Bill Lind

The Brookings Institute is correct that more emphasis should be placed on the long-distance passenger routes, although it is unrealistic to expect much if any state support because of the difficulty of coordinating so many states. Part of the reason is financial, the other political: were the long-distance routes to be dropped, so many states would lose all Amtrak service that it would become more difficult to maintain Congressional support for Amtrak.

But there is another reason for supporting long-distance trains. Many of them in effect are also corridor trains that serve a series of overlapping corridors. A good example is the Chicago-NewYork/Boston Lake Shore Limited. It serves not only its end points but corridors that include Chicago-Cleveland, Toledo-Buffalo, Buffalo-Albany, Syracuse-NYC and Albany-Boston. A coach seat may be sold several times over for different segments of the same run.

An easy and relatively cheap way to bolster the corridor-train service of long-distance trains would be to run a second daily train over the same route, timed about twelve

One of the more important questions surrounding incoming chairman Shuster will be his attitude toward Amtrak. Outside the Northeast Corridor, soon-to-be former chairman Mica was hostile to Amtrak. But if we are to build toward high speed rail the right and only feasible way, incrementally, then Amtrak offers the only available basis. All the corridors which are implementing higher speed rail – Cascades, Chicago-Detroit, Chicago-St. Louis, etc. – are Amtrak operations. If we lose Amtrak, we will lose any realistic hope of high speed rail with it. No one is going to duplicate California’s doomed attempt to build high speed rail as a stand-alone project.

Let's hope Mr. Shuster gets this. We are planning to release soon our new study on conservatives and high speed rail, which urges an incremental approach. We will make sure the new chairman receives a copy.

The basic problem with the highway bill is that it remains mostly a highway bill (entirely one if House Ways and Means has its way, which it won’t). That reflects the domination of virtually all legislation by interests. Interests represent the present; absent a time machine, neither the past nor the future (answers to many future problems are to be found in the past) can be on Capitol Hill passing out checks. Legislation therefore continues business as usual, even when changing circumstances mean business as usual cannot address the country’s needs. We see this in many areas, not just transportation; most of the trillion dollars a year we spend on defense goes for building a military museum. The real question is not how we fix the highway bill, but how we control the domination of the legislative process by interests.

Last week, I wrote Congressman Dave Camp, Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives, regarding the provisions of H.R. 3864 that would end the use of a portion of the gas tax to fund public transportation and leave transit dependent on annual appropriations.

I conveyed my concern to him that, as conservatives, this may reflect a misunderstanding of the conservative position on public transportation. Well-known transit critics create confusion on this point by presenting themselves as conservatives when they are in fact libertarians. I pointed out that conservatives understand that public transportation serves some important conservative goals. It enables people who are too poor to afford a car to get to jobs instead of having to rely on welfare. When it is electrified rail transit such as light rail or streetcars, it can spur substantial economic development in the areas it serves, raising property values. Electric railways also reduce our depen

If transit is to be able to defend itself politically during a period of potential Republican dominance, it needs to be able to reply to the libertarian argument that it is subsidized. Of course transit is subsidized. But so are highways, a point libertarians either pass over or deny outright, despite the evidence.

According to Federal Highway Administration data, all highway user fees, including the gas tax, now cover only about 50% of the cost of highways. That number will continue to drop as gas tax receipts decline. To compete politically, transit needs to equal that figure. That is to say, fares need to cover about 50% of operating costs.

Here we see another advantage of rail over bus. On average, rail transit systems nationwide do cover almost 54% of their costs from the farebox. Bus systems do not. Their national average cost recovery rate is on

In the last couple of years I worked with Paul Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation, I cycled to work. I now regularly use the bike trails around Cleveland, Ohio, which are many. So why don’t other conservatives ride bikes, both for recreation and transportation?

Most conservatives are middle class and middle age. We have responsibilities. It is simply too dangerous for most of us to take a bike out on the road. It we get hit by a car, it gets scratched paint and we get scratched, as in dead. Remember, the automobile’s motto is “Drive or die.” It forces everything else off the road, if necessary by killing it.

More bike paths are one answer to this, but it is a chicken-and-egg problem. There won’t be a significant constituency for funding bike paths until more conservatives ride bikes. But they won’t do that until they have safe places to ride.

In one of my Car Stop columns on our Center’s website: (