Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The Economist’s blog on business travel, Gulliver, has a short post this morning about Rep. John Mica’s proposal to privatize the Northeast Corridor. Blogger “N.B.” has a healthy dose of skepticism for arguments on either side but does significantly more damage to Mica’s argument that that of his opponents. Gulliver strikes a blow at the very idea that private companies can accomplish what Mica hopes they will:

Photo: The Economist

Surely the congressman is aware that most high-speed systems elsewhere in the first world were built with enormous investments of government money (not to mention exercises of government power, including eminent domain seizures to find land for new routes).

Major infrastructure projects, be they airports, highways, or railroads, are more often than not undertaken with significant government support. Privatisation of established rail lines has been successful before and can be again. But Americans shouldn’t trick themselves into thinking that private investors will willingly foot the bill for massively upgrading the nation’s high-speed rail infrastructure.

The post also questions the anti-privatization argument that the proposal would leave less profitable routes without an important source of funding. “Economics, not nostalgia or politics, should determine where Amtrak operates,” N.B. writes. “Right now, it’s often the opposite. Is it really necessary that Amtrak service Dodge City, Kansas (pop. 27,340)?”

Of course, the blog also says the obvious: this proposal isn’t going anywhere. House members can argue about it all they want, but the Senate isn’t having it, and neither is the president. It was wise of Mica to introduce the bill separately from the rest of the reauthorization, to avoid the risk of letting this controversial idea sink the rest of the bill.

House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) is moving forward with his plan to hand over the Northeast Corridor to private companies, despite (or because of) the fact that such a move could write Amtrak’s obituary.

Is privatizing the corridor a good move? Mica and Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) say that with the participation of private companies, they can build “real high-speed rail on NEC – less than two hours between WDC and NYC” and they can “double total intercity rail traffic on NEC.” They claim they can do all that for far less than Amtrak’s proposed price tag of $117 billion.

Commuter Rail

But some say that’s “not a rational plan.” One Hill staffer working on transportation issues said that Mica’s idea “just doesn’t work.” After all, she says, as long as commuter rail shares the track with intercity rail, there’s no way to double intercity service and run it at 120-mph speeds while still accommodating local train service. She says unless their plan is to raise fares exponentially to gather funds to build a whole new parallel track, it’s impossible to meet Mica’s goals under the terms he’s setting.

A 2006 GAO report [PDF], foreseeing the GOP attack on Amtrak, found that an “abrupt Amtrak cessation” would be severely disruptive to transit agencies up and down the corridor. “Seven of the nine commuter rail agencies in the Northeast operate over Amtrak-owned portions of the Northeast Corridor,” the GAO found. “According to officials from these agencies, access to Amtrak’s infrastructure is essential to their services.”

Even if services kept running but the management switched to a private company, the GAO warned that the transition “would take months, not weeks” and would involve complex labor and liability issues. “So we’re just putting everyone through all this upheaval to essentially put in the exact same thing, just under a different name,” said the staffer.

All We Are Saying is Give Amtrak a Chance

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The idyllic cross-country train trips that many Americans still take could get derailed by today’s “slash and burn” federal budget policies. Meanwhile, fears for the safety of rail passengers in the post-bin Laden era are drumming up political support for costly security measures and raising, once again, questions about why the federal government funds rail routes without any promise of profitability.

At this morning’s Senate Appropriations hearing on budget requests for the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak, the three senators in attendance were unified in their support for funding rail transportation. They’re working on the funding request for the FRA for 2012, not the rail piece of the overall transportation reauthorization. Still, with huge disagreements over spending levels in Congress still raging and a showdown looming over cuts as a quid-pro-quo for raising the debt ceiling, next year’s funding is a significant question.

So the three senators present wanted to know how they could be expected to defend rail funding without more transparency in the budget allocation process. They also asked pointed questions about what the administrators of the FRA and Amtrak were doing to keep riders safe from the terrorist attacks threatened by Al-Qaeda.

The FRA has taken on a greater role in the allocation of funding for rail projects over the last several years and senators appeared frustrated over a lack of clear information as to where the funding would come from. Indeed, some security projects appear in the FY2012 budget request but the FRA is also requesting a USDOT loan to for the same thing.

Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) was quick to commend FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo for his efforts, but called him out for not improving transparency about how, when, where and why projects are funded.  “I support investments,” she made clear. “Now is the time to address critics head on. We must communicate with the people.”

Murray and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) presented a grim future for surface transportation if funding does not keep up pace with booming population growth. The only other senator to speak, ranking Republican Susan Collins of Maine, agreed and reminded her colleagues that the ambitious national rail plan proposed by the FRA, including high-speed rail, has yet to be followed up with any cost estimates, for construction or operations.

