The major American urban centers, lining both the east and west coasts, are fast running out of fresh land for more people. But merely reciting the smart-growth mantras about more compact centers creates no real markets. Investment in convenient connections and mobility choices that don’t depend entirely on cars might. More investment in rail is a part of the answer.
Even though Congress still doesn’t get it, rail is behaving like a Warren Buffett value stock through this lingering recession. Those weary stock trackers on CNBC pointed out today that while the broader stock index has taken a dive over the last year, the transportation sector has held its ground. No thanks to airlines for sure. The strength is in rail holdings.
That strength is of course about commercial freight lines. But it makes we Citistaters think about passengers. The same day, the Wall Street Journal, while reporting a suspension in Amtrak’s Acela service due to cracks in shock and sway absorbers, said that Amtrak’s service in the Washington-Boston corridor now carries more passengers every day than U.S. Airways and Delta airline shuttles combined.
Still, appropriations for Amtrak are routinely excoriated as wasteful subsidies, while taxpayers have “lended” America West a bucketful of cash and may have to feather U.S. Airways flight from bankruptcy within the next year.
Watch how fast some congressmen will call for giving up on higher speed train service, now that the Acela train sets are showing some structural weaknesses. Cars and vans are recalled for defects every year, but nobody suggests reducing service to roads and bridges.
Perhaps it’s because Amtrak is a semi-public organization, like the postal service, that we feel such contempt for its business practices. The freight side of rail, after a brutal decade of consolidations, manages to make money for its investors. Even by the pound, passengers won’t pay what freight does. But imagine for a moment a federal government that maintained a sound track system, a backbone network covering the country. Something like the Interstate system, including formulas for cost sharing with states. If we treated rail like roads, maybe they’d be sustainable as well as popular.
(See Neal Peirce’s July 10 weblog entry, Amtrak, Rails, Regions.)