A take-down by Robert Samuelson.
[Update while later]
Florida Governor Rick Scott has turned down funding for it.
* My decision to reject the project comes down to three main economic realities:
o First – capital cost overruns from the project could put Florida taxpayers on the hook for an additional $3 billion.
o Second – ridership and revenue projections are historically overly-optimistic and would likely result in ongoing subsidies that state taxpayers would have to incur. (from $300 million – $575 million over 10 years) – Note: The state subsidizes Tri-Rail $34.6 million a year while passenger revenues covers only $10.4 million of the $64 million annual operating budget.
o Finally – if the project becomes too costly for taxpayers and is shut down, the state would have to return the $2.4 billion in federal funds to D.C.
That last “if” should be a “when.” Good for him. Too bad we don’t have as much sense in Sacramento.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This seems to have been influenced by my friend (and fellow member of the Competitive Space Task Force) Bob Poole of the Reason Foundation:
the Reason Foundation issued its report nearly two weeks ago. Using estimates for a proposed rail line in California, it projects the Tampa-to-Orlando link could cost $3 billion more than estimated.
Research by the Reason Foundation and the study’s main author, Wendell Cox, regularly offers a skeptical view of rail, so the findings are not particularly surprising. What’s notable is the work was overseen by Robert Poole, a foundation director who served on Scott’s transition team for transportation issues.
“It’s understandable that some are dreaming of flashy high-speed rail trains carrying tourists and residents between the two cities,” Poole said in a news release. “When you look at realistic construction costs and operating expenses you see these trains are likely to turn into a very expensive nightmare for taxpayers.”
Hey, Jerry, I’m sure Bob’s available for a similar analysis for CA. In case you haven’t noticed, you have budget problems, too.
Now, now. Everyone is being hard on Simple Joe Biden. Don’t you know that when he was a little boy, he got a train set for Christmas. Oh, how he loved that train set! He’d set it up in different patterns and spend hours watching his little choo-choo go round and round. Can we blame him for wanting to do the same thing, only on a bigger scale? Who cares if it’ll cost over $50 billion (chuckle) or $500 billion over the next 25 years? It’s only money, we can print more any time we want. Isn’t half a trillion dollars a reasonable price to pay for a silly man’s happiness?
Heck if I know why we need a high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando, anyway. I can drive to Orlando in an hour from the NW side of Tampa. If it were such a great idea, a company would build it and make money from the ticket sales. But, of course, it’s a dumb idea.
Users more than pay for roads through gas taxes (and tolls). Rail, on the other hand, is massively subsidized, even in the best cases. If it’s about environmental issues, then focus your efforts on alternatives to I/C engines. Otherwise, please find something useful and beneficial to our slacking economy to do.
Good for Scott. He might actually be a decent governor.
Federal money only accounts for 20% of road building. The other 80% comes from the states. When you add the two up, only 50% of total road operating costs are covered by users. The other 50% comes out of general revenue.
Airports were built by state, Federal and local governments way before there were per-ticket taxes on air travel. Even now, to expand an airport (like at Chicago O’Hare) involves Federal, state and local subsidies.
The argument that Americans won’t take the train assumes that we’re somehow fundamentally different then Europeans. The proposed high-speed links are between cities of comparable size and density to European ones.
Our national air travel system is the envy of countries with fancy high-speed rail. So are our freeways and turnpikes. Why wouldn’t we want to drive those jewels under with subsidized competition?
The only way this makes money is if we raise taxes on gas and air travel to European lev… oh. Nevermind.
What I’ve never understood about high speed rail proponents is why they don’t come up with at least a practical route for something that’s supposed to go fast. As ProL points out, the trip from Tampa to Orlando is short enough that nobody will abandon their car for rail. By the time you drive to the station, wait for the train, ride the train, and then find alternate transportatio; you could easily have driven the route.
Want to show off high speed rail? Give me some track between Denver and St. Louis or Chicago. Atlanta to Dallas. Even grabbing an extra town or two in between as a stop will still allow for a distance for the “high-speed” rail to get to speed and maintain it, such that the average velocity actually looks as fast as the interstate speed limit.
“The argument that Americans won’t take the train assumes that we’re somehow fundamentally different then Europeans.”
Brwp! Brwp! Untruth alert!
Europeans and Americans are both “just folks”, but the American train system is fundamentally different than the European one, and so are American cities. The American train system is designed to carry freight (slowly), and American cities (Florida ones especially, and I speak as a resident of one) are designed for cars.
