Streetsblog New York City

Stop me if you’ve heard these before:

“Most Americans don’t use railroads, they use cars.”

“There’s no better example of excessive government spending than the $53 billion President Obama allocated for high-speed rail in his 2012 budget.”

“Would you pay $1,000 so that someone — probably not you — can ride high-speed trains 58 miles a year?”

“High-speed rail may be feasible in parts of Europe or Japan, where the population density is much higher, but without enough people packed into a given space, there will never be enough riders to repay the cost of building and maintaining a high-speed rail system.”

Critics of federal initiatives to promote high-speed rail have launched these attacks with great frequency over the past few years. Their targets have been projects in Florida, Wisconsin, California, or even federal regulators and Secretary Ray LaHood. But their primary intended audience was the American people, and, according to the American Public Transportation Association, there has been a “well-oiled campaign” (pun probably intended) to make sure their message was repeated, and loudly.

APTA is trying to unplug that propaganda machine with its new “Inventory of the Criticisms of High-Speed Rail With Suggested Responses and Counterpoints” [PDF]. It methodically lists no fewer than 37 specific objections to pursuing high-speed rail (grouped thematically into eight chapters) and exposes them for “lack of veracity and vision.” The four critiques quoted above (the first two from Diana Furchtgott-Roth in the Washington Examiner, the third from CATO’s Randall O’Toole and the last from Thomas Sowell in The Albany Herald), barely scratch the surface of the anti-HSR literature addressed by the report.

The aim of the report is to give HSR supporters a way to return fire when detractors say things like:

• High-speed rail is too expensive and will never be profitable. APTA says the question of profit is “dangerously misleading and irrelevant” since “the economic value generated by passenger transportation historically is captured by the businesses served by the transportation network, not by the carriers.”
• It doesn’t have broad enough support. On the contrary, says APTA: Even the Congressional leaders who have been the most critical of the Obama administration’s allocation of rail funds “have set about finding creative ways of financing the initiative in the hope of encouraging greater private-sector support and leadership.”
• HSR might work elsewhere, but it won’t work in the U.S. Oh really? Sure, intercity passenger rail currently serves “the smallest share of riders among all modes of passenger transportation,” says APTA. But that’s changing. “In the Northeast Corridor, intercity trains enjoy a market share almost equal to the airlines, and nationally, ridership on Amtrak is at an all-time high.”

Many of the debunked criticisms point to some combination of unrecoverable cost and only marginal benefits, with the assumption that taxpayers will be on the hook for costs and that benefits will be confined to a select few. Not so: APTA cites ample evidence that high-speed passenger rail could be capable of operating profits and wide-ranging benefits.

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) both agree that a new surface transportation authorization bill needs to be finished before Congress leaves for the August recess. But that doesn’t mean it’ll happen.

Mica is making noises about a far smaller bill than the one proposed in 2009 by then-Chair Jim Oberstar – and even smaller than SAFETEA-LU, passed in 2005 for $286 billion. “I could take up to a $250 billion bill and leverage it by five, four times,” Mica told Congressional Quarterly. “I could have a huge amount of capacity in helping to finance projects.”

A smaller size might save Mica’s bill from the same fate as Oberstar’s, which ran into a brick wall on raising the gas tax. (Indeed, the idea isn’t any more popular now than it was then.) But will it satisfy the bill’s secondary mandate: to create jobs?

Officials from the American Public Transportation Association say that although they’re calling for a doubling of the federal investment in public transportation – a long shot, they know – the most important thing is just to get a bill signed, and soon.

APTA released the results of a survey yesterday showing just how desperate the transit industry is for a new multi-year bill. Eighty-four percent of private sector firms predicted revenue losses if the transportation bill is further delayed. Fifty percent said they’d probably have to resort to layoffs.

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With gas prices at their highest level since October 2008, the American Public Transportation Association’s monthly Transit Savings Report estimates that transit riders save, on average, $9,656 a year.

Of course, not everyone has equal access to these massive savings. According to APTA’s numbers, which are based on gas prices ($3.08 per gallon last week) and the national unreserved monthly parking rate, big city residents save the most by giving up their wheels. But what about residents of transit-poor areas? For them, car dependency is like a mandate to spend $805 more per month – the equivalent of a second rent check. With no other way to get around, how are they to access the savings available to transit riders?

With the House of Representatives seemingly prepared to skimp on transportation budgets and reorient spending toward highways, it may soon get tougher to extend the savings provided by transit to more Americans.

