“This Is On Congress’ Head”: It’s Almost Like Our Political System Is Designed To Fail Our Infrastructure
Sometimes, congressional Republicans have an odd sense of timing. Just hours after the deadly derailment of Amtrak 188, GOP lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee took up transportation spending measures, voting to slash Amtrak’s budget, while also rejecting Democratic proposals to bolster infrastructure and train safety.
As the debate unfolded yesterday, things got a little ugly. Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) argued that Congress bore some responsibility for the tragic accident by failing to make the proper investments. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), incensed, responded, “You tied it directly to an accident and a tragedy and suggested because we hadn’t funded it that caused that accident and you have no idea what caused it – and that’s a shame.”
Soon after, Republicans on the Appropriations Committee went ahead and did exactly what they intended to do – cutting rail investment – as if the accident in Philadelphia hadn’t just happened the night before. For many conservatives, there’s no reason to connect the two – if the derailment was the result of human error, Congress and budgetary choices are irrelevant.
The truth is more complicated. The New York Times reports today on rail technology you probably heard Rachel talking about last night.
For the second time in two years, a passenger train traveling well above its speed limit has derailed, leaving a trail of death and injuries. And for the second time, existing technology that might have prevented the accident was missing.
Amtrak has installed the technology, known as positive train control, on parts of its rail network in the Northeast Corridor. But the technology, designed to automatically slow or stop a train to prevent accidents, was not available on a critical stretch of track in Philadelphia where Train No. 188 derailed on Tuesday night, killing at least seven and injuring more than 200.
Robert Sumwalt, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, made things plain while talking to reporters yesterday afternoon: positive train control “is not installed for this area where the accident occurred, where the derailment occurred…. Based on what we know right now, we feel that had such a system been installed in this section of track, this accident would not have occurred.”
Among the votes House Republicans cast yesterday? Voting down a Democratic measure to invest immediately in expanded use of positive train control.
If you missed Rachel’s segment on this last night, I hope you’ll take the time to check it out.
To briefly summarize, in late 2008, Congress actually approved the Rail Safety Improvement Act, which, among other things, required technological upgrades to the nation’s rail system, including mandates on the accident-avoiding positive train control, which can automatically slow trains down remotely.
But Congress also gave the entire industry all kinds of time: the deadline to extend positive train control to all major rail lines is the end of this year: December 31st, 2015. And even this is too soon for much of the industry, which has lobbied Congress to push the deadline to 2020. From last night’s segment:
“This is not a mystery and this is also not hard…. This is something we know how to do, and we’ve done it in patches, pieces of track here and there.
“We also know we need to do it. It’s no mystery here, because what we need to do is something that we need to do concerning our nation’s infrastructure, honestly as a nation we really just can’t be bothered to get stuff like this done. It’s almost like our political system is designed to fail our infrastructure.
“I mean, the people, American people, left, right and center, want infrastructure investment…. Politicians, however, don’t like voting for it…. We are a great nation that has allowed the world-class national infrastructure that our grandparents built and our parents handed down to us to erode and suffer and starve to the point that it is decrepit and deadly.
“This is a failure of governance. This is on Congress’ head.”
For more on this, David Leonhardt noted yesterday that federal investment in infrastructure is at a generational low, while Philip Bump added rail investment struggles to find political support at least in part because people in Republican districts generally don’t take trains.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 14, 2015
“Stressed To The Breaking-Point”: House Republicans Aim To Cut Amtrak Funding The Day After Philadelphia Derailment
A New York–bound Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia last night, leaving at least six passengers dead and more than 200 injured. Department of Transportation and National Transportation Safety Board officials are investigating the reason for the accident, which is sure to be a flashpoint in an ongoing battle to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure.
The debate resumes today: The House Appropriations committee already had plans to mark up a bill on Wednesday that would, among other things, cut funding to Amtrak from $1.4 billion to $1.14 billion. (Britain, for the record, spends $8 billion annually on its rail network.) Not all Republicans are on board with the cuts. Pennsylvania Rep. Ryan Costello, who sits on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, on Wednesday promised he’s “not in that camp” and “if that bill shows a reduction when it hits the floor, myself and others, I think you’re going to see amendments to make sure that there is stable funding on the northeast corridor.”
President Richard Nixon created Amtrak in 1970 to boost passenger rail service, but he made it a for-profit corporation. That’s the cause of many its political troubles today. Amtrak has never been able to turn a profit, and Republicans—who favor a fully privatized rail system—are loath to spend taxpayer dollars on a money-losing operations. They have repeatedly threatened to slash federal funding for Amtrak, which has struggled to make do with what Congress gives it. In an annual report to Congress from February, Amtrak President Joseph Boardman described “critical infrastructure stressed to the breaking-point” that result in “frequent service meltdowns”: “Efforts by Amtrak, the freight railroad industry, and state and local governments to address these problems are thwarted by the lack of adequate and reliable Federal funding to match state and local investments in rail, and to attract private investment capital and facilitate public-private partnerships.”
