Transportation Choices
Published by DanM July 1st, 2008 in National and International Issues, Southern Utah Talking Points and Questions. Tags: No Tags.(The lack of them, that is.)
I live in Color Country. My parents live in another part of Utah, a five hour drive away … even at freeway speeds. (See my blog, Conservation for the the speed that I really drive.)
To travel to Color Country for a visit, here are our choices:
- They can get on a train that stops in a neighboring town (but not in their town, even though they live just a few blocks from the railroad track), get off in Salt Lake at close to midnight, wait for 9 1/2 hours somewhere (Ever try to get a room at midnight?), and then take a bus from Salt Lake to St. George in Color Country. Total trip time: 19 hours.
- A bus isn’t an option. Even though they live in the largest town in the whole region, the bus goes right through and doesn’t stop there.
- Flying!? Surely you jest.
My parents are getting up there in years. For the last visit, I drove up to where they live, and drove their car back, doubling the highway milage. Chalk up another few dozen gallons of gas from our friends in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela.
It sure would be nice if there was some sort of public transportation.
Since it’s election season, I read with interest that one of our candidates has a strong, outspoken position about it. In his role as chairman of the Senate Science, Commerce and Transportation committee, McCain has killed more transportation funding than just about anybody else. In his role as chairman, he was quoted as saying, “There’s only two parts of the country that can support a viable rail system - the Northeast and the far West.”
Similarly, his campaign website doesn’t mention rail travel. Instead, he wants to provide a $300 million prize to design battery cars. By contrast, the Bush budget that he supports kills $20 million for the next generation of high-speed rail, and $250 million for railroad rehabilitation.
Pardon me … but I think there are lots of people working on high tech batteries now. After all, there’s money to be made, with or without McCain’s $300 million dollar cake frosting. But if the government doesn’t do something, rail travel will just get worse and worse.
By contrast, Obama is a Senate cosponsor of a bill that will create a partnership with states to invest in rail service. Obama has said, “In many parts of the country, Amtrak is the only form of reliable transportation.”
Oh ja! I hear that.
I find it hard to believe that an expansion of heavy rail will ever be economical except around and between major urban areas. Rail is just too expensive and inflexible.
I can see a major expansion of bus service. Bus routes can be where ever there are roads and bus stations are not a big deal — Greyhound uses a McDonalds here in St. George.
I cannot believe there is anyplace in the US where Amtrak is the only reliable form of transportation. Amtrack in the NE corridor between Boston and Washington DC is convienent and relatively inexpensive (with huge Federal and state subsidies). Away from the NE corridor it is neither convienent, inexpensive nor especially reliable, and it would take a hugh amount of money to make it those things.
Ah! The impressionable blush of youth! Would that everyone had the benefit of heavy years to extend wisdom. But I wouldn’t wish the burdens of such advanced age on anyone.
I can remember when there actually WAS reliable and convenient rail transportation … and right here in the US of A, too!
In fact, there was a wonderful railroad station right in my parent’s town. The railroad demolished nearly all of it in the dead of night to avoid complications of dealing with pesky people who wanted to preserve the magnificent architecture.
So what happened? The automobile and Eisenhower happened, that’s what. (The Eisenhower administration was responsible for the interstate freeway legislation, to further add to whippersnapper knowledge.)
But since you mention “a huge amount of money” … let’s talk money. Recall from the blog that the Bush administration - supported by “Battery Charged” McCain - wants to kill proposals to spend $270 million on railroads. The US Department of Transportation (”Current Funding of Surface Transportation Infrastructure” - April 2007) quotes a figure of $147.5 BILLION for highways in 2004. I guess they’re forking it out so fast they can’t count it any faster than that.
That’s just a tad shy of two-tenths of one percent of the amount requested to rescue our railways.
The next time you drive from Salt Lake to Bountiful, you can see not one, but TWO massive freeways, both going to about the same place. Now that the highway lobby has achieved that decades long goal, they are building a railroad.
Oh … and they are locking several horse barns after the horses have escaped.
And people wonder why the Saudi’s have all our money.