According to APTA’s figures, New Yorkers see the biggest savings from riding transit, topping out at $14,159 a year. San Francisco is number three, saving $12,738 by taking the train. Washington, DC is way down at number 14, but we Washingtonians still save $9,709 a year riding transit. (These numbers assume that big city residents drive the same number of miles as anyone else, which they almost never do, so the real-life savings may not be quite as high as APTA indicates.)

Still, the huge savings for transit riders almost make those fare hikes a little easier to swallow, don’t they? Even paying more for transit service, riders are saving a bundle. But will Congress make sure these savings are available to more Americans? Or will we hang on to a system that gives a relatively small number of us the option to spend less on transportation?

A new report written by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute's Todd Litman for the American Public Transit Association [PDF], the trade organization for the nation's transit agencies, reminds us that one of the most valuable benefits of transit is to our health. Summarizing the state of research in the field, "Evaluating Public Transportation Health Benefits" lays out the basic fact that increasing transit use is an easy way of preventing thousands of unnecessary deaths each year. 

The damage that our current transportation system does to our health is staggering. Each year, 40,000 Americans die in traffic crashes, according to the report, the equivalent of 1,186,070 years of life lost. Estimates attribute an equal number of deaths to motor vehicle air pollution, which tends to affect an older population. The number of deaths attributable to a third category of health impact, the sedentary lifestyle driving promotes, wasn't estimated.

Importantly, the report points out that these tens of thousands of deaths, along with a number of injuries and illnesses an order of magnitude larger, aren't the result of how we drive but of how much we drive. For example, the United States has by far the highest traffic fatality rate among its peer countries per capita, but not per mile driven (that title goes to Ireland). Americans die more because we drive more, not because we drive worse.

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The transit industry's leading D.C. lobbying outlet today joined the umbrella group for state DOTs and two major construction groups to protest the Senate climate bill's failure to set aside all of the revenue from its proposed new fuel fees for infrastructure projects -- specifically, to the cash-strapped highway trust fund that is generally split, 80-20, between roads and transit.

American Public Transportation Association (APTA) chief William Millar told reporters that while the local transit agencies he represents are "very supportive of legislation to address climate change and energy issues," the Senate bill's diversion of all but about $6 billion of its fuel revenues for purposes unrelated to transportation is a matter of serious concern.

"This is one of those cases where we really can't even talk about the merits of any portion of the bill because the fundamental position is flawed," Millar said.

Referring to the legislation's promise of funding for the clean transport and land-use grants known as "CLEAN TEA" and TIGER, he added, "Many of those are very good ideas … but you can't make those ideas work if there's no significant funding to make them work, and this bill would aggravate the funding situation for public transit."

John Horsley, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), was more direct in outlining where state DOTs want to see the Senate climate bill's fuel revenues directed. "Channel[ing] every dollar through the highway trust fund," he said, would help the industry break through a congressional stalemate and win passage of a new six-year federal transport bill.

Stephen Sandherr, CEO of the Associated General Contractors, and Pete Ruane, president of the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, echoed Horsley's interpretation of the new fuel fees in the climate bill -- which are imposed on oil companies and refiners but are likely to be passed along through higher gas prices -- as a de facto "user fee" on drivers.

The climate proposal, Ruane said, does "nothing more than finance a lot of goals, which are enviable in part, on the backs of transportation users."

It remains to be seen whether the transportation industry's combative stance against the partial diversion of the bill's transportation revenue, billed as a "call for a rewrite" of the climate legislation, will help force senators into restructuring the measure. Ruane said he "like[s] the odds" facing the four groups.

But one congressional source was befuddled by APTA's move to "bit[e] the hand that feeds them" by criticizing a climate bill that stands to give broad, lasting benefits to rail and bus systems.

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The nation's transit systems hosted 10.2 billion trips last year, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) reported yesterday. While that figure represents a 3.8 percent decline from 2008, APTA's data showed light rail ridership rising in nine cities and the long-term increase in transit use continuing to outpace growth in population and vehicle miles traveled.

APTA President William Millar portrayed the new ridership figures as a win for transit, given the economic recession and the fact that fuel prices declined last year relative to their 2008 highs.

"Considering that nearly 60 percent of riders take public transportation to commute to and from work, it is not surprising that ridership declined in light of the many Americans who lost their jobs last year," Millar said in a statement.

Since 1995, APTA has reported a 31-percent increase in transit ridership nationwide, compared with a 15-percent increase in population over the same period and a 21-percent increase in highway miles traveled.

Nine cities reported light-rail ridership increases to APTA: Baltimore; Oceanside, CA; Memphis; Seattle; Philadelphia; Tampa; San Francisco; Portland; and New Orleans. Heavy rail networks in Los Angeles, D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia also saw more riders last year.