HACKENSACK, N.J. — This morning, millions of New Jersey residents will step into their cars, start their engines, and motor to work, according to an editorial in the Bergen Record. Probably few will know that their various governments are picking up much of the cost of this journey. In fact, the American driving experience relies on what is probably the biggest socialized transportation system in the world — our road and highway network.
This same morning, thousands of people will step on trains carrying the name of Amtrak in Newark, Trenton, and New York City. These passengers will be paying most if not all the costs of their journeys. In general, they will use a system that their governments feebly fund and that is constantly being asked to pay its own way.
Recognizing this imbalance and acting on it is the way to straighten out this country’s mixed-up transportation systems and solve Amtrak’s current fiscal crisis.
Quite simply, we subsidize driving and flying too much, and train travel not enough. If we brought this trilogy of expenditures more in balance, we would have more options on how to get to other cities quickly and easily, and we would have less suburban sprawl.
In 2000, the federal government appropriated a mere $520 million to Amtrak — compared to $33 billion on highways and $12.5 billion on air travel. No wonder Amtrak is going broke.
Let’s look at driving in more detail. In 1998, to take a typical year, the federal, state, and local governments spent $113 billion on building and maintaining roads, according to the 1999 book of Highway Statistics put out by the Federal Highway Administration. Of this, only $65 billion came from the gas tax, which is the closest we have to a user fee.
That means that in that year the gas tax paid only 57 percent of what we spent on roads.
About $5 billion came from tolls. Local and state governments provided most of the rest, chiefly through property taxes and general fund receipts. And these figures do not include paying for “externalities” like pollution or traffic congestion costs.
The nominally private airline companies, in turn, rely on a vast system of publicly funded airports. State and local taxpayers, not airlines, are the ones that run a risk when they build a mammoth new home for passenger planes. And when United, American, and other airlines ran into a jam last fall, Congress dropped $15 billion on them without blinking an eye.Now, that same body can debate loaning Amtrak a mere $100 million as if it were an outrageous request.
Much of the debate in the press has focused on Amtrak’s money losing long-distance routes. While this is a fair subject for discussion, eliminating those long distance routes would not solve Amtrak’s problem. The train company’s essential problem is a lack of healthy government investment in its systems.
We need a different framework within which to talk about transportation. Debates about subsidies, which tend to dominate discussion about train travel but are oddly absent when highways or air travel are mentioned, will not get us closer to a balanced transportation network.
The free market, a shaky concept anyway, did not build the interstate highway system or the network of modern airports around our cities, nor even the extensive railway system originally laid out in the 19th century.
Good transportation systems — highway, air, or rail — require lots of government money, whether it goes through a nominally private corporation or a government department. Amtrak, the federal agency created to run the national train system a generation ago, may or may not be the appropriate vehicle for a train network, but the necessity of government involvement and cash cannot be avoided.
Similar to those in education, investments in transportation systems produce great payoffs for society, but ones that are difficult to capture by a private financier. It’s why government has always led the way in transportation, from constructing the Erie Canal in the 1800s to experimenting with high-tech highways in the late 20th century.
What Amtrak really needs are some good lobbyists. Highway interests and airline owners have huge armies of Gucci-wearing lobbyists to fight for government money. For the most part all Amtrak has are a few train buffs — and the public interest.
Alex Marshall is author of “How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and The Roads Not Taken,” and is senior editor at the Regional Plan Association in New York City.