Because those industries are vastly more heavily subsidized than trains. If more roads had to pay for their own upkeep I would be willing to bet large sums of money that commuter rails would pick up quite a bit. Air travel is harder for me to argue because time saved is a pretty important factor and trains, even at cheap prices, are still slow.
Let’s take 95 south from the north shore in Massachusetts in the mornings. Usually, pretty thick traffic. It can take me up to an hour to drive a measly 15 miles, though I’d put my average commute around 35 minutes. There’s no rail system going around the hub, only the spokes into the city have any rail systems. If that hub was a toll road to help offset maintenance costs I think a rail system would be very, very feasible. I sure as hell would prefer it, not because I have any particular love of trains but because I’d much rather reclaim commuting time for reading, computing, etc. That’s up to an hour and a half wasted every day because I’m sitting in a car. Ridiculous. I want that time back, and I am willing to pay for it. Maybe I’m alone in that, but I’d rather we take some highway subsidies and put it to commuter rails. Let road travellers pay for the roads.
I understand that kind of libertarian perspective is unpopular with current conservatives who love oil and standard liberal thought who look to road systems as an essential federal task, but what the hell, as a Discordian I enjoy contrariness for its own sake. It’s a bonus that I happen to think it makes sense, too. Not that, if implemented, our taxes would decrease in fact, but it is a nice thought there, too.
Mr Moto and ERL: Interesting exchange you two had, and it provoked some thinking on my part. Most railway mileage in this country is privately owned, by for-profit corporations. Granted that some track is owned by governments or by public-sector corporations, especially in the Northeast, most is still in private hands.
Contrast this to the situation with highways and airports. Most highways are publicly owned, and held out for the “free” use of the automotive public. (Granted that there is a subsidy in gasoline taxes, licensing-tag fees, etc.) A few toll highways and bridges are owned by government entities or by public-sector authorities and corporations. Private roads abound but are short, usually dead-end entities; I would venture to guess that no private road connects any two major communities in an interurban sense anywhere in the country. (While Number Four Road between Lowville and Old Forge, NY has some private-road mileage, and there’s another long private road in Aroostook County, Maine, and there are no doubt other examples elsewhere, these have largely the character of two-ended accesses to private property, rather than being routes used as thoroughfares between their endpoints.) And virtually every airport in the country is owned and operated by a public-sector corporation, except for those few owned directly by a metropolis.
Now, what would happen if the railbeds – not the railway companies, but their rights-of-way and trackage assets – were assumed by the public sector? Railway companies would be charged mileage for their use; major corporations might acquire rolling stock and make up their own trains rather than paying someone else to haul their goods; niche operations might become profitable. And a level playing field for the maximum use of a valuable resource would be established. We might subsidize those operations that contributed to national security or public benefit, as we do now with Amtrak. Economic development might be better planned with the public interest in transportation taken into account.
And passenger service could be better scheduled and marketed. So you’re going from St. Louis to Los Angeles to make an important presentation to a major client? Don’t fly in and try to work on finalizing your presentation in the hotel room; relax on a comfortable train ride, with full office facilities provided in our business car.
This may sound at first glance socialist. But it’s applying to our rail network the same principle as now prevails on our highways. Consolidated Freightways and Greyhound are not nationalized, only the roads they use to travel on. Amtrak and Chessie would not be nationalized, only the railbeds they use.
I’ve been looking recently, but basically the situation is: either existing taxes more than pay for it, or less than two-thirds are covered by existing taxation. Pick-a-pundit is not a fun game to play.
from Why do I hafta kill Amalek? I don’t wanna!, but it’s close.
The only way I see the trains running on time, is if it was being managed by a fascist government, and I don’t think anyone wants that. Otherwise, how do you suppose it would be possible to get the government to act efficiently, and for that matter, how would the government get a hold of it at all? The amount of money pored into creating the railroad company would be hard for the government to pony up to pay for taking possession of the rail roads.
Here’s the DOT Performance and Accountability Report 2004. Of particular interest are pages 188 (196 in the full pdf because of preface numbering) and 219 (227 in the full pdf). This lists net costs. Also from the document, so you don’t have to find it yourself,
I imagine that if Amtrak gets the axe, then private parties or mixed private and governmental consortia would take over the routes that are profitable.
There’s no question though that speeds need to be raised to make Amtrak competive on mid-distance routes. Fast trains between the Bay Area and L.A. and San Diego would be a convenient and viable alternative to air travel and would relieve some of the traffic congestion at LAX.* As it is, the trains are just too slow. Next month, I’m taking the Coast Starlight down from Seattle to L.A. When planning the trip, I found that I could get off the Starlight in Oakland, transfer to a bus, then to another train in Stockton, and then to another bus in Bakersfield…and arrive in L.A. three or four hours ahead of the Starlight. Of course, this is a vacation, and speed is not enough of a concern to make me want to endure two bus trips in the Central Valley. I’ll stay on the Coast Starlight all the way through But there’s no excuse for a through train to be slower than the bus. And the reason the passenger trains are so slow is that outside of the NW Corridor, they have to share with freights, which have priority.