(PS … Don’t worry, the gargantuan pile of money being spent on paving the nation with asphalt - made with middle eastern oil - so cars - using middle eastern oil - can sit in traffic jams still PALES in comparison with the 650 BILLION dollars that the Iraq war is costing us. We could fund even highways for about three years with the cost so far. And China still seems willing to lend us more money to do it.)
Well young grasshopper, I too remember when there was much better railroad service in the US than there is now and it was reliable if not especially convenient – one or two trains a day and the station 30 miles away.
It was inevitable that highways would be more important than trains. Trains only go where there are tracks and don’t necessarily stop where we think they could and should – witness your home town. Also, we Americans just love our cars.
I doubt that $270 million would go very far in rescuing our railroads. That is probably about the subsidy for the Boston – New York – Washington corridor. The total subsidy for Amtrak has generally been over $1 billion for the last several years. Not requested by Bush but appropriated by Congress
Judging by the dollar figures being bandied about to build a water pipeline from Lake Powell to St. George, I’m not sure $270 million would extend the railroad from Cedar City to St. George and buy the rolling stock.
I am not opposed to railroads. I ride on them at every opportunity. I am not even opposed to subsidies for them – all other mass transportation modes in the US also receive subsidies – highways, airports, even barges. The bus service here in St. George is subsidized. I just think that for relatively sparsely populated areas of the country – most of Fly Over Country – buses make more sense than railroads.
I remember many years ago there was a local bus company in Utah called Lewis Brothers Stages that used to hit a lot of the small places – I don’t know if they are still in business or not. Back in the 30s I believe buses were used to transport people between Zion, Bryce and Grand Canyon National Parks.
I have to agree that some of my comparisons are not apples to apples. The bills that the Bush administration and McCain wanted to kill are for specific research and improvement projects. (But then, so was McCain’s battery research handout.) So to put the record right, here are some “apples to apples” figures.
Amtrak gets around forty percent of it’s budget from a federal subsidy. In a hotly contested fight in 2007, the federal government authorized a subsidy that averages 1.9 billion a year.
Even so, few improvements have been done over the years because even with subsidies, Amtrak has been forced to go into the red to keep operating and the debt burden is one of the capital problems they have. The Reagan administration really did almost kill them.
Gasoline is very heavily subsidized. Lots of it is hidden in government subsidies to the oil industry. Military costs for protection of production and shipment services, and environmental costs. The true cost of a gallon of gasoline may be five to fifteen times the cost actually paid at the pump. There’s a reason why gas, even at $5 a gallon, still can cost double or triple that much in Europe.
But lets not just pick on cars. Consider that after 9/11, Congress appropriated $15 billion in one shot to prop up air transportation. $5 billion went directly to the airlines. (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/09/eveningnews/main532311.shtml). Just one airline company, Boeing, gets over $20 billion in subsidies. (http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2007-03-23-eu-boeing-subsidy-ap_N.htm).
Because they have passenger rail transportation whittled down to a single target, it’s lots easier to track the subsidy they get. But air transportation gets lots of different subsidies. For example, in 1988 the Congressional Budget Office found that in spite of user fees paid into the Airport and Airways Trust Fund, the taxpayers still had to transfer $3 billion in subsidies per year to the FAA for things like air traffic controllers.
Remember … the entire railroad subsidy is currently $1.9 billion.
The 9/11 shock demonstrated that having transportation choices could be a very good thing. At the time, I was hosting out-of-town executives at a Salt Lake City convention. They were shocked to find out that they couldn’t go home for five days! But, since the Bush administration tried to drop the Amtrak subsidy entirely from the 2006 budget, it seems the lesson didn’t sink in.
The Q & A between McCain and then Amtrak President David Gunn really shows the hypocrisy. As reported by Wikipedia:
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Before a congressional hearing, Gunn answered a demand by leading Amtrak critic Arizona Senator John McCain to eliminate all operating subsidies by asking the Senator if he would also demand the same of the commuter airlines, upon whom the citizens of Arizona are dependent. McCain, usually not at a loss for words when debating Amtrak funding, did not reply.
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Lewis Stages is still around. But like Continental Trailways (I saw one parked behind the Hurricane museum in the middle of town just yesterday.) they have retreated to the charter bus business. If we want reliable public transportation, it has to be a public responsibility.