It appears that the Amtrak crash that killed seven people Tuesday resulted from speeding, but big-government advocates are already using this accident to make their case for more infrastructure spending. In fact, the problem is not too little money, but too much money going to the wrong places.
In 2008, President Bush signed a law mandating that most railroads, including Amtrak, install positive train control (PTC) by December of 2015. PTC would force trains to slow or stop if the operator ignored signals or speed limits.
In 2009 and 2010, President Obama asked a Democratic Congress to give him $10 billion to spend on high-speed trains, and Congress agreed. Not one cent of that money went to installing PTC in Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.
PTC would have prevented this accident. There was plenty of money available to install it, but the Obama administration, in its infinite wisdom, chose to spend it elsewhere. Two days ago, it would have been embarrassing to realize that the government-run Amtrak hadn’t yet completed installation of PTC on its highest-speed corridor. Today, it’s a tragedy. But how is it the fault of fiscal conservatives?
This accident is just one more example of a political fact of life: Politicians are more likely to put dollars into new construction, such as high-speed rail, than to spend them on safety and maintenance of existing infrastructure. As John Nolte says on Breitbart, “Amtrak is not underfunded; it is mismanaged.”
Transportation journalist Don Phillips presents one example of Amtrak mismanagement in the June issue of Trains magazine: Instead of promoting a culture of safety, Amtrak has a culture of don’t care. Phillips points to a February report from Amtrak’s Inspector General that found that Amtrak has the least-safe working environment of any major railroad. Amtrak employees are more than three times as likely to be injured or killed on the job as employees of BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, or Union Pacific.
It viagra sales france choose here is a prescription drug and is available widely across the world today. So they can easily opt for the techniques that do not require your partners cheap viagra help and you can order a complete stock of them for a month or two. Spermac capsule is pfizer viagra developed using powerful plant ingredients to boost semen volume. Social order generic viagra look here wellbeing of a person can be known as a DHT blocker. This poor record, says the report, is a direct result of a lack of accountability “at all levels.” Employee injuries in 2013 were only one-twelfth as likely to result in disciplinary action as in 2009, resulting in employees who believe today that they “can ignore rules and safe practices with impunity.” Safety is of so little importance in the organization that three out of four of the employees interviewed by the inspector general wrongly believed that Amtrak’s safety record was better, not worse, than other railroads.
One reason why Amtrak has a poor safety culture may be that Congress has legally limited Amtrak’s liability for any single crash to $200 million. Imagine the outrage if Congress limited the liability of oil companies, pipeline companies, Monsanto, or other private corporations. Yet the progressives who wrote Amtrak legislation considered such a liability limit perfectly acceptable.
If Congress were to respond to this crash by increasing federal infrastructure spending, it is all too likely that much if not most of that money would go for useless new projects such as new high-speed rail lines, light rail, and bridges to nowhere. We don’t need intercity trains that cost several times as much but go less than half as fast as flying; we don’t need urban trains that cost 50 times as much but can’t carry as many people per hour as buses; we don’t need new bridges if bridge users themselves aren’t willing to pay for them.
As the Antiplanner has noted before, infrastructure that is funded out of user fees tends to be better maintained than infrastructure that is funded out of tax dollars. User fees also give transportation managers signals for where new infrastructure is really needed; if people won’t pay for it out of user fees, it probably isn’t necessary.
Before 1970, America’s transportation system was almost entirely funded out of user fees and it was the best in the world. Since then, funding decisions have increasingly been made by politicians who are more interested in getting their pictures taken cutting ribbons than in making sure our transportation systems run safely and smoothly.
This country doesn’t need more infrastructure that it can’t afford to maintain. Instead, it needs a more reliable system of transport funding, and that means one based on user fees and not tax subsidies or federal deficit spending.
Note: This commentary in Newsweek was written before NTSB announced the train had been going over 100 mph around a 50-mph curve.
Of course congress does limit the liability of other private corporations. Outrage? I’d wager 90%+ of the country doesn’t know about it until there’s an incident. I’m not sure 10% of the country remembers the way oil industry senators blocked any attempt to remove the liability cap on oil spills after the deep water horizon spill. Not a federal issue, but plenty of states have medical and other liability caps. I’d wager a good chunk of congress would love to extend that nationwide too. Not sure outrage would be the response.
