M any people seem to think that America has lost its sense of purpose.
They overlook the obvious: that we are striving to become the Bulgaria of the
western hemisphere. At least we already have enough vampires to qualify.
You don’t have to seek further than the USA’s sub-soviet-quality passenger
railroad system, which produced the spectacular Philadelphia derailment last
week that killed eight people and injured dozens more. Six days later, we’re
still waiting for some explanation as to why the train was going 100
miles-per-hour on a historically dangerous curve within the city limits.
The otherwise excellent David Stockman posted a misguided
blog last week that contained all the boilerplate arguments denouncing
passenger rail: that it’s addicted to government subsidies and that a “free
market” would put it out of its misery because Americans prefer to drive and
fly from one place to another.
One reason Americans prefer to drive — say, from Albany, NY, to Boston —
is that there is only one train a day, it never leaves on time or arrives on
time, and it takes twice as long as a car trip for no reason that makes any
sense. Of course, this is exactly the kind of journey ( slightly less than
200 miles) that doesn’t make sense to fly, either, given all the dreary
business of getting to-and-from the airports, not to mention the expense of a
short-hop plane ticket.
I take the popular (and gorgeous!) Hudson River Amtrak train between
Albany and New York several times a year because bringing a car into
Manhattan is an enormous pain in the ass. This train may have the highest
ridership in the country, but it’s still a Third World experience. The heat
or the AC is often out of whack, you can’t buy so much as a bottle of water
on the train, the windows are gunked-over, and the seats are often broken.
They put wifi on trains a couple of years ago but it cuts out every ten
minutes.
Anyway, even if Americans seem to prefer for the present moment to drive
or fly, it may not always be the case that they will be able to. Several
surprising forces are gathering to take down the Happy Motoring matrix. Peak
oil is actually not playing out in the form of too-high gasoline prices, but
rather a race between a bankrupt middle class unable to pay the total costs
of motoring and an oil industry that can’t make a profit drilling for
hard-to-get oil. That scenario is plain to see in the rapid rise and now fall
of shale oil.
Nowhere on earth is there passenger rail that pays for itself. But, of
course, you don’t hear anyone complain about the public subsidies for driving
or air travel. Who do you think pays for the interstate highway system? What
major airport is privately owned and operated?
Some of the decisions made over our rail system are so dumb you wonder how
the executives on board ever got their jobs. For instance the train between
New York City and Chicago never runs on time for the simple reason that
Amtrak sold the right-of-way to the CSX freight line. CSX then tore up the
second track because there was an antiquated state real estate tax on
railroad tracks. As a result, freight trains have priority on the single
track and the passenger trains have to pull over on sidings every time a
freight needs to go by. Earth calling the New York state legislature. Rescind
the stupid tax.
America is going to need trains more than it thinks right now, despite
what the “free market” says. The condition of our trains is symptomatic of
the shape of the nation. The really sad part is we missed the window of
opportunity to build a high-speed system. Capital will soon be too scarce for
that. But we still have a conventional network that not so many decades ago
was the envy of the world, and we know exactly how to fix it. We just don’t
want to. No will left. Apparently we’d rather just turn into the walking
dead.