You could install the most whiz-bang awesome train in the world here in Jacksonville, and make it free to ride, and I still wouldn’t ride it unless it took me point to point from my house to my office. But naturally it cannot do that because my office park and apartment building aren’t important enough to warrant a stop. (and the places that might warrant stops are too far away for me to walk)
Trains work in Manhattan. Most of America is not Mahattan.
I am still trying to figure out why Amtrak does not come to a large city such as Phoenix.
http://www.trainweb.org/usarail/phoenix.htm
Come to think of it, every time I google Amtrak, I see the ad for flights to Phoenix $49. I love to fly anyway!
It’s all a moot point anyway. Just consider two things:
1. ZipCar.
2. Self-driving cars.
Add them together = Trains are dead by 2015. On the day you can SMS “Pick me up” to your ZipCar (or similar) service, and a robo-car will be automatically dispatched to your (GPS enabled) location and take you wherever you want to go (point to point, no central station) why would anyone take a train ever? It will be a taxi service minus the labor costs; maybe 30 cents/mile?
Some places in America won’t work for high-speed trains. Phoenix is one of them – there being nothing of size within range.
Having driven to a suburban train station and then taken the train into Chicago, trains work in Chicago too. Having been stuck in traffic trying to get from Chicago to Milwaukee, I suspect that trains on that route would work as well.
Jacksonville to Orlando? (I used to live there years ago.) Maybe downtown to downtown?
Airports were built by state, Federal and local governments way before there were per-ticket taxes on air travel.
Hey, history major, just something to keep in mind… the federal government paid for high speed rail long before Orville and Wilbur learned to crawl.
The argument that Americans won’t take the train assumes that we’re somehow fundamentally different then Europeans.
No. The argument is based on US history. We left trains once a better option became available. Perhaps you should try actually studying history, rather than repeating it.
Not the party of “no” but the part of “No shit.”
We left commuter trains because General Motors used political lobbying to push bus sales. They even tried to get rid of cable cars in San Francisco, despite the fact that buses couldn’t climb the hills.
We left long-haul trains because we spent billions of dollars subsidizing the construction of Interstate highways and airports, while pulling railroad subsidies. In fact, a wartime tax on rail travel (passed to discourage unnecessary travel) was used (in part) to build O’Hare.
Chris, you are so full of crap sometimes. Here, for example, you’ll find the cost-sharing allocation for highways. I will quote:
“Unless otherwise specified in the authorizing legislation, most projects will have an 80 percent Federal share….[except that] Federal share for projects on the Interstate system is 90 percent…States with large amounts of Federal lands have their Federal share of certain programs increased up to 95 percent…Some types of projects require no matching funds–the Federal government pays up to 100 percent of the cost….”
So what are you talking about, fixing potholes in my residential street? Yeah that comes from state and local tax revenues but who is suggesting high-speed rail is going to go right up to my front door? High-speed rail is at best a replacement for Interstates, and as noted these are built almost entirely with Federal money, and are entirely paid for by Federal and state fuel taxes or user fees (registration fees, tolls, et cetera).
The argument that Americans won’t take the train assumes that we’re somehow fundamentally different then Europeans.
It doesn’t assume a damn thing, because your verb tense is wrong. It’s not that Americans won’t take the train — future tense. It’s that they have not taken the train — past tense. We’ve had a very expensive development of steadily higher speed trains in the Northeast corridor, and its impact on Northeast corridor traffic has been nearly unmeasureably small.
Furthermore, Americans have not (past tense again!) taken the train even when it’s not high-speed — and Europeans do. The bulk of European rail travel is by ordinary train, not high-speed. Europeans apparently gladly take the train going at 80 MPH or even 60 MPH. Americans don’t.
Why high-speed rail nuts assume that demand is some weirdly-shaped curve, where if you offer the service at x MPH you have zero takers, but if you offer it at 1.05x MPH suddenly everyone will want to go, I have no idea. This is irrational. If Microsoft ran its business that way we sould laugh. Gosh, no one bought Windows Vista compared to XP. That must mean the differences between XP and Vista were NOT ENOUGH. We should build something even more like Vista, and less like XP. Then we’ll really make money!
High-speed rail nuts in the United States are just folks who don’t mind doubling down on stupidity.
“The argument that Americans won’t take the train assumes that we’re somehow fundamentally different then Europeans. ”
Probably because we are. Geography, culture, economics; you name it, it’s different.
We had our flirtation with passenger trains back in the late 1800’s, and aside from in the Boston-NYC-DC corridor, we’re so over them.