IMO train travel in this country should be fixed, not axed, and they should focus on the short and middle distance routes where it’s a viable alternative, or could be.
*Speaking of congestion at LAX, remind me to tell you sometime what I think OC’s plans to create a “Great Park” on the old El Toro air base. They should share the burden of the airport traffic they generate rather than sending it all to us.
I took this train, and it was wonderful. Yes, it took an hour longer than th ebus- which frankly I don’t comprehend. But it was worth it. I arrived relaxed, with almost an entire book read.
Does the train make more stops than the bus? Or is it that, like all track Amtrak uses outside the Northeast, the property of a freight line, or several? One of Amtrak’s ongoing operational problems is that the track’s owner gets priority over the use of its own property - if a freight needs to go through, the passengers are going onto a siding or into a yard and damn well wait. If the freight line is tight on cash and specializes in non-time-sensitive cargo, coal for instance, they won’t spend any more than they have to maintaining the rails. That can result in holding the top speed of even a lightweight passenger train to below highway speeds - and there’s nothing Amtrak can do about it.
The European passenger railroads, AFAIK, all have their own rights of way.
So let’s see. First, we limit the travel speed below what the train and tracks can safely handle. Then we make sure that passenger travel has the lowest possible priority. Gee, I can’t imagine what’s wrong with that, Amtrak should be the wealthiest company in the world.
In fairness, it started long before then. The commercial railroads had been losing money on passenger service almost from the get-go, making all their profits from their much-lower-cost freight service. In the post-war years, the expansion of high-speed roads and car ownership pushed the passenger services deeper into the red, and the railroads seem to have made a business decision to kill them off entirely while leaving their own hands apparently clean. They cut back service and service standards wherever they thought they could do so without political repercussions. When Penn Central went bankrupt anyway, while the Northeast and much of the rest of the country still absolutely needed passenger rail, is when passenger rail was nationalized. But the underlying economics were never addressed - it still is inherently a losing business in a country with a huge amount of lightly-traveled miles, but it’s always been necessary over a large part of the country anyway.
Perhaps the Northeast Corridor, with its dedicated lines, could be a profitable private company, but it would still be a public service requiring some public oversight. No clue about the Chicago area or SoCal, its other dense service areas running on rented tracks, but there’s no way the rest of the system could make it on its own - it never has.
Plenty of previous posts (and previous threads, and general histories of railway history) make a far more blatant link to politics than you seem to acknowledge.
Again, you’re ignoring points made elsewhere. Including hidden subsidies, railways make no greater loss than roads or air transport.
Who said it was? This is not an inherently American board, is it? Please help us with your own region’s perspective - what led to nationalization, and how is reprivatization going? Does Virgin own and maintain its own tracks, for instance? I’ve heard of a number of crashes since privatization attributable to scrimping on maintenance, is that true?
Certainly that’s been part of it - but the politics are the result of economics, not the cause, as is usually the case. I’ll add a present-day consideration for you that contradicts that: The areas of the US that are most dependent on passenger rail, the Northeast and California, are reliably Democratic on Election Day. The proponents of cutting federal funding to it are not.
Sure. We’re on the same side philosophically. That stuff would matter if the subsidies, hidden or overt, were comparable. But the Amtrak-privatization proposals that always keep coming up are essentially about cutting subsidies to it altogether, while still supporting road and air travel.
Nationalisation only occured as a result of WW2, and the government effectively taking control of the railways for that whole period. Privatisation is almost universally regarded as a ludicrous ideologically-driven mistake. The permanent way has returned to public ownership, in part due to the accidents you mention.
My point about loss-making passenger services not being a uniquely-American feature is that they’ve not been seen as a reason to privatise such services, not in the UK until recently, and not in many other parts of Europe.
Amtrak runs on freight track outside the Northeast. The freight railroads are content to let Amtrak go fast - except when they need a freight train to go by in the other direction. The passenger train usually gets the siding in those cases. Some railroads (UP, usually) let Amtrak trains overtake when the freight is going slowly. Others (CSX, specifically) don’t. Unfortunately, it would take a law or federal regulation to change this. Actually, the 1947 rule pretty much got rid of the “passengers have priority” principle - they stopped being 50 MPH faster than the freights and the schedulers allowed them to spend more time behind them.
As for the really fast (120+) stuff, you’re gonna need new alignments anyway. Acela has proven that they will pay for themselves but if Amtrak can’t get Congress to let it spend money on capital improvements instead of pissing it away on bad operations and slow trains that need to go fas it won’t happen soon.
Seconded (and I quoted the whole post because it was excellent, yet seemingly overlooked).
Amtrak has stations in about 30 cities in Illinois, and I would bet that some of those don’t even have bus service, let alone most which definitely don’t have commercial airline service.
