Where should Obama look for his high-speed rail revival? No further than the Acela rail services along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor-that is, according to Christian Wolmar of the NYTimes. Connecting Washington DC and Boston, the tracks offer the best “test case” for Obama to demonstrate high speed rail efficiency. Here are some highlights of the article:
The 450-mile trip from Boston to Washington takes almost seven hours and averages just 71 miles per hour, hardly faster than by car and uncompetitive with air.
How can Acela be improved without building an entirely new system? Money is needed to improve the overhead electric wires, straighten out curves and upgrade the track. And more trains are needed to increase trip frequency, reduce overcrowding and offer flexibility.
Basically, trains require money to run, not people and certainly not demand. Who’s money? Ours-the people not riding the train but paying for it.
According to Alan Reynolds, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the federal stimulus actually added about 2 percentage points to the unemployment rate. The jobs the stimulus was claimed to have created or saved can be mostly attributed to extending unemployment benefits and bolstering government programs such as Social Security and Medicaid.
Additionally the 4th quarter GDP report notes that GDP gains were attributed to private and fixed investment and not federal spending.
Yet Gov. Perdue is still calling the stimulus a success that “saved the country from a tremendous catastrophe” and continues to lobby for even more federal money to fund infrastructure and transportation projects.
All the while North Carolina’s unemployment rate continues to increase. According to the North Carolina Employment Security Commission’s latest reports unemployment increased to 11.2 percent in December – an overall 3.2 percent increase in the past year.
Pretty neat video of 58 million of your tax dollars hard at work. Some aerial footage of the new data center being built by Apple in Catawba County.
I’m still waiting for all the greeny environmentalists to put down their iPhones or iPads long enough to notice the number of poor defenseless trees who gave their lives for this or the fact that data centers are one of the largest users of electricity (you know, that stuff that when generated cause global warming).
Late last Friday, the NC Department of Transportation released a new report that represents a major step forward for the department — they are now using a “data-driven approach is being used to score projects across the state” as opposed to its previous scoring system relying on political favor and cronyism for transportation projects.
This scoring system and a common-sense prioritization of transportation projects is one that Civitas and others have been recommending for years.
According to the report:
each project is classified under one of the Department’s three primary goals (Safety, Mobility, Infrastructure Health) and three tiers (Statewide, Regional, and Subregional). Projects classified as Infrastructure Health were further classified by Submode (Interstate Pavement, Modernization, and Highway Miscellaneous).
If you dig deeper into the rankings and pay particular attention to the rankings under “Mobility” (page 57) a distinct conclusion can be drawn — the Charlotte area has been neglected. 8 of the top 10 highest scoring projects are in the Charlotte/I-85 corridor.
The key here will be to see if NCDOT actually sticks to this ranking system and makes decisions based on this or will we see political pressures creep back into the system. I’m guardedly optimistic that road building in the state may have finally turned a corner.
Nowhere in the world does high-speed rail make a profit. The director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris last year told The New York Times [NYT] only two high-speed rail lines – in France and Japan – manage to break even.
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Even if high-speed rail projects could be built on time and within budget, a March 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office report concluded high-speed passenger rail would have little impact on the congestion, environmental, energy and other issues that face U.S. transportation.
Draining billions of dollars from private businesses and individuals to subsidize projects that almost never come close to paying for themselves and will have little impact on the nation’s transportation system will not speed the engine of economic growth. It will help grind the engine to a halt.
The fact that high-speed rail lines need subsidies in the first place indicates they are massive money pits. Subsidies mean that more resources are required to produce fewer goods – how is that good for economic growth? And now even the U.S. government admits high speed rail doesn’t mitigate traffic congestion or offer any tangible “environmental benefits.” But these projects do line the pockets of politically-connected construction companies and developers – what a boondoggle.
Once these projects are completed and begin bleeding money, who will be forced to continue to subsidize their operations?
If you wanted to increase travel efficiency between Raleigh and Charlotte, what is the better use of $520 million?
