A left-wing blog accuses Republicans of wanting to “bring transport policy back to the 1950s.” At least, the GOP is two decades ahead of where the Democrats wanted to go, considering that 110-mph intercity trains and light rail both date back to the 1930s, and streetcars to several decades earlier.
Denver Zephyr traveling at 90 mph in 1939. Otto Perry photo. The train’s average speed of about 65 mph was far greater than the so-called high-speed trains proposed for Ohio (average 38.5 mph) or Wisconsin (average 59 mph).
The truth is that Republicans are proposing to be far more fiscally responsible than the Dems. Where House Transportation Committee chair James Oberstar proposed a $500 billion spending bill when less than $300 billion was available to spend, Republicans say they will spend no more than is actually available.
Actually, the 1950s were a pretty nice place to be considering that most transportation at that time did not receive any government subsidies, so no one was making outlandish promises to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on transportation systems that few people would use. Most transit and intercity travel systems were private and highways were paid for out of gasoline taxes and tolls, which were dedicated solely to the facilities used by the people who paid those fees.
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Today, most transportation receives subsidies of one kind or another, and the Dems seem intent on increasing subsidies if only to make more groups dependent on their largess. That’s probably closer to the 1930s as well, since the New Deal was throwing money at just about any industry that would conform to planners’ notions of how people should live.
Today’s Republicans raise the ire of the leftists when they propose to cut subsidies to transit. The blog laments that Republicans may want a “revision of the longstanding 80/20 ratio governing highway and transit spending.” Actually, that ratio is not very longstanding and the 80/20 ratio isn’t even correct.
Back in 1982, construction of the Interstate Highway System was drawing to a close, but Congress decided it had to double the federal gas tax from 4 to 8 cents, probably so it could have more money to throw around. Transit advocates wanted a share of the action, so Congress raised the tax to 9 cents, dedicating a penny to transit. From then on, all subsequent increases in gas taxes were split 80/20 between highways and transit.
Since the first 4 cents was all highway money, transit has always received less than 20 percent. At the current 18-cent gas tax, transit receives about 15.5 percent. Whatever the history, there is no reason why transit advocates are entitled to 20 percent of any of the fees paid by highway users.
Robert Poole and Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation suggest that highway user fees be dedicated to highways and federal subsidies to transit, if there are any, should come out of other funds. That may be the direction Republicans are headed, though it would be better to simply end federal involvement in what are largely local decisions, whether for highways or transit.
Current federal authority to spend gas tax money ends on December 31, so the lame-duck Congress will have to pass an extension or federal funds will stop flowing to the states for either highways or transit. It remains to be seen whether a split Congress will be able to pass a six-year authorization bill in 2011.
You say that in the 1950s transportation wasn’t subsidized – you’ve done some great work with funding/user fee figures for highways today, but what data are you basing this fact about the ’50s on?
Also, what about local road construction? Wasn’t this paid almost entirely out of general revenues, and therefore close to 100% subsidized?
BART wouldn’t have been built if the Key System wasn’t trashed.
Again expressways make up less than 2% of roads in the US.
The local road in front of my house was built by the developer and paid for by the developer and he was reimbursed when the houses were sold. Then the road was turned over to the county.
The road was repaved 30 some years later when our non polluting and very effective septic tanks were exchanged for connecting to the Portland sewer systeem. The same systeem that still dumps sewage in to the Columbia and Willamette river thanks to the density mandates and poor planning by Metro and Portland Planners.
Without the road, it would be hard to get a loan on a landlocked property.
Two percent of the roads in the US are expressways but ninety percent of the wear and tear and 100 percent of the (over-engineered)engineering standards are for the trucking industry.
As I stated in the prior post,(which no one has refuted) the primary user, of our highway system, by wear and tear, is the trucking industry, who pay nowhere near their share of the costs. When the gas tax is adjusted so that cars and motorcycles pay ten percent of the tax and tractor trailers pay ninety percent of the taxes then I won’t laugh every time Mr. O’toole suggests that the gas tax is a user fee. It is not a user fee, it is a transfer from auto drivers to the trucking industry.
Most of the damage to the roads in my neighborhood seem to be at bus stops. Many of them are being replaced with concrete pads so the Tri Met buses (that don’t pay a dime in fuel taxes) stop sinking in to the pavement.
The trucking industry pays it’s fair share. In Oregon the weight mile tax is now over 16 cents per mile while autos pay the equivalent of 1.2 cents per mile if they get 20 mpg. That’s more than 13 times the cost per mile. Registration is also high for trucks compared to cars. Trucks also pay a federal fuel tax and excise tax.
