June
14, 2002 2:15
p.m. Yes
to the Railroads
A
national endowment of the railroads is defensible.
he
scare headlines popped up here and there, intensifying last week. We were
told that Amtrak would cease services unless . . . Exactly. And Congress
will, we soon learned, and inevitably expected, come through with $500-odd
million, sufficient to give Amtrak another six months of life. And, in
Congress, something more than a stopgap measure is taking on steam. That
would be the (Sen.) Fritz Hollings bill, a grand design of $59 billion
to give us, coast to coast, a modern system. Sen. Hollings is a shrewd
legislator. Drawing deep on the fragrance of September 11, he has called
his bill the "National Defense Rail Act."
Now, the argument
against federal financing of rail travel begins with the axiomatic rule:
Let the rail passengers pay for their own conveniences.
A pretty fair rule, but it's not a violation of it to remark the complexities.
The first of these is that the government is heavily involved in subsidizing
traffic of every kind. The motorist can hardly drive around the block
without driving over asphalt primarily financed by town and county, but
also with contributions coming in tangentially from the federal government.
When you debouch from I-95, you travel
from road surface 100 percent paid for by the federal government, down
the ramp to cutoffs toward the construction of which the feds made a lesser
contribution, but a contribution nonetheless, onto roads paid for by the
state, and by lower echelons of government, county and city. It takes
hardy pioneering into highly exclusive warrens before the user runs into
the driveway he actually paid for himself.
The same holds true, of course, for the airlines, an intimation of whose
problems was given us by U.S. Airways last week, when management said
that service could not continue until $1 billion was raised.
There are other entwinements. The railroad, for instance, carries mail
and postal packages. These, of course, are paid for by fees. Arriving
at the right figure for such fees is an intricate assignment. What would
it cost to ship the same package via the competition? Well, that would
mean a truck. Trucks travel on federally paid-for roads.
And then, railroads have to pay for rights-of-way. Some own their own
tracks, some do not. How do you allocate the capital expense of servicing
these tracks?
And how to factor
in the national need for adequate transportation facilities? When President
Eisenhower launched the great highway program in 1956, he had partly in
mind the need to increase the facilities for transcontinental defense.
So to speak, a coast-to-coast Panama Canal.
Now where the question
gets itchy is the factor of relative convenience. There are a thousand
towns in America with no rail service at all, where inhabitants who want
to travel have to make their way by automobile or bus or airplane. These
are people many of whom seethe at the thought of northeast-corridor Americans
getting around between Boston and Washington on a fleet of trains that
are losing money. Fifty-two percent of travel between New York and Washington
is done by railroad. Can the situation be rectified by simply charging
more money? Experience shows that it can't. For some people, the demand
for train travel is inelastic, but not for a lot of people. If you doubled
the rail fare, you would not double the revenue.
This is a pretty
universal experience, there being no railroad service in any industrial
country that pays for itself. Do we have here an example of an organic
exception to the rule that services should pay their own way? That may
be in fact the case, but in any event, conservatives need to climb onto
a higher level from which to seek a broader perspective.
The urbanization
of America and the volatility of American travel need to be accepted as
a part of the American culture that shouldn't be constrained, let alone
aborted, by dogmatic enforcements of otherwise useful rules of procedure.
The plan of Sen.
Hollings is significantly to improve and to increase the availability
of railroads, and he needs to justify doing this, at a cost of over $5
billion per year, by persuading Congress and the public that however uneven
the usufructs of rail travel to different parts of America, a national
endowment is economically
defensible, culturally desirable, and tangentially useful to the common
defense.
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he
scare headlines popped up here and there, intensifying last week. We were
told that Amtrak would cease services unless . . . Exactly. And Congress
will, we soon learned, and inevitably expected, come through with $500-odd
million, sufficient to give Amtrak another six months of life. And, in
Congress, something more than a stopgap measure is taking on steam. That
would be the (Sen.) Fritz Hollings bill, a grand design of $59 billion
to give us, coast to coast, a modern system. Sen. Hollings is a shrewd
legislator. Drawing deep on the fragrance of September 11, he has called
his bill the "National Defense Rail Act."