And yet, rail safety has improved in the last decade. The Huffington Post notes that accidents in 2014 were down 42 percent since 2006. Meanwhile, Amtrak ridership on the Northeast corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C., hit an all-time high in 2014. Amtrak accounts for over three-fourths of air and rail travel between Washington and New York, and two congressman happened to be on the same train last night: Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, who got off shortly before the derailment, and former Congressman Patrick Murphy, who was on it. Boardman says even the popular Northeast corridor is starved “of the vital capital necessary to maintain and expand upon that success.”
A 2013 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the state of U.S. rail infrastructure a C+, slightly higher than the infrastructure grade for the nation as a whole (D+). By 2040, Amtrak expects traffic in the congested Northeast corridor to quadruple today’s ridership. “To meet future demand in the Northeast Corridor for both Amtrak and the eight commuter railroads that use the corridor, estimated investments are about $10 billion over the next 15 years to achieve a state of good repair and to increase train capacity by 40%,” ASCE writes. “Maintaining adequate track capacity to address expanding passenger and freight needs is among the largest challenges in creating a competitive passenger railroad network.”
Republicans don’t view passenger rail as energy-efficient travel that could only exist with public funds, but a sign of government mismanagement. Mitt Romney, while campaigning in 2012, said, “The subsidy for Amtrak, I would eliminate that.” But passenger rail, particularly the dream of bullet trains nationwide, is exactly the kind of project that necessitates government assistance—just like the transcontinental railroad did. Conservatives may liken it to a boondoggle, but California is constructing the nation’s first bullet train, at an estimated cost of $68 billion, with federal subsidies making up $3.3 billion of the secured funding. Amtrak puts estimates of the amount needed for an East Coast high-speed rail route at upwards of $110 billion. The private sector won’t take the risk on such a high startup cost. Yet, the House appropriations bill is clear: Not only does Amtrak receive less money, but “no funding is provided for high-speed rail.”
In April, the National Journal cited conservative funding battles as a main reason why America struggles to keep its rail functional and lags so far behind Western Europe and East Asia, which have faster, more efficient trains. Tea Party Republicans are responsible for shuttering the 2009 stimulus’ $8 billion in funds to connect 80 percent of the country to high-speed trains—the bulk of which would have gone to California, Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio. But when Republican governors Rick Scott, Scott Walker, and John Kasich swept into office in three of the four states, they rejected the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money. The funds were redirected to other transportation upgrades. But Walker later changed his mind, deciding that his state could use $150 million for Amtrak upgrades after all.
By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, May 13, 2015
“The Failure Of Austerity”: This Upcoming Traffic Apocalypse Will Be The End Of Chris Christie
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) is infamous as the guy whose underlings caused an epic traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge as part of some weird political punishment. In time, though, he will be known as the guy who caused the worst transportation snarl in the history of New York City.
I can’t see how this traffic disaster will mean anything but the end of Christie’s 2016 aspirations. The question for New Yorkers looking down the barrel of this sucker is whether it will be bad enough to break the hegemony of austerity in Congress.
So, what is happening? Let’s wind the tape back to 2010. The Recovery Act was in full swing, and all manner of stuff was being built across the country with stimulus money. The biggest project of all was called Access to the Region’s Core, a plan for a desperately needed new tunnel under the Hudson River and a new train station in Manhattan. There are only two other tunnels under the Hudson, both single-track and over 100 years old, both stuffed to capacity during rush hour, with demand only projected to grow.
The cost was projected at around $8 billion to $10 billion, with the federal government and the Port Authority picking up roughly three-quarters of the tab. Construction started in 2009, and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on rights-of-way and initial work.
Then Christie unilaterally canceled the project, charging that costs were skyrocketing, that New Jersey would thus have to pay 70 percent of the bill, and that the feds were going to stick the state with any cost overruns.
He was lying through his teeth. A Government Accountability Office report later detailed that cost estimates had not increased, that New Jersey was only paying 14.4 percent, and the feds had offered to share the burden of any overruns. Instead, Christie swiped the money earmarked for the project and spent a bunch of it on New Jersey’s highway fund, so he wouldn’t have to raise the gas tax. (He’s under investigation by the SEC and the Manhattan DA for that, among other things.)
