Posted on 12/18/2001 11:42:31 AM PST by Publius
I'm an expert on patience. It took me eight years to get to a position where I could influence American passenger rail policy. I started out in 1993 seeking a presidential appointment to the Amtrak board of directors. It was April 2000 before I finally received a congressional appointment to the Amtrak Reform Council, a body that didn't even exist when I began my quest. I'm not complaining. Now that I am on the ARC, I have to admit it was worth the wait.
My colleagues on that panel include some of the most serious, committed, thoughtful and dedicated partisans of passenger trains in our nation's history. With only one exception, all of them want to see passenger trains run, and all of them embrace the idea that it is the responsibility of the federal government to provide the leadership and financial support for a strong and growing passenger train system in our nation.
Working with my colleagues on the ARC was the most exciting, stimulating and rewarding thing I have done since the early Eighties. In those days I actually ran chartered passenger trains and served full-course meals and poured wine for our first-class passengers riding in the dining and lounge cars we chartered from private owners. More than a decade ago I made an important decision about my life. I decided to switch from running passenger trains as a personal frolic to getting our government to run passenger trains as a public obligation.
The ARC Finding
On November 9, the ARC exercised one of its statutory responsibilities. The members voted 6-5 in favor of a finding that Amtrak would not become financially self-sufficient in time to meet a congressionally imposed deadline of October 1, 2002. This was something the ARC was mandated to do under the 1997 Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act, the legislation that created the ARC and laid down the mandate that Amtrak must become self-sufficient within five years. When the vote on self-sufficiency came, I voted in the minority. I voted that the ARC should not make such a finding, even though I knew at the time -- as all of the ARC members did -- that there is no possible way, and never was any possible way, that Amtrak could have reached operational self-sufficiency, deadline or no deadline.
Many people have asked me since then, If you knew Amtrak couldn't break even by October 2002, why didn't you concur in a finding that said that? And my answer was, Because to do so would have been to concur in an absurdity, which is the presumption that passenger trains can or should be profitable. In fact, it would be to concur in two absurd presumptions, the second being that passenger train profitability can be ordained by an Act of Congress.
The absurd Myth of Passenger Train Profitability has retarded the nation's progress toward a sound passenger train system.
There are two ancillary myths, the Myth of the Great Debate and the Myth of Picking Winners and Losers. Together, these three dangerous myths have led passenger train advocates, as well as critics, down the primrose path of falsehoods. These falsehoods -- some of them propagated by Amtrak itself -- have made public discussion of passenger train issues unnecessarily confusing and set back the construction of America's new passenger train system by well over a decade.
The Myth of Passenger Train Profitability
I voted against the ARC finding because the 1997 law was silly, meaningless, irrelevant, futile, superfluous, gratuitously punitive and inappropriate. Companies don't become profitable because somebody passes a law ordering them to. Companies become profitable for two reasons:
Passenger trains have not enjoyed a favorable economic or political environment in this country since the 19th Century. Absent a change in that environment, passing a law commanding Amtrak to stop losing money is like shaking a baby to make it stop wetting its diaper. It's an act of futile, cruel desperation by somebody who doesn't understand what's really happening or how to stop it.
We laugh about the blind leading the blind. But the 1997 Amtrak Reform Act compounded that absurdity: It presumed that politicians could command bureaucrats to become businessmen. Congress acted without understanding the forces that drive transportation economics in this country. Profitability is not a reliable or trustworthy index of the effectiveness of a transportation system. Our highway and civil aviation systems are not profitable, nor do we expect them to be. Why then should we place this burden on Amtrak?
The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, recently noted that no passenger rail operation in the world operates at a profit. Sen. Hollings was correct but he didn't go far enough. He made it sound as if passenger trains are unique in being unable to make a profit. In fact, all forms of inter-city commercial passenger transportation are money losers -- if you calculate their costs the same way we calculate the costs of passenger trains.
Warren Buffett, America's most successful investor, became one of the nation's ten richest people by picking investments shrewdly and risking his money with companies he felt were poised for strong growth. In the October 21 Chicago Tribune, Buffet said, The airline business, from the time of Wilbur and Orville Wright through 1991, made zero money net.
