The Conservative Case for Rail

With today's announcement of stimulus funding for the first phase of Ohio passenger rail, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the conservative arguments for train travel.  The person profiled in this article, William Lind, grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.  Last year he co-wrote a book on the subject with the late Paul Weyrich.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Another idea that’s pervasive is that public transportation is subsidized but the gas tax fully pays for highways.
That’s a powerful argument the libertarians make to conservatives, and it’s bunk. The current dominance of roads is due to massive subsidization by government which through most of the twentieth century competed with privately owned, privately operated railways including streetcar systems that had to pay taxes. Every conservative understands very quickly what happens when you tax one mode and subsidize the other. The taxed mode disappears and the subsidized mode becomes dominant. Nothing about our current imbalance in transportation is a free market outcome. Not in the slightest.

The notion that the gas tax covers all highway expenses is a notion that will send any state Governor into fits of laughter. The highways require enormous support, local state and federal, that goes well beyond what gas taxes bring in. So it’s not a question of a subsidized mode versus an unsubsidized mode.

Read the full article here.

Posted by Scott Pullins at 1/28/2010 4:22 PM
Categories: Transportation, rail, trains
Tags: paul weyrich Ohio Trains William Lind 3C Project
 

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