"We have $8 billion," LaHood said. "You're going to see new buses; you're going to see ability of transit districts to really have the equipment ... And we'll begin at DOT to set a standard for our ability to get out of the recession, get people back to work in good-paying jobs."

LaHood says some of those federally-funded jobs involve driving buses. I don't know if he means big buses or a bunch of aging hippies driving old VW Microbuses around Eugene, OR, Portland's Pearl District and Bellingham, WA.

Mass transit almost never works. I've posted extensively about the folly of public transit here and on this web page.

It's your tax dollars at waste. (posted 5/28/09, permalink)

Almost Eighty Years Later; Almost Eighty Percent Uglier: In 1931, new railcars were introduced on the Philadelphia to Norristown transit line. The railway was then known as the Pennsylvania & Western (nicknamed the Piss & Whistle by locals); the new cars were built by Brill of Philadelphia.

The aluminum railcars had a streamlined design (resulting from wind-tunnel testing of scale models), featured rounded parabolic ends and could hit speeds as high as 92 mph. These amazing cars remained in service for 59 years. I rode them many times commuting to college. The replacement cars are Fisher-Price boxy and probably have the aerodynamics of a brick.

The line on which the new cars run is now controlled by SEPTA and is known as the Norristown High-Speed Line. So much for progress. (posted 4/6/09, permalink)

Fiscal Levitation: Buried in the details of the mass transit section of the recently-passed and signed Spendulus Package (aka - No Deadbeat Left Behind™) is $45 million to pay for environmental studies of a Disneyland to Las Vegas high-speed MagLev rail line, something that sounds like parody but is actually a pet project of Harry Reid, Democratic Senate Majority Leader. The 311-mph train could make the trip from Sin City to Tomorrowland in less than two hours, according to backers - at a cost of mega-billions.

Maglev costs about 10 times as much as regular rail. There's only one commercial maglev line in the world - the Shanghai Transrapid which travels from Pudong, on the Shanghai subway line to Pudong International Airport - a distance of less than 19 miles. There has never been a commercial long distance inter-city maglev rail line built.

The Shanghai maglev cost $1.33 billion to build. So the construction cost alone would be $70 million per mile (and that's with Chinese labor). Constructing a line from Disneyland to Las Vegas - a distance of almost 300 miles - would surely cost well over 20 billion dollars. This is an absurdly high number. And, in America - a large country with big distances between population centers - passenger rail never pays off.

The heyday of rail passenger service in America was in the 1920s. In those times, railroads were profitable and passengers were happy. The depression of the 1930s ended all that. The Pennsylvania Railroad's experience was typical. Like the rest of the nation's railroads, the Pennsy never earned a profit from passenger service since 1946, despite multi-million dollar investments in passenger equipment and facilities in the years following World War II. Competition from the use of automobiles for medium-distance intercity trips prevented the railroads from increasing fares enough to cover soaring labor and material costs.

Today, even in the densely Northeast Corridor, Amtrak can't make money. Not even with its high-speed, premium priced Acela trains. Since its inception in 1971, Amtrak has never recorded a profit while receiving more than $40 billion in federal funding since its inception.

Amtrak's annual operating deficit for the entire system is approximately $500 million dollars. The rest of Amtrak's deficit goes to debt service, capital projects on the Amtrak-owned Northeast Corridor infrastructure and Railroad Retirement costs.

Amtrak started Acela high-speed train service in late 2000. Each train can make the trip between New York and Washington in 2 hours, 28 minutes, with a top speed of 150 mph. Revenue from Acela fares was $403.5 million, or 27 percent of Amtrak's ticket sales. Acela tickets can be more than twice as expensive as those for slower, so-called regional trains between Washington and New York. Trains out of New York City account for over 60% of Amtrak's gross revenue.

In the 1940s to the 1960s, the Pennsylvania Railroad ran 'clockers' - hourly trains (22 per day, over 150 per week) between Philadelphia and New York; single electric locomotives carrying eight to ten passenger cars. Acela trains have two locomotives and six passenger cars; there are only 32 scheduled Acela runs per week.

Last year, Republican Senator John E. Sununu New Hampshire offered an amendment that would have forbidden Amtrak from running trains with government per-passenger subsidies that exceed $200. He asked, "How much money should the taxpayers be asked to spend on a business that is losing money?" His proposal was voted down by a wide margin in the Democrat-controlled Congress.

Passenger railroads in Japan and Great Britain are now mostly in private hands and are generally profitable.

Creating new rail networks will not solve America's woes - it will only create another unprofitable quasi-government entity. Privatization would weed out the unprofitable routes and maintain/create profitable, market-based transportation entities. (posted 3/30/09, permalink)