Politics is once again subverting sensible transportation policy
By A.W. | WASHINGTON, DC
COMMUTERS to New York received some overdue welcome news over the weekend. Anticipating substantial delays on Monday, New Jersey Transit pre-emptively allowed them to use their train tickets on private buses and ferries instead. By this point, rail-service interruptions had become so predictable that New Jerseyites were probably happy to traverse the Hudson River by boat. Four of the five workdays last week brought long delays on the line, largely the product of electrical failures in the octogenarian overhead wires running through the centenarian train tunnel under the Hudson.
Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, responded by excoriating Amtrak, which owns most of the tracks and equipment along the line, for its “indifference to New Jersey commuters and its abject neglect of the infrastructure that New Jersey and our entire region relies upon”. That was a bit rich coming from the man who, in an effort to bolster his reputation as a tough-talking scourge of wasteful spending ahead of his presidential run, scuttled plans for a new tunnel under the Hudson. That project would have helped bring America’s dominant rail corridor into, well, the 20th century at least. Instead, the region is left with hopeless bottlenecks and the looming threat of a malfunction that would shut down traffic on the line between Washington, DC and Boston, at an estimated cost to the economy of $100m per day.
This is, of course, hardly the first time politics has subverted sensible transportation policy. But the subversion is taking on grotesque proportions these days. The political refusal to raise gas taxes is a big problem. Diverting $4 billion from the tunnel project to road repairs helped Mr Christie keep his pledge to leave New Jersey’s gas tax at its current level, the second lowest in the country. It is also responsible for American transportation problems beyond the Northeast Corridor. The federal gas tax hasn’t budged from 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, leaving the country with underfunded infrastructure that includes nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges and a road network that earned a D grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers. This denialism has led to convoluted proposals to pay for road repairs, including a tax on international business profits and a cut to bank dividends. To make matters worse, as in any cash crunch, Congress is once again threatening to cut funding to Amtrak, bringing the overburdened corridor one step closer to collapse.
The deterioration of the system—one that not only carries commuters and intercity travellers, but also connects Newark Airport to New York—has implications beyond the rails. After an Amtrak crash killed eight people and shut down service between New York and Philadelphia for five days in May, airlines serving the corridor appeared to hike their prices, charging as much as $2,300 for short-haul flights. The Department of Transportation announced on Friday that it has opened an investigation into potential price-gouging by American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest and United airlines.
The whole incident might not have happened were the federal government putting adequate dollars into its busiest rail corridor. So the next time you find yourself stuck in a train by the Hudson—or, perhaps, shelling out extra for an airborne alternative—point your finger squarely at Americans’ favourite object of blame: Congress.
