Maggie's Farm

My father, now 90 and very much of sound mind, still talks about the time this country was crisscrossed by a network of passenger trains running at 90-100 mph, most of them still hauled by steam, and a lot of them in dark territory (that is, lines without block signals). In those days, over 10,000 people per night checked in to a hotel called the Pullman Company, operator of most, but by no means all, of the overnight sleeping cars on this system. They did this as privately operated companies, heavily taxed and arbitrarily regulated, securing their funding at market rates.

Let that sink in.

I've heard a lot of flimsy excuses and cherrypicked data over the years, from both the left and the right, as to why this system naturally met its demise. I've also spent most of my lifetime studying the policy trail behind it, and have found a much different story. I could recount this in some detail, but I've found there are few that want to hear it, primarily because all sides have dirty hands, and this doesn't comport with the spirts-team politics of our time.

The primary reason highway modes appear to be so much cheaper is that the Federal program has transferred all cost centers that can't turn a profit to the public sector, buried in a myriad of stovepiped programs that make accounting for costs exceptionally difficult for all but the most determined investigator. Despite that, and by the Feds' own published data, the highway program hasn't paid for itself out of Trust Fund revenues except for about five years in the late-'50s/early-'60s.

Congress has been overspending the Trust Fund by as much as 25% since at least the mid-'70s, the earlier data being unavailable. I recall being told by a senior policy official at FHWA, back during 41's administration, that they knew they were building inadequate infrastructure back in the mid-'50s, due to the anticipated increases in truck size and weight limits, but that the couldn't sell a program at the necessary level of spending.

Comparing costs of bus and rail is about the same as comparing apples and lag bolts. The accounting simply isn't comparable the way it's been done for the past several decades. When you do, you see very different results. The reason American freight railroads rebounded the way they have is because two truckers, J B Hunt and UPS, spent the late-'80s dragging the railroad's and Congress into the 20th century. A lot of them went kicking and screaming tntil several steamship operators got in on the act.

We're on the verge of seeing the same thing on the passenger side. Meanwhile, what neither the right nor the left have been willing to explain to me is why they engaged in a series of policy decisions, beginning early in the last century and culminating in 1971, that systematically destroyed a century and a quarter of private investment in what had been the very best passenger transportation system in the world.

And they wonder why so many of them were turned out on their busts back in 2016 ...