It was an infuriatingly stupid decision. But Hurricane Sandy changed it from stupid to disastrous. During the storm surge both the tunnels under the Hudson were flooded with ocean water, and the deposited salts are eating away the 100-year-old metal and concrete. Therefore, according to a recent study, both tunnels will need a total top-to-bottom overhaul in the next few years. Shutting even one of them down would basically be traffic apocalypse:
…shutting one of the two tracks in the tunnel under the Hudson River would cut service by about 75 percent because trains headed into New York would have to share the remaining track with trains headed west from the city, he said.
All told, more than 400,000 passengers ride trains through the two tunnels on a typical weekday, an Amtrak spokesman said. At peak commuting times, 24 trains an hour pass through the Hudson River tunnel, which is the only direct rail link between Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan and all points west. [New York Times]
In a blackly comedic coincidence, the canceled ARC tunnel would have come online in 2018, maybe just barely in time to take up the slack from one of the old ones being closed. Now those 300,000 or so displaced commuters are going to have to swim across the Hudson.
Anyway, according to the Times, Amtrak is going to work on the tunnels under the East River first, with no firm plans as to when they’re going to have to shut down the Hudson tunnels. They have a plan for another tunnel called the Gateway, but no way to pay for it as of yet.
And that brings us to Congress. The prospects for action at the federal level are nearly hopeless, but it’s worth noting that if they wanted to, Congress could solve this problem — just by appropriating some money for a new tunnel. Probably the best chance of that will be after the old tunnels are shut down and there’s a massive traffic jam from Newark to Long Island.
But in any case, Christie’s boneheaded posturing is at least yet another demonstration of the failure of austerity. Turns out not spending money doesn’t make crippling infrastructure needs disappear. It just postpones the day of reckoning, and raises the chances of expensive catastrophic failure.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, October 3, 2014
“All Aboard, Suckers”: Florida Taxpayers About To Be Railroaded
Here’s a really clever idea:
Let’s run express passenger trains 16 times round-trip every day between downtown Miami and the Orlando airport. That’s right, the airport.
Except the trains won’t go straight there, but will stop first in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, then head up the seaboard to Cocoa and hang a hard left 40 miles west across the middle of the state.
Oh, and the trip will take at least three hours one way.
Leaving aside the fact that you can inexpensively drive from downtown Miami to the Orlando airport in about the same time (or fly commercially in only 42 minutes), the project grandly known as All Aboard Florida raises other elementary questions.
Like, “Why?”
As it waddles down the tracks, this turkey enjoys the robust blessing of the Republican-led Legislature and Governor Rick Scott, who said the following to a reporter last month:
“It’s all funding that will be provided by somebody other than the state. It’s a private company.”
Scott’s either clueless or lying. All Aboard Florida is a future train wreck for taxpayers. With the possible exception of the Hogwarts Express, passenger rail services almost always lose money and end up subsidized by government.
All Aboard Florida already has applied for $1.6 billion in federal loans and plans to rent space at a new terminal at the Orlando International Airport, for which state lawmakers recently appropriated $213 million.
That’s just the beginning. According to the Scripps/Tribune Capitol Bureau, the company also wants the state to pay $44 million to connect its lines with Tri-Rail, the daily commuter link serving South Florida.
Only three short years ago, playing the Tea Party scrooge, Scott killed a proposed high-speed train project between Orlando and Tampa. In rejecting about $2 billion in federal funds, the governor asserted that Florida taxpayers would have ended up paying to operate the rail service once it was finished. He was right.
Now he’s yodeling a different tune, perhaps because his latest chief of staff, Adam Hollingsworth, formerly worked for one of the companies connected to All Aboard Florida. (When a reporter asked Scott if he’d talked to Hollingsworth about the project, he didn’t answer.)
Meanwhile, all along the proposed route, opposition is erupting. Here was the front-page headline in the July 13 Indian River Press Journal: ALL AGAINST ALL ABOARD.
Officials in Stuart, Fort Pierce, Vero Beach and other communities are rightly worried about the impact of adding 32 trains every day on the Florida East Coast tracks that All Aboard Florida plans to use.
The frequent stoppage of traffic at rail crossings is a major concern, especially because it will impede police, firefighters and other emergency responders. For residents and businesses near the track, the train noise and vibrations will be a recurring headache.
Indian River County Commissioner Bob Solari believes it could hurt local property values. And where the trains will cross busy waterways like the St. Lucie River, many say the repeated lowering of the railroad bridges will restrict boat travel and hurt the marine trades.
All Aboard Florida insists that its trains will be moving so fast that boaters and motorists won’t be inconvenienced for long periods, and it has promised to upgrade the road crossings to make them safer.
Few of the many critics seem reassured. Municipalities and counties fear they’ll be stuck with funding new infrastructure, just for the privilege of watching shiny locomotives whiz past all day long.
