Gabriel Roth Debunks Government Transit Subsidies
By David J. Theroux • Saturday February 12, 2011 11:42 PM PDT • 3 Comments
With President Obama’s new proposal for a massive, new federal plan for $53 billion in pork subsidies for high-speed rail, Independent Institute Research Fellow Gabriel Roth recently participated in a forum on public transit sponsored by the Mobility Choice Coalition. At the event, Bill Lind, director of the Center for Public Transportation affiliated with American Conservative magazine, pushed for government subsidies for rail transportation. But as reported by DC.STREETSBLOG.org, “Lind met his match in the form of Gabe Roth, a conservative transportation economist from the Independent Institute.”
“We love train travel but not the costs,” Roth said. The cheapest Amtrak fare from Washington, D.C. to New York that he could find on a given day was $76 one way; $139 for a higher-speed Acela. But there are multiple bus companies competing to give you a seat for under $20 – and without a public subsidy.
Part of the problem, Roth contends, is that there’s not enough competition in rail. Railroads don’t carry competing rail companies’ trains, whereas highways don’t pick favorites among bus carriers.
But more importantly, Roth said, rail requires its own dedicated right of way and can’t be packed as full as a freeway. “A high-speed train requires miles of empty track in front of it because a steel wheel on a steel rail cannot stop quickly,” he said. “But you can have buses every 10 seconds on the road and you would not think that road is over-crowded.”
Even Lind acknowledges that “high-speed rail is killing us.” It’s “icing without a cake,” he said. “What we need is a much denser network of intercity buses and passenger trains so you can go from anywhere in America to anywhere else in America without flying, without driving, where the buses feed the trains.”
“Buses have to be more than just a feeder network to a rail vision that’s 20 to 50 years and hundreds of billions of dollars away,” said Hoff of the ABA.
Anne Canby of the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership took some of the heatedness out of the debate with these words of wisdom: “There are very different markets. I have a grandchild who takes the bus wherever she goes. I take the train.”
Both/and, not either/or. Now, people, was that so hard?
Mr. Roth is editor of the Independent Institute’s award-winning book, Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads.
Tags: Books, Budget and Tax Policy, Corporatism, Economics, Government subsidies, Mercantilism, Nationalization, Politics, Socialism, Transportation, Urban Issues 
How does Obama know that trains are what we need absent a profit-loss test? He doesn’t and never will.
As with everything else the president proposes, this is more economic ignorance. Need it be pointed out that if high-speed rail service had a market and a profit opportunity, someone would have already provided it?
No subsidies! No economic central planning! Whatever is invested must be done by the private sector, which isn’t going to happen with the cancerous public sector growing like a tumor.
Steve Hogan | Feb 13, 2011 | Reply
I got the impression that what upset Bill Lind—a nice and knowledgable debater—was my point about buses being able to carry lots of passengers on freeways without having to bear the total infrastructure cost. He seemed to take that as a blow “below the belt”, and unfair to the rail mode which proudly bears all the costs of its infrastructure.
Unfortunately, a bankrupt federal government cannot afford to subsidize this sort of gallantry and, even if it could, cars or buses are often preferred by those whose journeys do not start and end at rail stations.
Gabriel Roth | Feb 14, 2011 | Reply
In response to Gabriel Roth’s comments:
“We love train travel but not the costs,”
—We’ve been subsidizing roads and gas for ages now, and spent much more in doing that than creating a true free market. This is also why is so much more expensive now to start a network of trains.
“Part of the problem is that there’s not enough competition in rail. Railroads don’t carry competing rail companies’ trains, whereas highways don’t pick favorites among bus carriers”
-Agreed. But that is due to the fact that we have ignore train transport in favor of subsidizing roads and gas for ages now. I have no problem with private companies competing to build and run rail service. Actually, that’s how all train service originally started in the US.
“Rail requires its own dedicated right of way and can’t be packed as full as a freeway. “A high-speed train requires miles of empty track in front of it because a steel wheel on a steel rail cannot stop quickly,” he said. “But you can have buses every 10 seconds on the road and you would not think that road is over-crowded.”
—Not sure how a group of buses carrying fewer people and driving in congested roads is more efficient than a train on a separate dedicated track that will get you there faster. For one, buses and cars also need miles and miles of roads, which as I said before, we have been subsidizing at increasing costs. But buses contribute to congestion because they go on the same roads as cars, which means they also take longer to get there. The difference is that trains can pack a lot more people into one “lane or track”, as opposed to cars and buses, which actually carry a lot less people along and use much more roads. This is also comparing apples to oranges. Buses have a different function than trains. Buses are better suited for inner city, shorter distances. Trains for connecting neighborhoods and cities.
I agree with Lind that a denser network of inner city trains (or light rail) and feeder buses is what is needed in most places. After all, Americans live in cities and neighborhoods.
Let private companies develop inter and intra state speed rail.
Angel Martinez | Feb 16, 2011 | Reply