During the Clinton prosperity bubble, of course, several airlines made enough money to move the industry as a whole into profitability. But in the year following the collapse of tech stocks in April 2000, all of those profits and more were wiped out, and the airline industry as a whole once again has become a lifetime net loser. This year the market capitalization of United Airlines dropped so far that the parent company lost its ranking as one of Chicago's fifty largest corporations. By the time United's board fired the CEO last month, the nation's second largest airline had a lower market capitalization than Tootsie Roll, Inc. And United's meals in first class now feature entrees with the consistency of a Tootsie Roll.
So using the logic Congress applied to Amtrak in 1997, should we force the airline industry into liquidation or restructuring just because it has shown a negative aggregate lifetime profit? The failure of the airline industry to earn a profit over its 75-year lifetime should tell us something about the futility of expecting Amtrak to make a profit, particularly over a 5-year timeline as specified by Congress in 1997. For the airlines have been the beneficiaries of the one of the largest taxpayer subsidy programs in the history of American socialism.
And let's not forget the $15 billion in chump change that Congress gave to the airlines so fast that please and thank you were separated by a nanosecond. Midway Airlines is getting a check big enough for it to start flying again. (Midway is one of that group of airlines -- like TWA -- who frequent Bankruptcy Court the way professional athletes hang out at strip clubs.)
If the airlines cannot be profitable after 75 years of federal investment in state-of-the-art infrastructure and command-and-control systems, how is Amtrak supposed to operate profitable, customer-friendly passenger trains over a 22,000-mile network of privately financed 19th Century railroad alignments using 19th Century signaling technology and 19th Century grade crossing protection that limits trains to an effective average speed of 48 miles per hour? You wouldn't dare pass a law ordering a bunch of managers to operate a profitable shoe manufacturing business in a 19th Century factory using technology built in 1920 while paying their employees 21st Century wages. So why would you pass a law ordering a bunch of managers to earn a profit carrying railroad passengers according to those same rules?
Since the establishment of their respective federal infrastructure programs, each of those three modes has enjoyed hundreds of billions of dollars in federal infrastructure investment, each from its own infrastructure and development program, and each eventually from its own trust fund. But today, after nearly a century of federal investment in road, air and water infrastructure, we still have no federal fund for the development of a modern passenger rail system. Our passenger-train service -- as well as our congested highways and our terror-threatened airline industry -- reflects this colossal failure of congressional will.
Transportation is no different than any other area of human activity: You may not always get what you pay for, but you definitely do not get what you don't pay for. So when six of my fellow ARC members said, We are shocked -- shocked! -- to find that Amtrak isn't making any money, I just couldn't go along with the charade. My vote was my way of saying, You're telling me Amtrak isn't making any money? So what else is new? Who is? Profitability in passenger transportation is a myth. Everybody is subsidized. Congress needs to get over it.
The Myth of the Great Debate
Amtrak's CEO, George Warrington, got up in front of the National Press Club last May and announced that he had discovered -- after three-and-a-half years in his job -- that Amtrak could not make a profit while also carrying out its mandate to provide a public service. I don't know why it took George so long to figure that out. It may not be sufficiently common knowledge to be included in the standard high school civics curriculum, but every state Department of Transportation official knows it, and they say so every year when their friendly Amtrak government affairs officer comes around soliciting alms. After three-and-a-half years of reassuring Congress that he would make their passenger trains profitable, George got up and told the National Press Club that it couldn't be done. And to resolve the dilemma he called upon the people and their elected representatives in Congress to hold what he called a Great National Debate on the future of the American passenger train. Sen. John McCain of Arizona has called for the same thing.
Id like to spare the people and Congress all that unnecessary effort. The idea that we need some sort of Great National Debate on passenger trains is a myth. Why? Because the debate has already been held, passenger trains have won, and I've got the proof!
I feel like that defense attorney in Miracle on 34th Street who wins Kris Kringle's sanity hearing by saying, OK, boys, bring 'em in! and the clerks start emptying mail bags full of letters that say the people of New York believe in Santa Claus. So lets imagine my speech to the Senate Transportation Committee.
