Ayn Rand: will we use Reardon Metal to revive the rails?

Cotton Boll Conspiracy and I had a colloquy the other day about the revival of passenger train service in America. I'm for it and think it's an economic necessity in a world of increasing energy scarcity. CBC says it's just not useful:

Personally, I'd love to see train travel revived, but I think it would hypocritical of me to expect every single American to contribute to something that myself and such a small percentage either use or plan to use.

Of course if you're government and you starve rail and favor other transit modes for decades, it's little wonder trains don't go anywhere you want to go and therefore you don't plan to use them.

CBC makes the argument train companies failed because they couldn't make money. What tipped them over the edge was, in no small measure, two factors: the post World War II privileging of autos as the means of getting places (by way of massive subsidies building highway infrastructure, and looking the other way as Detroit bought up and killed off public transit where it prospered); and by a similar binge of public spending to underpin the emerging airline industry in the late 1950s through the 1970s.

What if energy doesn't remain cheap? Marketplace had an interview today with a Forbes writer- no liberal elitist train nostalgist he- who has written a book about what happens as two billion additional people start consuming energy like we do in the next forty years, and as a result, gas hits $20 a gallon.

Among other things, there won't be the money to sustain the highway system as it now exists, and people won't commute an hour each way between exurbia and the city:

STEINER: Wal-Mart is a company with 6,000 suppliers, 80 percent of whom are in China. And so they ship the stuff over on cargo ships very cheaply. It gets to the ports, and then Wal-Mart has 7,000 trucks they use to disseminate it to 4,000 different stores in America. It's a network built on gasoline. And the only reason it works is cheap oil. Now Wal-Mart could morph. They're a smart company, they could turn into something else, but in the current form we know Wal-Mart, it won't survive.

RYSSDAL: But if at $12 a gallon we're driving by factors of 10 less than we are driving today. I have images of weeds sprouting up on the I-405 here in Los Angeles, and the 10 that goes across the country crumbling into the soil here. I mean, is that what you're envisioning here?

STEINER: I think some roads will close down. And I think a lot of the roads are going to go to tolls. We certainly don't need the giant infrastructure of roads we have in places like Chicago and Los Angeles right now. There's a highway every two miles. The nice thing is that it gives us thoroughfares that we can use for trains and other modes of transportation that would be impossible to put in because people live in these places without those roads being there. So they'll actually come in quite in handy.

The trouble, is, we'll lose years into hardship that we could have avoided planning ahead and reviving a balanced mass transit system. If one of the freight companies can pull a ton of freight 436 miles on a gallon of gas, rail starts looking pretty good.