President Obama’s plan to invest $13 billion in inter-city high speed rail has drawn excited praise from urbanists and environmentalists, and skepticism from conservatives. Liberals tend to argue that high-speed rail will take cars off the road and planes from the sky, while encouraging development of central cities. Conservatives tend to argue that Americans are too adicted to their cars, and high speed rail is too expensive, for those benefits to materialize.

But both sides ignore the crucial evidence of high speed rail’s economic potential from Europe, where it has already largely been built. TGV high speed rail service between Paris and Stuttgart stops in Strasbourg, France, a small city right across the Rheine from Germany. Governmental and business leaders who I interviewed on my recent reporting trip for a forthcoming feature in Next American City, with assistance from the German Marshall Fund, agreed that what they called”the TGV effect,” has benefited the local economy. But there are two important caveats: it must deliver travelers to a train station that is well-linked to local and regional mass transit, and it must link centers of existing economic activity.

From the Strasbourg train station you can take a tram or bus to anywhere in the city, a regional train to the suburbs, or rent a bicycle. As a result, Parisians, who can now get to Strasbourg in two hours and twenty minutes, roughly half the time it took before, can come in for a tourism or shopping day trip. But if the train station were isolated from the attractions, this would not work. For instance, wineries and castle ruins in the Alsace region that are only accessible by car are not necessarily seeing any effect from the TGV. As I wrote before about the California high-speed rail project, bringing people to the Los Angeles train station quickly is of limited value if they will need a car once they arrive anyway.

The other point that was emphasized to me is that the link from Paris is an important factor.”Paris is a center of business and wealth,” says Bruno Grandjean, program manager for Vehicules du Futur, a Strasbourg-area non-profit organization focused on sustainable transportation.”If you were just linking two places with nothing happening, it would not make any difference.” So proposed links between older industrial cities with stagnant economies might not generate nearly as much activity. But, overall, the benefits of the TGV help the proponents of high-speed rail present a stronger case — provided that they appreciate the importance of context, and design the American system accordingly.

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