Mr. Chairman, I hold here in my hand copies of forty editorials and guest essays that have appeared in the nation's media since September 11, all of them urging Congress to get busy on funding a passenger train system. Only three media outlets published essays against passenger trains. There were forty of these editorials and op-ed pieces in the days following the September 11 attack. You may be familiar with a couple of them because Andy Rooney presented them in his segment on Sixty Minutes. I have the transcript of one of them here, along with thirty-nine others clipped from newspapers across the country. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case. The people of the United States believe in passenger trains, and they don't expect to get them from Santa Claus. They expect their taxes to pay for the building of new railroad tracks and signals, just as their taxes paid for highways and airports and dams and barge canals. Mr. Warrington, Sen. McCain, you can forget about that great debate. It's over. We may not yet know how we're going to pay for that new infrastructure, but as for the question as to whether we want it and whether we need it, that's settled.
Now let me just say something about funding. If I am reading the sentiments of the American people correctly [hold up stack of editorials], we are rapidly approaching the same phase of passenger rail development that we had reached in highway development in July 1954. That was when Vice President Nixon addressed the National Governors Conference at Lake Placid, New York to announce the Interstate highway program. Nixon told the conference that President Eisenhower, the auto industry, the petroleum industry, the cement industry, the trucking industry, the manufacturers of earth-moving equipment and the big civil engineering firms had all agreed on the basic design of a 40,000-mile coast-to-coast, border-to-border network of limited-access, grade-separated, high-speed divided highways that would connect all cities of more than 50,000 people. Despite that agreement, however, it wasn't until two years later that Congress passed the Interstate and Defense Highway Act. All of the intervening time was spent debating a funding formula. Three bills failed before Congress agreed on a funding mechanism, a fuel tax paid into a new Highway Trust Fund. I hope it won't take this Congress another two years to devise a formula for funding passenger rail infrastructure, and I hope the people in this room will not feel unduly frustrated if it does. All of the different transportation modes had to fight for their existence, some for a very long time.
In 1925 Orville Wright testified before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce that the chief obstacle to the development of aviation was the lack of a federal airport program. It was another twenty-one years, 1946, before the federal government began dispensing matching funds to help local communities build commercial airports. Trains can't wait that long. We have to start funding now.
The Myth of Picking Winners and Losers
This is the myth that government not only should build the rails for new passenger trains but should pick the winners and losers. What I am referring to here is the growing number of would-be passenger train supporters who propagate the doctrine that the only type of inter-city passenger train that can be justified economically is the short distance or intermediate distance high speed corridor species. Don't let anybody tell you that. For one thing, we don't actually know if it's true. A lot of people have been going around acting as if it's true, but the fact is we just don't know what kinds of passenger trains will work in this country. There is no solid body of evidence and no corpus of experience that would enable us to pick the winners and losers in advance. The dirty little secret of the passenger train business in the United States is that there has been so little passenger train activity in the last thirty years that, in effect, there is no passenger-train industry and hence no industry experts.
I include myself when I say that, even though I've probably got more passenger train experience than most of the management at Amtrak. I worked for Amtrak as a station agent and reservations clerk from 1973 through 1979. In 1971 I co-founded a rail travel club which by 1986 had operated nearly 100 profitable rail excursions, about half of them on special trains we chartered. Nevertheless, despite all that experience, I hesitate to call myself a passenger train expert, and I don't acknowledge very many others in this country to be passenger train experts either. Most of the trains we need to be running have never even been tried, the number of trains we do run is so small, and our passenger rail technology so outdated, that America has never had the opportunity to build up a body of passenger rail expertise and management capability to measure against the best practices overseas.
Let's face it. We're amateurs. We're not in a position to get doctrinaire about what's going to work and what isn't. So when people ask me, Can overnight business class sleeping car trains be a successful alternative to air travel in any American markets of 700 to 900 miles? I honestly have to say, I don't know. I have strong suspicions, but I don't actually know. The concept hasn't been in existence in this country for thirty-five years, and in the last ten years of its existence it wasn't supported. When people ask, Can modern, fast, comfortable, long distance coach travel, something like the El Capitan or the Pacemaker, again make a significant contribution to American mobility? I have to say, I have my suspicions, but I'm no expert, and neither is anybody else.
