From the Archives - Examiner.com exclusive - Randal O'Toole on Virginia high-speed rail

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 9, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

This was my fifth article published on Examiner.com. Eventually I wrote about 500 articles that appeared on the now defunct news site over the six years between April 2010 and June 2016. This is the one-hundredth from that archive to be republished here.

Examiner.com exclusive - Randal O'Toole on Virginia high-speed rail
April 9, 2010 5:10 PM MST


According to an article in the Richmond Time-Dispatch by Eugene Trani, former president of Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia has received more than $75 million in federal stimulus money to spend on high-speed rail between Richmond and Washington, D.C. The money will go toward improvements on 11.5 miles of track north of Fredericksburg. An additional $10 million will be used to improve a railroad bypass on the outskirts of Richmond.

The question of whether money used toward high-speed rail is well-spent was one of the topics addressed at a Cato Institute briefing on Capitol Hill on April 9, where transportation experts Randal O’Toole (a senior fellow at Cato) and Ronald Utt (a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation) spoke.

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and other federal sources, the cost per passenger mile for air travel is 13 cents, of which one-tenth of a cent is paid through federal subsidy. For automobiles, the cost per passenger mile is 23 cents, of which one-half of a cent is paid through taxpayer subsidy. For Amtrak, the cost per passenger mile is 56 cents, of which 22 cents is subsidized by taxpayers. For transit (e.g., light rail or subways), the cost per passenger mile is 85 cents, with 61 cents coming from tax funding.

After the program ended, O’Toole answered a few questions about the prospects for high-speed rail in Virginia.

He said that what the government wants to do is “to spend a lot of money running trains a little faster than they run today. We’re not talking about bullet trains. We’re talking about running trains at a top speed of 110 miles an hour, which means an average speed of about 70 miles an hour.”

Continuing, O’Toole noted, “That’s not going to get a lot of people out of their cars, but it is going to cost taxpayers a lot of money. We’re talking about spending a lot of money to get very little benefit for anybody.”

With regard to how best to spend federal stimulus money to improve transportation in Virginia, O’Toole said:

“I think the way to spend the money would be to give loans to states and local areas that would be repaid out of user fees. Because if a transportation project can be repaid out of user fees, we know it’s worthwhile, we know that users want it. But if it requires huge subsidies that the users are never going to come close to paying for, then we shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

O’Toole, author of the 2010 book, Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It, recommended that people interested in more information about high-speed rail and related topics should visit his blog, The Anti-Planner, and the web site of the American Dream Coalition.

From the Archives: Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation James Burnley sees U.S. at 'crisis point for infrastructure'

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on June 25, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation James Burnley sees U.S. at 'crisis point for infrastructure'

Currently a partner at the law firm Venable LLP, James H. Burnley IV was not yet 40 years old when he became President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Transportation in 1987, having previously served as deputy secretary in that department as well as in the U.S. Department of Justice as an associate deputy attorney general.

In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner at the Heritage Foundation in Washington on June 25, Burnley did not mince words in his assessment of the current state of transportation in the United States.

Time to Rethink Roles

"We’re at a crisis point on infrastructure for transportation in this country and we need to start over, rethinking the roles” of the state, federal, and local governments in devising and implementing transportation policy, he said.

Noting that the economic situation today is quite different than it was in the late 1980s, Burnley pointed out that “we had deficits” under President Reagan “but nothing on the scale we have today.”

One matter that is significantly different, he said, is that “the highway user fee trust fund idea has broken down completely. In the last few years $34.5 billion have been transferred from general revenues because we can’t pay for the existing highway programs and the transit programs that are funded, in part, from the highway trust fund.”

That’s why, he said, we have to “go back to a clean sheet of paper and rethink the federal role vis-à-vis the states and cities on transportation.”

Critical of Obama
Burnley was also critical of the Obama administration’s approach to these issues.

“I don’t think that the policies that the Obama administration seems to be intent on implementing are taking us in that direction – unfortunately,” he said. “Rather, their policies, under the so-called ‘livability doctrine’ seem to be designed to have the federal government play a much more intrusive, heavy-handed role in state and local transportation decisions. I’m sorry to see that happening.”

One proposal, pushed heavily by the Obama administration, is to build and expand high-speed rail across the United States. Burnley is skeptical.

This is, he said, “an issue that ultimately will be determined by how much we as a country are willing to spend because it will never pay for itself and it requires enormous capital investments by someone.”

There are questions that have to be asked in the debate over high-speed rail, Burnley said. “Is that money available from any source, and, if so, where does it come from? The federal government? State government? Private capital, which I think is not very likely?”

Funding, he said, is “the ultimate determinative factor, which is where is the money going to come from, and is it an investment as a country that we want to make?”

High-Speed or Low-Speed?
One issue that is emerging is that federal stimulus funds claimed to be for high-speed rail are going to projects far removed from that concept.