Infrastructure should be funded out of user fees? What did the AP do to try and kill the new tappan zee span that’s going up but won’t be entirely paid for with user fees. Probably. Who knows, the bridge is under construction for a while now and still no financing plan or news on what the tolls will be. Just infusions of cash and low interest loans from outside sources.
Of course registration fees and gas taxes aren’t user fees. So no, the highways we had in 1970 were not paid for with user fees. In fact, the feds worked to block user fee backed transportation projects. Nobody likes toll roads. Don’t romanticize the interstate system’s messy authoritarian history. Politicians picked routes then too, and sent destructive highways through poor neighborhoods, leaving every city in the country with scars that remain to this day.
“It appears that the Amtrak crash that killed seven people Tuesday resulted from speeding”
That’s what speed do.
Did the engineer fall asleep at the controls? How else can you explain going twice the speed limit going into a curve? Distracted engineering?
If Google cars can drive a million miles in complex urban environments on auto pilot causing no accidents, certainly a fixed-guideway transit system can be automated.
Of course, a coercive monopolist (particularly one manipulated by a coercive union) has little incentive to innovate and eliminate the possibility of human error.
Rail will become even more obsolete (no longer in general use) when autonomous vehicles hit the market.
I’m not sure 10% of the country remembers the way oil industry senators blocked any attempt to remove the liability cap on oil spills after the deep water horizon spill.
Maybe because they saw the potential for rampant fraud and abuse by Gulf staters who saw the settlement as a potential cash cow, along with a public that was unlikely to cast a skeptical eye toward claimants in the midst of their outrage over fact that the spill occurred. Remember, businesses who claimed money from the settlement did not even have to prove that their losses were caused by the spill in order to collect payment.
Infrastructure should be funded out of user fees? What did the AP do to try and kill the new tappan zee span that’s going up but won’t be entirely paid for with user fees.
Why should he try to kill it? The bridge needs to be rebuilt. And he has fairly consistently advocated for user charges for projects like that one. If New York wants to do proceed in a different direction, is that his somehow his fault?
Of course registration fees and gas taxes aren’t user fees. So no, the highways we had in 1970 were not paid for with user fees.
Are they charges levied exclusively on users? Yes? Then they are user fees.
Don’t romanticize the interstate system’s messy authoritarian history. Politicians picked routes then too, and sent destructive highways through poor neighborhoods, leaving every city in the country with scars that remain to this day.
Boo hoo. Crying over spilled milk from 50+ years ago has no bearing (nor should it) on how pricing, investment, and management decisions should proceed today. When was the last time you was a “destructive highway” sent through a poor urban neighborhood? When was the last time you saw a new urban highway, period?
Having people die because there is no cure is ‘life’; allowing them to die when there is a cure but not used (or installed) is negligence.
The tappan zee fails the AP’s user fee test. Nobody wants to pay a $10-15 toll. So it probably isn’t necessary. Or is that only the standard for transit projects?
When I drive on local roads I pay gas taxes that are used on highways. My registration fees are the same whether I drive ten miles or ten thousand, the feedback between users and producers doesn’t exist. It’s not a user fee, and never was. User fee roads (toll roads) that could have offered that feedback were blocked by the feds for years. They still have many opponents in congress. And any attempt to turn a road into a user fee road that provides a feedback link between users and producers that the AP thinks is important is an uphill battle.
Seven people died and many others were severely injured because the Obama administration willfully and flagrantly refused to follow the law mandating the installation of PTC’s – which would have stopped this accident. Unlike the nebulous claims by the progressives that more money should have been spent (somewhere) this law specifically dealt with this exact situation-and would have saved lives.
So let’s not try to change the subject by talking about the Tappan Zee Bridge or Tom Brady’s football, people were killed by malfeasance by the Obama team – and, for once, they should be held accountable.
ahwr wrote: “Politicians picked routes then too, and sent destructive highways through poor neighborhoods, leaving every city in the country with scars that remain to this day.”
