Railways and the American Infrastructure Disaster
One hundred years ago, the United States’ passenger railway network was the largest and most sophisticated in the world, boasting grand, elegant terminals, far reaching luxury routes, and a level of connectivity surpassing today’s airline industry. The legendary railroad titans of that day such as New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad are simply an afterthought nowadays, and using trains to travel any distance, be it long or short, is rarely considered.
This sharp decline in rail ridership however, occurred almost exclusively in America. While the United States slowly closed its stations and ripped up its track network, countries all over Europe and Asia saw a renaissance with their railroads, and an evolution with train technology that mirrored what America saw with air travel. This juxt-opposition is no better illustrated than with the United States and Japan. Five years before the first flight of the iconic Boeing 747 jumbo jet, Japan began operation of its first Shinkansen train sets. The Tōkaidō Shinkansen began service between Osaka and Tokyo on 1 October 1964, just in time for the Tokyo Olympic games. Prior to 1964, this 310-mile line had an average trip time of six hours and 40 minutes. When the bullet train was introduced however, the trip time was cut in half to three hours and ten minutes. An astounding success, this line served over 100 million passengers in less than three years. Furthermore, the success of the Shinkansen did not end there. The Japanese continued to develop the technology, and have erected the most impressive network of high-speed rail in the world. Japanese trains have a near perfect on-time percentage (an average delay of just two seconds), and a perfect safety record, with not one fatality in the 50 years of operation. This excellence in rail also occurred in their every-day non-high-speed trains, allowing for an integrated and diverse transportation network. Indeed, Railway innovation and success continued to flourish all around the world with countries such as France, Italy, Russia, Germany, United Kingdom, China, Korea, Turkey, Morocco, Uzbekistan, and Spain constructing vast networks of higher-speed*, and high-speed-rail, metro systems, and complimentary public transit infrastructure.[i]
All of this information of course begs the question: what about the United States? How is it that the world’s richest country, with the largest GDP, still does not have true high-speed rail, or even a decent passenger rail system? Moreover, how is it that every time a public transportation project or initiative is proposed, it is met with immediate and powerful opposition. The reason for this ideological opposition to rail and public transportation in general can be summed up in three components: Car dependency, deliberate government action (or inaction), and transportation misinformation.
Car dependency:
Car dependency is a concept in which a town, city, and country’s planning with regard to infrastructure vastly favors automobiles to all other forms of transportation, including walking, bicycles, and public transportation. This favoritism is not limited to construction planning, but also extends to economic action, and social consideration.
In a technical sense, the spiral of car dependency begins with measures to make automobile use more pleasurable and advantageous, usually at the expense of other modes of transportation. Greater traffic volumes are induced through wider roads with higher speed limits, therefore leading to congestion. The urban design of cities and metropolitan areas subsequently adjusts to the needs of automobiles in terms of movement and space. Buildings are replaced by parking lots and small boulevards with walkable shopping areas are replaced by enclosed mall complexes. Walk-in banks, fast-food stores, and street vendors are replaced by drive-in versions of themselves that are inconveniently located for pedestrians. Town centers with a mixture of commercial, retail, and entertainment functions are replaced by single-function business parks, and 'multiplex' entertainment complexes, each surrounded by gargantuan parking lots. These kinds of environments not only require an automobile to access them, but render walking unthinkable on a larger scale, thus inducing even more traffic onto the increased road space. This results in even more congestion, and the cycle above continues. Roads get ever bigger, consuming ever greater tracts of land previously used for housing, manufacturing, and other socially and economically useful purposes. Public transit becomes less viable and socially stigmatized, eventually becoming a minority form of transportation. The preventative cost of owning a car further drives wealth inequality, and people's choices and freedoms to live functional lives without the use of a car are greatly reduced. Railways, which thrive on walkability and centrally located stations, fail in part because passengers live further and further from said stations, now making a trip in the very same car they may be trying to avoid necessary. The added reality of car dependency is the massive capital costs to upkeep roads, bridges, highways, and other transportation infrastructure associate with cars (costing hundreds of billions).[ii] The costs are not only economic. Nearly 40,000 people per year die in automobile accidents, a number that’s been growing every year.[iii] The individuals and companies that benefit from a car dependent society however, (oil companies, auto companies, etc.) have interest to retain the status quo, with many putting millions into advertisement campaigns to ensure that America remains transfixed by cars.