Szabo, for his part, could only promise that studies to be released within “the next couple of months” would present the “broader business case” for funding both high-speed rail and individual projects across the country. Szabo, the first union railman to hold his position, was proud of what his agency was doing to keep hazardous freight secure – but admitted that there are still unimplemented security measures that date back to 9/11.  He pointed out that for every $50 spent on aviation security, only $1 went to surface transportation.

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The House is still voting on amendment after amendment to the continuing resolution that will fund the federal government for the rest of FY2011. Just a quick recap as we go into the weekend. The “base bill” of HR 1 – not the amendments – would do the following:

• Eliminate the entire high-speed rail program.
• Cut $430 million of the $2 billion allocated for the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts program, the federal government’s primary means of support for transit capital investments.
• Eliminate TIGER, which provided more than $2 billion to innovative state and local transportation programs around the country last year, and rescind all unspent funds from last year.
• Cancel federal payments to the Washington, D.C. metro system.

As for the amendments:

• Republican Pete Sessions of Texas failed to cut $447 million out of Amtrak’s budget.
• Democrat Jared Polis of Colorado tried to keep the government from rescinding unused TIFIA and TIGER grant money from the stimulus. Polis’ amendment failed.

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If I told you there was a fantastic, $35 billion federal program to lend money for railroads to improve their infrastructure, you’d probably assume one of the following:

Artist's rendering of Denver Union Station, one of only two projects to get RRIF loans in 2010. Image: Denver Union Station Project Authority

1. It must be in China or Europe, not here.
2. I’m about to tell you that Republicans just cut it from the budget.
3. It’s over-subscribed, like TIGER, with 30 dollars of applications for every dollar available.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong! (Though all good guesses.) The Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing Program (RRIF) was first authorized (here in the USA) in 1976 and the program in its current form has been around since 1998. House Republicans spent several hours yesterday trying to figure out how to improve it (not kill it). And unlike other federal infrastructure financing programs, it’s vastly under-subscribed. Of the $35 billion it has at its disposal, it’s spent just $1 billion since 1998.

With the Republican assault on high-speed rail funding (which the House is trying to strip, down to the last penny, out of the FY2011 budget), RRIF could be a GOP-friendly funding mechanism for rail improvements, including for high-speed rail.

So why isn’t it being used to its full potential? That’s what the House Subcommittee on Railroads spent yesterday trying to figure out.

Bill Callison of the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway Company gave the committee a sense of where RRIF could be improved.

The story of our RRIF loans can be fairly described as the good, the bad and the ugly. The “good” is the results of those loans. We have a $25 million RRIF track rehabilitation loan that allowed us to take approximately 120 miles of track from 25 miles per hour (with numerous 10 mile-per-hour “slow orders”) to 40 miles per hour… We also have a $14 million loan which allowed us to purchase 150 open top hopper cars during a tight equipment market… The “bad” was the length of time it took to secure those loans… The “ugly” was what took place at the end of the process for the second loan.

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Bill Lind is a big man. The director of the Center for Public Transportation at American Conservative stands well over six feet tall, and when he really gets going, he seems to loom even larger. Maybe that’s why he hates buses so much. “Those seats are designed for garden gnomes,” he said.

A roundtable discussion yesterday sponsored by the Mobility Choice Coalition on ways to make public transportation align with principles of fiscal conservatism quickly morphed into an all-out brawl over buses vs. rail.

Lind is a rail guy. “Most Americans will not ride a bus if they can drive,” he said. “Buses carry primarily transit dependents.”

When others tried to “defend the honor” of buses, Lind stepped up his rhetoric, first declaring, “buses have no honor!” and then this stunner: “Live like a roach, ride a motorcoach.”

That was more than enough to raise the hackles of Daniel Hoff: “The American Bus Association represents those roaches.” He said bus riders in the Northeast Corridor make over $60,000 a year. And modern intercity bus service is clean and comfortable and has wi-fi.

Lind acknowledges that it’s the urban transit buses, not the intercity coaches, that he’s calling “rolling torture racks.” But still, he says, middle class people want to ride trains and streetcars, not buses. “Basic fact of life,” Lind said. “You can call it rational or irrational – it’s a mixture of both – but it’s a basic fact of life.” He said the user experience of buses just isn’t pleasurable enough to encourage people to leave their cars at home.

He chalks it up to “the stink factor.”

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In a recent interview with the Journal of Commerce, Transportation Chair John Mica (R-FL) indicated that he shares many transportation goals with the Obama administration.

We mentioned the Journal’s report the other day that Mica has tried to reassure transportation supporters that new House rules won’t starve the highway trust fund.

Now the Journal is reporting that Mica is eager to shift more freight transportation to rail in order to “ease pressure on federal road and bridge spending out of the Highway Trust Fund, by reducing the pace of wear and tear.”

