Highways and railroads

An article in today's online Finanční noviny (Financial Times) is pessimistic about the future of highway funding in the Czech Republic.

"At a press conference after a cabinet meeting, Transportation Minister [Vít] Bárta announced that if future budgets are kept at the level proposed for 2011, the country's highway and railroad corridors will take at least 100 years to build out. 'My predecessors built more than they had money for. In this way citizens maintained vain hopes," reiterated Bárta, who today received from premier Petr Nečas the task of working out a strategy for completing highways and railroads 'under the new budgetary conditions.'" (Emphasis added)

A few things caught my attention here. First of all, there's the unclear sense of what it means for the corridors to be done, or to be built out. It's as if there were some platonic ideal of highway and rail corridors which one might wish to have immediately, but that under budgetary realities will actually take 100 years. But it's really just a figure of speech; imagine the absurdity of not looking around every 10 years or so to see if what you're building is still what your economy needs.

Second, there's the issue of building more than you have money for, which is unsettlingly like the housing bubble in the U.S. One narrative of that catastrophe is that we built more houses than we had money for, and there's something to that explanation. And yet the houses got built, and so did the roads here in the Czech Republic. They may not have had the money, but they apparently had the labor and machinery and concrete-making capacity--if they didn't, the building that actually happened would have been physically impossible. And the workers got paid, and spent that money, and the construction firms made profits and spent that money, and roads got built. Move away from thinking about money and think just about the physical reality of workers, machinery, resources, and the question is whether the society is better off with those inputs having been used as they were than under the alternative. And the tricky thing is that it's hard to know whether the alternative would have been having those inputs used for some other purpose, or having them not used at all.

Third, there's the particular perspective that comes from my concern about the future availability of inexpensive energy, particularly oil. The communist period had a lot of negative legacies for the Czech Republic, but one positive one (probably unintentional) was the greater emphasis on rail transportation than on highways (though the rail system did need some serious upkeep and improvement after 1989). After the fall of communism the body politic clearly made a decision to follow the west European pattern (not quite as extreme as the U.S. pattern). I'm aware of the possibility that readers (if there are any) would see me coming from the country that leads the world in making everything nice and convenient for drivers, and say, "Sure, a huge highway system is good enough for him, he just doesn't want 'others' to enjoy what he's got at home." But that's really not it.

Under "normal" conditions the Czech highway plan is probably a pretty good one. In a world where people expect to get around by car and companies find it most convenient to move goods by truck, you can really handicap yourself by having an antiquated road system with almost no 4-lane, controlled-access highways. But if we're heading for another energy squeeze, you want a society that is less dependent on road transportation than the west European norm, not to mention the American one. From the perspective of transportation and settlement patterns, the legacy of communism, with its relative poverty and its imposed separation from the west, was a relatively low dependence on the private car (even if it wasn't as low as, say, in the USSR). In the understandable impatience since 1989 to make up for lost time, the Czechs are increasing their dependence on the internal combustion engine. If the energy-price situation of 2008 returns, this will turn out to be a sad misinvestment of money the country apparently doesn't have.