Posted on 09/12/2005 2:34:17 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
By far, the "bulk" of road mileage across the country is local and not state or national, so your statement does not stand.
What the author fails to mention is the devastating effect unionized labor had on the rail lines in the middle of the twentieth century. The Less than car load frieght was done away with because of the cost of unionized labor, passenger service was also done away with in large part because of the extra overhead of unionized labor. Rail today is not competitive for many forms of frieght, one major ltl truck casrrier pulled 20,000 pup's off of rail this year because of the unpredictable nature of rail shipping. Most LTL shipments are not extremekly time sennsitive but with inventory's trimmed and lead times cut to days rather than weeks it's not ppratical to have a two or three week transit time from shipper to cognsignee. So the picture is a little more complex than the author paints with his GAAP manuel and his excel spreadsheet.
Thanks for the ping!
Just like the author said, multi-mode is best, with a proper balance. If every train commuter tried to take a taxi to employment, it wouldn't work.
bookmark
You're welcome. :-)
Personally, I prefer driving. However, I'm a road enthusiast. Given the author's World Without Subsidies, I just might become a rail enthusiast! :-)
Because transponder technology is in its infancy, there are no reliable cost accounting methodologies for calculating a reasonable per mile cost, not to mention factoring in congestion pricing, improvements and law enforcement aspects.
Doing a literature search on the subject put the author in a difficult position. Oregon, for example, is proposing to change a penny per mile via transponder to be collected at the pump. London is proposing $2.30 per mile to be collected via transponder, after converting metric to English units and pounds to dollars. Singapore has a mature transponder system with a full range of pricing, and its costs are in excess of London's proposed charges. Lacking an established model, the author was forced to bend over and pull a number out.
Using numbers in the London (proposed) to Singapore (actual) range, the sum of $7.50 in billed costs for a rush hour commute from Shoreline to downtown Seattle is well within the range of possiblity. And it helps illustrate his point.
The author of this piece, whom I know, doesn't know one locomotive from another. He grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and used rail to get around because it was a normal part of everyday life.
But remember what happened in most major cities even before the unions ruined private transit concerns and pushed for the creation of subsidized transportation authorities. The problems of transferring between competing transit systems eventually led to consolidation as the bigger fish swallowed the smaller fish. By 1911 the Mitten interests in Philadelphia had bought out the smaller street railroads and created the great PRT -- Philadelphia Rapid Transit. Consolidation is a natural part of capitalism, and once that begins and competition decreases, costs will go up.
The point the author wished to make was that getting rid of subsidies for highways would not be fair unless one got rid of subsidies for transit systems too. TANSTAAFL applies to everyone.
True. Passenger rail was dying thanks to organized labor, but the coup de grace was applied in 1968 when the post office pulled the mail off the passenger trains and handed it to the airlines. The post office had in effect been subsidizing long distance passenger trains, and the loss of that last subsidy pushed passenger rail over the edge.
Most LTL shipments are not extremekly time sennsitive but with inventory's trimmed and lead times cut to days rather than weeks it's not ppratical to have a two or three week transit time from shipper to cognsignee.
And that is why the Canadian National has bitten the bullet and is becoming a regularly scheduled freight railroad and why the Norfolk Southern is now following suit.
The last I heard, C-SPAN will tape the forum and run segments of it sometime on a weekend or the middle of a night.
How much of that was aided and abetted by crony politics and palm-greasing, though, rather than fair-and-square free-market competition?
Here in Washington? Riiiiiiiiiight. I'm calling "Bulls!t" on that statement.
And what's the first part of the sentence have to do with the second part?
This guy's an idiot or a liar or both. I'll say both.
Either way, it's pointless to read the rest of the article. You can't trust the facts of an article that immediately crops up with statements like that.
This article is based on a speech given by the author in Olympia last February. In speaking, the author uses index cards like Reagan and does jazz riffs on the points like Clinton. The "belly laughs" were more like people rolling on the floor when the speech was made.
Please read Post #14.
I'm not sure what the (Republican) Vare and Penrose machines did in regard to the 1911 merger. The books on Philadelphia transportation history don't mention any role by the city's corrupt ruling machine, although that doesn't rule out its involvement.
Just that bit alone is wrong. How could the author even write "not socialism" and "insist on a level playing field" in the same sentence.
One among many silly errors in this article.
Thanks for the heads up!
This article is about fairness. Do you think it is fair to destroy their premise in the first paragraph?
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