Investment in California’s proposed High-Speed Rail (HSR) system has been justified partly on economic grounds, as a potential stimulus to employment and income growth. However, international experiences raise questions about the net economic development impacts of these costly mega-investments. Do they largely redistribute growth and investment, or do they have truly generative economic effects by virtue of the accessibility and agglomeration benefits they confer?
This remains a largely open question for California, though one which is too important to ignore. This paper examines job and labor market profiles of 26 proposed HSR station-areas in California in 2002 and 2008. These trends are compared to experiences around Shinkansen HSR stations in Japan. Empirical findings on corridor-level job distributions, cross-industrial typologies, and station-level density gradients suggest that the new HSR project is likely to induce knowledge- and service-based business agglomeration benefits, though these are mostly limited to large, globally connected cities. Growth can also shift to HSR-served edge cities, airports, and leisure-entertainment hubs. Such shifts, however, could be at the expense of small intermediate cities.
This paper concludes that the spatial redistributive effects of California’s HSR investment need not be a simple “zero-sum” game. When leveraged through far-sighted, proactive public policies, increased agglomerations that take form through redistribution can indeed have “generative” (i.e., real) economic qualities, to the benefit of the state at large.
Photo credit: dlisbona