Hey Chris, in sub-Saharan Africa they cook over dung fires. Since we’re not fundamentally different, do you suppose if the government passed out cow turds for free we’d all get rid of our expensive gas stoves and learn to appreciate the unique and unusual fragrance of burning poop under our morning omelet?
Is that what that smell is? I thought it was just Carl roasting Gerrib’s arguments again…
Hey, you’ll never want to go back once you’ve cooked over a dried meadow muffin in the morning.
Rail is most efficiently used to move bulk quantities of homogeneous goods between fixed locations at a relaxed schedule. America has the best rail system on the planet because it’s geared for this kind of traffic. Other, dumber, countries in Europe move far more of their freight on roads!
Using rail to move meatbags around is appallingly inefficient since it DOESN’T EVEN TAKE THEM TO THEIR DESTINATION the way that a flexible, decentralized system like roads and cars do.
High speed is exactly the same kind of economically ignorant big project triumphalism that produced the Ryugyong hotel.
They even tried to get rid of cable cars in San Francisco, despite the fact that buses couldn’t climb the hills.
Ah yes. My last trip to San Francicso there were no cars or buses to be seen, because none could make it up the hills. Yeah, that’s what I observed.
But hey: because General Motors used political lobbying to push
Yeah, there’s another part of Obama’s budget we could easily cut. Now your on the right track, err… route, Gerrib. You’re starting to sound like a regular Tea Partier. We can drop the Volt subsidies.
The distance from Jacksonville, FL to Orlando Florida is 140 miles. Orlando has a population of 2.8 million, Jacksonville 1.3 million. The distance from Paris to Brussels, Belgium is 164 miles, and Brussels has a population of 1.1 million. Paris is somewhat bigger than Orlando, at 10 million.
Both cities are connected by a multi-lane expressway (I’ve driven on both). The European expressway has higher speed limits.
Yet the high-speed rail link between the European cities is so popular that there are no scheduled airline flights between the two cities.
Please tell me again what great difference between these pairs of cities would mean that Europe can have high-speed rail and America can’t.
Regarding the construction estimates, please tell me why the costs for a California line (over mountains and earthquake faults) would have anything particular to do with the costs for constructing a line in flat and stable Florida.
Leland – you mean the General Motors that made the Motor Trend Car of the Year or the General Motors that withdrew its application for $14.4 billion in federal loans? You know, the one “socialist / fascist” Obama just re-privatized?
If you’d have stopped at the cable car museum when you were in San Francisco, they’d have explained that most of the cable car routes were torn out. The ones that survive were saved at great public outcry.
But that would require you to look at facts instead of theory. And since the facts don’t fit your theory, that just won’t do.
The argument that Americans won’t take the train assumes that we’re somehow fundamentally different then Europeans. The proposed high-speed links are between cities of comparable size and density to European ones.
None of the European countries are bigger than medium sized US states. When I lived in Germany, I noticed how the countryside was mostly open farmland while the people lived in villages like they’ve done for centuries. The population density in Europe makes railroad travel more practical. Combine that with very high gasoline taxes (gas cost $4 a gallon back in 1980 and is reportedly over $8 a gallon now) and you find that people aren’t as dependent on cars as we are here.
The central issues that work against high speed rail traffic in the US include:
1. Low population density across most of the US
2. Even “high-speed” railroads will require many hours to travel between many destinations, especially out here in the west. I can get on a regional jet and fly non-stop from Colorado Springs to LA in about 2 hours. It’d still take the better part of a day to make the same trip on high-speed rail, especially since I’d have to drive to Denver to catch the train. It’s highly unlikely you’d have any non-stop trains between Denver and LA so you’ll have to allow for repeated stops, acceleration and deceleration times, and slower speed through the mountains.
3. Once you get to your air or train destination, you still aren’t where you want to go. You’ll have to either rent a car or hope the mostly non-existent mass transit (heavily subsidized) will get you closer to your destination.
Please tell me again what great difference between these pairs of cities would mean that Europe can have high-speed rail and America can’t.
The price of a gallon of gas? Why don’t you just skip this crap and go directly there Chris. We need to increase the tax on gasoline. Everything wonderful will just flow from there.
“Yet the high-speed rail link between the European cities is so popular that there are no scheduled airline flights between the two cities.”
Oh? Someone may want to tell Brussels Airines that.
Larry J – you point out the very reason that nobody is proposing high speed rail between Denver and LA. As I pointed out upthread, the distance Paris to Brussels is the same as Orlando to Tampa.
