One can dismiss the complex interrelationships among these three variables as one twisted mess. But doing so does not help. What helps is taking a quick peek at these dynamics around the edges and seeing – or hoping – that doing so allows us to think more clearly about any of them. This effort is becoming increasingly important as we seem to be failing in all three areas.
Recently, the NYTimes published a detailed, state-by-state comparative analysis of the sources from which every state derives its energy: Coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, petroleum and wind (see NY Times – Electricity Generation). The state-by-state differences were vivid, if not eye-opening. But they largely reflected those resources these states have. And they also reflect how much revenue each state has to invest in more non-polluting technologies – although, of course, it requires energy to produce and maintain even those technologies that simply capture free energy. (If you can only read one more article this entire year, that would be the one.)
Why I consider this extraordinary diversity as a pollical issue is that it celebrates the wisdom – in certain areas — of what many may term state’s rights. While there is some overlap in allowing such individuality – carbon emissions do not respect state boundaries, and wind currents spread one state’s dirty air to another – the extraordinary differences in what each state chooses to do are inescapable necessities. At the extremes, Wyoming, Indiana and Kentucky, until recently, obtained most of their energy from coal – although natural gas has come to provide 39 percent of Indiana’s energy (from almost none 15 years ago), 23 percent of Kentucky’s (from practically zero a decade ago), and wind power has increased, in Wyoming from almost nothing two decades ago to 21 percent today. West Virginia, as one might expect, still derives almost all its energy from coal. But in most other states, the variation would not seem probable until one viewed the evidence – in simple but vivid graphic form in the NYTimes article. Otherwise, and particularly with each state’s experts possessing a firmer grasp of its resources than could anyone at the federal level, it would appear wise to let each state evolve in its own way – with bits of help and technology-sharing from other sources where they can.
This illustration is very different than the well-accepted standard that treating murder as a serious capital crime should not differ among states – although the ultimate penalties may differ. (The recent reversion of eastern Oklahoma to tribal laws and regulations, where penalties for most serious crimes are far lesser, is the only serious aberration to this pattern.)
Between these extremes lie dynamics like abortion. Until two years ago, it was legal everywhere, under any reasonable circumstances. Now it is up to the states. And various political parties and candidates would prefer it to be allowable everywhere, nowhere, in some places with or without exceptions (rape, incest, risk of death to the mother’s life, etc.) or nowhere without any exceptions. These differences are stark to a considerable percentage of our population, and largely drove the election we just experienced.
Transportation, Politics and Waste
These other examples were cited because they either had their own logic or often affected voters’ deeply-held beliefs. Or in some cases voters were snookered, while other issues drove their choices. But transportation is very different – an outlier where critical thinking, resources or belief systems are foreign to the hapless and often baseless decision-making that leads to choices, although politics often skews what little common sense exists in the field even further. I recently covered some examples of poor thinking in National Bus Trader Installments:
- In the October, 2022 issue, I explained the folly of introducing congestion pricing to a city like New York City, and instead, identified the characteristics of a city where such an approach might make sense.
- In the June, July and November, 2024 issues, I dealt with the interrelationships and dysfunctional consequences of the intersection of transit, traffic and politics.
- In the August, September and October, 2024 issues, I dealt with the physical and commercial environments in which electric buses might make sense – two that had a few where they made no sense, and one which had none where they might make sense.
- In the November, 2024 issue, I noted a transit route that carried fewer than one passenger per vehicle service hour – a situation where passengers could be better served by other modes (some of which – like car-sharing – we have not even begun to explore – and which hold great promise if and when driverless vehicles expand further into the transportation landscape).
But the folly that public transportation continues to be rolls (or crawls) on and on. Recently, one of the nation’s largest motorcoach companies, Coach USA, filed for bankruptcy. As charter and tour service slowly declined, and motorcoach operators were increasingly relegated to serving as contractors to transit agencies (at far lower profits and lower drivers’ wages), and with no alleviation of unwavering stupidity (e.g., charging motorcoaches bridge and tunnel fees) in sight, such failures were inevitable. Expect to see more of them.
