Saturday is National Train Day with events scheduled in all 50 states, including in Seattle at the beautifully restored King Street Station (above). I was a guest on this topic today on KUOW's The Conversation With Ross Reynolds, but time being what it is, much more needs to be said. Some of this may be familiar to Rogue readers, but it can't be stated often enough.
1. Seattle is better served by passenger rail than most American cities. It is the terminus of two long-distance Amtrak trains, the Coast Starlight and the Empire Builder. I've ridden both and they are the best way to see the country. In addition, it is served by the Amtrak Cascades, a regional corridor with multiple trains a day south to Portland and Eugene and north to Vancouver, B.C. You can enjoy a relaxing, spacious ride alongside spectacular scenery, have a meal or adult beverage, and work using onboard wi-fi. Sound Transit operates commuter rail via its Sounder service north and south in the metropolitan area. Finally, Seattle has both light rail and one streetcar line with more to come. Phoenix is by far the largest American city with no passenger rail service at all (although it has — WBIYB — light rail).
2. Passenger rail is the most environmentally friendly way to move large numbers of people, an advantage that matters even more if we're going to reduce greenhouse gases associated with climate change. Cars are terrible polluters, but so are airplanes. Trains also help ease congestion on highways and airline routes, as well as reducing the safety costs associated with cars and freeways. Commuter rail helps ease the horrible traffic of rush hours that impedes productivity, belches pollution and causes costly wrecks.
The Turbo Train at Phoenix Union Station in 1972. It was a futuristic technology but never received support and was relegated to use in the Northeast.
4. Amtrak keeps setting ridership records, including on its supposed "money losing" long-distance trains. These are essential to a national network, and they are also the lifeblood of many smaller communities. Thus, a train such as the Texas Eagle gets strong support in its otherwise reactionary namesake state. In addition, these trains are a truly wonderful way to travel. If you've never done it, take a train trip.
5. Given all these positives, why does Amtrak struggle for funding every year? It comes down to the reflexive Republican hatred of passenger trains, and the GOP controls the House. I've written more about this anti-rail fetish and its consequences here. Amtrak isn't the only way to go (for my historical look, see here). It's unfortunate that the Congress didn't simply provide subsidies to private railroads for passenger trains, and do so on competitive routes. Successful privatization and public-private models are working in other countries. Even the conservative/austerian Cameron government in Great Britain is embarking on an ambitious expansion of rail service, including building true high-speed rail. But however you do it, passenger service needs a dedicated funding stream that's not hostage to each year's budget battle.
6. So you mean subsidies? Yes. Much more of American economic life is subsidized than most people realize. Deposit insurance is one subsidy for banking. Our military "subsidizes" relatively cheap oil and the 10,000-mile supply chain so we can get cheap clothes made in Bangladesh. No transportation system is unsubsidized. Freeways aren't free and drivers don't pay their way. As the emergency sessions of Congress to fund the FAA — just to avoid flight delays — show some of the many subsidies to the airline industry. Freeways, roads and airplanes also have huge costs as externalities, real but not counted in conventional assessments. Only Amtrak is supposed to pay its way. This mindset keeps us stuck in a dysfunctional 1970s transportation system. A study of the German rail system showed that the subsidies paid actually repaid the nation when such externalities as the pollution and car wrecks avoided were priced in.
7. So should we have high-speed rail? Yes. We spend hours alone in our cars and think we're an advanced nation. In fact, we're way behind. Japan, Germany, France, Spain, the nordic countries and many more provide examples of 21st century transportation systems, of which high-speed rail is an essential part. Building, maintaining and operating them also provide jobs. Americans don't realize this because most of us don't get out in the world. If California ever builds true high-speed rail (going 155-miles-per-hour or more), that may change. Like light rail, once people try it, they love it. But we should also be rebuilding and adding frequency on the conventional rail network. As late as the 1950s, it was the finest in the world.
Happy National Train Day.
Trains!
Posted by: Petro | May 10, 2013 at 05:58 PM
Planes and automobiles.
Posted by: Ruben A. Perez | May 10, 2013 at 07:55 PM
What is it about trains that so exercises right-wingers? Didn't St Ayn Rand celebrate them in Atlas Shrugged? Don't they embody a cultural ideal (coherent small towns, epic national greatness, a graceful landscape, and "traditional American values"? What happened to all that?
