Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Pay the real costs of transportation
From the RoundTable blog
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Bob Peckman
Peckman, of Roanoke, is a jazz drummer and retired ITT engineer and physicist.
On Christmas, The Roanoke Times printed an article reporting how heavy trucks cause far more damage to highways than the fees they pay, ("Trucks toll on roads outweighs fees paid").
According to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, the interstate highway system was built to sustain automobile use without damage. They say that almost all of the damage to the interstate highways is caused by trucks. In order to accomplish economic recovery and sustained economic growth we have to stay focused on the facts.
Our governments have unfairly subsidized trucking while suppressing railroads. I don't think that was the intent, but we charged the railroads so much in property taxes that they were economically forced to rip up and trash half of their rail infrastructure when our policies should have encouraged them to improve what they had and to build more.
That is why our rail system is 50 to 100 years behind the rest of the industrialized world. We need to include the costs and payoffs of building a modern railroad in our focus. The heads of most state departments of transportation have never seen a modern railroad. We cannot rely on their experience in these matters.
We also need to focus on our goals for transportation.
One is that we need to move freight as cheaply as possible. To be viable and useful, freight has to be moved at the speed and reliability of our trucking system.
The cost of building a rail bed is about 10 percent of a road bed of the same freight capacity. Over the long haul, the cost of building the rail bed is on par with the road repair bill that is avoided with the loads it carries. Rails move freight for about 10 percent of the fuel used by trucks.
Furthermore, rail lines can be electrified so that the fuel is consumed in large power plants and delivered by transmission lines. That way the pollution per unit of fuel is less. And the power plants can change to wind, solar cell, solar thermal, water, geothermal, tidal generators or whatever is the cheapest in the future.
First, however, we need to build a modern rail infrastructure so we have all the options. Then, if everyone pays his own share of repair bills and pays for the pollution that must be cleaned up, the free market system will determine how the shippers will utilize trucks, trains and planes. But the free-market system works only when all the costs are fairly paid.
The cost to the environment must be included in the price. Climate change is just beginning, but storms are already getting bigger and more frequent. The prevailing west-to-east winds do not just flow smoothly. Turbulence in the jet stream is what brings us warm and cold snaps. Global warming brings greater turbulence, and we are already seeing more extreme arctic chills and then incredible warm spells.
The cost of mitigating global warming will be very great. The cost of inaction will be far worse.
The other goal of a transportation system is to move people with the best time and service at a good price. A modern freight railroad would provide the capacity to put passenger cars between fast freight trains. Such a train would get me to Washington faster than I could drive, much more safely and with about 10 percent the carbon production.
In order for the free-market system to select the best economic choices, we need to take the blinders off. Instead of hiding the real costs behind taxes and tax breaks, we must all pay the true costs for what we do. If we let the chips fall where they may, and we have all three transportation systems to choose from, then the free market economy will guide us to the decisions that make us the most competitive economically.