Curt – I just paid $3.20/gallon to fill up. There’s almost 2 billion Chinese and Indians who are going to be buying cars and taking flights on vacation. Whether we like it or not, cheap gas is over.
Now, we can be smart and start building what we’ll need for a higher-energy-cost society (plug-in hybrids, rail, etc.) or we can be stupid and wait until a crisis. I vote smart.
I just paid $3.20/gallon to fill up.
But… if we just increased the tax it could have been $5.20! Just think of the wonderful outcome: Less people driving (because they can’t afford it), and more tax revenue* to fund things like high speed rail. Come on Chris, I know you see it. Just come out and say it. I think you’ll feel better.
*OK: less people buying gas; might have an impact on those revenue projections. But.. but… it just FEELS so right!
Chis, I guess you didn’t hear the proposal is to build high speed rail that would connect 80% of all Americans. That would mean it’d have to connect every major city and quite a few smaller ones.
The only passenger rail we have in the US is Amtrak. It’s subsidized to the tune of a billion dollars a year and the only place where it could remotely be self-sufficient is the heavily populated NE corridor. Amtrak carried in a recent year 1/4th as many people as cars do every single day.
Larry J – if you look at the population distribution, you’ll find that your particular part of the country is one of the least-densely populated areas in the US. I suspect that we could have high-speed rail serving 80% of the population without a single mile of track in the entire Mountain Time Zone.
Again looking at the map, the Northeast Corridor could probably get more high-speed rail. I also note that Florida looks pretty densely populated.
Please tell me again what great difference between these You know, the one “socialist / fascist” Obama just re-privatized?
Um no. The US government still owns quite a bit of GM stock, just not a majority stake. We, the taxpayers, lost a lot of money on the deal. Further, GM has not paid back all the money it was given. Still, assuming all of your points about GM were true, exactly how does that bolster your argument? My point is we should cut off any additional funding to them. What’s your point, Gerrib?
If you’d have stopped at the cable car museum when you were in San Francisco, they’d have explained that most of the cable car routes were torn out.
While I understand that a cable car is not the same thing as high speed rail; how does the removal of tracked transportation not support my argument that US history has tried rail and found it lacking? You said the buses didn’t climb the hills. That was your theory, but I proved it false. So I’m curious what facts you claim don’t support my points?
Telling me about Europe is pretty silly, as Carl’s already pointed out. Perhaps you could try a more persuasive argument then, “we should be like Parisians!” I know what escargo is, and I don’t like it either. Cargo! That’s the stuff that should go on trains. Go back and read pdb. Let him school you.
As someone who’s ridden Amtrak from Louisville KY to Los Angeles, via Chicago, I’ll weigh in.
Passenger railroads are unnecessary and expensive. What we should really focus on is canal building. Canals can transport goods and passengers far cheaper than railroads, are simpler to construct, and trivial to maintain. Once constructed, neither system will carry a significant number of passengers (ridership rounds down to zero), but whereas nobody wants to live within a rifle-shot of a railroad because they’re very loud, everyone likes living near a beautiful waterway where they can take their kids fishing.
Call your legislator and tell them to vote for carp instead of crap.
Leland – I did say GM tried to get rid of cable cars. Again, if you’d paid attention at the cable car museum, you’d have learned that 1950s buses were not up to San Francisco’s hills. Like, make passengers get out and walk up hills.
My points are:
1) we’re no longer funding General Motors, and preventing it from going under looks like a better idea every day.
2) Rail was pulled not because it didn’t work but because private enterprise wanted to get rid of competition.
3) Large parts of the US have the same distance / density factors as Western Europe, which should have relevance in this argument.
It’s probably the greatest… nahhh, it’s not for you. It’s really more of a Shelbyville idea.
I’d only ride a train if there was a lottery at the beginning of the train ride to see which passenger gets to drive the train. Cuz, well you might win and then you’d get to drive a big ole’ train, honk that great big horn, and run hobo’s over, WEEEEE!!!! Then, when the train conductor screams that you’re going to fast and curls up in a fetal position in the corner you can push it just a little bit more to see if you can get the thing to ride on two wheels as we round the bend. See now your commute just became all that more fun and a memory for a lifetime. Trains are so charming!!
…there being nothing of size within range [of Phoenix for high-speed trains.]
I knew Las Vegas was a myth! Phoenix now has one light rail line. I’ve ridden it once from end to end and back. I love trains, but this is a real waste of money. Hopefully the one line is all the politicians need to call Phoenix Modern. Predictably there were accidents but they don’t get reported.
