Asymmetrical Information

I sure hope so.

Do you know that it would be cheaper for America if we did the following:

Every time a person goes up to an Amtrak ticket window and asks to buy a train ticket the clerk replies, “No tickets are available but here is a free plane ticket instead.”

This is the right thing to do. The Northeast Corridor generally works, or at least could be made to work. It has the strong advantage of actual riders. The insane "one train a day" lines through every single state with nearly no passengers that are more quaint sightseeing destinations than anything else are ridiculous pork barrel. Indeed, we would be better off using the money to give poor people free plane tickets.

Well, what about you internal combustion engine using, gas guzzling, air polluting, driving alone, car owning fat butts? What about all the money that's spent on such boondoggles as the $250 million dollar road to nowhere in Alaska, HMMM? And don't say its paid for with gasoline taxes. NOT! What about all the money that we spend in the Middle East on military excursions the sole purpose of which is to secure the OIL supply, HMMM? Yes it is. Otherwise, why don't we have troops in the Sudan? Right, no oil there.

John and Jeff

The Northeast corridor and the commuter trains could function very well under private ownership. The companies could run those lines at a much lower cost and without subsidies.

The remainder of the trains are usually run almost empty and are the least efficient use of energy there is. If you want to reduce our dependency on oil, you do not run these trains.

Jeff,

Sudan does have oil. It is being pumped by a China government-owned oil company. See this Washington Post article.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21143-2004Dec22.html
At the same time, China is arming Sudanese government and blocking anti-Sudan resolutions in UN Security Council.

Well, what about you internal combustion engine using, gas guzzling, air polluting, driving alone, car owning fat butts?

Interestingly, there is no commuter train route for the types of commuting I find necessary (sometimes up to 200 miles in a day for contract work). The closest bus stop is more than five miles away and the bus schedule doesn't coincide with mine. Furthermore I live in Colorado, where you can potentially experience extreme versions of all four seasons in one day, so enclosed transport of some sort is generally essential.

Also, my butt isn't fat. A little healthy walking and cycling solves that problem.

Sooooo...yeah, I think I'll continue driving. My small car gets up to 38 miles to the gallon on the highway and I've never been anywhere near a $250 million highway in Alaska. Go peddle that fraudulent argument somewhere else. For example, go blame the Alaskans and their politicos.

And unless you live in a cave somewhere and bang rocks together for a living, I'll bet well over half of everything you touch in a day consists of petrochemical products -- including most of that keyboard you've been pecking on.

Anony-mouse,

You're from Colorado. Me too. Have you heard they're talking about putting in a Front Range Commuter rail line? Might not be a bad idea as the entire front range may become one big metro area in 50 years.

While this is purely anicdotal...

I have been on many cross-country and non-DC/Boston Amtrak trains in the united states and none of them have ever been close to empty or even half empty. Most of them have been quite full.

As for subsidizing train travel in the United States, two points:

1) How much do you think your airplane ticket is subsidized by the government? I suspect, if you look into it, you'll discover as much if not more than your train ticket; and

2) After 9/11 don't you guys think it is a good idea that we have a quick way to get from point a to point b without air travel?

The Northeast Corridor is now just a few steps away from being a continuous commuter corridor. At the present moment you can travel from Boston to Providence as a commuter,and this will soon be extended on to TF Green Airport. There's a gap to New London and you're back on the ShoreLine Express and able to ride as a commuter well into Delaware. Then there's the second gap to Perryville and you're on to Washington. The point? The Corridor is acting as a local transportation corridor as it helps the region fill up its exurbs. The Corridor's financing problems have to be viewed in the context of that commuting and the road-based alternatives.

This Corridor function is quite different from the function that Amtrak fills for most of the rest of its system ( some aspects on the West Coast notwithstanding). There Amtrak is really is a tourist and plane-averse alternative. The Corridor, which Amtrak owns but doesn't fully operate, is essential in the daily economic life.So breaking it out is really a prelude to ending Amtrak's ownership, which doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of the current usage patterns.

Kate:

I think it'd be a great idea to have a quick way to get from point a to point b without air travel. Fortunately, we already have that. It's called the automobile.

As an example, I checked with Amtrak to see how quickly I could get from Seattle to Chicago. The fastest trip they offered was about 44 hours.