Yes, and the irony is that highway planners had designed the interstate highways to go around cities, but urban planners demanded they go through the cities so the planners could use them as an excuse for slum clearance. Then, when the highways succeeded in destroying neighborhoods, as the urban planners intended, a later generation of urban planners blamed it on the highway planners.
The 1955 highway bill didn’t have routes through the cities. Due to lobbying from urban mayors and planners, Congress rejected that bill. Only when routes were designed through the cities, at the behest of the mayors and planners, did Congress pass the bill in 1956.
And funded with something that was never a user fee.
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/5/13/why-i-do-not-support-move-mn
It’s probably futile to say this again, but I’ll give it one more try. The gas tax is a fee paid the users of a facility so it is a user fee. That’s it. End of story.
Of course, for a number of reasons the gas tax is not the ideal user fee, at least it does mean that in general the users of roadways are paying for them.
“When I drive on local roads I pay gas taxes that are used on highways.”
That’s a very familiar line that commenter Andrew used to repeat.
@frank
Does that make it invalid? If you don’t care about being charged for something you’re not using when you’re on local roads paid for with general tax revenue do you care about being charged more than the cost of the road when you’re driving on well used cheap to maintain at grade rural interstates so some suburbanites can have a cheap ride on an expensive to maintain elevated viaduct through a city to its downtown?
If you want a definition of user fee that includes the gas tax, fine. I don’t like that sort of semantic game. It just means the gas tax is a functionally useless user fee that provides negligible feedback between users and producers, one that charges government planners with the task of deciding where to invest a slush fund. Saying it’s not ideal is an understatement.
Funny that ahwr states that gas taxes aren’t user fees here, but on Streetsblog USA, he states: “The question then is how much of the cost should be paid for out of user fees (gas/mile taxes, tolls, parking meters etc…), and non user fees (registration/license fees, property/income tax etc…) ”
Quite some telling comments on other sites:
“The answer to Portland’s traffic problem is to discourage auto use. Rip out freeways”.
Typical of someone in hyperdense NYC to dictate what faraway places like Portland should do.
Yes frank, I’m from NYC. Moved to Portland a couple years ago. How long do I have to live somewhere before I can opine?
Ignore the hyperbole in some of my posts. FWIW I don’t think all the area freeways need to go. I5 should. Maybe 405, if not it should definitely be capped though, would restore ~28 of 36 blocks destroyed, right? West Burnside is a disaster and should see a road diet. I205 and much of I84 don’t run through valuable real estate, they aren’t so objectionable.
In the context of who pays in the aggregate you can call the gas tax a user fee. If user fee means it provides the solid feedback between users and producers the AP thinks is important so that you don’t need all knowing government planners to decide where to make investments, then no, in that context it’s not a user fee.
Ignore the hyperbole in some of my posts. FWIW I don’t think all the area freeways need to go. I5 should. Maybe 405
Yeah, then all the more than 150,000 drivers a day who used those freeways can just switch to the Interstate MAX, right? On the other hand, since government planners think building roads magically creates congestion, destroying those roads should clear out all the traffic immediately. Why don’t we just tear up 26 and “force” everyone to use westside MAX while we’re at it, too? Typical government planner thinking, he wants to destroy a useful road just because it offends his delicate sensibilities.
I’m always confused by these posts and threads. This blog is full of fervent absolutist rhetoric coupled with wishy washy cherry picking.
“We hate government spending on trains,” v. “If the government installed expensive technology, none of this would have happened.
Antiplanner v. the Interstate (maybe the most heavy handed top down government planning effort ever) is awesome and highway planners did a great job, in spite of those dastardly urban planners.
I’m not much of an advocate for rail transit but it doesn’t seem to me that Antiplanners are that much opposed to planning. As long as planning results in the forms and modes they prefer they’re all for it.
Totally have to agree here with metrosucks and applaud him for restraint in his word choices.
“How long do I have to live somewhere before I can opine?”
You can certainly start complaining right away.
Gas tax is imperfect? Of course. How about VMT that the AP has advocated for? Tech will make it possible to toll users for the roads they use. Many here would support such a system, especially if privacy concerns were addressed.
