Short-sighted transportation planning from the Leader-Telegram
November 5, 2007
Via WisOpinion: Don Huebscher, editor of Eau Claire’s Leader-Telegram, thinks trains are a waste of money:
An amendment was offered as part of the Amtrak budget vote that would have capped taxpayer subsidies at $200 per passenger next year, and reducing that cap by $25 per passenger in each following year. The amendment failed by a resounding 66-28 vote…
Does anyone out there really believe a train route that requires a $200 tax subsidy per passenger should continue to operate? Apparently there are, and 66 of them reside in the U.S. Senate.
The answer to his question is obviously Yes. But just in case you thought Mr. Huebscher has an actual understanding of the issue, as opposed to a desire to show off some bogus “small government” street cred, he removes all doubt by arguing that Amtrak exists “so families can take cross-country train trips for their vacations at public expense rather then pay their own way by auto or air - or cover the entire cost of the train trip themselves.” (emphasis mine)
Conservatives often pretend that, while trains are prohibitively expensive, roads and airports are free. Sadly for them, two minutes with a search engine reveals that federal subsidies for road construction over the last thirty years totalled approximately $1 trillion. Air subsidies have totally approximately $430 billion. And Amtrak subsidies have totalled approximately $30 billion.
That’s a lot of money, and of course it isn’t all allocated optimally — favored companies get inflated contracts, electorally important constituencies get favored over others, Alaskans get their federal welfare, and so on — but for the most part, the system lumbers on with relative efficiency.
The real point is that moving people from one place to another is a huge, complicated engineering problem. It takes vast amounts of money, time, and coordinated effort to build a transportation infrastructure in a country as big as ours. The only organization with the budget and operational scope to do it successfully is the federal government.
No individual would benefit by building themselves a road, or a railroad, or an airport. The transportation infrastructure, by design, is a loss leader. It doesn’t have to pay for itself via tolls, or fares. It pays for itself by allowing the economy to grow, by allowing things and people to move around the country, by making it possible for all parts of a huge continent to benefit from riches that in a different era would be confined to a single part of it.
This has been the case since Appius was the censor of Rome. No one “pays their own way”, whether they drive, or fly, or ride the bus, or take the train, and it’s stupid to expect them to.
It’s one thing to argue that our transportation dollars should be spent differently — personally, I’d like to see more of them spent on trains — but it’s another entirely to argue that our most environmentally-friendly and forward-looking transportation option be required to pay for itself, unlike every other infrastructure project in the history of the world.