Driving from Seattle to Chicago is a fairly straight-line freeway drive the entire way, and it's (according to Google Maps) 2063 miles. At 65 miles per hour, easy to sustain with two or three people in the car trading off the driving, you can make that same trip in 32 hours. In a pinch, one person could do it only 56 hours. (figure two 12-hour breaks splitting up three driving shifts)

The cheapest ticket they offered was $174. My car gets about 32 MPG on the highway, meaning that at $2.85 per gallon, (what we're paying here in beatiful Boise, Idaho right now) gasoline for that same trip would cost $183.

Note that this results in around $30 in fuel tax revenue for the feds and various states that I travel through, while the Amtrak ticket costs taxpayers hundreds of dollars in subsidies.

How much do you think your airplane ticket is subsidized by the government? I suspect, if you look into it, you'll discover as much if not more than your train ticket;

Okay I'll take the bait, what are the federal subsidies for air travel that you're referring to?

Privatization is a scam.

It has never delivered the lower costs to consumers that it has promised. It has never delivered a more efficient product or service.

Corporations exist to make profits and that is their only purpose. There was a time that corporations were required to operate "in the public good." No longer. All that they are bound to do is make a profit for their shareholders. Doing the right thing, leaving it to corporations to decide to do the right thing, such as reducing the pollution they create, doesn't work.

Conservatives must wake up from this delusion, and soon, or it spells the end of America in our very near future.

Thank you Simon:

Will someone PLEASE show me a passenger rail line that turns a profit by generally accepted rules of accounting?

Simon is just doing what liberals have been doing from FDR on - comparing the actual performance of businesses, mistakes, incompetent employees, and all, to the theoretical possible performance of a government department staffed by omniscient, never-erring people with no personal agendas of their own.

Meanwhile, out in the real world government departments are havens for the incompetent - at best. Their most competent personnel are often pursuing personal goals antithetical to the goals the department was created for. Businesses also suffer from stupid employees and from greedy employees who will sabotage the company to increase their own importance - but in a free market such problems are self-limiting. Either someone in charge keeps the company mostly on the right track, or they'll have lower quality, worse customer service, or higher costs compared to their competitors and either lose customers or have to slash their prices until they are losing money. A business that keeps losing either customers or money will soon either be under different management or bankrupt and dissolved. OTOH, a government agency can keep on going forever in spite of gross inefficiency and ineffectiveness. They may arrange things so that people in a particular class will have to deal with it, no matter how badly they are treated (the DMV for example), or else will try to get political support that keeps the money coming whether or not people use their service (Amtrak, public schools, etc.).

For example, a welfare department that was uniformly successful in seeing its clients received the training and attitude adjustments needed to get off the welfare rolls permanently would eventually have to reduce its own workforce as the number of clients became fewer. Instead, the number of welfare clients keeps increasing, and the few successful people I know who came from a welfare-supported background identify the welfare agencies as the biggest obstacle to success. It's not that the average social worker wants her agency to fail so badly that it has to hire more social workers - but the average social worker is pretty dim. Go up the heirarchy until you find someone who has the brains and the power to actually change things, and you are quite likely to find someone busy making sure that his job keeps growing in importance (generally reflected by the number of workers under him and the size of his department's budget), even if that requires an increasing number of welfare clients.

Alternately, he could find reasons to add increasing complexity to the jobs his subordinates do so more of them are needed to accomplish the same thing, and his budget and manpower have to increase. People who work in large and even medium-size corporations will also see plenty of this - but when it gets out of hand they start losing business. Government agencies can't lose business.

If this high-ranking supervisor is in charge of contracting out work to the private sector, he can increase the budget he administers by adding requirements that increase the cost to the contractors and raise their bids - and he can often make points with the politicians who fund his department by proposing such regulations. E.g., the Davis-Bacon act requires that government contractors for construction pay at least the "prevailing wage", which apparently is determined by construction unions and tends to be higher than the actual average wage. There's been quite a discussion of this on Volokh.com of how this raises costs and keeps minorities out of construction. I'm sure when this came up for a vote many years ago, many congressman were overjoyed to have the opportunity to pay off the unions that funded their campaign and keep their racist constituents happy, and whatever bureaucrat showed them this opportunity had a long and successful career.

I'm not saying that there aren't competent supervisors that actually care about doing the agency's real job - but eventually they'll be working for a self-aggrandizing SOB like I outlined above and wondering how so much stupidity could achieve such a position. Hint: it isn't stupidity.

Comments are Closed.