Let’s see if we can follow the thinking here on mass transit.
On the one hand is a Washington Post story that says Virginia just doesn’t get it on high speed rail. Fast train advocate Jim Ukrop bemoans the commonwealth’s “short-term thinking,” and, like other supporters of the idea, what the state to get spending on rail as soon as possible.
On the other hand, the Washington Examiner’s Dave Sherfinski has a piece showing that roughly one out of every six dollars Virginia will spend on transportation over the next six years won’t be spent on roads at all. Where is that money going? It’s being spent on “…items like public transportation, sidewalks, bike trails, bus shelters — and wildflowers.”
So the next time you’re stuck in traffic, a least the scenery will be nice.
Granted, roads will get the bulk of Virginia taxpayers’ money, and that’s a good thing. But even those dollars won’t be enough to end gridlock in some areas. The alternative, then, is more rail, right?
Not really. Despite rising ridership, rail still depends heavily on subsidies, federal, state and local. Those subsidies come either from state general funds or bonds – meaning they crowd-out other government spending, or force general increases in government spending, implying higher taxes – or they come from the taxes already paid by car owners through the gas tax and other fees.
High speed railers don’t really care where the money comes from; they just want more of it.
The problem is that for states like Virginia, getting the high speed rails rolling means spending huge sums of money just to bring the existing tracks up to par. Plans to bring a high speed rail through Richmond would require nearly $600 million in improvements to freight lines and a station that was determined to be obsolete in 1901 – the day it opened.
There has to be another alternative. And, buried within the Washington Post story, there is…because a number of those interviewed take the slow train from Richmond to jobs in DC. The riders choose to live more than 100 miles from their offices. Rather than drive or, heaven forbid, live closer to their places of employment, they prefer the commonwealth spend bags of money it doesn’t have on faster trains so they can save time on their commutes.
While I can appreciate the desire of folks to live where they please, and take jobs where they can find them, is it necessary for the rest of Virginia to subsidize their choices?
No. And as Heritage Foundation transportation expert Ron Utt told us in an interview, high speed rail is an expensive pipe dream that will demand even greater subsidies from governments and taxpayers. In today’s economic climate, governments (and taxpayers) can no longer afford to indulge the expensive rail fantasies of the few. “Rail advocates will never get it,” Utt said. “It’s a kind of religion. And as long as you have access to other people’s money, what’s to stop you” from believing whatever nonsense you wish.
