For Release Friday, October 9, 2009
Citiwire.net
There is an old saying that Americans will always do the right thing, but only after they have tried everything else first.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to make the transition. Latest example: visceral opposition to high-speed rail by those who should be thinking more innovatively. Consider Robert Samuelson’s recent column in the Washington Post– “A Rail Boondoggle, Moving at High Speed.” Samuelson cites the usual statistics–that we are an auto culture, that not enough people ride trains, that the costs are high. So, he concludes, President Obama’s commitment to high-speed passenger rail is a fool’s errand.
But Samuelson’s among those who has been playing this song for over 20 years. Their message has turned into a weird anomaly given what is happening around the rest of the globe.
First, lets look at the true subsidy costs of a mono focus on highway investment. At least $100 billion of state, county, and city general funds are invested every year in highways and highway costs. Those are direct subsidies to the highway system, outside of any “user pay” trust fund. The federal government has started to invest general funds into highways, in part because no one wants to actually have to pay for the costs of highways with an increase in user fees.
Second, there are over 2 million Americans injured every year on America’s roads, at an annual medical cost of over $200 billion. Saving half of that cost would pay the entire cost of health care reform over the next decade.
Third, the energy and environmental costs of our auto culture drive our defense and medical costs in ways that we have all agreed to turn a blind eye to–though the true cost is probably in the range of a half trillion dollars a year.
If we can manage to ignore the $750 billion cost of our highway fixation, then Samuelson’s argument makes some kind of weird sense–though you have to suspend logic, economics, and global experience to get there.
Why has every industrialized nation in the world made, and continues to make, large scale investments in high-speed rail? That’s what Samuelson’s argument can’t reach. If you look at the roll call of nations with high-speed passenger rail, it includes Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, China, and South Korea. Could all of them be wrong? China alone is pursuing a 3,000-mile high-speed network. What propels all of these industrial nations to invest so seriously in this mode of transportation? They are making hardheaded decisions about their nation’s future and their economic self-interest. We have just started to do so.
In the U.S. House of Representative, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has marked up a reauthorization bill for highways and transit. The bill proposes to spend $550 billion over the next 6 years. The vast majority of those funds would go to the highway program. The bill would allocate $50 billion over the life of the bill for high-speed passenger rail. That’s less than 10 percent of our national transportation funding. The Samuelsons of the world may call it a waste. I see a humongous greater waste–the $750 billion we’re incurring, year-in and year-out, in the indirect costs we incur by failing to build alternatives to our transportation monoculture. That’s the unconscionable economic waste.
I am not suggesting that highways are going to be anything other than the dominant mode of transportation in the United States for a long time. I am suggesting that there are corridors, less than 500 miles long, where density and economic activity make high speed passenger rail the only viable mobility investment. The total trip time of air travel in those corridors, combined with the energy costs, makes high speed rail the logical choice and a far better choice than the costs of expanding highway capacity in those congested and dense corridors. For those trips, high-speed rail delivers you to the heart of the city, not to a remote airport. I am also suggesting that there is simply no comparison between the safety of a train trip verses the safety of an auto trip. In the end, we need a broader set of mobility choices than we have created for ourselves. The public seems to understand this, as editorial and public opinion polling is making clear.
What is discouraging in this debate is that someone as bright as Samuelson cannot think in broader, more expansive terms about the American future. We can do better. Yes, we can!
Tom Downs is chairman of the North American Board of Veolia Transportation and a former president of Amtrak. His e-mail is tmdowns1@aol.com.
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15 Comments
The American-Totalitarian-Transport-Carmmunist-Sprawlopoly-Central-Committee…Official Statement:
Automobile-Dependants of Petropolis!
You are advised by your Petro-Masters to keep your snouts in the Opec-Oil-Trough!
Chow down that drive-thru fast food, drink that drive-thru Starbucks coffee, cash a check at the drive-thru bank, pick up some Alka-Seltzer at the drive-thru drug store, fill up your gazzoline slurpin hog & keep on cruisin…keep on slurpin…keep on guzzlin…don’t you just luv those Cadillacs—all shiny & new!
Dear Mr. Downs:
I worked for my father who was the manager of a Kroger grocery store while I was in high school and college in Tennessee. His store was the largest one in Nashville in the 1950s’ and it had a basement under it that was as large as the store. Except for perishables, the main Nashville warehouse was supplied by barge and rail primarily from Cincinatti. We would recieve a large truck load from the Nashville warehouse on Friday and a small truck midweek. The driver and us sackers and stock boys would unload the trucks into the basement inventory. Items were brought out at various times during the week to restock the shelves. Some where along the line someone invented “Just in time shipping and delivery” and justified it with the time value of money. I am sure if businesses would look again at this complex process, that has many trucks for many different products converging on our retail businesses and consider damage to our freeways and roads, the cost of fuel both dollar wise and damage to the enviroment, they would reverse that decision. I believe in high speed rail, but I believe we will have a far greater gain both cost wise and enviromentally if we rebuild our rairoads for commerce and passengers and save the High Speed monorails till later.
Dr. Robert Justice
Retired Chemical Engineer
Kingwood, TX
Really appreciate you doing the research on comparative costs. That’s often difficult information for the rest of us to extract.
