What a difference a conjunction makes. Late in the stimulus lawmaking debate, by the time its twists and turns had insulted all of our special interests, 8 billion magical dollars appeared for high-speed rail, next to 1.3 billion for Amtrak and 6.9 for public transit. It looked like a conclusive victory for the ‘bullet train’ set, Americans with little use for actual railroads but who sparkle with enthusiasm for superfast trains in the abstract. Thing is, it wasn’t $8 billion for HSR alone, but for HSR and intercity rail: two vaguely defined concepts that, when coupled, are an awkward way to say ‘railroads’.

No one has anything against high-speed (currently understood to be at least 220 kph) rail, least of all this writer. But faced with the usual problem of limited resources and limitless desires, we do have to prioritize. If $30 billion is the going rate for a minimal high-speed line, then what could be done with the same money for existing, popular train routes? It could speed the routes of many times more people, that’s obviously what. On the aggregate, the American-person-hours saved by somewhat speeding many routes would far exceed the gains from a single high-speed line.

Of course, current railroad passengers are assumed not to have valuable hours. Hollywood HSR projections don’t talk about time saved by transferring people from existing lines to high-speed. They talk about the environmental gains of transferring people from regional airlines to HSR and tacitly assume that existing Amtrak passengers are flat characters from the Old West that will continue to ride slow lines because they have plenty of time to get to their ghost towns. Or something. Certainly new HSR lines will win passengers from both slower railroad lines and airlines, but there is a distinct (and condescending) those people in the air when existing train passengers are infrequently remembered. And in terms of the bustling Northeast Corridor, it’s a that region dismissal. In any case, those people and that region are ignored because they violate the fundamental tenet of American HSR religion, which holds that only by rolling out high-speed rail between sprawled out metropolises will Americans understand the glory of trains and storm the IRS to demand the higher income taxes needed to finance a modern national network and maybe some public transportation for the poors.

Like most religions, AHSR worships little understood artifacts in far off lands, specifically Japan’s Shinkansen and France’s TGV. These are revered as if they existed in a vacuum, as if they were not built upon and deeply connected to slower-speed regional railroads and public transportation. As if those slower things were not the popular and well funded base of which high-speed rail is simply the leading edge of technology.

AHSR acolytes are lucky that the foreign gods they worship are not all-powerful, or they would quickly be smitten. Everything that our futuretrain technologists hate about Amtrak—the unions, the need for subsidy, the bureaucracy—has been crucial to the development of successful public railroad corporations like the SNCF, the frenchy Amtrak whose flagship brand is the beloved TGV. In America we have HSR futurists who know better than countries which have deliberately cultivated HSR, who believe we can jump from incompetently running a 1960s-era train network to perfectly executing a single $45 billion high-speed line implementation. That could work, but probably not.

It’s like praising Monet but saying he really should have been more careful with the brush strokes, or gushing that old world cities are a great place to visit. Where do domestic HSR know-it-alls get off? What we should be emulating from our railroad betters is not the blunt action of opening the throttle but rather learning how to fund and run a large public institution. Railroads can not be run like Google, sadly. They are never going to be efficient companies in the Republican sense (where you hire undocumented immigrants, spit on them, then cheat on taxes). There are likely some undiscovered ways of running a competitive railroad market, but we can’t just crash through the problem of large scale administration like the drunken cowboys that the world justifiably perceives us as.

Still, California is giving it a go. They’ve bravely committed $0 present-day funds and some billions in bonds to a plan to run trains at a certain speed for a certain (highly improbable) fare, to desperately compete with those high-flying, eagerly subsidized airlines on their own turf of raw speed. It’s like Doc Brown’s DeLorean: you just have to hit 220 mph in a train and suddenly you’re in France, but without the SNCF strikes and appreciation of terroir. Good luck with that, guys.

I have a confession to make. I rode Amtrak home from Georgia to New York after Christmas. The trip was many hours, I can’t be much more precise than that. The ticket was a few $20 bills more than it would have been to fly, but there were other criteria for me than the cost and schedule. For starters, there was the proximity of the train station on both ends versus that of the airport. There was the probable difference between scheduled arrival and actual arrival times (a dreadful quantity that is strangely absent from most discussions of ‘how long’ it takes to fly somewhere). Stress was another factor. Basically, when various members of my Georgia family incredulously asked if I was saving money—or what?—by taking the train I simply shook my head.

It’s not that I don’t value my time; it’s that I do value it as something other than the difference between hopeful departure and arrival times. I value time not being trapped, not standing in line, not feeling abused by a government-corporate transportation junta. So as a trial, I booked a one-way plane ticket down and an Amtrak ticket up. I was not surprised when my flight out was delayed, but I was surprised by the delay’s length, location, and cause (4 hours, on the plane, because the pilot was “stuck in traffic”). On the trip home I was only surprised that the train arrived in New York a few minutes ahead of schedule despite its having stood still for an hour overnight. We had left in the late evening (parents’ bedtime) and got to New York in the early afternoon. I slept and was never bored, between my novel and my netbook. To arrive by plane at that (scheduled) time I would have had to leave from the parents’ house in the morning, netting only a few more hours of driving-time with them before oppression-time at the airport and flying. No thanks.

That was just one trip, but surely the delays and stress of consumer airline travel are established by now. The strange thing is how quickly those delays and indignities are forgotten when comparing flight with other modes. If we’re going to reduce travel to simply the time spent doing it—a travel sentence—we should at least try to adjust it for reality. And personally I would like to factor in being barked at by overweight security guards.

Which raises a nasty potential outcome of the jet-to-HSR transition that pinot noir chuggers dream of: will we transfer the worst parts of current plane travel directly into our railroad future? Rail is inherently safer than planes, especially when its intersections with automobiles are minimized, and there is no need for a security state dress-up party just to roll around on iron for a few hours. Train companies present and future should advertise and extend their significant convenience (and Constitution-respecting) lead against airplanes, not race them to the bottom of the terror-hyping abyss.

If we would just set our priorities straight, to modernize and speed our neglected passenger rail in all its dimensions (regulatory, bureaucratic, physical…) we could drastically improve many routes. An hour not waiting for freight to pass here, a cleaned up and respectable train station there, a horn not uselessly blown by a uselessly weighted down train: these low-hanging fruit would convert an unknown number of carbon-heavy airline and auto trips to rail (aided by rising fuel costs including a carbon tax if we’re smart). By developing broader public support and experiencing railroad success once again on this continent, we’ll eventually (like, in five years) be in a position to build canonical high-speed lines without risk of a skittish public pulling the plug when the cowboys can’t deliver on all their promises. It takes ten dang years to lay the first HSR track anyway—if half that time seems too long to lay the institutional groundwork, you really should find something besides thousand-mile rail networks to be an internet fan of.

There’s reason to hope that this “high-speed and intercity rail” stimulus is a step in a wiser direction—Amtrak does run our intercity rail, after all. The funds are going to be distributed in some new change-y ways which will probably be effective like everything the O has put his mind to so far. Shuttling money from this pot directly to Amtrak won’t be encouraged, and that’s fine—let’s use it to take the Northeast Corridor off their hands and scoop up whatever freight lines we can. Let’s use it to build out practical travel infrastructure for all Americans.

The verdict for this crazy last-minute HSR-branded railroad stimulus is full speed ahead—with reservations.