Driving on to Irrelevance: That Or a 21st Century Train System
Thomas Downs / Oct 09 2009
For Release Friday, October 9, 2009 Citiwire.net
There is an old saying that Americans will always do the right thing, but only after they have tried everything else first.
Unfortunately, it's hard to make the transition. Latest example: visceral opposition to high-speed rail by those who should be thinking more innovatively. Consider Robert Samuelson's recent column in the Washington Post- "A Rail Boondoggle, Moving at High Speed." Samuelson cites the usual statistics-that we are an auto culture, that not enough people ride trains, that the costs are high. So, he concludes, President Obama's commitment to high-speed passenger rail is a fool's errand.
But Samuelson's among those who has been playing this song for over 20 years. Their message has turned into a weird anomaly given what is happening around the rest of the globe.
First, lets look at the true subsidy costs of a mono focus on highway investment. At least $100 billion of state, county, and city general funds are invested every year in highways and highway costs. Those are direct subsidies to the highway system, outside of any "user pay" trust fund. The federal government has started to invest general funds into highways, in part because no one wants to actually have to pay for the costs of highways with an increase in user fees.
Second, there are over 2 million Americans injured every year on America's roads, at an annual medical cost of over $200 billion. Saving half of that cost would pay the entire cost of health care reform over the next decade.
Third, the energy and environmental costs of our auto culture drive our defense and medical costs in ways that he have all agreed to turn a blind eye to-though the true cost is probably in the range of a half trillion dollars a year.
If we can manage to ignore the $750 billion cost of our highway fixation, then Samuelson's argument makes some kind of weird sense-though you have to suspend logic, economics, and global experience to get there.
Why has every industrialized nation in the world made, and continues to make, large scale investments in high-speed rail? That's what Samuelson's argument can't reach. If you look at the roll call of nations with high-speed passenger rail, it includes Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, China, and South Korea. Could all of them be wrong? China alone is pursuing a 3,000-mile high-speed network. What propels all of these industrial nations to invest so seriously in this mode of transportation?
They are making hardheaded decisions about their nation's future and their economic self-interest. We have just started to do so.
In the U.S. House of Representative, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has marked up a reauthorization bill for highways and transit. The bill proposes to spend $550 billion over the next 6 years. The vast majority of those funds would go to the highway program. The bill would allocate $50 billion over the life of the bill for high-speed passenger rail. That's less than 10 percent of our national transportation funding. The Samuelsons of the world may call it a waste. I see a humongous greater waste-the $750 billion we're incurring, year-in and year-out, in the indirect costs we incur by failing to build alternatives to our transportation monoculture. That's the unconscionable economic waste.
I am not suggesting that highways are going to be anything other than the dominant mode of transportation in the United States for a long time. I am suggesting that there are corridors, less than 500 miles long, where density and economic activity make high speed passenger rail the only viable mobility investment. The total trip time of air travel in those corridors, combined with the energy costs, makes high speed rail the logical choice and a far better choice than the costs of expanding highway capacity in those congested and dense corridors. For those trips, high-speed rail delivers you to the heart of the city, not to a remote airport. I am also suggesting that there is simply no comparison between the safety of a train trip verses the safety of an auto trip. In the end, we need a broader set of mobility choices than we have created for ourselves. The public seems to understand this, as editorial and public opinion polling is making clear.
What is discouraging in this debate is that someone as bright as Samuelson cannot think in broader, more expansive terms about the American future. We can do better. Yes, we can!
Tom Downs is chairman of the North American Board of Veolia Transportation and a former president of Amtrak. His e-mail is tmdowns1@aol.com.
In August, the U.S. unemployment rate reached 6.1 percent — the highest level in five years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rate has steadily risen after reaching 5 percent in April and 5.7 percent in July.
U.S. employers shed 84,000 jobs in August — the eighth-consecutive month of significant cuts. Since January, 605,000 jobs have been eliminated.
