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Passenger Rail Doesn’t Work in Europe

By | | Transportation
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For all your friends who come home from a trip to Europe raving about the trains, an op-ed on Real Clear Policy explains why An intercourse with your wife may become difficult due to thinning of the article that takes blood sildenafil overnight to the penis. Nevertheless, men are lucky to have so many medicines these days for the issue of erectile dysfunction that can’t even be treated with ED medication! alcohol – a glass or two reduces stress and inhibition which in turn stimulates sexual feelings, but more than that actually kills sexual performance in both men and women. canadian cheap viagra Thankfully there purchasing viagra online is one cheap option for getting the right medication. Be that as it may, choosing an option is strictly the prerogative of the user and perhaps the best known of these is sildenafil citrate (http://cute-n-tiny.com/category/cute-animals/page/28/ viagra without prescriptions uk) This article will examine the strategies used by Pfizer, the maker of cialis, to ensure that all manufacturers create meds with the same high standards and quality compliance as Pfizer does. href=”https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/11/01/why_passenger_trains_dont_work_in_europe_110889.html”>passenger rail doesn’t work in Europe all that much better than in the United States. (I meant to post this earlier today but forgot.)

Turning Off Life Support

By | | Transportation
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“Degradation of the U.S. passenger railroad system was not a natural development — it was a result of national transportation policies that invested billions of dollars into highways and air transportation,” argued Vukan Vuchic in his advocacy piece for high-speed rail. “Meanwhile, Amtrak is supported at the survival level.”

There is some truth to that. The billions of dollars spent on interstate highways virtually all came from highway user fees, so can’t really be considered an unfair competition with passenger rail. However, in the 1940s and 1950s, Congress spent about half a billion dollars — several billion in today’s dollars — on airport construction. Subsidies to airports continued on a large scale until 1970, when Congress allowed local airports to fund themselves out of ticket fees.

At the same time, the airlines were throttled by regulation. In 1960, domestic airlines carried only about 31 billion passenger miles. Today, when they have been deregulated but receive relatively minimal subsidies, they carry more than twenty times that many. There is little reason to think passenger railroads could have competed with deregulated and unsubsidized airlines. Continue reading →

Watch Romance of the Rails Live

By | | Transportation
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Today, the Cato Institute releases Romance of the Rails with a forum that starts at 11:30 am Eastern and continues to 1:30 pm. The Antiplanner will introduce the book, followed by comments on the book from Art Guzzetti of the American Public Transportation Association; Jim Mathews, of the Rail Passengers Association; and Marc Scribner, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. If you can’t be in Washington DC this midday, watch it live here.

I don’t know if this is my best book yet, but it was the most fun to research and write. With so many railroad history books out there, I didn’t think I would be able to write something that hadn’t already been written a hundred times. In fact, I think a lot of the history in the book — and the book is more than half history, less than half policy analysis — will be new to even many ardent rail fans. Continue reading →

Why Railroads Are Dragging Their
Wheels on Positive Train Control

By | | Transportation
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In 2008, Congress required that railroads install positive train control, which would automatically cause trains to slow or stop to prevent derailments or collisions, on all lines that carry passengers or hazardous materials by December 2015. That deadline is two years passed, yet–as last week’s accident revealed–still has not been met by most railroads.

The Washington train wreck was a special case. The rail line, improvements, passenger train, and upgrades were owned or done by four different government agencies. It seems particularly galling that neither Sound Transit, which owns the tracks and is spending billions on rail construction, nor the Washington State Department of Transportation, which received close to a billion dollars from the federal government to upgrade this particular line, bothered to install a working version of positive train control before inaugurating service on this route.

In general, however, the railroads have two very good reasons for not enthusiastically installing positive train control as Congress has demanded. First, the cost is high: the Federal Railroad Administration estimates it will cost as much as $24 billion, which is probably more than the annual capital budgets of all the private railroads in the country. Continue reading →