Tag: transportation

Categories
subsidy

Non-​Billions for Non-Trains

California, train, high speed rail, waste, fraud, government spending, transportation

The federal government has officially stopped throwing money at California’s long-​in-​the-​non-​making “high-​speed” railroad. A scheduled-​but-​unspent $4 billion in federal subsidy has been canceled.

If the nonexistent project continues, money to fund non-​laying down of non-​tracks must come from other sources.

Non-​tracks? Yes. As Victoria Taft notes, “Not one foot of track” of the not-​in-​progress “high-​speed” railroad of the future has been glued into place. 

We were just getting to track-​laying phase, California Governor Newsom protests.

The going rate for snail-​pace non-​completion of nonexistent, not-​in-​progress railroads is $15 billion (says the Department of Transportation): the estimated amount of federal funding for California’s non-​project to date.

The total graft bin may have been even larger than that; who knows how many nickels for the non-​project have been collected from widows and orphans? But something like $15 billion is how much the federal government doled out over 16 years to ensure the railroad’s non-​construction. Projected total cost of California’s infinite-​prep-​phase railroad: $135 billion.

Why has it taken so long — six-​ish whole months — for the second Trump administration to get around to stoppering this particular gusher of monstrous waste of taxpayer dollars?

Perhaps proceeding as fast as they can, the cost-​cutters and fraud-​flayers take their mission one thing at a time. In Trump’s place, you might be tempted to chuck the whole five-​mile-​thick list of federal expenditures, throw it into the pyre and defund everything, re-​starting from scratch with the courts and military. But not all temptations play out in Washington.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
budgets & spending cuts crime and punishment deficits and debt free trade & free markets

The Great Rail Robbery

Amtrak, trains, subsidy, transportation

It’s unclear “what problem Amtrak privatization proposals are intended to solve,” an Amtrak white paper argues.

The authors assert that “giving the United States the passenger rail system it needs will require substantial, assured, multi-​year federal funding.…”

That flies in the face of experience. But if you are looking for a problem to solve, consider the biggest current story about Amtrak, its thieving employees. 

Buckle up, for the rail gets bumpy: Sixty-​one of 119 Amtrak employees exposed in 2022 for perpetrating a healthcare scam were kept on the job until a recent internal investigation. 

For several years, these employees had collected kickbacks from doctors willing to file fake medical claims. 

Amtrak now promises that it is (finally) cleaning house.

The organization’s inspector general says that the large number of employees “who cavalierly participated in this scheme to steal Amtrak’s funds suggests not only a serious lapse in basic ethics, but a troubling workforce culture … in which blatant criminal behavior was somehow normalized.”

A culture that DOGE has been finding in many governmental endeavors.

What governments lack are decent feedback mechanisms that real markets provide. Amtrak operates in a fake reality of “needs” — those infinite “needs” mentioned in the white paper against privatization.

Businesses succeed; businesses fail — and if the latter, they move aside to let others try to do better. But the white paper treats business failure as proof that government funding is mandatory.

For taxpayers, always on the hook for Amtrak failures, privatization is a solution.

Privatization would also mean less tolerance for keeping thieves on payrolls.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Planners Cover Up Waste

You know that politicians waste money. You guess that they waste a lot of time.

But did you know they deliberately waste our time?

Transportation scholar Randal O’Toole regales us with the fix that California’s overlords have put themselves in. Merely assuming that dense city living decreases commuting, California’s legislators cooked up a law requiring local governments to increase population density.

But it turns out “transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by ‘level of service,’ which,” O’Toole informs us, “measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.”

So what to do? Golden State’s august solons have exempted cities and municipalities from calculating and disclosing the bad effects of their own legislation. They offer other standards, all of which, O’Toole explains, demonstrate only “that planners and planning enthusiasts in the legislature don’t like the results of their own plans, so they simply want to ignore them.”