I think the debate about rail needs to be moved out of the extreme edges (200 miles per hour or nothing) and into the sensible center. While it is possible – and enjoyable – to travel by TGV and other high speed trains in Europe, what really makes their transportation systems work is their network of pretty fast, reliable, frequent trains.
As an example, here in Seattle we ride the train south to Portland, OR and north to Vancouver, BC. Both trips take about the same time as driving (though with far less hassle and more safety and comfort) If we just upgraded the Right of Ways, improved the equipment, added a few more trains, and increased the speed from 75 to 125 miles per hour we would have a fabulous alternative to either driving or flying. This REinvestment would also bolster our existing institutions and urban areas, rather than creating a whole new disruptive infrastructure with more speed than we need and less convenience than we want.
I am rather concerned about all this HSR stuff myself. True, we need it, but we already have the skeletal basis of a good passenger rail system, which government has fed a pittance to, over the past 38 years, and which now is possessed of mostly shabby equipment that should in many cases be replaced with new material, and in all cases requires drastic overhaul. Routes are in limbo like the east end of the Sunset Limited, others have been cut like the Pioneer. All of these need to be reinstated and kept in operation UNTIL THEY ARE REPLACED WITH HSR. The need is NOW, not 30 years in the future and we can go a long way toward that if we choose.
We need to sell this point over and over again: anything up to 300-miles of distance is cheaper travel by rail. (Water would be cheaper but we don’t have rivers going every place we need them.) People remember montras: anything up to 300-miles of distance is cheaper travel by rail.
My wife and I totally agree.
We have traveled on trains through out Europe
and have had great safe experiences going from
city centers to city centers. The smaller local trains
have also been wonderful
Highspeed Rail works only if the tracks are dedicated
to passenger service and there are no crossings at grade.
Also if the general public has access to the right of way
they might be found walking or hiking on the tracks or
various recreational activities or vandalizing and placing
objects on the tracks out of curiosity.
What if there is heavy snow ? I dont want to hit snow at
110 mph .
I’m a physicist who has been thinking about transportation issues for decades, and this is one of the most perceptive transportation articles I’ve seen. Most importantly, he gets the indirect costs of automobile transportation right. The many studies conducted about this issue conclude that the price of the automobile’s unpaid indirect costs is between $10 and $25 per gallon. Trains are the way the U.S. needs to go!
After reading the column posted regarding high speed rail, it’s economical justifications and the extreme costs that would be saved for the American people by adhering to this new and innovative mode of transportation as is the rest of the growing and insightful countries in this world…..it is my firm understanding, now, that this is a great opportunity for America to grow up with these countires, stop being ignorant and behind in their mode of thinking and decision making. It’s plain as day the usefulness of High Speed Rail Transportation.
Congress has it all wrong. The amount spent on highways should be substantially less than that invested in high speed rail. As a country we need to subsidize high speed rail and other rail options and stop throwing money into asphalt. I love my car, but for longer trips moving frieght and people we should have a sound rail system and not some iron age throw back.
Don’t throw money at the freight lines; let them use their profits to maintain the tracks. Build passenger cars. There is no excuse for a full train. Detroit factories could use the work. Build stations and bathrooms. Use older cars for the cheap seats. Our goal here is to get people off of the highways, not rich people out of airplanes. Finally, take those long passenger trains and turn them up to 150mph on the straights and slow order them on the curves. We can do this with what we have now!
We really do need the high speed rail here in Illinois for all of the passanger trains! There are parts of Illinois who used to have train service that no longer do and it would ease up on the heavy car traffic on the highways for those who live in the Quad Cities area and also down in the Peoria area to get to Chicago and other places instead of having to drive to get to their locations where they’re trying to go to!
Hey, I can understand this column and even understand thinking innovation, but when one usually does in my restrospect of life and submit for grants first to continue to advance and put out more innovative ideas along with the ones that already needed to be examined and payed for, and then denied, not yet listing the replitude that your around non innovative people who can not understand you and I believe only intent is to misfocus on who is innovation and ones life. Hey, what good is it to be an innovative thinker at all, especially if there are no rewards for this except to put innovation into place. Do we as innovative thinkers not also have the priority to live better lives or are we just suppose to submit innovative thoughts and struggle with less than what we need?
Tom is “right on”, and the other guy is either un-educated or taking a “pay-off” for his efforts to keep spending ourselves to ruin, and all the other pains that we suffer by wasting “road money”. Why does the trucking industry use rail for all the long hauls that they can, and UPS ships most of their packages over 600 miles (except dedicated air-freight) via rail! This guy is just outdated, not thinking, or doesn’t understand the problem. According to the latest Facts that I can find (2007 ) on freight hauled in the USA, rail handled 1,819,633 ton-miles of freight vs. 1,317,061 for trucks, plus Millions of passengers!
Source ( US DOT – “RITA” , BTS)
Sincerely, Donald Monteith 49720-0756
Mr. Downs,
i read your report on Driving on to Irrelevance — That or a 21st Century Train System. Robert Samuelson is talking crazy! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He should realize that we need high speed trains because our freeways and airlines are too jammed and airports are too far away from city centers and security problems at airports. There needs to be a high speed rail line from Cleveland, Ohio, to Nashville, Tenn., serving Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati and Louisville and one from Cleveland to Pittsburgh.