Why should Philadelphia, and the United States invest more in rail transit and less in roads?
Because cars, and the infrastructure we’ve built around them, are a disaster. They kill more than 30,000 Americans a year, and maim many times more. They degrade our air quality and contribute to global warming. They are a huge economic burden to the working poor, and the sheer amount of land devoted to storing them has devastated our urban centers and made housing unaffordable.
That is an excerpt from this article which suggest abolishing the interstate highway system altogether. While that may sound radical, he does not actually mean that roads maintenance will cease or that roads will be destroyed, but rather that the system of allocating funds for maintenance is broken, and that highway maintenance should become a state, rather than federal burden. Its not a terrible idea.
If that federal road paving gravy train were to stop paying for infamously wasteful highway projects (think: all those guys standing around doing nothing when you crawl by at 5mph late for work and all that equipment sitting around idle while the road is still closed for the next month) Think about the average construction cost of $25 million per lane-mile. Consider that more oil is utilized each year in maintaining roads than is burned in gas tanks.
Oil is a precious resource, let’s make it go farther by using it in trains. Consider CSX’s claim to move 1 ton of freight 400+ miles on 1 gallon of fuel. Wonder why our roads are so full of big, relatively inefficient tractor trailers causing a disproportionately high share of traffic and road damage than personal vehicles when we have the largest national rail network in the world.
Consider that it costs $66 billion annually to maintain the interstate highway system, a massive subsidy on automobile travel. Amtrak receives approximately $1.6 billion in subsidy annually, less than 1/40th the subsidy on automobiles. Imagine if the auto manufacturers had to pay to maintain the road system as Amtrak and the freight companies do, and realize how that burden would instantly put the american auto industry asunder.
According to Amtrak’s website, they took in “$3.2 billion in revenue and incurred approximately $4.3” which would indicate a $1.1 billion deficit/subsidy requirement.
If $3.2 billion could be shaved from the budget for the highway system and allocated to Amtrak, tickets could be free.
And if the rest of the burden of highway maintenance were put on to the states, the rest of that money could be loaned to municipalities to build metro systems.
And then we could have roads, which states would need to fund by user fees in fuel taxes, property tax, and/or tolls- or private roads, perhaps funded by some mandated consortium of oil companies and auto manufacturers. Roads with less traffic, less trucks, and less accidents due to less intoxicated drivers, less poor people in improperly maintained vehicles, less people driving who really shouldn’t be but have no other choice, etc.
…And we could have a system of rail transit that is cheaper and faster than driving, which would really make driving pointless for a large percentage of the population. Think PHL -> NYP in 20 minutes. If we had what they have in Japan, that would be our reality. And why shouldn’t we have what Japan has? This is America!