Eight people were killed Tuesday evening when a speeding Amtrak train went off the rails in Philadelphia, injuring more than 200. Human error is strongly suspected, but transportation safety experts say definitively that the accident would not have happened had the line been equipped with an automated braking system that is already standard on rail lines in much of the industrialized world.
Seven years ago, Amtrak had been ordered by Congress to install such a system by the end of 2015, but it was not given the funding needed to carry out that mandate. And the day after the accident, the House Appropriations Committee voted to slash Amtrak funding by another $252 million.
Amtrak in particular, and rail transit in general, have long been Republican targets. The argument is that rail and transit service ought to pay for itself and even be privatized and run at a profit. If it can’t be run at a profit, it shouldn’t exist, even though no major passenger rail network in the world is run at a profit.
But let’s be honest: The “pay for itself” argument is cover for what is really a cultural and even tribal distaste for rail. Rail is perceived by some as urban, vaguely leftist and even foreign. While the automobile is individualistic — and if you have any doubt, look around you in rush-hour traffic — rail is deemed socialistic and thus un-American. To deny that sentiment’s existence and power is to deny reality.
But roads don’t pay for themselves either. The managed-lane toll projects being built along I-575 and I-75, for example, require significant subsidies, and won’t pay for themselves for at least 50 years, if then. The soon-to-be bankrupt federal Highway Trust Fund hasn’t paid for itself in years either, requiring the infusion of tens of billions of dollars in general-fund revenues to subsidize it.
(That’s because we haven’t raised the federal gas tax since 1993, back when a movie ticket cost $4, a gallon of gasoline cost $1.15 and the average new car cost less than $13,000. Prices for all of those things provided by private enterprise have gone up considerably and we accept it as natural, yet somehow it’s a scandal if the price for government-provided goods increases as well.)
Rail is indeed a largely urban amenity. But look around you — we are becoming a largely urban country. The Atlanta metro region has grown from 3 million in 1990 to 5.7 million today, with no commensurate increase in highway capacity in part because we’d have no place to put that much asphalt. In addition, younger Americans today are much less likely than their parents to own a car or even have a drivers’ license — thus the popularity of Uber and Lyft — and real estate developers and relocating corporations are scrambling for the relatively few parcels of land served by passenger rail in this state.
The market is telling us that while the automobile will still play a critical role, the capacity of our highway networks and the tolerance of our citizenry for sitting in traffic are both about maxed out. Yet as a state and a nation, we still make transportation policy based on a romanticized vision of ourselves as we were back in 1975, instead of what we will be in 2025 or 2030.
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