This article from the Baltimore Sun is especially timely, as The Des Moines
Sunday Register today announced the beginning of a multi-year, multimillion
dollar project to rebuild Interstate Highway 235 through Des Moines and its
increasingly sprawling suburbs.
As environmentalists, we should move beyond finding ways to mitigate the
damage caused by highway construction. We should move beyond just finding
ways to route highways around evironmentally sensitive areas. We should now
start to question whether any more highways should be built, or "improved" by
widening, while our rail system continues to undergo abandonment.
Not only are highways environmentally destructive and energy inefficient,
compared to rail. Highways are murderously unsafe, compared to rail. A few
days ago a 125 car pileup in Georgia turned an Interstate highway into an
instant junkyard, killed four people, and seriously injured 15. Every year,
motor vehicle accidents kill about 42,000 people and seriously injure tens of
thousands more. All this carnage is so commonplace that it is considered
barely newsworthy by the major media. Last Thursday's Georgia pileup rated
just three brief paragraphs on page two of The Des Moines Register. The New
York Times carried a photo one page one, with the story buried on page 12.
Rail transport, particularly with modern communications, is far safer than a
highway system. Starting in the mid-1960s, the Japanese were able to operate
their high-speed "bullet" train for over thirty years without a single
passenger fatality. It is unconscionable for the US to be without such a
modern, safe passenger railway system. Our transportation dysfunction can
only be explained by the power of the highway lobby: the road construction
contractors, the auto manufacturers, the oil companies and all the other
monied interests that benefit from our present lack of a transportation
policy that meets the needs of people for safe, environmentally sound rail
transportation.
As the following article explains.
Tom Mathews
Transportation issue chair
Sierra Club, Iowa Chapter
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Subj: Big money fuels scheme to derail Amtrak for good
Date: 02-03-06 20:41:19 EST
From: [log in to unmask] (Eric Bruun)
Sender: [log in to unmask] (Sierra Club Forum on
Transportation Issues)
Reply-to: [log in to unmask] (Sierra Club Forum on
Transportation Issues)
To: [log in to unmask]
>From the Baltimore Sun:
Big money fuels scheme to derail Amtrak for good
By Douglas Turner
March 5, 2002
WASHINGTON - Just 15 miles south of here, the federal government is building
a $600 million spaghetti-bowl interchange at just one of the zillion
intersections of the Interstate Highway System. This follows an investment
of at least $200 million to add four lanes to Interstate 95 immediately
south of this crowded interchange.
There is enough spent there to build a great university campus - complete
with medical school, linear accelerator and chemistry laboratories. This
mindless splurge, which is being replicated all over the country, will
accomplish nothing.
The four new lanes are now bumper-to-bumper by 11 most Saturday mornings.
This is because motor vehicle traffic abhors a vacuum. Buses, cars and
trucks go where the capacity is. And traffic is expanding faster than road
capacity.
Despite this investment of taxpayer dollars, the capacity of this particular
interchange is locked in for the next 40 years simply because of the bridge
abutments and other built-in arrangements.
State and federal highway agencies throw hundreds of billions around like
this without blinking, with no public debate and virtually no media notice.
It's on automatic.
Similarly, federal agencies and airport authorities dump tens of billions
into new runways, aprons and other projects. That, too, is on automatic.
It doesn't take a nuclear physicist to figure out why. The combination of
forces favoring sprawl, concrete and steel - automakers, contractors and oil
companies - is virtually unbeatable here.
The hired guns in pinstripes representing the major airlines are likewise
unstoppable. Witness last fall's congressional $15 billion bailout of the
major airlines, whose callous and reckless indifference to security concerns
played a role in the hijackings of Sept. 11.
These same forces have traditionally thwarted attempts by former Democratic
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and other progressive thinkers to
advance rail solutions to inter-city transportation problems. These
interests have succeeded in preventing Amtrak from fulfilling the promise
made when President Richard Nixon created it three decades ago.
Now, with the support of White House Budget Director Mitchell E. Daniels
Jr., this combine has hatched a cabal to kill off Amtrak when it is most
needed.
This conspiracy - and it is not too strong a term - centers on a report
concocted by the so-called Amtrak Reform Council. This was a 1997 creation
of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and then-Senate Majority
Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi.
This elitist exercise in anti-urban, regionalist bias was forced on Congress
by those two Republicans as a condition of continuing the modest level -
compared with the subsidies given the airline and highway businesses - of
operating subsidies provided to Amtrak.
According to the 1997 law, Amtrak had to show a profit by 2002 or this
Amtrak Reform Council would call on the passenger system to come up with a
liquidation plan.
No national or regional passenger system in the world shows a profit, any
more than the airline or trucking industries could operate without
government money. All transportation - other than canoes, bikes and scooters
- is subsidized.
The council also produced a plan to "reorganize" Amtrak. Complaining loudly
about the modest subsidies Amtrak receives to run a national passenger
system, the council proposes to break up and sell off the entire system,
including the only tracks Amtrak owns - the northeastern corridor, running
from Washington to Boston.
Already under the reform council's pressure to cut costs, Amtrak has
announced it will cut 18 long-distance trains from service this fall,
including trains running through the district of New York Republican Jack
Quinn, chairman of the House Transportation Subcommittee on Railroads.
The reorganization "plan" crafted by the council is a predictable one,
considering the council's makeup. Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Lott saw to it that
the panel would be dominated by the most dedicated, right-wing,
anti-government ideologues they could find - people who would be indifferent
to the interests of Amtrak's middle-class customers.
The plan the reform council produced is an audacious union-busting grab for
government property, with a death grip on the public purse. It would sell
off Amtrak's assets, liquidating some, and offer parts of its system to
private operators. These private operators would be subsidized, of course,
according to the reform council scheme. One estimate is $100 billion over a
decade.
Privatization moves in Massachusetts and Britain have proved disastrous. The
$100 billion is a good estimate of what Amtrak should have gotten but didn't
because of its well-heeled opponents. This outrageous plan for Amtrak is a
classic case study of what can happen when entrenched big money is pitted
against the common citizen in this town.
Douglas Turner is the Washington bureau chief of The Buffalo News. Readers
may write him at 1141 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045.
Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun
(Distributed only for the purposes of discussion between railroad activists.)
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