America’s Monorail
July 15, 2009
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Posted by Michael S. Langston
Every time I hear about Amtrak receiving more money from the federal government, I’m reminded of a Simpson episode where due to a fine the rich Mr. Burns paid for polluting the local water ways, they gathered at a town hall meeting to decide what to do with all that money.
While making the decision, the typical slick snake oil salesman, Lyle Lanley comes in and sells Springfield their very own solar powered monorail. The quote I remember clearly is when the Lyle started his sales pitch with this gem:
Y’know, a town with money is like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!
& while it’s obvious to most people that we don’t have extra money to blow, we continue to spend like drunken sailors on the continuous budget drains like Amtrak.
In order to not be out done by Bush’s massive increase in Amtrak funding (here), Obama included billions (here) in the economic stimulus package.
Meanwhile, since President Nixon created Amtrak, its history is overflowing with budget deficits, mismanagement, and continuing a decreased percentage of passenger miles demonstrates thoroughly that this experiment has failed. Wiki has a great article on the history of Amtrak which helps explain various causes of rails decline. Additionally, for the thoughtful environmentalist, Cato has a published report that generally more energy is used per passenger mile on rails than on other forms of transport (here). Noting among other things:
Far from protecting the environment, most rail transit lines use more energy per passenger mile, and many generate more greenhouse gases, than the average passenger automobile. Rail transit provides no guarantee that a city will save energy or meet greenhouse gas targets.
Among those many others reasons why the Utopian vision of mass rails should go away, a glaring reason is the density of most of the American population.
While mass transit seems to work well in fairly dense areas, they do not work well in less dense areas. Other forms of transportation, such as car and airline are valued more highly than train. From a 2002 Cato article describing how Amtrak should be treated they noted:
To put this point in context, in 2000 Americans made only 22.5 million trips by Amtrak compared to 665 million on commercial airlines.
I’m just extremely happy the Buggy Whip Corporation of America isn’t still around. I’d hate to see all the political money thrown its way in an attempt to save it.
Categories: Economics
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Tags: Economics, Public Transportation, Wasteful Spending, Welfare
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