It's a fairly conventional, post-World War II view. America's onetime urban planning guru, Robert Moses, lined up with Detroit to demonize public transit, aided by things like the civil rights movement: only in your own car could you control near whom you'd have to sit.
It was, of course, a vision fueled by visions of cheap gas forever. Moses thought cars were the answer to everything, which is why we have so many interstate highways gutting the hearts of cities. He weighed in on interstate design, biographer Robert Caro has noted, making sure median strips were too narrow to ever build rail corridors in the right of way. Low-density suburban housing tracts ensured there would not be enough population density to make passenger rail work effectively in many parts of the country. Auto companies bought up, and killed off, successful streetcar and interurban systems. Airlines played their part, too, though also based on a vision of endless cheap fuel that has turned into a hellish human version of slaughterhouse cattle chutes and inedible food.
The net result is that in the 1890s you could get from Portland, Oregon to Eugene, Oregon by train faster than you can get the same distance by car today.
Is that progress?
Amtrak labors under several serious burdens.
One is Congress, which has treated its own creation as a pinata since its creation. Congress invented it, and has spent four decades trying to kill it. Starve it of capital, burden it with ancient rolling stock, refuse to upgrade railways that were built with massive government support so that passenger trains can go faster, and require them- by law- to yield to freight traffic, and it's easier to argue Amtrak is a crappy system needing to be killed off. Oppose its expansion and you can throw in the argument that your constituents are subsidizing a crappy system for undeserving, wealthy Yankees. That plays well in the South.
Another problem is that Amtrak is expected to be a commuter rail system in several areas of the company and where there's enough pre-auto density to support it, while at the same time it is expected to provide long-haul, cross country service-again, without the capital to make it work. Europe is criss-crossed with high speed train links that make it possible to go enormous distances in hours. Amtrak's adding a second, round-trip, daily service between Seattle and Vancouver, BC, such is the demand even at today's low-speed possibilities.
High speed rail works. Why don't we have it? Why is there no fast rail link in the Greenville-Columbia-Charleston corridor? A half century ago you could go by train between Charleston and Columbia, by private carriage. It worked then, why not re-create the public infrastructure to bring it back? Drive across the state and all you can do is drive and listen to the radio. Travel by train and you can get work done en route. Pull several hundred rail passengers' cars off the roads and you've made a way bigger contribution to traffic congestion than building more roads- the habitual reflex of politicians.
I'm actually a big fan of rail travel but I don't believe government can run it efficiently, particularly not with the restrictions in place that you noted above. Unfortunately, though, all the private carriers got out of the passenger rail business years ago.
ReplyDeleteWhat we've come up with is this bizarre business model - based in part on politicians trying to keep constituents happy - that doesn't work, yet we keep pumping money into it expecting different results.
I don't think high speed rail will ever get off the ground here for several reasons: First, too many people may like the idea of high speed rail, but they don't want the rail line near their homes, so it's difficult to construct routes through anything but eminent domain. Possible, but politically challenging.
Second, the costs involved would be staggering. Again, not that similar amounts aren't being spent on other infrastructure projects, but the average person and politician is reluctant to approach things differently, particularly when special interest groups are telling them why they shouldn't.
Third, and this is just a personal belief, I can't see a high speed rail system succeeding under government ownership, and I don't see a private entity willing to take on the challenge.
Perhaps if someone were willing to start up a high speed route between, say, Chicago and New York, and build from there, they could do it incrementally. However, I'm not optimistic they could overcome zoning restrictions, public opposition to concerns over noise, traffic, safety, etc., and shareholders demands (if they were a public company) to provide a sustainable on-going return.
Which pretty much proves my point. Conservative opposition has made it almost impossible to revive private rail service; you're against any infrastructure support to aid its revival, so you want to kill of what survives. But you're a train fan.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that what's made it almost impossible to revive private rail service is the fact that it's not profitable. One hundred years ago, there were probably 50 private passenger rail carriers, if not more. They didn't all disappear because of conservative opposition, but because it cost too much money.
ReplyDeleteIf I'm against infrastructure support, it's because I'm trying to be consistent. The federal government (supposedly) has a finite amount of tax dollars to spend and I'd like it to go to more essential services such as defense, social security, Medicare, etc.
I suppose that I could have been like the Republican from Delaware that I quoted in my blog post who said he wasn't happy with the stimulus as a whole, but was glad that something he liked was getting some of the largess.
Personally, I'd love to see train travel revived, but I think it would hypocritical of me to expect every single American to contribute to something that myself and such a small percentage either use or plan to use.