Rail in the Stimulus
Rep Peter DeFazio has authored an amendment that would increase the level of rail funding in the stimulus bill. It’s an excellent idea. Funds for highway repairs are a fine use of stimulus money, but insofar as we’re investing in new transportation capabilities we ought to be investing in what we don’t have enough of—mass transit and intercity rail—while fixing up our vast, but crumbling, road network. Right now the amendment is being bottled up by the Rules Committee, so if you happen to live in a district of one of the members you have a special obligation to get in touch with their office and offer your opinion. But even if DeFazio wins there, there’s still the small matter of the actual vote so even if your member isn’t on Rules, it’s never too early.
Meanwhile, The Hill reports on the promising development—the creation of a new broad-based pro-rail coalition that includes all the key stakeholders:
The newly minted OneRail coalition markets itself as a first time assembly of disparate groups representing commuter rail lines, freight rail lines, public transportation and the environment. [...] Several trade and issue advocacy groups are part of OneRail, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Amtrak, the American Short Line & Regional Railroad Association, the Association of American Railroads, and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.
The group will be working on the stimulus package but also, and in my view more importantly, on the reauthorization of the big transportation bill.
29 Responses to “Rail in the Stimulus”
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January 26th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Does anyone have hard data on the energy consumption of rail vice automobiles/trucks vice airplanes for moving people and goods? Also, the capital investment and operating costs needed for each transport mode?
January 26th, 2009 at 10:20 am
OneRail sounds like a good group, but to include “all key stakeholders” it would have to include rail labor, which it does not appear to do.
January 26th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Don Williams: this month’s Washington Monthly has a good piece on freight rail that includes some numbers on how it compares to trucks for certain distances.
Long story short: trucks are better for short runs (from railheads to destination, eg, or in-state transport, perhaps), and trains work best at longer distances and with bigger loads (think thousand-mile journeys with 100-200 semi-sized trailer/containers–trains work much better). Air is only useful for time-critical service. Energy and cost wise it’s much more expensive than any land options.
As for infrastructure, the article has a good example of I-81 in Virginia, which is jammed with truck traffic (I can vouch for that, living right along this route). It’s nearing capacity, but the state is seriously considering upgrading the parallel rail routes instead of widening the highway because it would be a lot cheaper to improve the rail lines.
I think the key takeaway is that road, rail, and air are all important components of any transportation infrastructure and none of them should be ignored. We’ve neglected rail for a long time, but it can serve an important role in maximizing the efficiency of our infrastructure and our economy.
January 26th, 2009 at 10:51 am
@Don Williams:
The Washinton Monthly article that Matt has linked to before has good rough numbers on energy use for moving freight — though its numbers on carbon are a little skewed (Longman confuses carbon emissions from transportation with total carbon emissions, overstating the reduction). If you want more technical analysis, this article isn’t bad. Bottom line is that w/r/t freight, rail’s a clear winner. It’s not so clear with passenger rail, as humans (and their luggage) can’t be packed nearly as densely as freight, so passenger trains are mostly full of empty space.
January 26th, 2009 at 11:18 am
@Don Williams
It’s hard work learning how to use the internets but a Google search for “energy consumption passenger trains” went right to this entry in Wikipedia that seems to have the information you are looking for.
January 26th, 2009 at 11:24 am
There are obvious congestion externalities to automobiles that suggest that rail investment is undervalued for urban transit. Where is the systematic undervaluation of investment in rail for inter-city transportation, especially of people?
January 26th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
What do you do if your Rep is DeFazio?
(snark – I’ve already written to thank Pete for his good work)
January 26th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
There are obvious congestion externalities to automobiles that suggest that rail investment is undervalued for urban transit.
No, there aren’t. See:
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2006/08_rail_systems_winston.aspx
January 26th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Enh. Brookings contradicts that elsewhere with unvarnished support for rail.
And the 2006 paper was obviously written before the gas price spike. People’s habits were, obviously, changed.
January 26th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
The Winston anti-subway paper is provocative but ultimately quite stupid. The worst part, by far, is their ridiculously favorable assumption about what would happen if NYC shut down its subways. Only $1.3 billion in congestion costs? From 5 million riders suddenly needing alternate transportation?
Right. That’s the cost of a large commercial building in Manhattan. Massive congestion would cause the failure of large numbers of businesses in Manhattan, and the resulting drop in property values across the whole city, I’m guessing, would be in the tens to hundreds of billions.
Economists who badly need a reality check. Shocking!
The rest of the paper is a bullshit equilibrium analysis which assumes every change in rail service has an incrementally linear effect on the economy, which is a ridiculous simplification. There are obviously tipping points.
Just look at Europe.