This is not false humility. I'll stake my passenger train credentials against those of anyone in this country. We passenger train advocates have to recognize that there's a huge vacuum of knowledge and experience in this country. We have no basis for picking winners and losers at this stage of our understanding. Mail-and-express trains, seasonal vacation trains, long distance trains that network with feeder trains at key junctions, high speed rail lines into hub airports, tour trains, group travel, corporate charters of whole trains or of certain cars -- same deal: We don't know. There are no American passenger-train experts. The corporate memory of American passenger train management has been devastated by time and mortality and by nearly a century of neglect on the part of our national policymakers. We will have to re-invent and rebuild those skills ourselves.
So the idea of picking winners and losers, like the idea of having a Great Debate and the idea that profitability is a reliable index of passenger train success, is a myth. What does that suggest about the railroad infrastructure Congress is now being called upon to build? It suggests that this new infrastructure should not be configured for any one particular type of train or for any particular region of the country. Instead we should follow the model used in building our highways, our airports and even our waterways: Don't let the government pick winners and losers. Just put a modern infrastructure out there and then rely on the ingenuity and greed of the American business community to find profitable uses for it.
Weve Been Down This Road Before
Don't forget that we had this debate when we tried to build highways. When the Better Roads movement began back in the 1880s, it was the farmers who started the agitation. The road advocates in Congress all sang the same tune: We have to get the American farmer out of the mud so he can get his crops to the local grain elevator and bring his supplies and mail order merchandise back from the freight house. This was the period when so-called farm-to-market roads were the justification for a federal highway program.
Then the League of American Wheelmen got into the act and demanded hard-surfaced roads so they could ride bicycles from town to town. When cars were invented, the motoring lobby started agitating for roads. That got the farmers upset. Why waste precious federal tax dollars to pave roads for city folks with autos when the farmers need the roads more? they asked.
The same issue cropped up again after World War I when the motor truck became sufficiently reliable for manufacturers to start switching some of their freight shipments from rail to road. After the truckers spent several frustrating years making nine-day trips from Chicago to New York over dirt roads, they began agitating for hard-surfaced highways to connect major cities. But the critics wailed that trucking freight over long distances was a utopian fantasy that could never justify itself economically. Long distance freight shipping, they said, was a natural job for the railroads, and government should not interfere with nature.
The same debate broke out in the Thirties when Congress rejected a proposal for an $8 billion national highway program. The critics charged that only rich people owned cars capable of driving long distances between cities, so Congress should not waste federal funds on extravagant speedways for the luxurious few.
We're not ready to say which kinds of trains will work and which won't. We don't know what the natural market for passenger trains is, and we won't know until we get some experience running them. We have to start building projects that will enable us to run more trains of all types -- including the high speed freight trains that shippers like UPS and FedEx are demanding -- and run them faster, more frequently, more closely spaced, more safely and grade-separated from conflicting rail routes and the motor vehicle system.
When I hear critics say, Well, the federal government may have a role in financing improvements for high-speed trains that carry business travelers in urban corridors, but it has no business promoting long distance leisure travel for a tiny minority of well heeled tourists, I have to ask, Oh, really? Then why does the Army Corps of Engineers use taxpayer funds to build breakwaters and dredge channels for the cruise ships that dock at Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and New Orleans? Then why does the US Coast Guard protect those harbors, and why do Customs & Immigration have an army of inspectors at every pier? And anyway, who says long distance train travel consists only of so-called leisure travel?
The pace may be leisurely compared with air travel, but when I spent my days putting people on board the Zephyr, the Empire Builder and the City of New Orleans at Chicagos Union Station, they didn't look much like cruise ship passengers to me. The people I put on those trains were college students traveling between home and school, people visiting their families, people relocating to new jobs or checking out an out-of-town job opportunity, professional groups heading to a conference, foreign visitors who wanted to see the US close up and meet Americans en route, and retirees -- most of them not particularly wealthy -- who wanted a relaxing and informative travel experience.
Those are activities worthy of federal infrastructure support. They already get federal infrastructure support when they're carried out on the highway, airway and waterway systems. Why not on rail as well?
If a so-called tiny minority of well-heeled tourists wants to ride a passenger train, I say, Welcome aboard! Cruise ship travel started out as an upper class fringe phenomenon in the Sixties, but thanks to the billions of dollars the federal government handed out to local communities to improve their deepwater ports, the cost of cruise ship travel came down, new entrepreneurs entered the business, and what was formerly considered a luxury for a slender stratum of super-rich individuals has now turned into a virtual entitlement for the middle class.
