Richard Florida comments on this post at Seeking Alpha, ‘Why Railroads Will Make Us Richer,’ and argues [referring to the Eastern Seaboard's rail and transportation network]:

There’s a lesson there for the industrial Midwest and for other regions of the country, North America, and the world. Those places that positon themselves for this new era of spiky, geographic growth and which have the infrastructure that connects them to major centers will prosper, while those that do not will likely fall behind even further.

This didn’t really speak to me me until I wandered off to buy a train ticket to Shanghai earlier today, to discover the brand new 5-hour Wuhan to Shanghai high speed train, which cost about $60 for a round-trip ticket. Mmm subsidized travel. It’s comparable in time commitment to flying, given travel time to and from the airports.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore the livability of sweaty, dirty, overpopulated central China vs. a lot of the United States [with several important caveats - more later]. A not insignificant part of this is the availability of municipal and national level transportation systems; and while I’m skeptical of the viability of many major infrastructure projects here [again, more later], it’s impossible to speak to the same convenience in much of the U.S.

It is of course easy to point fingers at derelict infrastructure in the U.S. and immediately jump to the conclusion that localized examples in other countries are a testament to America’s inevitable decline, ignoring fundamental differences such as population density, habitation patterns, and other measures of quality of life. Still, Florida’s point about the interconnectedness of major cities within the ‘knowledge economy’ are important (simultaneous with the suggestion that gradual increases in commodity prices were the root cause of the financial crisis?) Whether the solution is more cost efficient automobiles, or the Milwaukee-Chicago Maglev, is well beyond my pay grade. Still, subsidies for either would seem much more defensible than all sorts of other market interventions that the U.S. has become involved in as of late.

For reference, here’s Florida’s ‘map of Asian mega-cities,’ from his book, Who’s Your City?