Slow passenger trains have a certain romance. I like the idea of a high speed train, but it just doesn’t make any sense… unless they took cars! Yes, a high speed car ferry might work in places with enough traffic.
If it really were a good idea, a bond repaid only by ticket sales would work… so it’s not really a good idea, is it?
Curt Thomson wrote:
The price of a gallon of gas? Why don’t you just skip this crap and go directly there Chris.
Actually, Chris, why don’t you just skip this crap and move directly there? To Europe, I mean.
You’ve spent years telling us how great their socialized medicine is, how great their transportation system is, how great their foreign policy is, how great their defense posture is, how great their retirement system is, and, I think, how great their education system is. You’d obviously rather live there than here. Fine. Go ahead. But why do you insist on dragging all of us along on your fantastic voyage?
Mike
Chris, we already had fully functioning passenger railroads. Nobody in the government could force people to abandon the trains they’d been riding for a century, and the railroads certainly didn’t want to drive away their revenue stream. People quit riding the trains because cars are sooo much more convenient.
So here’s my Amtrak story. I rode Amtrak from Louisville to LA via Chicago, and back. It was fun, and I’d recommend everyone do it once. Doing it twice might be another matter.
Just after dark, using a GPS, I found the Amtrak train station in Louisville, which at the time was about 8 feet wide and 3 feet deep, apparently a bus stop in a former life, situated in the middle of nowhere.
I assumed I must be in the wrong place, but there was a train sitting there. Eventually two other people showed up, and we reassured ourselves that we were in the right place. Then a couple pickup trucks carrying the train’s crew arrived and we boarded. It was nice because we could sit anywhere we wanted, given that there were only three passengers for an entire train. We were off to Chicago!
But first we had a three hour layover in a bus station in Indianapolis in the middle of the night, where quite a few more people got on board, maybe 30 or 40 in total. By late morning of the next day we were stuck behind a freight train whose crew had worked their scheduled hours. They hopped off their train, jumped into a pickup truck, and drove home. So we sat there for an hour till it became apparent that it would be several more hours before another crew came to move the freight train along. So our conductor decided we would also abandon our train and continue the epic journey by bus.
So the train’s engineer, myself, and a couple of other intrepid travelers started shoveling snow to make a path from the train to the road, which took about half an hour. Then some buses arrived and we were driven to the train station in Chicago, arriving around noon. My total travel time was about 16 hours. I could’ve driven it in eight, but then I’d have missed out on spending the whole night sitting in a chair, either on a train listening to clickety-clack or in the Indy bus station warily eyeing derelicts.
Anyway, in Chicago we spent another couple of hours waiting to board the train for LA, then spent about an hour after that sitting in the yard.
My adventure continued in this vein for several more days. The people were nice, the food was great, and I got to read several books. A couple of times we had to stop to let drug sniffing dogs check the baggage cars, and one night I couldn’t get to sleep because the tracks were so rough that my head kept slamming against the wall of my sleeper compartment. I finally realized that the only way to sleep was to let go with my legs and arms and ignore the head slams till I passed out.
Once I was safely in downtown LA, I realized why only three people had boarded in Louisville. From a population of a couple million people who could’ve showed up for the trip, the other two were the only ones as dumb as I was. Of the rest of the passengers who boarded in Chicago, about 20% of us spent most of the journey in the smoking car, puffing like chimneys, riding a train because smoking on airlines got banned. The rest of the passengers were just terrified of flying.
For most long journeys, that is probably the only ridership you can count on, chain smokers and people who would never, ever get on an airplane.
Sorry Chris I don’t want to pile on but “we’re no longer funding General Motors, and preventing it from going under looks like a better idea every day.”
GM actually went bankrupt after we pumped in $57 billion. If they had declared bankruptcy as McCain had suggested (and was demonized for) the current results would have been the same but we would not have given them $57 billion.
Private cars are cool and fun, but they are a stupid way to get around. They are wasteful of resources, harmful to the natural and psychological environment, and ruinously expensive (both individually and on a societal basis) to boot. The only fair way to have cars would be to put transponders on each one and bill the owner for his/her use on a regular basis. But we can’t have that, can we?
(Actually, we can. Most of the new freeway construction in North Texas is already toll-only; it’s only a matter of time before all of them are. I look forward to that day.)
The only reason we have a national freeway system at all is because Uncle Sugar fronted the money WPA-style back in the 1920s and ’30s. That’s right, folks: when you ride on the freeway, you ride with Karl Marx, because the federal-aid highway system is pure, big-government socialism.