I find it funny how some see rail as part of our national infrastructure while ignoring the fact trucks transport more goods and deliver to places rail can’t. Isn’t that infrastructure? Isn’t that part of our national commerce infrastructure?
It’s also important to understand trucking companies pay those taxes before turning a dime of profit.
Blaming trucks has always been a easy answer to what are complex issues.
The wear and tear on the road is in direct proportion to the cube of the axle weight.
A tractor trailer weighs an average of 60,000 pounds and has six axles. Thats 10,000 pound per axle. A honda accord weighs, with passengers, about three thousand pounds or 1,500 pounds per axle. The ratio of wear and tear is 10,000 cubed times six/1,500 cubed times 2. Simplifying, the ratio is six trillion/6.75 Billion. Simplifying completely, 888 to one. That means one tractor trailer does as much damage as 888 Honda Accords.
The tractor trailer should pay 888 times the gas tax as a Honda Accord. They don’t and until they do they are not paying their fair share. The Honda Accord user is subisdizing the tractor trailer driver. To add insult to injury, the Honda Accord user is also forced to pay for a highway which is over-engineered to a standard which only the tractor trailer requires and a tractor trailer uses as much lane space as three accords.
Railroads are vastly more efficient at long haul cargo. Tractor trailers are only necessary for the last mile. And they don’t have to be anywhere near as big as they are for transport on that last mile.
I say stop the subsidy to the trucking industry and turn the interstates into tollways.
Oregon highway engineers advise ODOT to establish what’s called cost responsibility in determining trucks fair share of highway costs and it’s not anywhere near 888 times. The cubing of weight doesn’t make sense at all. Axle weight does have an effect but also the number of tires bearing that weight has an effect. Keep in mind trucks also pay the same rate whether loaded or empty.
The efficiency of using rail and then switching to trucks for the last mile is nonexistent. The extra manpower used in handling the freight offsets any savings.
Railroad buffs love to romanticize and spread myths concerning efficiencies. The bottom line is trucks do a better job in our modern economy. The market makes that abundantly clear. Except in cases like ore and coal hauling where efficiencies can be had rail lags behind. Rail doesn’t and can’t react to changing locations or expanding industrial areas.
The comparison to an Accord only makes sense if trucks were used for passenger transport. That Accord cannot deliver a load of lumber, pallets of groceries, or any number of goods. The truck deserves more space on the road as it is doing a service.
The recent political consensus regarding transportation in Washington has consisted of the highway interests and transit interesting “going along” with one another to obtain their “cut” of federal funding. By upsetting this long-established political arrangement, the Republicans risk the highway program in particular, since it is now heavily dependent on obtaining general fund revenues and obtaining the votes of pro-transit legislators to obtain such direct subsidies. The urban states–who pay most taxes and generally subsidize rural states with federal funds–and their representatives take a hard line: no transit funding, no highway funding.
I really don’t care how loud the motorheads here and elsewhere scream (it ought to be rather amusing); I hope transit supporters have a backbone and play hardball politics–given Obama’s record of continually trying to be “bipartisan” and getting trounced a few weeks ago since he looked weak, they can’t count on this Administration for leadership with backbone.
Stevenplunk,
Quoting a newspaper article, or saying that you think something doesn’t make sense doesn’t change the laws of physics or basic civil engineering principles. It’s all about the load bearing on the road translated through the axle. I invite you to consult a textbook and refute me based on your research.
What I say is confirmed anecdotally by the huge ruts, tractor trailer width, throughout the interstate highway system and the fact that most toll roads prohibit combos with more than three axles.
Switching from rail to trucks can be done very cost effectively and is done every day of the week. It’s called containerized freight.
The comparison to the Accord is most apt for illustrating the magnitude of the transfer from auto drivers to the trucking industry. Most auto drivers buy and burn their gasoline locally on local roads which are funded with local funds. Yet, the federal gas tax they pay at that local pump goes to highways outside of their locality which they use only rarely and which the trucking industry uses all the time.
I think tractor trailers are fine. I also know that they could not function profitably on long hauls if they actually had to pay their pro rata share of the wear and tear. I am merely opposed to subsidies. I say eliminate the subsidy.
An Atlantic Magazine blog has an interesting posting on High Speed Rail in China and the US.
