Federal investment must precede private investment

Say you’re a looking to buy a home in a medium-sized city, and your choice is between two neighborhoods. Neighborhood A is a well-established, thriving, middle-class neighborhood with a stock of postwar-era homes that are generally in good shape. Its streets and sidewalks are well-maintained, its crime rate is low and it’s in a high-ranking school district. Yet there are no stores within walking distance, a fact that concerns you as the city has bad traffic congestion and gas prices are constantly rising.

Neighborhood B is an historically working-class neighborhood of modest Victorian homes, many of which are in need of major repairs. It has had some crime issues, and its schools are ranked slightly below average. Yet there is a diversity of retail within walking distance, recent city government investments have fixed up the streets, crime is starting to go down thanks to a greater police presence, and a light rail line is planned to be built within blocks of the house you’re considering.

The city is offering mortgage assistance to homebuyers in neighborhood B, but not enough to make the decision a no-brainer. Meanwhile, a budget crunch is forcing the City Council to consider making cuts in public education, safety and infrastructure maintenance, making it highly uncertain whether neighborhood B will continue to improve.

Extrapolate this analogy to the national level, where Neighborhood A is the United States’ road and highway network and the many thriving car-oriented places it has generated, and neighborhood B is its passenger train network, and the walkable inner cities and small towns that once thrived on their rail connections but have fallen on hard times. Like a city trying to encourage people to buy homes in disadvantaged neighborhoods, Congressional leaders want to spur private investment in passenger rail. Yet most are unwilling to make the substantial public investments that any private contractor would require in order to enter the business. House leaders are even threatening to make devastating cuts to passenger rail just at a time when it is beginning to revive thanks to earlier federal investment (the Recovery Act and subsequent appropriations for High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail).

Just as putting money into the public amenities that make a neighborhood a great place to live, a sufficient level of government investment in a modern network of fast, frequent and reliable passenger trains spurs the private sector to create jobs and redevelop the kind of walkable, transit-rich towns and cities that Americans are increasingly demanding. As is happening in places like Normal, Illinois, and has happened in places like Meridian, Mississippi, downtown economic development occurs as intercity train service improves—in Meridian, all it took was the opening of a new intermodal transportation center, where local and intercity buses converge with two daily Amtrak trains, to spur new business downtown.

The biggest obstacle to bringing American passenger train service up to modern world standards—almost completely unacknowledged in yesterday’s House Transportation Committee hearing on passenger rail privatization (video available)—remains the lack of an ongoing dedicated source of funding for trains, similar to what highways and aviation enjoy. The tremendous potential for modern train service to revitalize our cities and towns will remain unrealized as long as the passenger train’s competing, less efficient, modes remain highly capitalized with generous public funding, while Amtrak is left to beg Congress every year for its meager slice of the federal pie.

Mutually-beneficial private-sector partnerships with Amtrak to better serve the traveling public are entirely possible, and there aren’t many train advocates who would want to prevent such partnerships. But until trains are truly put on a level playing field with other modes, and are seen as integral counterparts to roads and planes in moving Americans safely and efficiently, such improvements will remain elusive dreams.

There was no pot of money ready and waiting to be spent to develop the Interstate Highway System in the 1940s, but visionary leaders decided that the system would enable country’s continued prosperity, and they came up with a way to finance it. As petroleum prices rise and gridlock increasingly plagues our roads and aviation system, we desperately need to apply the same forward-thinking attitude to our forlorn passenger train network.