Railroads more important than alternative fuels in recovery plans

Small towns all across the United States will suffer terribly as we slide farther into the various crises: financial, energy, climate, etc. Utterly dependent on car and truck connections and deprived of railroad access, small towns will suffer isolation and atrophy. Larger cities enjoying only middling rail links to other places will fare only slightly better. Cheap energy allowed a tremendous increase in living standards over the past century. Unfortunately, we lost control of our own destiny when the U.S. hit its peak of oil production in 1971. Unbridled exuberance engendered by a supercharged economy following WWII caused capitalist enterprises to overreach and overtax the planet. We take from Mother Earth faster than she can replace what we take. Cheap energy deluded us into believing that we could go on doing that indefinitely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb , Paul R. Ehrlich

The temporary reprieve brought on by the economic recession subsidizes today’s inexpensive gasoline. As the economy recovers, fuel prices will as well. Meanwhile, low prices world wide discourage expensive exploration and extraction methods. The recession effectively gave us a “tax cut” by reducing the amount of money we remit overseas to oil producing countries. If Americans could agree to raise domestic energy taxes, we could maintain public pressure to conserve fuel and raise revenues necessary to rebuild the rail network that we need to permanently reduce car and truck dependency.

American infrastructure and tax subsidies disproportionately favor cars, trucks, and airline transportation. Train web offers some enlightening comparisons of transportation subsidies in the U.S. Of course trains don’t “pay for themselves” but neither do highways; however, highways cost far more for the nation as a whole.

General Motors and friends, now begging Congress for a bail-out, deserve the lion’s share of blame for the sorry state of our rail transportation system. The documentary, “Taken for a ride,” – among other sources – document General Motors’ deliberate strategy to bankrupt the railroad system so that they could sell more cars and trucks, starting in the 1930s and continuing to the present day.

Without elaborate data, one can easily understand how cities built around trains and railroads would sprawl less than cities built around an automobile-based transportation system. Trains require stations, terminals, depots and passengers’ willingness to walk to and from these facilities. Train-centered transportation causes urban development to cluster around stations. With cars and trucks, only the availability of streets, highways, and parking places limits urban development. Alfred Sloan and the automobile industry worked very hard to make train and streetcar transit inconvenient and to make cars glamorous. Efficiently run railroad systems always made more economic sense than automobile-oriented transportation systems.

We complain today about how quickly cars lose their value, compared to other investments – like real estate. Trains tend to endure and provide good service for decades. Asphalt and concrete roadways require far more maintenance than railroads but the robber barons convinced us to go with cars and trucks instead of rail because they could make more money that way. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly worked very hard to limit competition and invent new uses for petroleum products that would create ever-increasing demand (see Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize” or Wikipedia). Cars, trucks, and road networks gave him exactly what he wanted – perpetually increasing demand.

The advent of “peak oil” virtually guarantees that an economic recovery will hurt small American towns as much if not more than the current recession has hurt them. Small town residents lacking access to cheap motor fuel or railroads will find travel increasingly expensive. Agricultural communities lacking rail access will find it increasingly difficult to transport their products to markets and customers. Air travel has already become prohibitively expensive for most people.

The Obama Administration’s plans for economic recovery should not enable the car companies to continue business as usual. I predict that the personally-owned car will become increasingly rare in the future. Alternative fuels, green fuels, and electric cars will not enable us to forge into the future on the automobile-oriented transportation system created over the past 60 years. The United States must join the league of rational nations (all of Europe, China, Japan, Korea, etc.) who place rail transportation in high priority. http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2006-05a.htm

The American economy will not recover until it recognizes and plans for expensive energy.

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