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WomenDontRule -> RE: High Speed Rail: All Aboard! (2/24/2009 7:22:09 AM)
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ORIGINAL: DedicatedDom40
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ORIGINAL: Coldwarrior57
lets suspend the cap gain tax to people can invest in companies and make a pofit.
Last time we tried that, things didnt work out as intended. Instead of investment that created jobs, we had Wall St gambling with other people's money. How would we avoid that outcome the second go-around? You have a magic formula to change investor behavior?
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ORIGINAL: Coldwarrior57
AMTRAK, (roflmao) we are all aware that amtrak has lost money every year for I dont know how long?
Lets remember that public money funds airport infrastructure, and the private sector airlines only pay for their own operations costs. Public money funds the maintenance of commercial waterways, and private barge operators only pay for their own operations. Public money funds the interstates, and the private trucking companies only pay their operating costs. Now, all of these modes may have some 'use taxes', but not anything near enough to cover the infrastructure costs sufficiently to make the interstates, waterways, and airports thmeselves profitable as an entity of their own..
Railroads are different. Their efficiency related to the physics of steel wheel on steel rail, requiring a fractional amount of energy to move the same amount of weight, is so great above all other modes, that the private rail operators actually cover both costs, operating AND infrastructure, on their own dime. And most want it that way, so they maintain 100% control, thus keeping "public policy" out of their infrastructutre decisions.
Seperate Amtrak from their infrastructure funding responsibilities like all other modes, and they will turn a profit. They will even find themselves with lots of new entry competition because of the overall profit potential. We would see hundreds of profitable Amtraks out there, just as we see hundreds of profitable trucking companies on the interstates.
The irony is, Amtrak is doing more of 'the right thing' (pun intended), pushing towards full capitalism principles more than its airline competitors who dont carry infrastructure costs on their books. Amtrak's books should bring appreciation from right, but instead, it brings far more criticism. Mostly from the extreme right nutjobs who ignore critical facts.
This is not wholly correct. First of all, the government-funded interstates, airports and waterways are all open to the public for our use as well. Not so the railroads, which by their very nature of course cannot be open to the public to use. You cannot climb onto a working rail line with your "family railcar" and drive to Aunt Mary's. So the "public" benefit is largely vicarious in that rail transport saves fuel and emissions and road wear, traffic, etc. Yes, the railroads pay largely for their own upkeep, but then again it is a private property you and I cannot use as we can use the highways or airports or waterways funded with public money.
Also, rail is not the most energy efficient means of transport. Water is, by a very substantial margin. Barge and ship transport is the most energy efficient transport mode available. The "physics" benefits of water transport eclipse those of rail.
Freight railroads have an industry-wide average of 412.9 ton-miles/gallon of fuel used. This is many times the fuel efficiency of trucks, which deliver freight at a very energy wasteful 155.7 ton-miles per gallon. (...but then...you can't have a rail line in every town or street, so trucks are a necessary evil...)
Inland river barge transport however, has an industry-wide avarage of 576 ton-miles per gallon of fuel used, or a bit over 28% better than rail. Ocean and coastwise barges and ships are in the 711 ton-miles per gallon range which is even more efficient, about 72% better.
Put simply, a gallon of fuel will move a ton if cargo 413 miles on a train, 576 miles on a river barge, or 711 miles on an ocean or coastal ship or barge.
Having said all that, water will never be able to host any sort of high speed passenger mover.
It's not completely true that railroads fund 100% of their infrastructure cost. Consider that most railroads in the midwest, south and west run on land granted them long ago at no cost by the government, and much of the industrial land astride many railroads for miles and miles, was also grant land. For example, the largest of the railroad land grants was to the Northern Pacific Railroad: 40 million acres in a 100-mile wide band running 2,000 miles from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound. Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads were granted 400-foot right-of-ways plus ten square miles of land for every mile of track built. The same held true for much smaller numbers of eastern railroads, so most (not all) railroads run on and develop land that was given them, for free.
Here is a map of the railroads that benefitted from land grant or bond legislation.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/map_item.pl
Now those land grants had some onerous terms at times, but it was still, free. Union Pacific and BNSF today benefit hugely in $ from the coal they move out of the Powder River Basin, much of which is mined in land that the railroads owned via land grants.
Also, through FRA grants and other Federal programs, railroads are often give funding to make improvements, not all of which has to be paid back. The federal government also built and runs a huge research facility and test area in Pueblo, CO, to develop and test railroad technologies. While there is industry funding participation, the lions share is paid for by the feds.
So railroads have had their share of the gravy train as well.
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