The rail industry hasn’t been immune from workforce reductions. On the freight side, the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Inc. furloughed 33 operating, mechanical and engineering workers at June’s end primarily because the 745-mile regional is dealing with a downturn in paper, lumber and other forest products business.
The U.S. Class Is are employing fewer people, too. As of mid-July, the large roads’ workforce totaled 164,644, down 0.8 percent (or 1,383 employees) compared with July 2007’s level, according to the most recent Surface Transportation Board employment data. The Class Is employed fewer train and engine-service, transportation (other than T&E), and maintenance of equipment and stores workers than last year, as well as fewer professional and administrative staffers, and executives and staff assistants.
On the passenger-rail side, the Chicago Transit Authority recently eliminated 43 jobs, including nine management positions. By year's end, the agency expects to cut a total of 80 administrative positions through layoffs and attrition. The Sacramento Regional Transit District and San Diego County’s North County Transit District also are contemplating job cuts because of reduced state funding, and Miami-Dade Transit might trim its workforce because of budget woes.
Smaller workforces will continue to be the norm for a number of industries nationwide. In June, 31 percent of the respondents to the Business Roundtable’s second-quarter chief executive officer survey said their company's workforces would decrease over the next six months compared with 22 percent of first-quarter survey respondents. An association of CEOs at leading corporations, the roundtable solicited responses from 110 of its 160 members.
Whether the five-year-high national rate means the economy is entering or already in a recession is irrelevant to perhaps thousands of railroaders and workers in other industries who already are or soon might be out of a job.
"BACK TO THE CITY" -- IS THIS THE MOMENT? August 24, 2008 by Neil Peirce Washington Post
City or suburb? For decades that's been the choice for most Americans. Suburbs have been the hands-down winners -- by the millions, we've rushed to the urban edge.
But could we be on the cusp of an historic "back to the city" shift? The case is building.
Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, says we're in the midst of a "demographic inversion." Check such cities as Atlanta and Washington, he suggests -- they're beginning to resemble historic Vienna or Paris, the centuries-old pattern in which the people of means chose to live near the vital city centers, while the poor were left to live in the less expensive outskirts.
Atlanta, for example, is seeing so many better-off whites move in that its decades-old status as a predominantly black and low-income city may soon be reversed. Conversely, suburban Clayton and DeKalb counties are already registering black majorities while simultaneously serving as immigrant gateways.
A parallel switch has been under way in Washington, D.C., for several years as young professionals have poured into neighborhoods such as the 14th and U Street corridors that were an epicenter of the 1968 riots. Chicago has registered sensational gains in downtown living. The same phenomenon is being registered continentwide -- strong on the West Coast, even cropping up in such Sun Belt cities as Charlotte and Houston.
Why this shift, now? Industries, with their smokestacks, noise and pollutants, have largely disappeared from city centers. Random urban street violence, the scourge of urban life in the 1970s and '80s, has subsided dramatically.
And, writes Ehrenhalt in a recent New Republic article, today's youth, bored by the cul-de-sac world they grew up in, are the cutting edge of the new population move: "It is striking how pervasive the pro-city sensibility is within this generation, particularly among its elite."
The cities' revival is even broader -- not just young singles and married couples but "mingles" (unmarried and gay couples) and "jingles" (ex-suburban empty-nesters), notes William Hudnut, former Indianapolis mayor and Urban Land Institute senior fellow.
There's a big cautionary note here -- we're not about to witness abandonment of the suburbs, or rapid movement back to all our city cores. "But we are living," Ehrenhalt notes, "at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the 20th century is coming to an end."
So what are the affluent and their middle-class friends seeking? "Walkable urbanism" -- places with convenient mixes of shops, apartments and brownstones, parks and entertainment. That's the formula Brookings Institution fellow Christopher Leinberger spells out in his recent book, "The Option of Urbanism." Such spots, Leinberger notes, don't need to be downtown -- in many areas, they're the classy, rising suburban town centers, often served by regional rail transit.
