TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING. Kalamazoo College's Olga Bonfiglio has a pleasant ride on the Empire Builder.

After spending two days on the Empire Builder, the long-haul Amtrak line from Chicago to Seattle/Portland, I quickly realized that our investment in trains should be readily and heartily embraced. And, if more Americans were to take such trips, I’m sure they, too, would choose trains as an alternative mode of travel.

Amtrak staff was courteous and responsive to passengers, a bit quirky as train people can be, but absolutely delightful while we all traveled the miles and hours together across the country. Riding the train, especially on an overnight, was romantic and adventurous and we kept to our schedule despite the numerous times we had to yield to freight trains.

Apparently no locomotive failures, dogcatch crews, or rockslides hampered their course.

Professor Bonfiglio was sufficiently impressed to offer a number of thoughts about Passenger Rail. The paragraphs about the unintended consequences of the Interstate Highways are instructive.

Promoted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 required citizens to finance the Interstates by paying 15 to 20 percent of the price of a gallon of gas. The 46,876-mile Interstate system took 35 years to complete and cost $128.9 billion. The feds paid 90 percent of the cost or about $114 billion—$425 billion in 2006 dollars— even though the Interstates were under the control of the states. Governors and mayors signed onto this massive public works plan without hesitation because they saw it as an economic development tool for their cities. They would be proved wrong within a couple decades.

As more and more people needed and bought cars, they found themselves stuck in more traffic jams and having to contend with endless road repair. Operating an automobile amounted to $6,000 to $7,000 per year (outside its purchase) and the accident and death rates related to cars—at least 40,000 deaths per year—were overwhelming.

Building the Interstates in the cities also drastically changed urban life, something Eisenhower never intended and experts never foresaw. Neighborhoods were torn up to make way for the highways. Social stratification and racial discrimination intensified as middle class white people migrated to the suburbs and left poor people and minority groups behind in the cities. Downtowns that were designed for pedestrians became congested places and the influx of cars made them frustrating to navigate. Old buildings were demolished to create surface parking, which then created gaping, ugly holes in the cityscape. People felt unsafe and increasingly reluctant to go downtown. Retail moved out to the suburbs and the companies eventually followed. Of course, all of this out-migration ended up depleting the tax base and making ghost towns out of our once vibrant and prosperous downtowns.

The downtowns might have been doomed anyway: perhaps an ambitious economic historian is working on a dissertation where the counterfactual is telecommunication and computer network expansion that occurred more rapidly because reduced government spending on highways made more capital available for those industries. Or, put aside the speculations, consider the role of electric interurbans and limited tramlines in developing the suburbs of Los Angeles, Shaker Heights in Ohio, and, horrible dictu, Waukesha County, Wisconsin, ground zero of opposition to faster train service north of the Cheddar Curtain. Heck, Portland, Oregon, runs a trolley to a mall.

By the late 1990s transportation engineers and analysts began questioning the Interstate’s “externalities” as they costed out pollution, energy waste, land disruption, accidents, time wasted in traffic jams. They also learned that spending hundreds of millions of dollars to add highway lanes and interchanges didn’t relieve congestion.

The airlines tried to make up for their operational costs with reduced legroom, poorer air quality and overcrowding. Greater demand for air travel also necessitated building or expanding airports, which all takes up a lot of tax dollars.

Common Dreams readers might be intrigued by the regressive transfer inherent in that road and airport building. The late Paul Weyrich characterized public spending on roads as socialism, and the use of those moneys to build airports is a subsidy to relatively rich people.

I'm intrigued to see a Common Dreams article that has anything favorable to say about public-private partnerships.

Interstate II (http://www.texasrailadvocates.org/InterstateII.htm) involves double- or triple-tracking 20,000 to 30,000 miles of mainline freight railroads, establishing corridors for high-speed trains and eventually electrifying the trains to replace diesel engines. [Gil] Carmichael [of the University of Denver] estimates this could all be done in 20 years for two cents on the motor fuel tax.

“We have this incredible railroad network that goes out all over this land from city center to city center. That's what is so amazing. It's already there,” said Carmichael (in McCommons). Another idea train advocates promote is the re-establishment of a combined freight and passenger rail system through private-public partnerships that work with state transportation departments. Dedicated passenger lines have a multiplier effect that can relieve traffic congestion, reduce freight bottlenecks, diminish flight delays, reduce this country's carbon footprint and accommodate people without cars or the means or desire to fly.

The McCommons reference is to James McCommons, author of Waiting on a Train. There's a book review coming, but first a few more photo essays on the trains he rode. (The last Trip Report had your Superintendent in California. He did not find a Silicon Valley experiment with a beam transporter to get home.)

There is potential to provide the Passenger Rail capacity on existing railroad rights-of-way in some of the more thickly settled parts of the country, which reduces the enviromental impact and population displacement of construction. Better signalling and dispatching, and a few improvements at bridges and junctions will go a long way.