I suspect the answer can be found in the seedbed of the right-wing renaissance, the sun belt. While it's true that right-wingers love their Norman Rockwell Americana, their aversion to cities and diversity surpasses it. What they advocate is a debased American value system of hyper-mobility and separation. If you isolate people in boomburbs on the edges of cities, you also divide and conquer the citizenry into haves and have nots. You obscure the crucial interdependence that underlies ours (and really any) national project. In other words, you create the very alienation that right-wingers attribute to liberalism.
The discontent of modern America is inseparable from this alienation. The shell game that right-wing puppetmasters employ to confuse fearful, older white citizens suggests all would be well if only minorities didn't have so many civil rights. Start with loneliness, mix in some victimology, add a few croutons of hysteria and voila!, paranoia, the psychological basis of movement conservatism.
Conservatism may as well be the disease of which it purports to be the cure. Our greatness (contra David Brooks) is in our cities, not the suburbs. And good cities have good transit. The neurotic tic in the American psyche knows this and flails against this reality. It attempts to starve not just the beast of government but the harlot of otherness. It knows its enemies all-too well, and it looks suspiciously like the extended Obama family.
Our civil war is not about anything real so much as the phantasmagoria of American identity. You want a more humane and thoughtful America? Start with trains. Take the underground railroad from the depths of our shared pain to the light of a better day.
Posted by: soleri | May 11, 2013 at 06:26 AM
Goddamit, soleri - I think I need a cigarette...
Posted by: Petro | May 11, 2013 at 08:45 AM
Rogue's contributors can probably come up with wonderful stories about their train experiences. For me, it began with the Rock Island Rocket between college and Denver. It progressed to Amtrak between DC and NYC. The culmination was a junket on the Orient Express, where we backed into the Gare du Nord in Paris and were too blitzed to collect our luggage in a timely manner. The sum total of all this is the visceral thrill of clickety-clack and not having to brave the hordes at the airport.
Posted by: morecleanair | May 11, 2013 at 10:12 AM
roll me one Petro. What a great closing sentencing by Soleri.
Posted by: cal Lash | May 11, 2013 at 10:19 AM
Brilliant, Soleri
Posted by: Rogue Columnist | May 11, 2013 at 11:01 AM
I think that conservatives react against mass transit simply because liberals champion it. It's that simple. There are an awful lot of similar examples. The New York Times noted last year that:
"It can be difficult to remember now, given the ferocity with which many Republicans assail it as an attack on freedom, but the provision in President Obama’s health care law requiring all Americans to buy health insurance has its roots in conservative thinking.
"The concept that people should be required to buy health coverage was fleshed out more than two decades ago by a number of conservative economists, embraced by scholars at conservative research groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, and championed, for a time, by Republicans in the Senate.
"The individual mandate, as it is known, was seen then as a conservative alternative to some of the health care approaches favored by liberals — like creating a national health service or requiring employers to provide health coverage."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/health/policy/health-care-mandate-was-first-backed-by-conservatives.html?_r=0
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | May 11, 2013 at 04:13 PM
So, maybe we could slip Glen Beck a few bucks to have him say "liberals want to privatize your Social Security?"
Posted by: Petro | May 11, 2013 at 04:47 PM
Trains also move much of our coal. Someday, they may have to also move nuclear waste. We can't have travellers competing with coal and radioactive waste for precious rails and railbeds. We must keep people flying so that they never really see America and witness the desperation of all the abandoned communities that lie along the rail lines.
Posted by: Silly Confusion | May 13, 2013 at 07:58 AM
That was a tasty salad soleri tossed! Roll another one, if you got'em, Petro.
Unfortunately, my only true train (heavy rail) experience was the Verde Valley site-seeing train. Of course, I use light rail (WBIYB!) when I can.
Posted by: eclecticdog | May 13, 2013 at 09:03 AM
Love the Turbo Train photo! And yeah, rail travel ... it's one of my favorite parts of going abroad.
Posted by: Justin | May 13, 2013 at 11:42 AM
I agree with Justin about rail travel
Posted by: robino064 | May 20, 2013 at 07:19 AM