Conclusion
I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect that a firm federal commitment to rail infrastructure also will change the demographics of rail travel, creating new markets, opening up new travel and leisure choices for millions of Americans who today know nothing of rail travel, attracting train-riding overseas visitors who find our current mobility options puzzling and inconvenient, and opening up new entrepreneurial opportunities that the bureaucratic mind, with its picking- winners-and-losers mentality, simply is not configured to imagine.
I hope people can now accept the idea that profitability is of no more importance in a passenger train environment than in an air or highway environment, that we need no further debate about funding a national passenger rail system, and that government bureaucrats cannot handicap the system's winners and losers. The time to start building our new national passenger rail system has arrived. It's a job that will require all of our efforts.
Rodney, I would be so pissed if I could not get a beer on an Amtrak -- seriously, I know how you feel.
I would go to Holland, where the trains run to the second on time, get you from city to city in nothing flat, and, some Dutch gal comes down the aisle with a cart bearing candy, coffee, papers to read and Heinekens to drink.
And go check out the TGV.
It goes so fast, you can't look out the window sometimes without getting a little queasy.
Smooth, quiet, it would beat a 737 in a race between two cities as far apart as Indianapolis and St. Louis, and anything nearer. No kidding.
Don't bum out because you are seeing Amtrak and imagining that as the future of the American Rail System.
If I believed it were, I would not be arguing my points.
Let's face it. The author is right. The feds have been funding internal improvements for nearly 200 years. Canals had their day. Rail had its day. Roads have had their day. So has air. Now it's time to fund the rails again.
What's old becomes new again.
I second that emotion.
Amtrak is the contractor that was hired by the state of Washington's Department of Transportation to run the Cascades Service trains on the Vancouver (BC)--Seattle--Portland--Eugene run. These trains use Talgo equipment that tilts on curves and permits higher speeds than are possible using the standard Amtrak equipment.
In the Bistro Car -- yes, I know it's a sissy name for a bar car, but that's the Pacific Northwest for you -- Amtrak sells our Pacific Northwest microbrews, the micros that made Seattle famous for something other than Microsoft and rain.
If you ever get out this way, take the Cascades, grab a micro, sit down in the business car and watch the scenery as you skip the white-knuckled horror of Interstate 5.
If a train could get you from Chicago to Detroit in 2 hours, would you take it?.
---max
"If a train could get you from Chicago to Detroit in 2 hours, would you take it?."
In the unlikely event I was ever traveling from Chicago to Detroit, getting there in two hours would be good. However, that would be assuming that for the entire 283 miles, without any slowdown or stopping--which means you would monopolize the rail (doubtful)--you would have to maintain 140 MPH.
I vaguely remember reading something, somewhere about high speed trains, but can't remember enough to speak decisively about it, but I don't think that's going to be happening in our lifetimes, even if the government was willing to toss a trillion bucks at it.
Besides, you can already go from Chicago to Detroit in about 2 hours...on an airplane (although that may be a mistake on my part. Perusing Expedia flight posts, it takes 2:05 for a non-stop flight, but I don't think a jet'll stay aloft at 140 MPH)...for only $89 (plus gate tax, plus landing tax, plus takeoff tax, sales tax, fuel tax, and who knows what else).
---max
Convenience and price will be the key to quick adoption of rail. A cartwheel system will have to be reimplemented where passengers are brought in to mainline stations and transported rapidly to other mainline stations non-stop to transfer onto another train that reaches into the hinterlands if that is where their destination lies. These trains would need to operate on a 1 hour schedule between major metropolitan areas so travelers could go and come at their leisure.
Something else that is going on quietly on railroad right of way (read private property) is the burial of fiber optic cable for communications sales. This is being done partly to help defray these property tax expenses some have talked about. Using the property to its highest and best use. But dont forget. The tax man used to tax each and every telegraph pole. Ive heard my dad talk about when Southern Railway did away with telegraph in his area, the railroad immediately chainsawed every pole and gave it away so they would not have to pay tax on it another year.
