It seems some commentators are thinking along similar lines as I am about how the new fuel economy standards fit into the larger transportation picture. Ryan Avent and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich both have prescriptive analyses in The American Prospect, and the Financial Times’ Lex column concurs with my analysis.
The entire alternative transportation community has been busy rebuffing George Will’s casting of us as a bunch of elitists who want to ram our preferences down people’s throats, whereas the American “free market” (i.e. federal policy) has done little but limit our transportation choices for quite some time. “Americans by the scores of millions have been happily trading distance for space, living farther from their jobs in order to enjoy ample backyards and other aspects of low-density living,” Will writes. Happily? I’m sure many automobile commuters who sit in traffic every day would beg to differ. Here are a fewgoodrebuttals.
George Will hasn’t been the only target of sustainable mobility advocates’ ire this week. Trains for America asks the questions that the Gwinnett Gazette’s Benita Dodd should have asked, and Streetsblog takes aim at the Heritage Foundation’s resident car-hugger Alan Pisarski.
Another loyal rail critic, Cato’s Randal O’Toole, presents more misinformation about passenger trains in a USA Today op-ed. “Amtrak charges a minimum of $99 for its high-speed Acela from New York to Washington,” he says, “but only $72 for its conventional train. Fares for unsubsidized buses on this route start as low as $20 (including free Wi-Fi), while airfares start at $99.” First, everyone who pays gasoline taxes to maintain highways is subsidizing intercity buses, and second, by the time most people are ready to book a flight, the fare has risen sharply above the base rate. O’Toole also repeats the false canard that Interstate highways pay for themselves, when in fact every mode of travel is made affordable by government spending. Plus, I wouldn’t call 736 fewer BTUs per passenger mile “marginally” more fuel-efficient.
Longtime transportation observer Tom Vanderbilt wonders why passenger trains are practically the only example of a technology that regressed over the course of the 20th century. The main culprits: a decline in rail capacity (thanks to underinvestment from government) combined with ballooning freight rail traffic, generating a system designed for slower, heavier trains. He concludes:
Obama’s bold vision obscures a simple fact: 220 mph would be phenomenal, but we would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration.
LCL: Streetsblog maps out the legislative machinery this year’s surface transportation reform bill will be cranked through; what the results of Tuesday’s vote mean for California HSR; China invests just shy of $300 billion in trains, iStockAnalyst endorses an incremental approach to improving passenger rail; AASHTO’s new chairman beats the drum for faster trains; NARP Council member Jim Loomis on a passenger rail success and a failure overseas; Maryland scraps road widening & funds light rail instead; and what if more sports teams went “on the road” by train?
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