I-5 certainly does not need to go. It needs to be expanded. Three lanes simply aren’t enough in 2015 (and may not have been in the 1960s), and taking one lane during peak period for HOV is ludicrous. No way people from the ‘Couve could ever get to jobs in a reasonable amount of time in PDX on light rail. Just ain’t going to happen. Yes, 405 was a travesty, especially since the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exhibition building was arsoned to build it.
West Burnside is only a disaster in that it has not been maintained by the city, which has allowed potholes large enough to swallow a small child.
I-84 is also desperately in need of expansion, although there’s no where to go, especially since the MAX line was built.
Listen. I was car-less in Portland for four years and it sucked balls. Taking the bus or MAX to the grocery store: awful. Not being able to get to the coast, the Gorge, or Mt. Hood to hike: intolerable. Those things alone (although this site helped) woke me up from my anti-car jihad. Maybe these facts will somehow soften your war against cars, too.
How do you plan to address privacy concerns? I used that evil word, didn’t I. How do you propose to deal with privacy concerns? Or whatever phrasing you are willing to respond to. Genuinely curious.
Re west Burnside: I mean between the river and 23rd, maybe a bit beyond. It’s a dangerous and unpleasant place, especially if you aren’t in a car. It does not efficiently move people in cars, divides otherwise connected neighborhoods, and it reduces nearby land values. It’s a mess.
If traffic on i5 is bad then toll it to eliminate congestion. Commuter buses tend to require large subsidies because of little off peak demand, but toll revenue should be sufficient. To be clear the part of I 5 I see as destructive is between Fremont bridge until it meets 405 a bit later. I didn’t say anything about extending max north. Even if a little more of trips to downtown is on surface streets I’m not sure it’s obvious peak hour commutes would be any longer. If you aren’t traveling downtown then you don’t need to be driving through it.
I’m not as anticar as you seem to think. There’s a middle ground between being carless and where we are now. Just because a car is very useful for trips out of town or moving large quantities of goods within town does not mean that all trips need to be made by car. Where cars make the least sense, where highways and arterials are the most damaging it seems prudent to consider alternatives.
“How do you plan to address privacy concerns?”
The Antiplanner has posted about this. My answer is to get government out of the road business entirely. That’s a serious suggestion that won’t be taken seriously by people who believe we need government to build the roads (and that government actually is the entity building the roads).
“Re west Burnside: I mean between the river and 23rd, maybe a bit beyond. It’s a dangerous and unpleasant place, especially if you aren’t in a car. It does not efficiently move people in cars, divides otherwise connected neighborhoods, and it reduces nearby land values. It’s a mess.”
Maybe, but I don’t think a road diet is going to help things. Burnside has been a mess for more than a century. It wasn’t particularly pleasant with streetcars or horses and carriages, either. But if you need to drive from Old Town to Fred Meyer to get groceries, what’s the alternative? Walking? Max? Been there. Done that. Sucks. Perhaps some traffic calming measures and other things are in order. I’m not a transportation specialist, as some here are quick to point out, but as it stands now, the city has let it get to its current chaotic and unmaintained state.
“If traffic on i5 is bad then toll it to eliminate congestion.”
Agreed.
“I didn’t say anything about extending max north.”
True, but that’s also a topic with long history here, and a possible “solution” many propose.
“If you aren’t traveling downtown then you don’t need to be driving through it.”
That’s a good point, but as there are only two bridges across the Columbia, and as the interchange around Jantzen Beach is an absolute disaster, I’m not sure what the answer is there, either.
“I’m not as anticar as you seem to think. There’s a middle ground between being carless and where we are now. Just because a car is very useful for trips out of town or moving large quantities of goods within town does not mean that all trips need to be made by car.”
Again, I agree.
That’s a very familiar line that commenter Andrew used to repeat.
They’re both just copy-pasting from the same Strong Towns blog post.
The tappan zee fails the AP’s user fee test. Nobody wants to pay a $10-15 toll. So it probably isn’t necessary. Or is that only the standard for transit projects?
When I drive on local roads I pay gas taxes that are used on highways. My registration fees are the same whether I drive ten miles or ten thousand, the feedback between users and producers doesn’t exist. It’s not a user fee, and never was.
$10-15 toll? Right….