FREIGHT railroads are an essential backbone of this country. There is simply no comparison between the cost of hauling 50 hopper cars full of coal by rail and the cost of hauling it by road. Depending upon the route, the cost difference could be well over an order of magnitude.
Railroads' cost advantage, however, is only significant when loads are consolidated into long trains. If a particular facility uses 10 cars of coal per day, it would be more cost-efficient to deliver a 50 cars load of coal every five days than two 5-cars of coal each day. People, however, aren't generally willing to travel on that sort of schedule. A train which runs once a week in this country will not get seven times as many people per run as one that runs daily; it might even get fewer.
Rail is an excellent means of transporting large quantities of non-time-critical freight. When no other modes of human transportation are unavailable, using the freight rail infrastructure for human transport will provide at least a transportation option. On some highly-traveled routes it may be competitive with other modes of transport, but the economics of scale usually do not kick in sufficiently for it to really be economical.
My best Amtrak story was when, in 1992 or so, I made a cross-country trip on the old George Washington (C&O), which Amtrak called the Cardinal.
It ran from Chicago to New York, and we rode it from Indianapolis to Manassas, Virginia, to visit relatives.
The route is beautiful, and slow, and goes past the town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, about nightfall.
The scenery is spectacular, and I spent much time with my wife and young son in the cafe car, looking out the window.
At the time I still smoked, and Amtrak had just instituted its no smoking policy. So that meant you had to go between the cars, or stand out on the end of the last car, to have a smoke. It was cold and off-and-on raining, but no big deal.
Especially after several beers in the cafe car.
So I remember standing on the end balcony of the last car, in the dark of night, watching a railroad guy on the ground, a half-mile away, astride the tracks, swinging his oil lamp back and forth in a slow arc, after the train had started moving again and was picking up steam, leaving him in the distance.
And this very pleasant mist was being drawn up, from the Venturi effect of the train going so fast over the tracks.
The scene was the very essence of the romantic lure of rail travel, or so I thought.
After a few minutes I realized that is was not raining.
Rather, the old cars treated the efflux of the sleeper cars' toilets and sinks with the "fast track" treatment, if you know what I mean.
This was the source of the 'mist'.
This freaked me out, but I couldn't tell my wife, or she would not have let me back into the sleeper car. And maybe never allowed me indoors at home again, I don't know.
I would have been permanently assigned outdoor status, like a mastiff.
Anyway, this is another reason not to smoke.
I do hope that trains in the future have some kind of lavatory tanks so that pedestrians standing by a TGV-type train are not given the Jackson Pollock treatment as it passes them at 250 mph!
Regards, caddie
But UPS and FedEx are demanding trains that are time-critical, but not necessarily in need of overnight movement. UPS and the CSX have worked on a deal, and FedEx wants an arrangement similar to the "hot freight" of fifty years ago. They want to own the train and pay the BNSF or the CSX to provide a locomotive, cab crew and dispatching services.
The UP has an arrangement with the CSX to move fresh fruit and vegetables from California to Brooklyn on a very tight schedule with only a crew change, rather than a locomotive change, at Chicago.
The railroads are getting back into the business of moving time-sensitive materials on fixed schedules. Now if you put a coach or a few sleepers on the end of that train, you have a "hot freight" carrying people. This may be how things end up.
That's correct. Amtrak has been making about 70-80% of its costs since 1990, while highways consistnently make 10-30% of their costs from the gas tax revenue derived from vehicle miles traveled upon them. Highways are paid for by your property taxes, which pay for municipal and county roads, which produce most of the vehicle mile consumption of gasoline to produce gas tax revenue to pay for expressways.
Gas taxes are about $0.40 per gallon, and fleet economy is around 20 mpg. A 6 lane highway stuffed to the gills with 180,000 cars per mile per day (like say, Boston's Central Artery) is producing just $3600 in daily revenue per mile, or $1,314,000 per year per mile. Yet the costs of building such a freeway along are upwards of $25 million to well over $100 million per mile depending on location (the Central Artery is coming in at over $1 billion per mile - similar costs are about to be experienced for the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge and approaches over the Potomac on the Beltway), and annual maintenance and police costs are 2 to 5% of construction cost, to say nothing of interest on bonds, forgone property tax revenue, etc. Obviously, massive tolls or enormous increases in gas taxes would be needed to balance the books.