What makes these shifts special, notes Ehrenhalt, is their signal that "an America that seemed destined for ever-increasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability." All this was occurring, Leinberger notes, before the recent surge of gasoline prices to the $4-a-gallon range. It will gain momentum as the number of new childless households expands rapidly. A generation ago, 50 percent of U.S. households had children at home, but over 80 percent of the coming years' households will likely be singles and childless couples. That means less move-out to suburbs to avoid problematic inner-city schools.
For the first time in our lifetimes, Leinberger argues, advocates of urbanism "have the wind to our back."
But don't expect all the new population density to crop up in traditional cities and suburban towns, argues Robert Lang of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute. With Census figures suggesting the U.S. population will reach 400 million in 2039 -- several years earlier than previously forecast -- Lang foresees a major share of new residential and town growth occurring "atop" closer-in post-World War II tract-style suburbs.
The concept is an intriguing one. Many malls with their acres of parking will be remade into mixed-use and multifamily housing. People may still drive to work but will (like our grandparents) drive less frequently -- taking an evening stroll from home to shops or a bar or coffee shop, for example. Telecommuting will increase. Lang's term is "micro-walkability. He sees "islands of urbanity -- and sociability -- in seas of suburbia."
In fact, Lang says, such "archipelagoes of walkable space" are already cropping up in such archetypical post-World War II suburban counties as Fairfax (Virginia), Orange (California) and Johnson (Kansas). A decade ago, population increase would have impelled many people to forsake these counties for still farther-out locations. But no more, Lang predicts -- the closer-in counties, he contends, will keep on filling up as our "almost decadent use of space, resource consumptive, damaging the planet, starts to decline." Call it "return to the city" (or "old suburb") or whatever you like, it sounds like sensationally good news.
Reprinted from projo.com, The Providence Journal
David Warsh: Trains and the future shape of cities
01:00 AM EST on Thursday, January 3, 2008
DAVID WARSH
BOSTON
TO GAIN a little perspective on the housing bubble, compare it in your mind’s eye with the great slow-motion changes in real-estate values that have taken place over the last century and a half in response to the advent of the railroad and the automobile. John Stilgoe, a professor of visual and environmental studies as Harvard University, has pondered the implications of these developments for the landscape as well as anyone.
In Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene, published in 1983, he described the triumph of railroads in the years after 1880, when they re-arranged the American landscape, creating suburbs, transforming manufacturing districts, robbing small towns of their vitality and linking formerly distinct cities in a series of metropolitan corridors, usually powered by electricity.
Then, just as rapidly, the golden age of railroads was over, with the advent of Henry Ford’s famous Model A. Something like a third of all rail passengers defected to automobiles during the 1920s alone. Traffic declined another 40 percent during the first four years of the Great Depression, and never again approached its former peaks, despite massive population growth.
New York and New England became laboratories for the automobile, “the testing place of a sprawling, irregular pattern of real estate development, the automobile exurb.” No one who carefully read Stilgoe would have been surprised by the spectacular growth of Wal-Mart in the 1980s and ’90s — a canny Arkansas businessman taking advantage of the Interstate Highway System, cheap oil, globalization, modern finance and the computer to create business districts where there had been farms.
Now Stilgoe is back with Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape. “An economic and cultural tsunami is about to transform the United States,” he writes; the question, he says, is not if but when. “Return [of the train] will alter everyday life more dramatically than the . .” . arrival of personal computers, Internet connections, or cell phones . Half-forgotten cities that lie along the nation’s obscure operating railroad routes — Lynchburg, Va., for example — will be transformed, he says. So will be regions that now lie far from any currently useable track — National Parks, ski facilities, Lake Tahoe, Moosehead Lake.
What will drive the change? Rising fuel costs and intractable highway congestion, Stilgoe says. He barely mentions global warming — that goes beyond the scope of the “scenario analysis” he favors, at least for now, but of course if it begins to take on the atmosphere of crisis it will be the single biggest factor in accelerating the changes that he expects. Railroad locomotives account for just 1 percent of national oil consumption. Electrification permits faster acceleration and braking, and so lets more trains operate in a given space; electric locomotives pull more, require less maintenance and pollute very little. The demand for fast and clean electric trains will increase the attractiveness of nuclear power.