“Part of the $8 billion in stimulus money that was set aside last year for high speed rail that’s not going to the two greenfield projects in California and in Florida has been spread out by the federal [Department of Transportation] among the states to be spent on existing railroad lines,” Burnley explained, which, outside of the Northeast Corridor – where the lines are owned by Amtrak – are owned by freight railroads.

“What we think about as the high-speed rail program” besides those greenfield projects and Acela -- “we’re talking about increasing speeds by 2, 3, 4 miles an hour, very modest increases.”

As a result, that stimulus “money is, in fact, going as direct subsidies to the freight railroads because those are the lines upon which the passenger trains run outside the Northeast Corridor,” said Burnley. “You can argue the merits of that but, factually, I think, it’s important to note that that’s what’s happened. That’s where those billions of dollars are going.”

In other words, federal money designated for “high-speed rail” is subsiding “slow rail” instead.

Charlottesville's Choo-Choo Flim-Flam

Charlottesville is agog with the news that a new passenger train rides through town on its way to Washington and New York. Rachana Dixit has the story in the Daily Progress:

A new, daily Amtrak train that will stop in Charlottesville before going to Washington and the Northeast received much fanfare on Wednesday as it rolled into the city’s West Main Street station.

“We’re really pushing rail and public transportation because it’s the wave of the future,” Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said during the train’s whistle-stop tour.

The new train was due to arrive at the station at 2:15 p.m., and it pulled in at roughly 2:24 p.m.

Beginning in Lynchburg, the train officially starts its service today and will add 14 more trips per week in Charlottesville. It came to Charlottesville on Wednesday from Culpeper and then headed to Lynchburg after Kaine — who received a rail hat that said “Chief Engineer,” a train whistle and bandana — hopped on.

Some area residents have advocated for more passenger rail service along the U.S. 29 corridor, most notably Meredith Richards, a former councilor and the chairwoman of CvilleRail and the Piedmont Rail Coalition.

The new train, which makes no economic sense (I'll get to that momentarily), is subsidized by Virginia taxpayers to the tune of at least $10.9 million over the next three years (Daily Progress figure) or perhaps $17 million (WSET).

The estimated number of new passenger trips per year ranges from 50,000 to 59,000, which means that each trip is underwritten by taxpayers for between $96 to $113 (using the higher subsidy amount).

The aim of the new service is to entice people away from driving to Washington on Route 29. For an individual, however, it is cheaper to travel by car than by train, even with the subsidy.

I calculate that it costs me, driving my 1999 Saturn, about $20.00 in gasoline (and I'm being generous: that's assuming gas is $2.50 per gallon, when it actually is less than that along the Route 29 corridor, at least until you reach the Beltway). It costs me between $1.00 and $8.00 to park in Ballston. Even if I park in the nearest commercial parking garage near my downtown DC office, the maximum charge for 24 hours is $22.00.

That means that the most I would pay to drive myself to downtown DC is $42.00, roundtrip, including parking. Since I nearly always park in Ballston, however, it is more realistic to calculate my cost to be $28.00 (if I spend all day in DC).

According to the Amtrak web site, the one-way fare on the new train is $29. Roundtrip fare is $58.

That means I save between $16 and $30 by driving myself.

If I were to travel with a friend or colleague and split the costs, we together save between $32 and $60.

For every person traveling together on that Charlottesville-DC trip, choosing Amtrak increases the cost by 100 percent while choosing a private automobile reduces it by 50 percent (up to the point every passenger seat in the car is filled).

I enjoy riding on a train as much as anyone. It is my preferred mode of transportation between Washington and New York. (There's no way you'll find me driving on the streets of Manhattan.) I once even took the Acela from New York to DC. Someone else was paying for it, of course.

Enjoying railroad travel should not, however, blind us to the fact that passenger rail, because it is not economically viable in an open market -- that is, in the absence of government subsidies -- exists only because of a transfer of wealth from the poor (who, by and large, do not travel by train) and the rich (who like to travel by train because it is the chic thing to do, and they can pretend to be environmentally conscious while doing it).

Looking at the numbers, however, why would any rational person choose to take the train rather than drive between Charlottesville and DC? Besides saving money, you would have more flexibility in terms of choosing when to depart and arrive, and if you have a change of plans -- or if your DC-area business is in Tyson's Corner rather than Capitol Hill -- you are better able to adapt to your travel needs and desires. What's more, if I drive myself, I can talk on the phone or listen to NPR without worrying about bothering other passengers.

This is a bad deal. Anyone who thinks otherwise has been bamboozled. (To be fair, people with large disposable incomes and who care little about their travel budgets might rationally choose the Amtrak option. The rest of us would not.)

And watch out: They're going to foist this boondoggle on Richmond and Roanoke, too. (No word about Elm Grove.)






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