CSXT 4617 wrote:Well, sure. But, the roads are crowded. We need a chairman who will push for more service to not only make more money, but also to take more cars off the road.
If passenger rail made money in the present day economic/political environment, don't you think they'd be running trains everywhere? And why would we need a subsidized government organization to run them? The fact is, every train that runs loses money. More trains means less money. Granted, operating efficiency may be gained by extending service further to put more bodies on a train (and therefore more fares) to a certain extent, but you're also adding fixed costs in terms of track, signal, and station maintenance. At the end of the day, they're still losing money, and any gains (reductions in loss) from increased operational efficiency probably won't cover the finance costs of the organizations share of the expansions capital costs.
If what we want is more service, we need to look to the past when we had decent transportation services and compare it to today. Back then, these services were privately operated, because transporting people was a profitable enterprise. Who was their competition? Well the railroads competed with other railroad companies, and also competed with the trolley/interurban companies. That competition was what motivated these private operators to provide good services. If you lived in Media or West Chester and commuted to Center City, you could take the PRR, or you could take the trolley. If the trolley was too slow for you, you could take the PRR. If the PRR was too expensive, you could take the trolley. But if either one of them pissed you off for whatever reason, you could take the other one. Industry regulation back then wasn't particularly burdensome, and they didn't take a dime of taxes for operating costs until the end of their corporate lives.
Let's fast forward to today. What limited services exist are operated by one taxpayer-subsidized government organization, because it is no longer profitable. Service doesn't go nearly everywhere it used to, and the quality of the service often leaves much to be desired. There's really no competition in terms of mass-transportation services, because they're pretty much the only game in town. Therefore, when they fail to provide you with acceptable service, you have no alternative but to complain. And that does very little to change things. They do, however, compete with an entirely different transportation system, also government operated and much more heavily subsidized - the interstate highway system. Since everyone pays for the system through their taxes, and its costs aren't paid for by users directly, an artificial demand is created - which is what effectively put privately operated passenger rail out of business. Industry regulations these days are evermore burdensome - and in most cases counterintuitive. And of course, the government mass transit services cost plenty of taxpayer dollars.
So here we are with fewer, more limited transportation options, our taxes are too high, and the state is flat broke - worse, in fact due to a ticking time bomb of debt and pension payments - and much of what's left of the infrastructure is falling apart. The Feds just printed a f***ton of cash for ARRA, which mostly went to cronies. Very little went to projects that were in any way meaningful to improving critical infrastructure. The feds can no longer print that kind of money, because there's no one to buy the corresponding debt instruments. Now - Do we ask our government to fix the transportation problems they helped create -OR- Do we demand that the government get out of the transportation business and let the private sector run it the way it was 70 years ago, when service was abundant, of decent quality, and economical.
Makes me really not look forward to health care as I get older...
This has been another ridiculously verbose, politically-tainted rant, brought to you by
limejuice.
