Advocates of passenger rail resort to all kinds of misleading statistics and arguments. But this stat, which showed up and was repeated over and over again this morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” as some kind of explanation for last night’s tragedy, is arguably the worst I’ve seen.
Looks terrible, right? Except that if you take the numbers they used and adjust them for rail ridership in the two countries, it turns out there isn’t much of a gap in funding at all. I looked it up on this table on the International Union of Railways website, and did the math myself. Rail ridership numbers here (in passenger-km) are for 2011.
USA: 14.7 cents per passenger-km
China: 15.6 cents per passenger-km
So yes, we spend a lot less money, but the Chinese actually ride trains a bit under 100 times more than we do, and that fact kind of matters.
I have no idea how the above graphic made it on “Morning Joe.” I don’t know if there’s some rail advocacy group that sent out a press release containing those numbers — if they did, I didn’t get it. Maybe everyone was just too lazy to ask the obvious question or look up the data. But there you have it. Perhaps Joe Scarborough will mention this as a corrective.
Of course, this says nothing about the merits of the issue. I love trains, but in my personal opinion, this is 14.7 cents too many in the United States. There is no demand for passenger rail in most of the places Amtrak serves, and a private company could do a better job where demand does exist, i.e. in the Northeast.
But the main idea here is, let’s be a little more careful with numbers, okay?