I happen to live in a state where a share of the state’s gas tax is used to provide aid to counties and cities, so those gas tax funds are being used to partly finance local roads as well. It’s not clear why they would need to be financed entirely with gas taxes though. Property taxes work just fine, since they reflect the value of location and access provided by the road network in the price of the property.
Your registration fees are a fixed charge. Regardless of whether you’re talking about local roads or highways, a large share of the costs of those roads are fixed — they don’t vary with traffic volume. So there is little to gain from adopting variable charges. It might be more important for some users (heavy vehicles) to pay variable charges, but that has more to do with the pavement damage they generate.
The major problem with the gas tax is that it is opaque (hidden from the user) and largely disconnected from demand. There is no feedback mechanism between the user of the system and the provider of the service, a condition that has (frustratingly) allowed Minnesotans to demand lots of transportation spending while resisting the corresponding increases in taxes to make that possible.
Opaque? Drivers pay it every time they refill their tank. The price (inclusive of the tax) is plastered on the sign in large letters.
Disconnected from demand? That’s not a serious argument. I’ve done this before, but the regurgitation of this idiocy encouraged me to do it again. If you go to the FHWA’s highway statistics database you can download national-level data on VMT and gallons of motor fuel subject to taxation. Using data for the last 30 years I fit a simple bivariate regression to gauge the strength of the relationship between the two. The coefficient of determination was 0.99. That is nearly perfect correlation. To suggest that gas taxes are disconnected from demand is just silly. It simply ignores the evidence to the contrary.
His other point is also wrong. There is in fact a feedback mechanism. If revenues from the gas taxes are falling short of what is required to maintain the infrastructure, then the rate can be adjusted to provide the additional revenue that is the feedback mechanism, provided it is used correctly (a big “if” in the world of government-provided roads)
It appears that the Amtrak crash that killed seven people Tuesday resulted from speeding, but big-government advocates are already using this accident to make their case for more infrastructure spending.
Well, that didn’t take long. Reminds me very much of the I-35W bridge collapse seven years ago. The demagogues were out in full force shortly after that tragedy to claim that more funding was urgently needed. Some were even undeterred when it was later demonstrated that the cause of the collapse was an abnormally thin gusset plate that had given way. Just like that in case, there will never be enough Amtrak funding to prevent careless engineers from speeding through curved sections of track which require reduced speeds.
Bennett, I missed your post as we posted at nearly the same time, but you make some very good points:
Antiplanner v. the Interstate (maybe the most heavy handed top down government planning effort ever) is awesome and highway planners did a great job, in spite of those dastardly urban planners.
I’m not much of an advocate for rail transit but it doesn’t seem to me that Antiplanners are that much opposed to planning. As long as planning results in the forms and modes they prefer they’re all for it.
It would seem that free market economists, fiscal conservatives, libertarians—whatever you want to call them—would be opposed to the federal government’s top-down planning of the Interstate Highway System.
Certainly it used imminent domain, which could be argued to be a violation of private property rights. Certainly it wrought great environmental harm. Certainly it was designed not primarily for civilian transportation but for government defense, including the deployment of tens of thousands of atomic and nuclear weapons. Perhaps in the long run it was paid for by user fees.
Antiplanners’ championing the IHS is an implicit embrace of statism.
From The Federalist:
”
It’s probably futile to say this again, but I’ll give it one more try. The gas tax is a fee paid the users of a facility so it is a user fee. That’s it. End of story.
”
~Builder
The tax is not on use of the facility, but on gasoline. If you have an electric car, you don’t pay anything to use the roads. If you walk on the road or ride a bicycle you don’t pay any fees.
It’s a crude proxy but it’s not a user fee. It’s goes into a big pot and may or may not be used on the facility being used. A toll on the road on the other hand would be a user fee as it goes toward the facility being used.
”
Seven people died and many others were severely injured because the Obama administration willfully and flagrantly refused to follow the law mandating the installation of PTC’s – which would have stopped this accident.
”
The law is clear that PTC does not have to be installed until the end of the year.
To piggy back on PRK’s comment. I rarely use the interstate. I drive mostly on local arterials. I also own a gas powered lawn mower. When I do use the interstate it’s mostly for business and my company is paying for the gas. Essentially, I’m subsidizing suburban conservative highway champions.
I really like the interstate… for interstate travel.