And if we’re going to have big-government socialism, let’s have trains instead.
The motor fuel tax doesn’t even come close to providing enough money for the maintenance and upkeep of all those linear deserts called “freeways”. Now that gasoline is approaching something close to its actual price, the stupidity of basing an entire civilization on individually-owned one-ton gasoline-fueled wheeled carts will become more obvious to all. A few years from now cars will go back to being what they always really were: luxury playthings for the rich. The rest of us will travel by train, bus, and foot, and be better for it.
Private cars are cool and fun, but they are a stupid way to get around. They are wasteful of resources, harmful to the natural and psychological environment, and ruinously expensive (both individually and on a societal basis) to boot. The only fair way to have cars would be to put transponders on each one and bill the owner for his/her use on a regular basis. But we can’t have that, can we?
B. Lewis, first, thing you ignored a resource. Me. My time and wealth is wasted by these schemes.
Second, I’m not interested in “fair”. But if I were, gasoline taxes and toll roads would adequately cover fairness.
The motor fuel tax doesn’t even come close to providing enough money for the maintenance and upkeep of all those linear deserts called “freeways”.
And what’s going to provide enough money for the maintenance and upkeep of high speed rails? It’s not going to be tickets else the rail won’t be competitive with airplanes or cars.
A few years from now cars will go back to being what they always really were: luxury playthings for the rich.
Amazing how one can ignore the entire history of the automobile. According to Wikipedia, the first cars (by Benz) for sale sold in 1888. In 1908, the first Model T, which is frequently thought of as the first car for the masses was built. So you claim that cars “really” were luxury playthings, but that state would have held, at best, for about first twenty years in which cars were commercially available.
That remote time is supposed to be the usual state of the automobile while century in between that time and now is the anomaly. More than 80% of the lifespan of the commercially available automobile.
And if we’re going to have big-government socialism, let’s have trains instead.
Every complaint that holds for cars and highway systems holds for high speed trains. They require expensive infrastructure that in recent history wasn’t covered by the people using the train. High speed rail wastes resources. They are an even dumber way to get around since they cover point to point travel far worse than cars do and they travel slower than planes. The bottom line is that people drive or fly, they don’t take trains. So high speed trains don’t have the advantage of being heavily used.
The only reason we have a national freeway system at all is because Uncle Sugar fronted the money WPA-style back in the 1920s and ’30s. That’s right, folks: when you ride on the freeway, you ride with Karl Marx, because the federal-aid highway system is pure, big-government socialism.
Well this is nonsense. Significant Federal involvement in highways began with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, and it was funded entirely with taxes on motor fuels and user fees. Go here and learn something before you make an ass out of yourself in print.
The motor fuel tax doesn’t even come close to providing enough money for the maintenance and upkeep of all those linear deserts called “freeways”
More garbage. In fact, the motor fuel tax not only pays for maintenance, upkeep, and extensions to highways, plus subsidies to mass transit — some of it has even simply gone into the vast open maw of the Treasury to fund random shovel-ready pork and “stimulus.” I’ll quote from the link above, which comes directly from the Department of Transportation:
“The HTF [Highway Trust Fund] was created as a user-supported fund. Simply, the revenues of the HTF were intended for financing highways, with the taxes dedicated to the HTF paid by the users of highways. This principle is still in effect, but the tax structure has changed since 1956…..The 1982 STAA also established a special Mass Transit Account in the HTF to receive part of the motor-fuel tax.
“Then, another increase of 5 cents per gallon…was enacted as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990….The act also established a “first” for the HTF. One-half of the revenues derived from the 5-cent increase went to the General Fund of the Treasury for deficit reduction…..Another fuel tax increase of 4.3 cents per gallon was enacted effective October 1, 1993, by the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993….and the entire amount of the increase was directed to the General Fund of the Treasury for deficit reduction.”
I suspect that we could have high-speed rail serving 80% of the population without a single mile of track in the entire Mountain Time Zone.
But you could still pay taxes for it!
Seriously, I really admire Chris’s stick-to-it-iveness here. Having lived in the Netherlands, I can say there Euros take the trains all the time. The vast majority are slow-speed trains. This works because:
* First and foremost, government plays winners. Gas is ~10euros/gallon. Beyond that, though, you have to pay 25% VAT on your new car, and the annual fees for license renewal and registration are around 1000E. Parking is atrocious in cities, and costs extra rent. Autos are a semi-luxury good. Thanks to the rampant welfare handouts, it is conceivable you could see a poor person driving a car, but they would have had to sacrifice just about every other luxury in life. Trains, on the other hand, are subsidized both in terms of ticket sales and infrastructure.
