A much better comparison would be the amount of highway expenses covered by toll roads; gas taxes come from all drivers, not just highway drivers, and I would bet that tolls would cover far less of a percentage of road construction and maintenance costs than for a similar investment in transit.

That’s unreasonable. Virtually all drivers use freeways at least occasionally. Honestly, do you know a driver who has never been on a freeway? Furthermore, all drivers benefit from the presence of freeways. Freeways are the primary means by which freight is transported and are also the primary means for evacuations. They also free up surface roads from through traffic.

Regardless of where that falls, the point is still the same–highways are a massive public works program and their creation was a deliberate policy decision (or rather set of policy decisions), and drivers bear only a fraction of the costs of the roads they drive on.

Yes, but that fraction is very high — over 80%. The subsidy is very low. This is the opposite of the case with transit, where the vast majority of the funding comes from people who don’t use transit at all, even occasionally. Furthermore, the ancillary positive effects of transit are minimal. Transit doesn’t keep many cars off the road, and may actually inhibit freight travel.

This isn’t to say transit shouldn’t be subsidized, but it should show that transit should be managed in the most cost-effective way possible. Huge capital projects that yield nominal benefits, like new rail systems in areas with low population density, should be avoided.

Why would new development around the Union Passenger Terminal just be “shifting wealth around?” If the UPT were a hub, you would have hundreds of thousands of new travelers arriving at that destination that weren’t there before, which could drive a host of new development activity, growing the city’s tax base.

They’d be arriving at that specific destination, sure, but I doubt it would encourage many more people to come to the New Orleans area on a daily basis. We already have low freeway congestion, and most people own cars. That’s always going to be the most convenient travel option.

If there are other good ways of promoting investment there, why has Loyola Ave and environs been a sea of surface parking lots for two generations?

There’s already a great deal of investment in that area. It’s largely built out with office buildings. There are numerous surface lots, but that’s largely due to the demand for parking, particularly near the Superdome. In any event, the only thing that will cause those lots to go away is new white-collar jobs in the CBD, and I don’t see how rail will accomplish that kind of sea-change. In fact, I think that rail will encourage the lots to stay, because people are going to want to be able to park near the station. Unless the city tries to force the surface lots out through zoning changes, they aren’t going anywhere.

And even if this were just “shifting wealth around,” I think you could make a number of really good arguments that we should be promoting development in the downtown core, which is a dense and sustainable and culturally vibrant area of the city, as opposed to sprawling out into the backswamp.

A preference for inner-city development over suburban development is a poor reason for supporting multi-billion dollar rail projects, IMO.

Thanks for your thoughtful points. 80% of direct costs associated with highway funds might be covered by the gas tax, but that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison with transit box-fare revenues for transit. A much better comparison would be the amount of highway expenses covered by toll roads; gas taxes come from all drivers, not just highway drivers, and I would bet that tolls would cover far less of a percentage of road construction and maintenance costs than for a similar investment in transit. Regardless of where that falls, the point is still the same–highways are a massive public works program and their creation was a deliberate policy decision (or rather set of policy decisions), and drivers bear only a fraction of the costs of the roads they drive on. The same can be said of other forms of transit, but we should at least be talking apples-to-apples.

Why would new development around the Union Passenger Terminal just be “shifting wealth around?” If the UPT were a hub, you would have hundreds of thousands of new travelers arriving at that destination that weren’t there before, which could drive a host of new development activity, growing the city’s tax base. If there are other good ways of promoting investment there, why has Loyola Ave and environs been a sea of surface parking lots for two generations? And even if this were just “shifting wealth around,” I think you could make a number of really good arguments that we should be promoting development in the downtown core, which is a dense and sustainable and culturally vibrant area of the city, as opposed to sprawling out into the backswamp.

The fact of the matter is that we call spending money on highways “investing” and spending money on transit “subsidies.”

I’d argue that we can, because highways aren’t as subsidized as transit. Well over 80% of highway funds are covered by gasoline taxes, which are paid by motorists at the pump. I believe that fairbox recovery for transit averages around 25%, or at least a minority percentage.

“well, if it drives hundreds of millions in private investment around the termini in BR and in NOLA, is it worth it?” I’d say yes.

It might do so, or it might not (I lean towards “not”). However, even if it did it would merely be reorienting development. It wouldn’t be creating wealth, it would just be shifting it around. This has nothing to do with how much it costs, and there are probably less expensive ways of encouraging redevelopment near the terminals.

Clay, what do you think about a TIF district around the Union Passenger Terminal to help cover the costs, akin to what you are mentioning for. I think that idea has legs, especially in light of the streetcar announcement and the City Council’s impulse to reform the city’s TIF policies to be more geographic/district based, and the amount of development that could happen. Also, the UPT is owned by the NOBC, so regardless of what we think about Sean Cummings, it is at least in the public domain.

I actually have heard from a number of folks that BR should be bypassed completely on the connection between NOLA and Houston–just going along freight rail corridors directly through Lafayette, with BR merely a spur from NOLA or on an HSR route along the old Illinois Central corridor, but BR would never let that happen.

How is value being created? You might succeed in reorienting some development, but I see no argument as to why more commerce would occur and more wealth created simply because you built some trains.

It makes total sense.

We get a high speed train at a fixed cost (probably way below whatever this government plan would have cost), and if someone else gets the profits and hires people here to boot — who cares? Bully! Excellent!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

If third parties make the profit out of the increased land values and not the train owner/operator, it will require substantial government investment, but that’s not such a bad thing. After all, value IS being created.

We wouldn’t have had to print more money had we not run up a huge deficit during years of economic growth.

When we had a budget surplus we should have paid off our debt, instead we cut taxes, expanded medicare benefits, and went to war twice. When someone can explain to me how that’s “fiscal conservatism” then I might take more of the doom and gloom about the deficit to heart.

What used to be the capitalistic mindset was when a company hits a downturn they take out loans, reinvest and make their product better and become profitable again. Now we have this conservative “capitalist” mindset to simply cut the budget and layoff to the bare bone to keep profits up. Ultimately the company’s product becomes a steamy pile of shit and it either gets bailed out by the government because the executives are still filthy rich and call in favors or the company just goes under.

Think of America as a business as you conservatives like to do, sure we can just decrease spending to be budget neutral with the lower tax revenue, or we can take out loans, reinvest and make this country a better (and more profitable) place, again.

Ok, so the feds fund it (i.e. print the money for it) which is debt and deficit we with the rest of the country still owe for it, aaaannnnd LA gets to pay for the yearly cost from here on out. Thanks!

I like high speed trains, loved and used them in Europe and in the Northeast. But this sounds like a federal program that just loads another debt on the states who are already weighed down with debt and budget issues.

Here’s a question: why don’t we just give some Euro or other company a right of way an franchise for as long as it takes for them to make a sufficient profit (heck, give them a 99 year lease for $1 and let them get 100% of the profits as long as they handle the costs) and let them build it???