Wasting Time on Passenger Rail
Thursday, August 20th, 2009 By Marc KilmerAccording to Gongwer($), the Ohio Rail Development Commission is excited that driving between Ohio’s cities will take less time than passenger rail. Yes, even though they admit that driving will save you a lot of time, the ORDC thinks that rail travel is competitive.
According to ORDC numbers, it would take three hours by rail to get from Cleveland to Columbus. Driving takes two-and-a-half hours. From Cincinnati to Columbus you’ll be on the train for three hours as opposed to two hours and twenty minutes in a car.
These estimates don’t include other factors which will make rail travel even longer. Unless your house is right next to the train station, you’re going to need to spend time getting to the train. Similarly, unless your destination is right next to the train station, you’re going to spend time getting from the station to where you are ultimately going. And you’re going to spend time buying tickets, waiting for the train, boarding the train, waiting for the train to leave, waiting to get off the train, etc. Factor in all of these things and it’s clear that, time-wise, driving is a far better option for inter-city travel.
ORDC says that even though rail travel will take longer, because you can work on the train means it will be competitive. That’s true, to a certain extent. Of course, if you’re taking a family vacation or just going to Cleveland to see Grandma, you may not be able to fill the time working. But if ORDC really thinks that these few extra hours of work are so valuable, then any pricing for passenger rail in Ohio should be priced at a level that requires no taxpayer subsidy. If people want to ride the train in order to get more work done, they should pay the full price of that trip. Then they can determine if the high price and longer trip is really worth the trade-off. Somehow I doubt many Ohioans will think so.
These issues, and many more, are discussed in Randal O’Toole’s study on rail travel published by the Buckeye Institute.
As an aside, I tried to find the press release discussed in Gongwer at the ORDC website so I could link to that instead of linking to a subscriber site like Gongwer. The release wasn’t posted yet. The efficiency of the ORDC is certainly questionable when they can’t even put up their cheerleading press release.
Tags: passenger rail
August 20th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Why do you insist that the trains recover all their costs directly from passenger fares? The highways and airports do not, and now the airlines themselves are losing money. Transportation is inherently unprofitable. It creates great economic value, but most of that wealth-creation occurs outside the transportation system itself and cannot effectively be captured by the transportation enterprise. About 1/3 of highway costs are not recovered from motor-fuel taxes, license fees, traffic fines and other user charges. The missing third is subsidized out of state general funds with money collected from income, property, sales and other taxes. The Airline Passenger Ticket Tax does not effectively pay for the airports, and the FAA itself, which costs about $3 billion per year, is funded out of the General Fund, i.e., by non-users. Likewise the National Transportation Safety Board and other federal and state agencies essential to, but not paid by, commercial aviation.
August 22nd, 2009 at 9:21 am
Like Mr. Plous, I would have no objection to a relatively small subsidy; however, I agree with you that it makes no sense to build a passenger rail system that is slower than driving. What we need are European-style high-speed rail between Cincinnati and Cleveland, with at most three intermediate stops: Dayton, Columbus, and Mansfield (the last to connect to trains running east and west). We could couple this with a slower local service to take care of towns in between.