I live in Fairfield County Connecticut which is one of the few areas of the country that is well served by trains. My town of 55,000 people has four different train stations for commuter trains to New York. Within five miles from my front door is a station that handles Amtrak trains on the Boston to Washington line as well as others that go further south to Florida, North to Canada or west through Pennsylvania. Thousands of folks take the train from these stations every day. The key, however, is that most of these travellers are going no further than the 30 miles to Manhattan and nearly all of them are going at most 120 miles to some point between Philadelphia and Boston. We are served by the high speed Acela trains. We live in an area where highway congestion is a major problem. The train is a much better way to travel than the car. In short, Fairfield County Connecticut is the perfect place to encourage train travel.
So why is this relevant? Here's the answer: none of the train lines that operate through this area makes a profit. In fact, none of them comes close to making a profit. The commuter trains that are run by MetroNorth Commuter Railroad, a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority depend upon subsidies from the state and federal governments. There are special taxes levied in this area just to fund the MTA. Indeed, Metro North loses money even though over three quarters of the commuters from my area to New York City take the train. And lest you think that the fares are low, the round trip to Manhattan costs about $12.00 even when one buys the special discount monthly tickets.
The Amtrak trains are part of a system that requires billions of dollars of public subsidies just to keep going each year. There is no clear public information with regard to earnings (or losses) per line, but it seems clear that no portion of the Amtrak system makes a profit.
I was thinking about this today after reading the latest column from George Will in which he discusses why liberals love high speed rail travel. Will thinks that the reason is that travel by train makes people give up control to someone else. I think that Will is too kind to the progressive movement and the push by Obama for high speed rail travel. In fact, I believe that Obama's push for high speed rail is just a move to benfit some hard core Democrat constituency groups: construction and public employee unions. Money spent to build high speed rail lines will go in large part for construction carried out by union members. Once the lines are completed, the trains will be manned by members of the public employees unions. Further, by discussing trains, Obama can appear to be doing something about environmental issues even though these trains will not result in less pollution in any location other than in the bogus feasibility studies that predict a ridership much higher than will actually be achieved. So Obama can appear to be creating jobs and cleaning the environment when all he is doing is using government funds to pay off his supporters. Best of all for Obama, by the time that the failure of these high speed lines is evident, he will be long gone from the White House.
The sad truth is that if high speed rail cannot work in the Northeast corridor, it cannot work anywhere. Nowhere else in the USA has the population density combined with the well developed public transportation feeder lines needed for the trains to work. Will folks in Los Angeles take the bus across the metro area to get to a train station in order to take a high speed ride to San Diego (especially when there is no easy way to get around San Diego upon arrival)? Or will these same folks get in their cars an drive the 100 miles or so to their exact destination? The answer seems a self-evident and resounding NO! How many are likely to pay more to spend more time to travel by train when the train travel cost more than the car trip?
Hopefully, the GOP House majority will end the nonsensical quest for "high speed" rail lines.
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