What is to say, however, that long-distance intercity transportation trumps freight transportation on the mainline railroads? Certainly, freight movement in itself is a significant public interest, as experienced in my home state of Oregon and my neighboring state of Washington - both statse that have made it clear that freight movement needs to be addressed. Washington has even largely stopped new passenger rail funding, and shifted it to freight rail funding - i.e. purchasing shortline railroads, purchasing freight car fleets, and upgrading freight railroad tracks and yards, and improving access for freight shippers to the railroads.
Mr. Norman has a good point that I believe has been all but side-stepped in the four pages of discussion - what is the role of the intercity long distance passenger train? Take a heavy mainline railroad - are we going to prioritize one eight-car, 70% loaded passenger train - over 50 fully loaded freight trains carrying coal for power plants, automobiles, steel, produce, grain, lumber, and manufactured goods? If the railroad were carrying 100 passenger trains, I'd say passengers have a bit of a priority, but the fact is and remains, only 3 million some passengers rode an Amtrak intercity train in FY2005. That's a statistically insignificant number of intercity travellers.
The railroads have zero obligation to haul passengers; their obligation was absolved through RPRA and Staggers. Their mandated obligation to allow Amtrak trains on their tracks expired several years ago. If we are to demand that the railroads have a vested public interest in hauling passengers, why don't we expect the same of every common carrier trucking company to also run busses for passenger transport? The same would be true for cargo airlines, including no less than UPS Airlines and FedEx Express.
Just because we like something makes no mandate of our government to insist that a private property owner (the railroads) made concessions to our demands unless there is a clear public safety concern. If we want to argue that there is a energy crisis looming that we need to resolve, we need to resolve that problem internally and not force an external entity (the railroads) to concede to our demands, because we (private individuals) cannot hold ourselves accountable and use restraint with regards to our own personal energy usage. Nor must we insist that the only solution is by rail, because unlike
icgsteve's post,
icgsteve wrote:Trains can go anywhere, they can go fast, they sip energy, if we electrify the rail lines as most of the world has we can get the energy from many sources and we can switch energy sources just as fast as it takes to build an few generating plants.
The fact is that trains cannot go anywhere, nor can they go fast. In my neck of the woods, there is a large debate over a railroad line that is six miles long between two suburbs in Portland, and whether we should spend government dollars to support a "wine train" in the hopes of further development as a commuter rail corridor; however the line is both steep and curvy, and would have a top speed no higher than 30 MPH. Likewise, our country is mired in a poor energy policy that shuns many effective modes of power generation, yet requires the construction of generating plants that produce only small amounts of electricity (i.e. wind farms) and cannot realistically provide for our current energy needs - much less our future needs.
We all know rail has a place, but we are spending hundreds of millions on a mode of transport that has extremely little utility. What will make or break this form of transport is warm bodies in seats - and after 36 years, the warm bodies are still missing. $300M a year would go a long ways towards resolve local transportation issues that would make significant strides into reducing congestion, pollution and energy consumption. People who choose to live in remote areas must accept that with remoteness comes lack of choices that may be abundant in more populated areas, such as access to multiple modes of transport. And the ability and/or need to travel is a privilege, not a right, nor is such guaranteed to be provided by any government or document.