One of the special-interest provisions in the transportation bill that passed the Senate a couple of weeks ago is a requirement that operators of passenger trains be licensed by the Surface Transportation Board. There is one and only one exception: Amtrak.
Supposedly, this could give Amtrak an edge when it competes with other companies for contracts for local commuter-rail service. Since Amtrak has lost business to Veolia and other private rail contractors in many cities, some people think this provision was written to support Amtrak and the transit unions that represent Amtrak employees.
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It isn’t enough that federal control or funding has made Amtrak and the transit industry some of the least productive parts of the nation’s economy. Now they want to ruin the freight sector as well. That alone made it worthwhile to kill the bill.
Does the Antiplanner have information regarding the “Great Streetcar Scandal”. Some economists argue that the eventual removal of fixed rail sites over neighborhoods would have been inevitable even if GM didn’t lobby on behalf of buses. Streetcars need at level gradient rail of decent working order and power lines to go to given locations. Buses require only the street. Others say if the government had not intervened so much during the Great Depression suburban and interurban railroads would have been all but vanquished.
Suggest you read this paper, which was presented at a Transportation Research Board (TRB) meeting some years ago:
Kennedy, 60 Minutes, and Roger Rabbit:
Understanding Conspiracy-Theory Explanations of
The Decline of Urban Mass Transit (Adobe Acrobat .pdf).
I repeat the last paragraph in the paper below [emphasis added]:
The GM conspiracy myth, understood in this way, makes a great deal of sense. It becomes irrelevant that GM did or did not cause or even contribute to the decline of mass transit in the U.S. What becomes compelling, from a larger perspective, is the manner in which the GM story is used, the political and economic climates in which it is most likely to emerge, and the types of policy initiatives under consideration during the periods in which the story is being told. What should also intrigue us is the power of the myth to attract a following. In this regard, the compelling nature of the myth’s villain – the General Motors Corporation – speaks volumes. If we cannot cast GM, the producer and supplier of automobiles, as the ultimate enemy, then we end up with a shocking and nearly unfathomable alternative: What if the enemy is not the supplier, but rather the consumer? What if, to paraphrase Oliver Perry, we have met the enemy, and the enemy is us?
I couldn’t get your link to work.
Here is another location:
http://marthabianco.com/kennedy_rogerrabbit.pdf
See The Roger Rabbit Myth for a detailed explanation, with references, about why the GM streetcar conspiracy is a myth.
Roger Rabbit Myth – are you seriously suggesting that Roger Rabbit doesn’t exist?
I saw him starring in a film on TV!
What GM did with NCL isn’t a myth, though what they did was take advantage of transportation policy that is hostile to rail.
The Antiplanner wrote:
Supposedly, this could give Amtrak an edge when it competes with other companies for contracts for local commuter-rail service. Since Amtrak has lost business to Veolia and other private rail contractors in many cities, some people think this provision was written to support Amtrak and the transit unions that represent Amtrak employees.
And it’s interesting to note that even in places where Veolia is providing transportation services, the employees working for Veolia (and other companies) are generally unionized. Bringing in a private company (and Amtrak is not a private company) to provide transportation services is not “union-busting,” no matter what the unions claim.
Now Veolia and others are in business to earn a profit for their owners, and that is probably what the unions representing Amtrak workers don’t like, for it is reasonable to assume that union negotiators won’t get as good of a deal for their members if they have to negotiate an agreement with Veolia instead of Amtrak.
Are Amtrak employees on the federal employee wage system?
They are not federal employees so far as I’ve been able to search, they work for the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, the actual name for Amtrak. It’s employees come under the same rules, regulations, and retirement plans as any other railroad. Amtrak is federal and state funded, and in some cases even locally funded. AMTRAK is quasi-government, set up to parameters like a corporation kind of like the TVA. The employees work for the corporation and are not Federal employees. They have different compensation, benefits, etc.
I believe Lazy is correct.
I understand that most persons working for Amtrak are covered by the Railroad Retirement Act (RRTA), which is significantly more generous (and more expensive) than Social Security (which is largely funded by FICA and payroll taxes).
While I’m on the subject. The TVA like Amtrak is a quasi-government company. TVA became a model for America’s governmental efforts to modernize Third World agrarian societies, a noble effort but it came with substantial consequences. Ronald Reagan had moved to television as the host and a frequent performer for General Electric Theater in the 50’s. Reagan was later fired by General Electric in 1962 in response to his audacity (or bravery) referring to the TVA as one of the problems associated with big government. The government built over 25 dams. The purpose of which was to contain what was described as those once every 100 year type flood. The Army Engineers set out to solve this problem. They said that it was possible that once in 500 years there could be a total capacity flood that would inundate some 600,000 acres. Well, the engineers fixed that. They made a series of permanent lakes which inundated over a million acres; of course provide a navigable channel from which goods and commerce could flow and provide hydro electricity (inspiring the 1960 film “Wild River”). The resulting hydro power is now far eclipsed by the tons of coal plants and the navigation channels created are largley used to transport the barges of coal needed to keep the coal plants running and the cost of maintaining the channel is such that they could have payed for shipping the coal by rail with money left over. In such large concentration, parts of the lower Tennessee Valley have air quality problems (which sort of inspired another movie “Fire Down Below”). It’s the same problem in Los Angeles which is also in a valley. It’s susceptible to atmospheric inversion in which a layer of warm air holds in the exhausts from road vehicles, airplanes, locomotives, shipping, manufacturing, and other sources (in this case coal plant exhaust).
Oh I forgot to mention, General Electric was the principal provider of steam turbine and generation equipment when the TVA started building coal plants in the 40’s and 50’s.