going to trump numbers on this issue. There are just too many rhetoric-laden issues intertwined in the rail debate – global warming, the rights of ranchers, the airline and automobile industries – to believe otherwise.

Despite his half-hearted attempt at judiciousness, Glaeser has heavily armed opponents with rhetoric. Just look at how his numbers were echoed by the Washington Post’s economics writer Robert Samuelson, who used them to snidely dismiss the reasonableness of a high speed rail project in Texas. And Glaeser’s comments (and his “back-of-an-envelope figures”) have continued to echo through the interwebs. The public opinion of casual observers is slowly shaping.

But is Glaeser right? I’m not sure. On the Infrastructurist, Yonah Freemark puts together a compelling case that Glaeser’s numbers are all wrong. Figuring in the projected population growth of Texas, when high speed rail links opens in 2030, Freemark argues, the line could prove profitable.

The problem is the numbers only tell half the story. It is easy for casual observers to miss what high speed rail ultimately means for Texas: the success of an urbanization project unprecedented in the history of civic development.

Consider this: no where else in the world offers the convergence of a unique set of factors that make high speed rail, urban transit, and other space-shaping prerogatives so vital. Texas is forecasted to show tremendous population and job growth. It also boasts a collection of cities whose growth was interrupted and devastated by the introduction of the car early in their young lives. The result is state made up sprawling mega-plexes, where space knows no constraint, and where growth can always go outwards, get cheaper, and grow larger in scale.

The problems this creates go beyond the usual arguments for building “sustainably,” that is, that sprawling suburban-style development wastes resources and discourages eco-friendly habits, from the driveway to the dinner table. There are many people for whom suburban life is rather attractive. If you don’t like it, don’t live there. The real problem is that the pattern of suburban development unconsciously wages war on the city center. Because of the habits of shoppers, the considerations of bankers and financers, and the weighing of risk by real estate developers, the suburban model of development has offered a much safer, predictable investment strategy over the past four or five decades. Why else would a developer build a suburban, strip-mall at the corner of Pearl Street and McKinney Avenue, arguably ground zero in the story of Dallas’ successes at densely re-building its inner core? Developers need surety of access to their development. The availability of ample parking and easy to navigate roadways ensures that access.

What parking and roads block out, however, is the possibility of creating dense, walk-able communities, vibrant settings for lives lived in public, patrolled by the eyes of neighbors and shop keeps, enriched by countless interactions and exchanges with neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. To those who have never lived in a city where such street life exists, this may all sound like romantic hogwash. It isn’t. There is a reason why Dallas seems such a boring, beaten-down place by visitors. The lack of street life is top of the list.

The only way to change the trend towards parking and roads on a major scale is to build rail, because it is the only way to ensure developers the possibility of foot traffic to stores with less parking.

The Obama administration’s proposed high speed rail routes (click to enlarge)

This doesn’t happen easily, cheaply, or overnight. Nearly all of Dallas’ transit oriented developments have required some amount of public support to get going. But the idea for the investment is simple: if the city can help a project oriented around transit survive through a period of initial growth, then the habits of consumers that are formed after rail provides the access will begin to support the development organically. In other words, the rail has to be on the ground before a developer will take the risk and invest in dense urban neighborhoods. (A bus route – as a cheaper public transit option – doesn’t provide a developer the kind of long-term assurance of pedestrian access that rail does.)

Not surprisingly, it is the lack of on-the-ground transportation networks in Texas’ cities that is being cited as a reason against building high speed rail. “My question is simple,” writes Tyler Cowen on www.marginalrevolution.com, “how could you take rail from Dallas to Houston and cope once you got there?”

Cowen’s question is an important one, but it doesn’t dismiss the need for high speed rail, rather it reinforces the vision for rail as part of a larger infrastructure project linking together Texas’ growing cities. It also helps illustrate how high speed rail will help support the development of these urban transportation systems.

Take some of Freemark’s ridership numbers he quotes on the Infrastructurist:

“In France, for instance, the 200 mph TGV Est line between Paris (metro population 11 million) and Strasbourg (600,000) carried 11 million passengers in its first year of operation.

“This figure is well supported by a comparison with Spain, whose AVE line between Madrid (7.1 million) and Barcelona (3.2 million) will serve 8 million passengers a year by 2011, taking 50% of total market share”

In both instances, the number of riders exceeded the actual populations of the cities the rail connected. Without even taking into account the traffic from Waco, Austin, Temple, San Antonio, and College Station (all of which would be connected by the planned Texas T-Bone rail system), or that Texas’ population is rapidly growing, consider that today the population of Harris County is nearly 4 million and Dallas County is 2.4 million. Now consider the impact a large percentage of those people arriving on rail into Union Station would have on the surrounding streets, spilling out to catch taxis or switch to bus, rail, or streetcar transportation. If I were a developer, I would know where I’d want to build – and I wouldn’t need to count on public dollars (though since I’m a developer, I’d likely still ask).

Even air travel between Texas cities doesn’t offer the same pedestrian conveniences, immediate access to inner neighborhoods and transportation options.

The difficulty is that the project Texas has to undertake in the next few decades – the densification and urbanization of its cities – has never been done before. The car has wrecked havoc on the habits and space of every American city, and undoing the damage has proved a challenge even for places like New York. Texas has to undergo a much more profound change in order to build out the space to absorb growth, while providing its residents access to goods, services, and jobs. A high speed rail connection between Texas’ urban centers is a necessary part of the solution, and if the rail system on its own doesn’t look like it could turn a profit (though there is some argument that it could), then it needs to be subsidized.