Britain doesn’t do a whole lot of manufacturing and very little natural resource extraction. It is not a farm or mineral exporter. It is located on an island where anything going any distance to somewhere else in Europe is going by water.

Hence, little call for rail freight.

Much of the role of rail freight in general in Europe is taken up by water shipment on the seas that surround it, and the major rivers like the Rhine, Danube, Vistula, which conveniently serve Silesia, the Rhur, etc.

Airport bonds are not paid back by revenue. Airports purposefully indebt themselves to the maximum bonding capacity they have, and then simply pay the interest and continually roll the debt over. This is why Denver, for example, hasn’t paid off any of its construction debt, and why other airports like DFW, for example, simply go more and more into debt as their bonding capacity expands.

There is no intention of ever paying this debt off.

First and foremost, putting a train down the interstate median would require substantial re-engineering of overpasses and a tremendous cost. How are you going to get a train under this, highman?

Still have to build bridges. Then you cut off both sides of the freeway with tracks; police and emergency vehicles wouldn’t be able to cross the median.

Resurfacing one side sometimes entails rerouting traffic from one side to the other. With tracks down the middle, this becomes impossible or very expensive.

Please no more “center of I-5″ comments.

If you assume all the air passengers would have picked up the tab on the $285 million in local and state grants for non-passenger airports and tax on the bonds of about $150 million, then fares would have had to have been be about $0.69 cents higher (out of an average fare of in 1998 given the 625 million plus air passenger boardings. That said, the tax benefit on the tax-free bonds doesn’t actually go issuer (the airport), it goes to the people who hold the bonds. So the idea that this is a subsidy to the airport (or any other government agency) is a bit of a fallacy. Saying bond revenues should be taxed is like saying when you take out a loan to buy a home you should pay 35% on the principle of that loan as income in addition to your interest on the loan.

As for Europe, the air fare tax rates are actually pretty close as a percentage to the US, but the fares are significalty higher to begin due to higher airport fees, higher traffic management fees and fuel surcharges and fuel taxes which are built into the fares. A 300 mile trip in a high density market in the US has an average pre-tax one way fare of about $85. In Europe that same average one-way trip costs about $126 pre-tax.