Deliberate Government Action (or inaction):
The decline and the “depression” of the railroad industry as a whole is largely due to severe sanctions and regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission, hypocritical transportation ideology, and lacking government investment. With these draconian regulations, the US government essentially picked transportation “winners” and “losers,” largely because these regulations didn’t have equivalent standards across other modes of transport (especially by the time the airlines deregulated in 1978). Moreover, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 initiated consistent capital investment into roads and highways, but no such investments into railways. This allowed for bus and truck companies like Greyhound and Megabus to lower their operating costs, as they were essentially given a free right-of-way that was constantly maintained, without ever spending a dollar of their own revenue to do so. Though the gas tax does contribute to the highway fund, it accounts for just 27% of highway spending in the US.[iv] Similarly, while airline companies do pay landing and gate rental fees at large airports, they do not have to pay for the nationalized FAA air traffic control (the equivalent of train dispatching), or the initial capital investments to build airports in the first place. Some airlines, like Cape Air, receive so much in government subsidy that their planes can fly empty on certain flights and still make a profit.[v] This spending contrasts greatly with the railroads, which are forced to pay for their own dispatching, maintenance and right-of-way. Train companies like Amtrak finance 100% of their owned infrastructure, (with freight companies paying for the rest) stations included, unless a particular state wants to finance a passenger train or provide station upkeep. This hypocrisy in funding leads to poor performance and service overall. Instead of de-training at a grand, centrally located stations, train companies are forced to operate small, understaffed, and poorly designed (though much cheaper) ‘Am-shacks,’ sometimes located so far from any semblance of civilization that passengers swear off train travel forever because of the inconvenience.[vi]
In 1971, Penn-Central, the conglomeration of New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad declared the largest bankruptcy in history (at that time), and forced the United States government to quickly save the passenger rail network by forming the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, or Amtrak. From the beginning, Amtrak was set up to fail. Richard Nixon’s administration consolidated the various passenger train operators into a single national rail service to adapt to falling ridership. Either as an act of sabotage or short-sightedness, Amtrak was set up as a for-profit company receiving government subsidies rather than as a fully integrated part of the national transit infrastructure, and nobody expected Nixon’s measure to last for more than a few years. Indeed, it was believed that within a few years, train ridership would cease altogether. This prediction however, was wrong. Americans, for whatever reason, returned to the rails, flooding a passenger rail system that was wholly unprepared to last longer than five years. As Amtrak managed to hold on throughout the years, many routes became profitable, the most famous of which being the highly traveled Northeast Corridor, a section of higher-speed-rail track between Boston and Washington DC largely following the old Pennsylvania Railroad’s mainline.
The system as a whole, however, has never turned a profit, and this fact has led largely conservative politicians to say that the system shouldn’t get any more government money, commonly referring to rail projects are ‘boondoggles.’ This attitude demonstrates the foolishness that was built into Amtrak from the very beginning: expecting a crucial transportation service to be profitable without significant government subsidies. There is no form of transportation that is inherently profitable and the government seeing fit to allow subsidies in one form of transport, but not another is blatant hypocrisy. No one ever called the interstate highway system a ‘boondoggle.’
Transportation Misinformation:
The three most misleading railways myths are as follows:
1. Railways are 100-year-old technology that cannot compete with newer forms of travel
This of course holds the same weight as claiming the airfoil is 100-year-old tech that can’t compete with better options. Of course, flying would not be so popular if we were still flying 1950’s Lockheed Constellations across the country with like-airports to use. Air technology developed and became faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain.
The same is true with rail travel. Other countries developed extremely modern, fast, and reliable trains while the US never developed past 1950’s railway technology. We cannot complain about old railway technology being incapable of competing with other forms of travel if we haven’t fully realized all possibilities.
2. A railroad is a company and therefore must make a profit
This statement is not only fundamentally false, but ideologically flawed. To say the railway companies should be profitable is like saying the Interstate Highway System or the United States Postal Service should run at a profit. Sure, both could (and in certain situations have) run at a profit. However, trying to make these services run at a profit runs counter to why they exist in the first place: to provide essential infrastructure on which the rest of the economy and country moves.
Until we join the rest of the world, and discard these antiquated views of rail travel, our system will be stuck in the 20th century.
3. Save for land cruising foamers, nobody rides trains anymore, so they should not be government funded.
Though trains do indeed have somewhat of a cult following, this statement is factually false. Most rail advocated are not calling for high speed trains in South Dakota. Intelligent deployment of rail technology is just as important as having it in the first place. Moreover, the year 2019 saw 26.85 billion passenger kilometers in the United States. People may not ride the train everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they don’t ride the train anywhere. In Amtrak’s Northeast corridor, the most densely populated region in the U.S., with myriad flight options, Amtrak’s share of the air-flight market for travel between New York and Washington, D.C., increased from 37 - 75% from 2000 to 2012. It is no coincidence that this increase began in the same year that the Acela (Amtrak’s fastest train), was introduced. “On both ease of travel and potential productivity, rail holds a large competitive advantage over the plane,” Bloomberg writes.[vii] “And that's on mobility alone, without factoring in other benefits to city economies or transport sustainability.” Finally, in 2019, Amtrak recorded its most popular year ever, with more than 32 million passenger trips and a year-on-year increase of 800,000 passengers. Indeed, the same rules of induced demand that apply to highway lanes, apply also to train travel. If the tracks are built, running the newest and best rail technology, people will flock to use it. One cannot claim that nobody rides the train if there are no good trains to ride.
Rail travel in the US will never be like Japan, France or Germany. These countries have heavily invested in their rail infrastructure for decades. All of the major countries in the world that lead in rail infrastructure also boast major interstate highway systems and large, sophisticated airports, showing that ‘picking transportation winners and losers,’ was unique to the United States.
In order to meet the growing needs of 21st century domestic travel, America must invest more evenly across its transportation modes, and commit to having a diverse and integrated system, one that uses rail, air and road travel appropriately and smartly.
[i] Higher-speed-rail=110-125mph | High-speed-rail=125mph and above
[ii] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/highway-and-road-expenditures
[iii] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-29/as-driving-returns-u-s-traffic-deaths-continue-to-soar
[iv] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/highway-and-road-expenditures
[v] https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-aviations-battle-serve-remote-american-cities-reap-subsidies-2021-9
[vi] https://amtrakguide.com/stations/miami-amtrak-station/
[vii] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-26/why-more-northeast-u-s-travelers-take-the-train-instead-of-a-plane-in-2-charts