“My goal would be to get more trucks off of the highway, and more cars off of the highway,” Mica said.

Mica also refered to the vastly undersubscribed Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing loan program, which hasn’t shared the popularity of other federal funding programs like TIGER and TIFIA. He told the Journal would not try to use RRIF money for road projects, “but I can free that up for rail infrastructure … (and) enhancement of rail takes pressure off of my highways, if it’s properly applied, too.”

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Rail and airline employees would face lowered barriers to unionizing under a new rule announced today by the Obama administration that would put union elections for workers in both modes of transportation on an equal footing with other industries.

The rule, approved on a 2-1 vote by the National Mediation Board (NMB), would end a decades-old practice of counting employees who abstain or do not vote in union elections as "no" votes, thus making the process of organizing workers more difficult.

The Senate labor committee's chairman, Tom Harkin (D-IA), hailed the unionizing shift in a statement. “NMB’s long overdue rule change ensures that all American workers will have a voice in the workplace and a right to fair wages and work conditions," said Harkin, who had joined more than three dozen fellow senators in endorsing the new rule in December.

In practice, the NMB's move is more likely to affect airlines than railroads, where the majority of workers are already represented by labor unions. Indeed, the Air Transport Association -- which represents the interests of leading domestic airlines -- is already moving ahead with a legal challenge to the new rule, the Associated Press reported today.

Nonetheless, surface transportation labor interests joined Harkin in welcoming the NMB announcement, published in today's Federal Register. James Little, president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), said in a statement that "today's decision was long overdue" and would spur his group to new organizing drives.

"TWU lost elections in the past because many supposed voters were on leave or in the hospital or unreachable – every non-vote was counted against our union," Little said.

The senior Democratic and Republican senators in charge of setting annual transportation spending levels today urged the leader of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to develop a more comprehensive plan for using the White House's high-speed rail program to spur the development of viable U.S. train networks.

The chairman of the Senate appropriations committee's transport panel, Patty Murray (D-WA), hailed the Obama administration for breaking from its predecessor by strongly supporting rail investments.

But she also questioned the absence of an FRA budget request for implementing the anti-crash technology known as positive train control, and she advised rail chief Joseph Szabo to provide more of a long-term vision for leveraging the $10.5 billion Congress has approved since last year to develop high-speed and intercity rail.

"This committee is a strong supporter of infrastructure spending, but we have to set strong priorities and make sure that the money's going to be consistently there," Murray told Szabo. "To get a request this year to fund it but not [be] sure what's going to happen next year, I don't think that's going to be enough."

Her GOP counterpart on the panel, Kit Bond (MO), was considerably more harsh in assessing the FRA's lack of a full-scale national rail plan. The agency has released an initial document outlining its priorities, but a final version is not expected until later this year.

Until that more detailed rail development proposal is released, Bond told Szabo, "it would be irresponsible for the committee to give the [administration's] high-speed rail plan any additional funds. ... Rail supporters have to know there are limits to these [budget] requests even in the best of times."

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Federal Transit Administration (FTA) chief Peter Rogoff today mounted a defense of the White House's transit safety plan, assuring some skeptical members of Congress that he does not want to "replicate" inter-city rail safety rules that have taken flak for impeding the development of viable U.S. train networks.

Referencing the safety struggles of Washington D.C.'s Metro transit system, where oversight was relegated to an under-funded, effectively inactive committee before a series of rail accidents last year, Rogoff acknowledged that previous federal regulators were "complicit in wrongdoing" to some degree.

"[W]e engaged in at least helping the transit industry develop voluntary [safety] standards," Rogoff told the House oversight committee. "As a federal agency, I feel it's our obligation to identify what the safe practices [are]. The only way we can ensure there will be safe practices is to have mandatory standards."

The Obama administration's transit safety proposal [PDF] would seek to impose such mandatory standards for transit safety, requiring local agencies to meet a minimum threshold of compliance or be subject to federal monitoring. The president's budget for fiscal year 2011 would set aside about $30 million to help transit agencies pay for any safety upgrades required by the new federal oversight.

"It is not our goal to replicate the voluminous [Federal Rail Administration] rulebook for transit systems," Rogoff told lawmakers. The FRA's slate of safety standards have required Amtrak's Acela trains to stop short of maximum speeds and Caltrain commuter rail to delay introduction of lighter-weight cars, coming under fire from rail advocates.

But lawmakers' openness to debating the White House safety plan does not mean the FTA can count on passage this year. Leaders of the House transportation committee have indicated they do not aim to take up the transit safety bill as a free-standing measure, instead leaving the issue to the next six-year federal infrastructure bill -- which may not come to a final vote until next spring at the earliest.

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