The whole project is anchored on the dubious notion that millions of people can’t wait to hop a train from Miami to the Orlando airport (via Cocoa). Although All Aboard Florida has sued to keep secret its ridership surveys, its website sunnily predicts that three out of four passengers will be tourists.
Tourists who are what … afraid to fly? Too scared to drive?
Talk about a narrow market.
And while it’s always beneficial to reduce the number of cars on the highway, this particular experiment can’t possibly break even. The only money will be made in the beginning with real-estate deals, by well-connected contractors working on new stations, modernizing the rails and laying 40 miles of fresh track between Brevard County and the land of Disney.
At this point, the momentum for All Aboard is all political, and only the rising outcry can derail it. Scott, who’s up for re-election, recently asked the Federal Railroad Administration to extend to 75 days the public-comment period that will follow the agency’s upcoming environmental impact study.
If the trains ever start running, spewing red ink with every toot of their horns, don’t be surprised if the state steps in to bail out the project, or asks the feds to do it.
Either way, we’ll get stung with the bill somewhere down the line.
All aboard, suckers.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, July 22, 2014
“Build We Won’t”: Weakening The Economy In The Short Run While Undermining Its Prospects For The Long Run
You often find people talking about our economic difficulties as if they were complicated and mysterious, with no obvious solution. As the economist Dean Baker recently pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. The basic story of what went wrong is, in fact, almost absurdly simple: We had an immense housing bubble, and, when the bubble burst, it left a huge hole in spending. Everything else is footnotes.
And the appropriate policy response was simple, too: Fill that hole in demand. In particular, the aftermath of the bursting bubble was (and still is) a very good time to invest in infrastructure. In prosperous times, public spending on roads, bridges and so on competes with the private sector for resources. Since 2008, however, our economy has been awash in unemployed workers (especially construction workers) and capital with no place to go (which is why government borrowing costs are at historic lows). Putting those idle resources to work building useful stuff should have been a no-brainer.
But what actually happened was exactly the opposite: an unprecedented plunge in infrastructure spending. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, public expenditures on construction have fallen more than 20 percent since early 2008. In policy terms, this represents an almost surreally awful wrong turn; we’ve managed to weaken the economy in the short run even as we undermine its prospects for the long run. Well played!
And it’s about to get even worse. The federal highway trust fund, which pays for a large part of American road construction and maintenance, is almost exhausted. Unless Congress agrees to top up the fund somehow, road work all across the country will have to be scaled back just a few weeks from now. If this were to happen, it would quickly cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs, which might derail the employment recovery that finally seems to be gaining steam. And it would also reduce long-run economic potential.
How did things go so wrong? As with so many of our problems, the answer is the combined effect of rigid ideology and scorched-earth political tactics. The highway fund crisis is just one example of a much broader problem.
So, about the highway fund: Road spending is traditionally paid for via dedicated taxes on fuel. The federal trust fund, in particular, gets its money from the federal gasoline tax. In recent years, however, revenue from the gas tax has consistently fallen short of needs. That’s mainly because the tax rate, at 18.4 cents per gallon, hasn’t changed since 1993, even as the overall level of prices has risen more than 60 percent.
It’s hard to think of any good reason why taxes on gasoline should be so low, and it’s easy to think of reasons, ranging from climate concerns to reducing dependence on the Middle East, why gas should cost more. So there’s a very strong case for raising the gas tax, even aside from the need to pay for road work. But even if we aren’t ready to do that right now — if, say, we want to avoid raising taxes until the economy is stronger — we don’t have to stop building and repairing roads. Congress can and has topped up the highway trust fund from general revenue. In fact, it has thrown $54 billion into the hat since 2008. Why not do it again?
But no. We can’t simply write a check to the highway fund, we’re told, because that would increase the deficit. And deficits are evil, at least when there’s a Democrat in the White House, even if the government can borrow at incredibly low interest rates. And we can’t raise gas taxes because that would be a tax increase, and tax increases are even more evil than deficits. So our roads must be allowed to fall into disrepair.
If this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. But similar logic lies behind the overall plunge in public investment. Most such investment is carried out by state and local governments, which generally must run balanced budgets and saw revenue decline after the housing bust. But the federal government could have supported public investment through deficit-financed grants, and states themselves could have raised more revenue (which some but not all did). The collapse of public investment was, therefore, a political choice.
What’s useful about the looming highway crisis is that it illustrates just how self-destructive that political choice has become. It’s one thing to block green investment, or high-speed rail, or even school construction. I’m for such things, but many on the right aren’t. But everyone from progressive think tanks to the United States Chamber of Commerce thinks we need good roads. Yet the combination of anti-tax ideology and deficit hysteria (itself mostly whipped up in an attempt to bully President Obama into spending cuts) means that we’re letting our highways, and our future, erode away.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 3, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 