The gist of the new standards of “regulation”? “[T]hey ignore the impact on people’s time and lives: if densification reduces per capita vehicle miles traveled by 1 percent, planners will regard it as a victory even if the other 99 percent of travel is slowed by millions of hours per year.”

It’s quite apparent that politicians are willing to sacrifice our time to get what they — not we — want. Time is not money. Time is more important than money.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Red Lights, Green Roads

Washington State activist Tim Eyman could celebrate election night. Several of his sponsored anti-​red-​light-​camera initiatives won — in Bellingham and Longview and Monroe.

But his statewide initiative seems to be going down.

Eyman has become obsessed with transportation issues, and he’s receiving the usual push-​back from insiders and editorialists. The Seattle Times proclaimed his I‑1125 “anachronistic,” saying that Eyman

may have something to say about the scope of government. His anti-​tax proposals fare well. But voters do not think much of his ideas for moving — or, more precisely, not moving — people around a busy metropolitan region.

A tad disingenuous. Washington’s voters received a barrage of advertising against the measure, but the campaign tended to ignore the measure’s main point, its attempt to strengthen the feedback systems of paying for (and developing) road projects. I‑1125 would have kept politicians’ hands out of the road till, forcing them to leave money in road funds put there by fuel taxes and tolls and such.

Despite the negative campaign, on election night the measure was losing so narrowly that many deemed it “too close to call.”

Contrast this with the common anti-​initiative complaint, that voting for them is driven by well-​funded campaigns that overpower citizens’ reason. Well, Eyman’s initiative campaigns carry mainly on the written measures themselves: His group spends nothing on paid advertising, while his opponents splurge millions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Ride the Market Express

What’s the biggest expense for people in the lowest income bracket? Housing? Food? Medical care?

No.

It’s transportation.

Across all income levels, transportation comes in as the second largest expenditure. It’s a big deal.

Places to go; people to see. Often, it’s business to do. Our way of life depends on moving things and people around.

The Washington Post headlined a recent story, “Infrastructure is a priority, survey shows, but paying for it isn’t.” The implication? Americans want a free lunch.

That’s bad. But not true.

The Post should have made it clear that people are specifically skeptical about “paying for it” through higher taxes. The Rockefeller Foundation Infrastructure Survey found that over 70 percent of us oppose raising the gas tax, 64 percent are against adding tolls to existing highways, and 58 percent aghast at the thought of a tax on each mile driven.

However, the survey’s most interesting number was 78 — that’s the overwhelming percentage of Americans who want private sector investment in transportation projects. As consumers, we know we’re not responsible for all the costs and cost overruns involved in bringing most products or services to market. When we decide to purchase something we do pay some of these costs, but not before. Privatizing transportation would allow market forces like “price” and “consumer demand” to get better transportation to market, with investors — not consumers — taking the bulk of the risk.

Or we could let politicians and bureaucrats continue to make things worse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Wicked Trimmers of Cost

Robberies. Corruption. Furious government-​enabled debt expansion in the name of curing the effects of prior furious government-​enabled debt expansion. Murders. War.

And now, carpooling.

Yes, just when you think maybe it really is time to move to Canada to escape American insanity, you hear about how our neighbors to the north are harassing people for daring to save money on gas.

The alleged villain is an online startup called PickupPal​.com. This is a website enabling people going places to hook up with other people going places. The site actively fosters collusive cooperation among travelers. My blood boils! Grr!

Two problems with this, if you live in Ontario.

First, Ontario strictly regulates ridesharing. Ontario riders can carpool only to and from work; must ride with the same person every day; may pay that person for their trouble only once a week; may not cross municipal boundaries during the ride; etcetera.

Second, Ontario bus companies are huge fans of these regulations. So the bus companies sued PickupPal. And the Ontario courts have just fined PickupPal over $11,000 Canadian dollars for making possible a $60 ride from Toronto to Montreal. PickupPal must also somehow enforce the Toronto regulations on their website.

Finally, the world is safe again for Ontario bus service.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.