Who’s making the change? Corporate managers, savvy long-term investors, real-estate developers, and speculators — the same people who, for the middle 50 years of the 20th Century, were committed to a model focused on the automobile. In the last 20 years, these same players have begun to swing round to railroads. It isn’t necessary to have a grand unified plan. Stilgoe is a believer in mechanisms of “implicit conspiracy.”
“Without active effort, often without knowing each other, individuals — and corporations — may allow something massive to happen because a small part of it benefits them.”
What’s his evidence? Stilgoe scans the trade magazines — not just Railway Age, but Modern Materials Handling and Commercial Real Estate Investment. He reads such books as Main Lines: Rebirth of the North American Railroads, 1970-2000, by Richard Saunders. He practices what he preaches and gets out plenty and looks around. But the evidence he finds most compelling are the questions that his former students get in touch to ask. He is a little short on numbers here: “Bit by bit the questions reveal where so much of the now-hidden late-1990s dot-com-boom money went. It went to wait for the train.”
What will the world look like, after the return to rails? Autos and airliners distribute population, writes Stilgoe; railroads concentrate it. “Assume the train as a given, and suddenly many small satellite cities, often with very low real estate values, become attractive to real estate investors.” Old roadbeds will be upgraded, rights-of-way previously converted to nature trails will be reclaimed and converted to high-speed passenger service. (Think not? A prime early example is Massachusetts’ new Greeenbush line along the shore towns southeast of Boston.)
My favorite bellwether among those that Stilgoe mentions is the one closest to home — the Grand Trunk Line spur in Cambridge, Mass. Today this single track is nearly invisible as it snakes out of Somerville’s Boynton yards, across busy Cambridge Street, through the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, over the Charles River alongside the Boston University bridge, bypassing Boston’s North and South stations in the process, arriving finally on the doorstep of the 200-acre parcel where Harvard University plans to build its new science park.
Already the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has arranged the buildings it has recently constructed above the Grand Trunk siding to allow a double track to be installed — the fundamental improvement required to allow for passenger travel. Such “architectural evidence of assumed future change” is everywhere to be found among the railroads, says Stilgoe. I, for one, believe him.
“However difficult it is to imagine a grass-grown railroad track becoming a high-speed, heavily-trafficked route, it is still more difficult to imagine grass growing through the pavement of interstate highways,” he writes. What about the vast changes in relative real-estate prices — urban, railroad suburban and beltway — that would follow in the wake of such a reversal of fortune? Such a technological turnabout, dwarfing the dislocations of the housing bubble, is much easier to contemplate if you have read Stilgoe’s book.
David Warsh, a former columnist and reporter for The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, runs economicprincipals.com.
Don Phillips Speech at the Railway Age Conference [ Publisher’s Note: Every now and then some writing comes our way that is so compelling, we simply have to share it with our readers. The following excerpts, from a speech by noted journalist Don Phillips to the recent Railway Age conference in Washington is just such an item. Our thanks to rail advocate Fritz Plous of Chicago for these notes.Additional thanks to Michael Testerman of the Virginia Association of Railway Patrons for sharing this information with CvilleRail.] Don Phillips of the International Herald Tribune was the luncheon speaker on Day 1 of the conference. The following represents my notes on his speech and Q.&A, plus some table talk I picked up from him before the speech. Note: No railroad CEOs or USDOT bureaucrats were harmed during the preparation of this transcript---Fritz Plous. This is the fifth speech I’ve been asked to do for a railroad or airline group in the last three months. I do not take fees for these speeches. I pay my travel expenses myself. The most recent speech I gave was out in Kansas City, last week. I will start by telling you the same two things I have told all these other audiences.