1. Upgrade a rail line (but not fully) that serves a few hundred people per day that could possibly grow to a couple of thousand people per day.
2. Replace the Yadkin River Bridge ($300M) and have $220 million left over to widen I-85 in Cabarrus, Rowan and Davidson Counties from 2 lanes to 4 which in some sections has a daily traffic count of 110,000 cars per day and is consistently the cause of traffic jams and accidents. (And as all you greenies out there know, traffic congestion leads to global warmingglobal cooling climate change.)
Yesterday Gov. Bev Perdue was talking about completing the I-485 loop around Charlotte. While talking she said: “We want you to have a reason to bring it in under budget, and done well, and done so as to last for the next 50 years,” Perdue said. “The only way I think you can do that, without raising the gas tax, which I’m not going to do ever, (emphasis added) is that you have got to have a different financing structure.”
Not so fast Bev, Senate Bill 200, that you signed, raised the gas tax 2 cents a gallon according to the Fiscal Note prepared for the bill. According to that note, “The bill would set the rate for the first six month period at 29.9 cents per gallon, an increase of 2.0 cents per gallon“! So about that NEVER RAISING THE GAS TAX?
I have heard politicians break promises after making them – but this is the first time I have heard one break the promise before making it.
You can read the story from WRAL here and watch Bev talks about gas tax:
In what has to be seen as a somewhat bizarre and highly questionable decision, the NC DOT has decided to continue with its plans to expand a Winston-Salem road that leads to the soon to be empty Dell manufacturing plant. From today’s W-S Journal:
Even though Dell said earlier this month that it will close the plant early next year, DOT officials say they are moving ahead with the Union Cross Road plans. They say that present and future traffic needs justify the expense.
The cost to widen the road? $53 million.
Oh and the traffic counts the DOT is basing the need for widening on, they were done at the height of Dell’s employment and use of the road in 2007.
So is this the “critical needs” that the General Assembly used to justify raising the gas tax by 2 cents per gallon on July 1? I sure hope not.
Western NC Congressman Heath Shuler continues to frustrate liberals by sponsoring another 2nd Amendment bill in Congress. This time he has teamed up with fellow Democrat Mike Ross (D-AR) and Republicans John Fleming (R-LA), Spencer Baucus (R-AL), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Denny Rehberg (R-MT) to sponsor HR 3789 to finally sort out how law abiding citizens that choose to travel on Amtrak can lawfully travel with a firearm in their checked baggage.
Now, before the anti-self defense crowd work themselves up into a tizzy about Shuler’s bill, a few facts need to be considered. Airline passengers currently are provided a process to travel with a firearm as checked luggage. This bill would simply apply that process to the state controlled rail monopoly. The Senate passed a similar measure as an amendment to the transportation and housing appropriations bill in September by a vote of 68-30 with both Senators Burr and Hagan voting “Yea.”
Guns appears to be one area of legislation that the Blue Dog Caucus appears to be willing to challenge the Democrat Congressional leadership since the Dogs caved in on a single payer healthcare plan.
The N&O reveals (yet again) that it failed Economics 101. Taking cues from a new study put out by the Brookings Institution, the editorial praises the Southeast High-Speed Rail Corridor as the obvious choice to lighten air travel. The study concluded that 1.1 million people flew last year between RDU airport and either Charlotte or Washington D.C.
The solution to this “large” amount of air traffic—the Southeast High-Speed Rail.
But, the editorial fails to consider how many North Carolina travels will actually jump on this high-speed train (which actually isn’t high-speed, by the way). Ridership numbers consistently show that the average North Carolinian will take a round trip train only once every 27 years.
So, why does the high-speed rail “make sense to lighten the load on airports” when no one is actually riding the train? It doesn’t. Nor does it make sense to spend more than $1.3 billion of taxpayer money to upgrade the 400 miles of North Carolina tracks needed to implement the high-speed rail. Before the N&O publishes nonsense like this, please consider actual ridership numbers. Let’s pay attention to what the market signals as the best transportation alternative for the traveler, like say, better roads for our Fords and Chevys.