If you examine the cost of projects to build new highways or reconstruct existing ones, you can come up with figures like: (a) a car trip from NYC to Florida is subsidzed about $200 each way by property taxes, (b) the average 15 miles each way daily expressway commute represents a subsidy of well over $1000 per commuter, (c) the average cost of a rebuilt complex highway interchange could be paid for by levying a $0.25 toll on every vehicle traversing it every day.
Looked at in that light, the starvation level Amtrak system is a bargain. To say nothing of its potential were it actually capitalized to expand and increase its variable profits from actually operating trains against its high fixed costs. Similarly, the 5:15 commuter train with 500 people on board paying $5 each is netting over $2000 vs. the very minimal actual costs of operation for 1 hour in crew salary, depreciation, fuel, etc.
Yet somehow, the impression is out there that trains can't make money, while highways pay their own way.
When you have a chance, check the budget line for your town, township, and county for streets and roads, then check the gas tax they are collecting. You'll find it is tens of millions annually, and the gas tax collection is nil.
If we relied on gas taxes only to pay for roads at the current level of taxation, we'd never be able to leave our driveway, since there'd be no local road system.
You'd be surprised how much of your state general revenue taxes and your local property taxes are going to subsidize automobile travel.
A while back I learned that in many areas of freight movement the speed of a delivery is less important than the reliability. In other words, many customers would rather receive a delivery in twelve days on the dot than seven days with the possibility that it might be six or eight.
Using property taxes to fund local roads does not seem like a big deal to me, for a substantial portion of a property's value is directly tied to its access to public infrastructure. A suburban residential lot that sells for $100,000 would be worth only a fraction of that value if it only abutted on a river or railroad right-of-way. In fact, there's no way in hell this land would ever support a residential land use under the latter circumstances.
Having said all that, it would seem that there are only two ways to get railroads and highways on a "level playing field" -- either have the government take over all the railroads in the U.S., or privatize every road in the country. I'm not sure I want to see either one of these things happen, so this kind of debate will go on for a long time.
BTW, New Jersey Transit held their public hearings for their proposed fare hikes the other day. While I can understand their need for a fare hike and view NJT as a top-notch agency, the last few months have exposed some major flaws in public transit as it operates today:
1. The methods of funding public transit in the U.S. are absolutely idiotic. Federal Transit Administration funds can be used for capital projects, but not for operating expenses. This is like providing incentives for people to purchase an $800,000 home even though they can't afford to buy any furniture. The natural result is that transit agencies (NJT is particularly bad this way) build major projects that they can't possibly operate, due to limitations in operating funds or capacity constraints. September 11th has given NJT an excuse for all those trains jamming into Penn Station (NY) packed to the roof with passengers, but the truth is that those trains were packed to the roof before September 11th. The fact that NJT was able to open their Midtown Direct service and build the Secaucus Transfer despite the common understanding that the Northeast Corridor Line cannot accommodate the projected passenger load is an absolute disgrace.
2. The major flaw with any rail system is that a train only operates with one degree of freedom (i.e., forward and backward). If there is a problem somewhere on the system, then there is no way to divert trains somewhere else and still get people to their destinations. If a major highway is shut down for hours at a time, at least people have an opportunity to find their way to an alternate route. Can you possibly put a value on that kind of flexibility when you compare railroads to highways?
You're absolutely correct about that. However, governments have also subsidized the construction of railroads for the same reason. The difference is that in the U.S. the government support for railroads is limited to capital improvements and does not extend to operating costs.
Coston is being considered as a replacement for Warrington:
Already there is widespread talk about a successor. Most prominently, though not exclusively, mentioned is James Coston, a former Amtrak employee and a member of the soon-to-be defunct Amtrak Reform Council. Many on Capitol Hill involved in rail transportation are excited about the prospect of Coston, now a Chicago railroad lawyer, taking over the reins of Americas passenger railroad. While not denying that he would be interested in the job, Coston stopped short of saying he was seeking it.I am very interested in a solution, Coston told TRAINS news wire, and want to assist in the best way I can.
(from Trains NewsWire,03/07/02 [site registration required])
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