According to an article in the Richmond Time-Dispatch by Eugene Trani, former president of Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia has received more than $75 million in federal stimulus money to spend on high-speed rail between Richmond and Washington, D.C. The money will go toward improvements on 11.5 miles of track north of Fredericksburg. An additional $10 million will be used to improve a railroad bypass on the outskirts of Richmond.
The question of whether money used toward high-speed rail is well-spent was one of the topics addressed at a Cato Institute briefing on Capitol Hill on April 9, where transportation experts Randal O’Toole (a senior fellow at Cato) and Ronald Utt (a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation) spoke.
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and other federal sources, the cost per passenger mile for air travel is 13 cents, of which one-tenth of a cent is paid through federal subsidy. For automobiles, the cost per passenger mile is 23 cents, of which one-half of a cent is paid through taxpayer subsidy. For Amtrak, the cost per passenger mile is 56 cents, of which 22 cents is subsidized by taxpayers. For transit (e.g., light rail or subways), the cost per passenger mile is 85 cents, with 61 cents coming from tax funding.
After the program ended, O’Toole answered a few questions about the prospects for high-speed rail in Virginia.
He said that what the government wants to do is “to spend a lot of money running trains a little faster than they run today. We’re not talking about bullet trains. We’re talking about running trains at a top speed of 110 miles an hour, which means an average speed of about 70 miles an hour.”
Continuing, O’Toole noted, “That’s not going to get a lot of people out of their cars, but it is going to cost taxpayers a lot of money. We’re talking about spending a lot of money to get very little benefit for anybody.”
With regard to how best to spend federal stimulus money to improve transportation in Virginia, O’Toole said:
“I think the way to spend the money would be to give loans to states and local areas that would be repaid out of user fees. Because if a transportation project can be repaid out of user fees, we know it’s worthwhile, we know that users want it. But if it requires huge subsidies that the users are never going to come close to paying for, then we shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
O’Toole, author of the 2010 book, Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It, recommended that people interested in more information about high-speed rail and related topics should visit his blog, The Anti-Planner, and the web site of the American Dream Coalition.
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Comments
Cato= Libertarians. Of course they are opposed to government spending. There are a couple of inconsistencies in Dr. O'Toole's critique:
1. He's right that that its a cheaper substitute to true High Speed Rail. The trouble is, Cato is against true HSR, too. If you are categorically against government spending, then you logically should want to spend less, not more.
2. What is the particular advantage of government loans? They don't guarantee that any particular project will be more businesslike. Its just another way of offering a government subsidy. So far, we've spent $50 billion in loans for GM. Is that a businesslike arrangement? That's enough for three good projects in the Midwest.
We can easily afford these projects. The cost of a typical HSR line of about 300 miles would be in the range of $15 billion. We could build two for the cost of our wars until Memorial Day.
Let's not kid ourselves that these make money. Just build good projects.
O'Toole is not a very good source on urban planning as he is in the pocket of interests who do not believe that urban planning is necessary. O'Toole thinks that the solution to our traffic and infrastructure woes is to do nothing and hope that in our apathy and sloth and unwillingness to spend revenue our problems will sort themselves out. This is the problem with libertarianism - it simply is not a realistic philosophy.
If I were uninformed, unintelligent, and extremely gullible, I might believe a word of what was said here. Since I'm not, I don't. Both government and non-government agencies have looked extensively into light rail and come up with similar conclusions: light rail will cost taxpayers less money than other transportation projects/fixes. Furthermore, it does reduce the burden of transportation on the environment (or are we all drinking the humans-do-no-harm-to-the-environment juice here?).
The United States is basically in the position of having to build high speed rail from scratch and is posed with two options: incrementally upgrade the existing privately owned rail system to enable it to carry passengers (again) at 110mph or construct a completely separate true high speed rail capability that a can operate up to 220mph. In either case, the start-up costs are going to be high and initial investments by the government or private industry will make it look like it is not cost competitive with air travel or automobiles. But if you include the sunk costs over time in airports, roads and other infrastructure for all entities, the cost picture comparison picture will change considerably.
A 2009 report commissioned by the UK govt found that any CO2 benefits from high speed rail as compared to air travel are likely to be sucked up by the energy spent and CO2 emitted when building the line.
One needs only to look at the expensive empty buses in Charlottesville (including the free trolley) to know that light rail for most places is hugely wasteful. Newsflash to who seem to only like technology that isn't useful to humans. People like their cars!
O'Toole documents extensively in multiple US cities that these projects have been expensive disasters. To attack him as being the pockets of special interest is a convenient ad-hominem method of ignoring his very well researched work.
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