This country is in terrible shape when it comes to transportation. We are not facing a transportation crisis or headed for a transportation crisis. We are in one now, and nobody’s doing anything about it.
Do not count on a Democratic administration and a Democratic congress—which is what we’re likely to get—to do anything about it. It could actually get worse.
Amtrak’s ridership is going up—big-time. There’s a simple reason for it: There’s no other way to go. Flying and driving have become impossible in many parts of this country.
Let me ask a question. Most of you traveled to come to this conference today. Does anybody here actually like flying? (No hands go up, people shift nervously in their seats).
I like the sensation of flying, but I do not like the experience of getting on a plane. I have vowed that except in cases of extreme emergency I will not fly from a U.S. airport because of the TSA. If I had to go to Europe again [he lived there for three years] I would take a train to Montreal and fly from Dorval. Everybody else does security better than we do. The Canadian TSA people are at least courteous.
(He talks about the growing congestion caused by increased freight and passenger traffic on the U.S. railroads and how it can be solved only by building additional infrastructure).
Mixing passengers and freight will take subsidies—massive subsidies. The available track mileage that the railroads do not want for freight is vanishing rapidly. Almost all track mileage left is in use now.
Let me make a prediction: There will not be significant cooperation between the freight railroads and the passenger-rail advocates for the next few years. Groups like NARP need to be talking—now—to the CEOs of the freight railroads. At this time there is no coordination. The freight people go up to Capitol Hill to talk to congress about what they need, and they come down again. The passenger advocates go up the Hill and come back down again. I’m not sure the two groups even run into each other in the hallways.
One reason the freight railroads do not want to run more passenger trains is that Amtrak does not pay them enough for the use of their track. The compensation has to be adjusted.
High taxes continue to be used as an excuse for not investing federal funds in rail. “High taxes” have become more than just a phrase. Every candidate now has to campaign on a promise to reduce taxes and has to reassure the voters that he believes taxes are too high.
So the country is not ready to deal with it immobility. The more I see and the more I learn, the more I like Ike. He created our modern mobility when he decided to build the Interstate highway system. He had a vision, he got people to go along with it, and he got them to agree that we had to raise taxes in order to make the vision come true. That’s how we got the federal motor-fuel tax and the Motor Fuel Trust Fund.
Recently I have been attending some very disturbing press conferences. I attended the one announcing the latest AASHTO report--Combating Congestion through Leadership, Innovation, and Resources. Even the railroads and the truck lines are now getting behind AASHTO and pushing the same report because they have seen the congestion first-hand, and they’ve seen how it affects their operations. But you know what? When I go to these press conferences the press isn’t there. The trade press is there, but the mainstream media aren’t there. Congestion is a nationwide problem, and it’s being documented, but when the reports come out, it’s like a tree fell in the forest and nobody heard it.
Alex Kummant is going to start ordering equipment—soon. I’ve been out riding Amtrak a lot. It’s getting better at on-time performance. The crews and the other employees are getting nicer—except at Chicago Union Station. I was trying to board No. 3 for Kansas City last week and the Amtrak people had no idea how they were going to load us. They led us down the platform and we all started piling up at one door. Nobody could hear any instructions because of the noise in the train-shed, and the diesel fumes were awful. When we couldn’t board the train everybody started surging down to another door, but the door wasn’t open, so we surged back to the first door. Evidently they expected everybody on the train to board through one car. You know how they finally decided to prioritize our boarding? They asked, “How many are in your party?” They decided to board the large groups first. The young woman next to me was about to have an asthma attack because of the diesel fumes. She said she would be O.K. once she was inside the train, and she put her arm in mine and said, “Let’s say we’re a two.”
Congestion has become a nationwide problem, but it’s not viewed that way because most of the congestion is experienced only by people from the local area. Wherever you go, people will say, “We got a terrible traffic problem here in East Bejeezus, you know that?” But they think it’s only them. They don’t drive around the country and see that it’s national. My son-in-law out in Denver is a stay-at-home Mr. Mom. His wife is a doctor and makes good money, so he stays home and takes care of the kids. Sometimes he’ll drive up to the mountains in the middle of the week and go skiing. He loves to ski and will take any chance he can get to get out of town and up on the slopes.
