We have a lot of work to do!
There is so much excitement over the Amtrak funding in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. If you’re starving and have only had an occasional crust of stale bread to eat, the offer of two occasional crusts of stale bread sounds exciting.
It’s not.
I haven’t said much about it, not wanting to sound cynical and kill everyone’s excitement, but this article matches what I have been thinking. There was big excitement over President Obama /Amtrak Joe’s “High Speed Rail” money in 2008 too.
They want us to believe that a trillion bucks for the military is trivial and eight billion (Obama) or 66 billion (Amtrak Joe) is generous…and people seem to overwhelmingly fall for it.
Looking back at the Obama eight billion, it’s a federal program, so everybody has to get some. Eight billion divided by 50 states is…$160 million. Wa hoo! Evenly divided, each state would get enough to build about 25 miles of new commuter service.
This article in Railway Age tells the story of $66 billion. It ain’ pretty.
This isn’t a matter of some folks getting to ride a train. It’s a matter of climate change. It’s a matter of the same number of people killed on the highways E̳v̳e̳r̳y̳ ̳M̳o̳n̳t̳h̳ (just another month in America) as there were in the attacks of September 11 2001 (a really big deal). It’s a matter of the highway model being a huge drain on the national economy when the costs of congestion, pollution, accidents, and other secondary effects are counted.
We need to assemble the voices of passenger train advocacy groups, environmental groups, and rights groups into a noise that all the branches of government will hear loud and clear.
TAW