* I don’t think I ever rode a “high speed” train – unless 2 hours from Brussels to Paris is high speed. Google Maps is instructive here: type in Brussels to Paris, and you get 1:20 for the train, which for a 200 mile journey is not bad. Of course, the journey is actually 2 hours, because Google Maps sneakily adds in 40 minutes for the taxi from Paris Nord to downtown + the tram and walks to Brussels-Zuid/Midi. I can get this ticket for only 78E, which is reasonable I guess, although I need to add in 2E tram fare and 20E taxi… let’s say 100E. That’s 10 gallons of gas, so I’d have to get 20 mpg to beat it by car, and you can bet parking is not free when I get to Paris. On the other hand, gas is 1/3rd the price here, and parking is free or close to it in Orlando.
* There’s a local infrastructure to take you from high-speed train to where you want to go, cheaply and quickly. Every town over 1000 people in the Netherlands has a train stop, right in the town center in most cases. On top of that, trams are ubiquitous. Unless you’re going to Disney World, I wouldn’t count on Orlando area transit to get you where you want to go. You’re not talking about $500B in new high-speed rail lines. You’re talking about Trillions to completely re-draw the entire transportation infrastructure in every city and town that has a high-speed rail stop. Better get it right, too, because if any trip requires more than two transfers you can consider it riderless. Which leads me to the last difference,
* The cities and towns in the US are not laid out for stop-based travel. It works in some parts of some of our cities, for sure – Boston, New York, and Chicago have great, well-used transit systems. That’s because they were built at a time when THERE WERE NO CARS. It’s not just density, either, although that is a big part of it. Los Angeles urban area is actually denser than New York City. It’s uniformity, and distance between the things you need. In Europe it’s either-or: either you’re rich enough to own a car, so you don’t need the train, so you don’t care how close you are to groceries, clothing, cafes, OR – and here’s where it gets important – you are NOT rich enough to own a car, so you live in the dense area around the train station which has everything you need within walking distance. So not only are you spending $$T to reorganize the entire national transportation infrastructure, but you’re also assuming a national New Urbanism re-zoning board that will make American cities be organized like European cities. At a cost of several more $$T, no doubt.
If you want to bring back rail, the way to do it is to change zoning laws in your community slowly over the course of several decades, and make a case for cancelling the implicit military subsidy that oil companies get from our armed forces, and whatever this portion of road works you claim comes from the general fund. DON’T fight subsidy with another subsidy. That’s suicidal.
Economic and cultural arguments aside, it seems to me that leftists simply hate the very idea of privately owned automobiles, and want to force the “masses” into “mass” transportation, in which they can travel only where and when the government says they can. That’s the bottom line.
Not to promote trains hauling cars which I mentioned above, but this is interesting.
Carl Pham wrote: Well this is nonsense. Significant Federal involvement in highways began with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956
The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, U.S. 39 Stat. 355, was enacted on July 11, 1916. The Federal Aid Highway Act was passed in 1921. These two acts, and subsequent legislation, defined the Federal Aid Road program to develop a gigantic national highway system.
it was funded entirely with taxes on motor fuels and user fees.
The first federal gasoline tax in the United States was created on June 6, 1932 with the enactment of the Revenue Act of 1932, not in 1956 as you suggest.
In a 2007 interview, then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters stated that only about 60% of federal gas taxes are used for highway and bridge construction. The remaining 40% goes to earmarked programs. Revenues from other taxes are also used in federal transportation programs.
In other words, the motor fuel tax doesn’t even come close to paying for the federal highway system. It’s supported by direct taxpayer subsidy — pure socialism.
Go here and learn something before you make an ass out of yourself in print.
As the kids say, “NO U”. It looks like YOU are the one who’s made as ass of himself, Mr. Pham. Now admit you were wrong and apologize to me for making it personal.
Gerrib, what do you think GE gets out of high speed rail? If you want to demonize GM for destroying rail in San Francisco (pretty bad argument since SF has one of the better commuter rails in the nation), then what about GE pushing high speed rail? Obama just hired one of the GE execs to head his economic panel. That panel is pushing high speed rail. GE has several deals to provide high speed rail in China and is considering bidding some of those products for both Florida and California.