But recently he had a long period where he wasn’t able to get away during the week so he had to go skiing on the weekend, like most people in Denver do, and for the first time he found himself in the middle of a huge traffic jam made up of skiers trying to get out to the mountains. He was stuck for hours, and he was totally amazed to find that this happens all the time.
That’s how most American drivers are. They only know about their own congestion problems. They don’t realize it’s going on all over the country. Most of the Interstates in the Eastern part of the country are now over capacity. The media don’t know about it because there are no good transportation reporters out there. That’s why I left the Washington Post. My editor was not really interested in transportation problems, only airline safety and security. Sept. 11 changed American journalism in a very remarkable way. I had been doing aviation-safety pieces, but now they said I had to cover homeland security. I wanted to cover general transportation, but the editor literally said to me, “We don’t want to see any more of that crap about railroads.” That’s exactly what she said: “We don’t want to see any more of that crap about railroads.”
Europe is different. Europe understands everything that’s going on—and more. Europe is in a near-panic over mobility. They know it’s the key to economic integration and development, so they’re spending money like nobody ever heard of. They’ve created a whole new science of tunneling and they’re building 20-mile, 30-mile base tunnels—a tunnel under the Matterhorn—to move trains without having to climb and curve and gain altitude. One of the base tunnels is costing $20 billion. This country is not prepared to spend that kind of money on transportation.
The Greens run things in Europe and they have fallen in love with railroads. In the U.S. the Greens are still in a mentality of “saving” things, not building things. But in Europe the Greens understand that building new railroads is one of the best things you can do to save the environment.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is viewed worldwide—and even in some parts of the Bush administration—as a dismal failure. They’ve dragged Michael Jackson back in to try to fix it. He’s the only one in the administration that seems to know what’s wrong. Michael Jackson and Kip Hawley, the head of the Transportation Security Administration — he’s good too, although he has an almost impossible task in turning that place around. In Europe they don’t place so much attention on what’s in your luggage. They focus on your eyes. They pull you aside and ask you questions and watch how you react facially. The TSA is starting to do this too.
I was afraid Amtrak was about to go off in the same direction as the TSA [rigorous luggage inspections]. Two Amtrak security directors were forced out because they wanted to go in this direction. They wanted to make Amtrak look like aviation.
Jim Oberstar I like. He has always understood what kind of a passenger-rail system this country needs, and now for the first time in his career he is chairman of a committee (Transportation & Infrastructure) that can do something about it. He is not being led by anyone. This is something he wants to do.
But he also wants to re-regulate the freight railroads, and some of the railroads are giving him ammunition. Jim McClellan at NS is saying that if we get re-regulation the railroads we’ll not be able to raise the capital to add capacity. That will leave them with only one way to stay profitable: use their capacity scarcity to get the rates up, run the cheap traffic off the railroad.
Things have got to get worse before they get better in this country. Europe has a planned economy. The U.S. has an accidental economy. The Greens in Europe are much more sophisticated than Greens in the U.S. They understand how to build, not just save.
I believe the states and the railroads can get together with the feds and do projects to enhance capacity. The railroads still have a lot of suspicion of the federal government, but that is changing. The railroads are doing things today that would have been heresy 10 years ago.
The French—they are different from you and me. They have now electrified most of the main lines in their country, and almost all of the electricity for those lines comes from nuclear plants. They can keep their people moving without petroleum.
In the early part of the 20th century the electrical utilities in America tried to convince the railroads to electrify. They offered them electricity at a discount in return for the railroads’ letting the utilities use their right of way for their long-distance transmission lines. It would have been a great deal for the U.S. railroad industry, but the railroads turned the utilities down. And when the utilities in California offered the same deal to the railroads out there in the 1970s, Gov. Ronald Reagan squashed it. We do things differently in this country.
