Nicest of the Damned: Amtrak shutdown
Unfortunately, Congress has forced Amtrak to maintain nationwide service, and there’s not a nationwide commitment to the service. If Congress wants universal service, they need to pony up the sliver of highway funds that Amtrak represents.
If they’re willing to let Amtrak cut unpopular routes, it could be profitable right now.
And Amtrak would cease to exist outside the NE corridor.
National rail service is skeletal at best, with the interstate highway system’s spread over the past 50 years.
If you want to ride the rails from Atlanta, you can go to Washington DC or New Orleans, but not to Florida (at least not without a trip to one of thoee other cities).
I can’t imagine the scenario that would make rail service really viable without drifting off into the realm of outright fantasy. Care to join me?
We cut all spending on interstate highways, except what’s needed for possible defense and evacuation uses (Ike’s original plan, after all).
We remove all downtown freeway interchanges, keeping all major roads of that type out of population centers.
In many cities (Atlanta, Seattle, LA), rail lines were integral to their growth and success. Then the rail lines were torn up in the post-WWII era by a consortium of companies who stood to benefit in the near term from replacing trains with buses[1][2]. Comparing the maps of the old lines with proposals for new systems is quite frustrating: keeping those old systems in place wouldn’t cost nearly as much as it will to replace them.
When you factor in the added benefits — lower pollution, reduced urban sprawl — it make you wonder what some business interests won’t do to make a short-term profit.
So we replace all those old lines, and reconnect all those neighborhoods with street-level transit that never gets stuck in traffic, that never needs new highways, and that is always safe and dependable.
We also invest in rails for short to medium inter-city routes, leaving the transcontinental stuff to the airlines. There’s no reason why I can’t take a train from Seattle to Portland or San Francisco and have it move faster than highway speed. The 125 in the name of the UK’s intercity 125 trains is not just a number: that’s how fast they go. In a country 800+ miles long, that helps. The TGV and Shinkansen travel up to 300 km/h, about 190 mph. That’s triple the speed most of us can manage over a long drive with none of the fatigue and aggravation.
But this all just fantasy: I can’t imagine what it would take to make any of this reality, but then I never imagined smoking would be as unpopular as it is, either.
[1] In the 1930s and 1940s, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company conspired with Standard Oil of California and General Motors to replace highly-efficient urban electric transit systems with bus operations using petroleum. They formed National City Lines, which by the mid-1950s had completed the motorization of electric transit systems in sixteen states. This included the destruction of the Pacific Electric System in Southern California, which operated 3,000 trains through 56 cities and carried 80 million passengers annually. General Motors was convicted of conspiracy in 1949 and fined $5,000.
http://www.pir.org/usctrust.html
[2] Thus was formed United Cities Motor Transit (UCMT) as a subsidiary of GM’s bus division. Its sole function was to acquire electric street-car companies, convert them to GM motorbus operation, and then resell the properties to local concerns which agreed to purchase GM bus replacements. ‘In each case,’ [GM General Counsel] Hogan stated, GM ‘successfully motorized the city, turned the management over to other interests and liquidated its investment.’ The program ceased, however, in 1935 when GM was censured by the American Transit Association (ATA) for its self-serving role, as a bus manufacturer, in apparently attempting to motorize Portland’s electric streetcar system.”
http://rapidtransit.com/net/thirdrail/9905/agt1.htm