Viewed from a purely technological perspective, America’s high speed rail is an embarrassment compared to China’s: shaky, slow, and not particularly sleek. But viewed in another way, our slow rail network is the price for a lot of great things about America: our limits on government power, our democratic political system, and the fact that we’re already rich enough to have an enormous amount of existing infrastructure, in the form of houses, industrial plant, and roads, that would be very expensive to tear up in the name of building rail lines. All in all, I think these things are more valuable than even a really cool train system.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/why-the-us-will-not-get-chinas-high-speed-rail/66863/
stevenplunk wrote:
I find it funny how some see rail as part of our national infrastructure while ignoring the fact trucks transport more goods and deliver to places rail can’t. Isn’t that infrastructure? Isn’t that part of our national commerce infrastructure?
UPS and FedEx are two of the largest customers of the U.S. railroad industry. They load their trailers and containers onto the railroads for long(er) trips at intermodal terminals at various places in the nation. I recall reading someplace that this makes economic sense if the goods in the trailer need to travel more than about 1300 km (800 miles). So these two trucking and air freight companies (and bitter rivals) do use the railroad network, but they invariably use the highway network at the beginning and end of each shipment by railroad.
As an aside, I have seen UPS and FedEx trailers sharing the same train frequently.
stevenpunk wrote:
“Railroad buffs love to romanticize and spread myths concerning efficiencies. The bottom line is trucks do a better job in our modern economy. The market makes that abundantly clear. Except in cases like ore and coal hauling where efficiencies can be had rail lags behind.”
Trucks do a good job at providing short haul small lot movement of goods. When it comes to moving large shipments short distances or small shipments large distances, almost everything is on a train, and a lot of what isn’t is on a barge or ship or coursing through a pipeline.
Your notions of how freight is handled in the modern American economy are so mired in the pre-deregulations 1970’s.
“Rail doesn’t and can’t react to changing locations or expanding industrial areas.”
Every year, railroads build out their tracks to hundreds of existign and new industrial sites, or industries pay to be connected in to the national rail network. Every railroad maintains a full time staff of dozens of professionals whose job consists of nothing more than taking calls from industries wanting to receive new rail service. These people are so busy taking calls that they do not even have time to solicit new business by cold-calling. If you are not aware of this, you simply are not paying any attention at all to the industry. Generally, railroads replace about 5-10% of their traffic base every year with new customers at new locations requiring the construction of new sidetracks and spurs because firms are constantly relocating, going out of business, or changing the business they do or their way of doing it.
Rail can also reach sites off the tracks through two other methods of shipment – transloading and intermodal. Intermodal is where a container or trailer is handled on a truck to a major rail terminal, loaded on a train for a journey of 300-3000 miles, and then rehandled by truck to final destination. Transloading is where a good makes part of its journey by rail and then is loaded into a truck (or barge or pipeline) for the remainder. Or vice-versa. This belies your other silly statement:
“The efficiency of using rail and then switching to trucks for the last mile is nonexistent. The extra manpower used in handling the freight offsets any savings.”
In fact, a huge number of rail customers do just that. For example, my father-in-law receives box car load shipments of beer from distant breweries to his warehouse, and then breaks the shipments apart and repackages the pallets onto trucks to make final deliveries to bars, restaurants, and retail distributors. This allows you to buy beer by the bottle, six-pack, or case, instead of having to purchase an entire truck or rail car load direct from the brewery. This same model is followed by dozens of industries – paper distribution, scrap resale, food distribution, chemical wholesalers, lube oil distributors, steel distributors, lumber distributors, etc. The entire warehousing/distribution industry is built on the premise of the purposeful rehandling of goods to add value. For example, you need a bunch of 2×4’s at Home Depot. Well, those were probably cut down in British Columbia or the Pacific Northwest, loaded at the sawmill onto a boxcar or flat car and shipped across the country to a Home Depot warehouse. There, the big shipment is broken apart and shipped by truck to local stores for you to purchase. Surely you are not under the ridiculous misapprehension that a truck hauls wood 3000+ miles across the country direct to your local Home Depot or Ace Hardware?
“The efficiency of using rail and then switching to trucks for the last mile is nonexistent. The extra manpower used in handling the freight offsets any savings.”
Funny, then why does JB Hunt, UPS and others use railroads to haul their freight long distances with them making the local pick up and delivery? Do they just want to waste money for no good reason? Rail has a lot of limitations but making false statements doesn’t help the public better understand those limitations.
stevenplunk said: Railroad buffs love to romanticize and spread myths concerning efficiencies. The bottom line is trucks do a better job in our modern economy. The market makes that abundantly clear. Except in cases like ore and coal hauling where efficiencies can be had rail lags behind. Rail doesn’t and can’t react to changing locations or expanding industrial areas.
THWM: http://www.wabashnational.com/roadrailer.htm
Keep mind that the USA is also missing 100,000+ miles of rail line too!