Uncle Sam

How Uncle Sam Should Finance Rail
By Daniel G. Jennings
It’s obvious that America needs to expand, modernize and electrify it’s railroad system to reduce reliance upon imported oil, reduce pollution and increase the efficiency, speed and capacity of our transportation system.
Unfortunately, there is no national mechanism for systematically funding railroad improvements in the United States. Only the federal government could provide such funding and it has no means of doing so. There is no federal agency dedicated to funding rail improvements, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is basically a regulatory agency and Amtrak is an operating company for passenger trains and select rail lines. There is no agency dedicated to dispersing federal moneys to railroad improvements.
An excellent model for such an agency exists in the way the federal government finances three other very successful transportation systems: highways, air travel and urban transit. The federal government doesn’t try to build or operate highways, airports or city transit systems itself, instead it allocates funds to state, local and regional governments and agencies which build and operate the transportation infrastructure.
This method has worked well: America has the most extensive and successful system of highways in the world. All of our cities are connected by excellent highways and served by first class freeways. Almost every city in America, no matter how small, has a modern state of the art airport providing air service. Virtually every American city has an excellent bus transit system and many larger cities have or are building state of the art rail transit systems. Even such traditionally auto oriented cities as Houston, Denver and Los Angeles are investing heavily in rail transit.
There’s no reason why this system shouldn’t work with rail as well. Give the Federal Railroad Administration or some new agency the power to fund railroad projects. This new agency would fund the electrification, modernization and expansion of the private freight railroad lines, commuter and regional passenger rail systems and high speed rail projects. The federal bureaucrats wouldn’t operate the trains as they do at Amtrak they’d simply allocate funds at the direction of Congress.
With large amounts of federal funds available private railroads would have an incentive to modernize, expand and electrify their rail lines because Uncle Sam would guarantee financing. State, regional and local governments would have an incentive to build new commuter and regional passenger rail lines because Uncle Sam would pay much of the bill. Private entrepreneurs and governments would have an incentive to build high-speed rail lines because Uncle Sam would pick up part of the tab.
More importantly a nationwide network of interest groups that would lobby Congress for more funds for rail would be created. Instead of a few thousand angry passengers, contractors, local governments, large corporations and others with deep pockets would be lobbying for rail funds. Congress would have an incentive to support rail because political operatives with deep pockets would profit from it.
The failure of Amtrak proves that Uncle Sam has no business running a railroad. It’s time to abandon the socialist European model of a national railroad operated by bureaucrats and apply the tried and tested American model of federal funding for transportation projects built
and operated by state, local or regional governments or private enterprise. That’s how the transcontinental railroads, the federal highway system, the Interstate system, most of our airports and most of the urban transit systems were built.
The question is will President Bush and Congress have the common sense and brains to implement such a sensible solution? Or will they keep allowing the vital national resource known as our railroads to go to waste?