January 26th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Rick Karr,
I don’t buy the David Lawyer article claiming passenger rail is more efficient than autos. Will look closer, but what’s actually being compared needs scrutiny.
Doesn’t take long to find more coherent data:
Saturday, 03 May 2008 17:02 Howard Harding According to the latest edition of the Transportation Energy Data Book from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s website (edition 26):
In 2005, domestic airlines on average consumed 20.5% more energy per passenger-mile than Amtrak, while cars consumed 27.2% more than Amtrak. Looked at the other way round, Amtrak consumes 17.0% and 21.4% less energy per passenger-mile than airlines and cars, respectively. [One passenger-mile is one passenger traveling one mile.]
Those percentages are derived from these Oak Ridge figures (British Thermal Units or BTUs per passenger-mile, 2005 data), organized here most to least efficient:
Amtrak: 2,709
Commuter rail: 2,743
Rail transit: 2,784
Certificated air carriers: 3,264 (excludes international services)
Cars: 3,445
notes of interest:
Amtrak consumed 14.6 trillion BTUs in 2005, which was 8.2% less than 15.9 trillion in 2003 and 19.3% below Amtrak’s peak year of energy use (2001, with 18.1 trillion BTUs).
Amtrak in 2005 consumed 65,477,000 gallons of diesel fuel and used 531,377,000 kilowatt hours. [Both figures exclude consumption by commuter railroads for which Amtrak provides services.]
This indicates that 62.3% of Amtrak energy is diesel fuel vs. 37.7% electricity.
[Note that about half of Amtrak's ridership is on the more efficient electric powered routes in the Northeast.]
The tables from this document you may find most useful are:
Table 2.12 Passenger travel and energy use, 2004
Table 2.13 Energy intensities of highway passenger modes, 1970-2005
Table 2.14 Energy intensities of nonhighway passenger modes, 1970-2005
Table 9.10 Historical Amtrak figures including car-miles, train-miles, etc.
Table 9.11 Summary statistics for commuter rail operations, 1984-2005
Table 9.12 Summary statistics for rail transit operations, 1970-2005
Table A.15 Intercity Rail Fuel Use
[Note: Table 2.12 has 2004 data because 2005 data is not yet available for some modes. As the relevant footnotes explain, the airline statistics in Table 2.12 include "1/2 of international scheduled services" whereas those in Table 2.14 do not include any international services. This report also has considerable freight data.]
The “What’s New” page for Edition 26 reports that, “The transportation share of U.S. energy use reached 28.4% in 2006 which is the highest share recorded since 1970.”
=======================
Several comments regarding what is the most energy-efficient way to travel . . . [By Christopher Parker]
First, the decisions are different if you are an INDIVIDUAL or a society. For us individuals, if we travel on something that’s already going there, we are using NO fuel and causing NO pollution – unless we displace someone else who then has to drive.
Figures on energy efficiency are different, depending on if you measure seat-miles or people-miles. Airlines do better than Amtrak at cramming every last seat full of people. Automobiles are typically occupied by one person – so they get twice as efficient if two people are in them.
Much of the environmental impact of driving comes when building the car in the first place, which is added on top of the figures above. There is a lot of value in going car-free, and for society, in enabling people to be car-free. Thus renting a car every weekend is preferable to owning one.
Another measure, not often talked about, is the amount of land required. On this railroads are much superior to roads. I’m not sure if airports (which are very big) have enough footprint to cancel not needing any land at all once you are in the air.
http://www.railvermont.org/passenger/energy-efficiency-of-passenger-rail.html
January 26th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Thanks for all the info, everybody.
PS to namekarB at 5: It’s more efficient to ask for info from gatekeepers than to paw through hundreds of Google hits of dubious reliability.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
This paper shoiuld be getting a lot more attention right now:
Link.
- MT
January 26th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
For a reply to the paper linked by fpr3, see here:
The reply is idiotic. The author doesn’t even seem to understand the meaning of “social cost.”
January 26th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Looked at the other way round, Amtrak consumes 17.0% and 21.4% less energy per passenger-mile than airlines and cars, respectively.
How about Amtrak vs. intercity buses? And is this total energy consumption, or only operating energy consumption?
And these are averages for current vehicles, right? So any car that is 21% more efficent than the average car will beat the Amtrak average. And new CAFE standards require a 40% improvement in car and light truck fleet fuel efficiency by 2020.
January 26th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
I for one would willingly pay 21.4% more for gas to avoid the horror show that is the typical trip on Amtrak. Just having a comfortable seat on a long trip is worth that.
January 27th, 2009 at 1:07 am
I will suggest that someone who doesn’t know the difference between a social cost and a private cost is so ignorant of the relevant concepts that his reply to the paper I cited is worthless.
January 27th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
DTM,
I would suggest you have great difficulty telling the difference between a good point and a bad one.
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