This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Michael Lowrey, associate editor of Carolina Journal.

One of the biggest problems with American transportation policy is that many policymakers really don’t have a clue.

A case in point is Virginia state Sen. John C. Watkins, who recently was named the first chairman of the Virginia-North Carolina Interstate High-Speed Rail Compact. The compact is the organization overseeing plans for a 162-mile, $2.3 billion plan to bring higher-speed rail service between Raleigh and Richmond. The promised higher speeds really aren’t all that fast, with trains set to reach speeds of 110 mph along portions of the upgraded route.

But that hasn’t stopped Watkins and others from promising big things from the project. For example, Watkins stressed to the Raleigh News & Observer how the proposed improved rail service would undermine airline hubs like US Airways’ big operation at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport:

“It would be so much easier for the consumers who now have to fly through Charlotte or wherever. It makes a lot more sense to be able to get on a train that you can depend on to be on time — and just go.”

Hate to break it to the senator, but approximately no one actually flies between Raleigh (RDU) and Richmond (RIC) these days.

The federal government does keep track of such things, and publishes a quarterly “Domestic Airlines Fare Consumer Report” which includes data on the number of passengers traveling between city pairs in the continental U.S. and the average fares paid. The data released by the Department of Transportation include only city pairs with at least 10 passengers a day. That’s a total — the sum of people flying commercially, whether connecting or nonstop. The RIC-RDU market isn’t listed for the first quarter of 2010 (latest data available) or any quarter of 2009.

And this isn’t just a Raleigh-Richmond situation. Short-haul air service largely has disappeared in the continental U.S. outside of the Boston-New York City-Washington, D.C. corridor. US Airways does fly between CLT and RDU nine times a day — with a total of 1,201 seats a day this summer — but only about five or six people actually begin their journey each day in Charlotte and fly up to Raleigh-Durham. CLT-RIC, a 256-mile route on which US Airways offers eight flights a day with a total of 734 seats, only averages about 40 people going from Charlotte to Richmond daily.

What are the rest of the passengers on those flights doing? Connecting to a multitude of destinations at Charlotte/Douglas, most of them 300 miles or more from home. And Watkins’ multibillion-dollar rail project won’t change — can’t change — that.

Not really all that fast rail service will likewise have a very modest impact at most on automobile travel between Richmond and the Triangle. There are perfectly good Interstate highway connections between the two regions that are not used very heavily. And what matters to travelers is door-to-door travel time, how long it takes to get from their starting point to their final destination. In areas as large as the Triangle or the greater Richmond area, those starting and ending points are often not going to be in close proximity to a rail station.

At $2.3 billion, faster Raleigh-Richmond rail service is a poor use of public money. There simply are many other transportation projects that would produce a much greater bang for that sort of buck. As long as those overseeing transportation policy don’t know what they’re talking about, it will continue to be unlikely that the public’s money will be well-spent. Garbage in, garbage out.