Many of us here are for limited government, so that the will of the market determines winner and losers. So reading you whine about GM is pathetic, particularly when you use it as an example for a larger, more intrustive federal government. It’s just hypocrisy when you whine about GM thuggery while touting how great it was we bailed them out.
Read Roga, he’s got good information too!
Well Rickl, the idea that trains could replace our cars is absurd. Trains are quite competitive against horses, but that’s about it.
Despite having well-developed rail systems that American liberals envy, Europeans still own 0.54 cars per person, which includes countries like Romania where cars are virtually non-existent. Sure, Belgians can take a train to Paris, but they still own 5.2 million cars.
But lets indulge the idea that we’re going to replace our cars with trains, and ignore the fact that it would force half of us to walk forty miles a day just to get back and forth to the train stations, ten miles distant from our endpoints, adding 10 or 11 hours to our commute time.
Every day in this country 124 million people decide to take the car, while only 79,671 people decide to take Amtrak. So for every person who realizes the infinite advantages of rail travel and choses the train, 1,556 other people go by car.
Well, we’re going to force them to chose otherwise. So, Amtrak needs to expand its current employment by a factor of 1,566, from 19,000 total employees to 29,564,000. Yes, that would mean 10% of the US population would be employed to shuttle the other 40% of the population from point A to point B, or rather, to within a couple dozen miles of point A and point B. Perhaps another 10% of the population could be employed to pull rickshaws the rest of the way.
Currently 353 are Amtrak police officers, so those will grow to 533,708. What will they do? I’m not sure, but given that trains already cause 1,000 fatalities a year (with only 0.02% of the population riding them), perhaps they’ll photograph the 1.5 million annual deaths under the new system of “safe travel.” In truth I doubt the deaths would jump by nearly that amount, as freight traffic would be unchanged and train/vehicle collisions would be eliminated. Then again, walking the rails to get home might become much more common in a US without cars, when we’re a fully railroaded country.
So I think we can rule out any possibility that rail will ever make a significant contribution to our passenger transportation infrastructure. Cars may seem inefficient, but how inefficient was it for me and my two new friends to have our own train from Louisville to Indianapolis? Not light-rail mind you, a full-blown train capable of transcontinental journeys. And it’s not that more trains or more train investment would’ve made a difference. The train was there. The seats were there. Nobody (except us three fools) chose to ride on it.
The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, U.S. 39 Stat. 355, was enacted on July 11, 1916. The Federal Aid Highway Act was passed in 1921
So you’re suggesting long-distance car travel displaced train travel in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and not the late 1950s and early 1960s as we all imagine? Excuse me if I laugh contemptuously. When were you born?
These two acts, and subsequent legislation, defined the Federal Aid Road program to develop a gigantic national highway system.
Mmmm, yes. Subsequent legislation like — the Highway Act of 1956! Which is where I began. Good grief.
The first federal gasoline tax in the United States was created on June 6, 1932 with the enactment of the Revenue Act of 1932, not in 1956 as you suggest.
Gosh, I don’t remember saying squat about the first gasoline tax, nor do I see why it matters in the least. The question for the class was: what paid for all those Interstates? The answer is: the Federal gas tax. (The rest of the class understands, as apparently you do not, that very little of the long-distance car travel that arguably might be replaced by high-speed rail trips takes place on Route 66, or on any other portion of the 70+ years old pre-Interstate highway system, so we couldn’t care less how that was built.)
In a 2007 interview, then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters stated that only about 60% of federal gas taxes are used for highway and bridge construction. The remaining 40% goes to earmarked programs.
Good heavens, do you not realize that this statement says that federal gas taxes pay for highways and for other things besides? That is, gas taxes subsidize other government activities, general income taxes do not subsidize highways? Is English your first language?
Now admit you were wrong
I was wrong. I should have said nothing. It is unkind to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
and apologize to me for making it personal.
I apologize. Ordinarily I am gracious and do not make fun of the gross handicaps of people. In my defense, let me observe that your cognitive deficits were initially less obvious than they are now.
Dear Mr. Pham:
Your attempt to disguise your evident lack of simple research skills has failed. You stand exposed as a blowhard and historical illiterate. While I wish you well, I find I have no more use for you. I therefore bid you good day, sir.
Sincerely,
B Lewis
Make sure you say it like this, B.
B. Lewis, you inadvertently bolstered Carl’s case by stating:
Restating your sentence: Only sixty percent of the gas tax goes for the intended purpose of road work. The other 40% is siphoned off for other government expenditures.
The correct response is “Gee Carl, I guess I was mistaken. It happens occasionally.” Then move on.