(The Toledo Blade posted the following editorial on its website on September 3.)
TOLEDO, Ohio — America’s transportation stepchild, the rail passenger system, is not in any position to alleviate the problems of motorists faced with rising gas prices, but the nation should face the fact that its neglect of rail travel was a short-sighted, if not imbecilic, decision by politicians who bet the ranch on airplanes and gas-burning internal-combustion engines as the way to move people.
For the first time, Congress is giving serious consideration to subsidizing, to the tune of $1.4 billion over six years, nationwide passenger service, provided the states put in matching funds. This funding “is a first-time-ever for passenger rail,” says David Johnson, assistant director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. It is a welcome change of policy.
To be sure, these funds are a drop in the bucket compared with the hundreds of billions that have been spent building the Interstate highway system and subsidizing the airline industry that now find that its business model for operation is increasingly directing flights to the nearest cities with federal bankruptcy courts.
Historians looking back on the era of wholesale neglect of passenger rail service will wonder how the United States ever allowed a once workable rail system to scrape along just a handout or two from bankruptcy for so many decades.
Specifically for Ohio, it is contemplated that a web of passenger-train routes can be established, with Cleveland as a main hub and Toledo and Columbus as secondary hubs.
For the near-term future this would mean primarily spending money on identifying the right-of-way and security updates that would be needed to improve the present system. It is reasonable to expect that Ohio would have not have augmented east-west service as at present, but also north-south service in the Cleveland-Cincinnati corridor.
No, rail service is not coming to the wholesale aid of motorists in the near-term future. However, even an oil-oriented administration, fixated on pumping oil out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska — a short-term fix if ever there was one — should be able to see the wisdom of serious consideration of alternatives to private vehicles and air travel for many point-to-point trips. Congress has always been somewhat more enlightened on the subject of rail travel, and it is time the White House got with the program, too.