Boomers, Lionel and American Flyer
Clearly, most decisions by politicians at the federal and state levels are made by people of my age (77), somewhat older or somewhat younger – the core of which are termed “baby boomers.” Particularly among male baby boomers, one historical experience so many of us had in common is always overlooked: As children, we grew up with train sets. (Lionel sets, as I had, were mostly differentiated from American Flyer sets because Lionel tracks contained three rails, while American Flyer tracks contained only two.) But countless hours spent as young children take their toll on our psyches throughout our lives. At often tragic costs, our obsession with trains has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars over the years, as we built and operated heavy and light rail systems all over the place. Their inflexibility helped little when mass transportation was most needed – for example, in evacuations, where thousands of high-floor buses would have been handy, since masses of them could have reached New Orleans and Houston – among the first of the near-annual wave of examples — long before the storm hit.
Both these early examples enjoy AMTRAK service. But it contributed a pittance of what was needed for evacuation, given its costs. The subsidies given to AMTRAK, most recently, are staggering. In the mid 1970s, and for decades afterwards, AMTRAK was allotted a couple billion dollars a year. In what was renamed the Tax Reduction Act (to facilitate its passage), but now referred to again as the Infrastructure Act, AMTRAK was given 60 million dollars. Having worked on an AMTRAK train in the mid 1970s, and having dealt with the railroad often as an expert witness – and having seen the waste and carnage first-hand – I cannot imagine what this bottomless pit will do with all this money.
Another example is the Los Angeles METRO – originally a ploy to help former Mayor Thomas Bradley mount a run for governor, which Californians thought one could not achieve as a mayor from a city that did not even have a rail system of any kind. The first three lines placed the County $7B in debt – just for its construction. (In 2018, fares for Los Angeles County’s bus and subway systems covered nine percent of their operating costs; they are much less now.) Placing this in perspective, Tokyo’s transit system covers 160 percent of its operating costs. But more and more lines have been added to the Los Angeles County system. Yet for years that has not been enough to satisfy our primeval crazy for trains, needed or not:
- Plans for a high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and Las Vegas appeared and fell off the boomer’s drawing boards for decades.
- Now, in the era where many individuals need not even show up at work physically, these drawing boards are being covered by a new folly – a high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco – the latter likely our only major city with so little traffic that, during some rush hour periods, the streets are practically empty.
On and Off the Drawing Boards Once Again
Perhaps drawing boards are a poor image for the almost certain digital renditions of any transportation system for at least the past 35 years. Regardless, new plans for squandering enormous sums of money on this folly come and go. A recent article in Forbes magazine (August/September, 2024) well summarized the dynamics. More accurately, these plans were openly mocked: “…California, which calls itself the Golden State…is pure lead. Never has an area with so much going of it … been so mismanaged by its politicians.” Forbes notes (incorrectly) that for the first time since it achieved statehood in 1950, California has been losing population. As I myself was a resident of California from 1980 through 1997, I recall a huge exodus around 1993 when (a) the aerospace industry laid off roughly 250,000 workers, and the Northridge Earthquake devastated Los Angeles. But Forbes can be excused for missing this blip, significant as it was at the time.
Among the State’s boomer’s plans to add yet more trains onto the State’s transportation infrastructure:
- The state is planning to ban diesel-operated locomotives. Older engines would be prohibited by 2029, and large freight trains would have to produce zero emissions by 2035. As Forbes noted, the technology for such trains does not presently exist.
- Railroads will be required to deposit billions of dollars into a special fund so that, if and when these technologies do exit, the funds to buy them will be available.
- The batteries to power such trains will need to be ten times larger than those that exist now.
- Even apart from the inefficiency of such batteries, they will be prone to fires and explosions.
Apart from the impact such follies will have on the State’s residents, such policies and their regulations will effectively ban two thirds of the nation’s locomotives from entering the state. The natural consequence of such a ban would, of course, result into a transfer of cargo to an enormous fleet of trucks. But as Forbes points out, this will not happen so fast: The state has a mandate to force a transition to battery-powered trucks.
Topping this folly, the state has a plan to build a 463-mile-long high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This project – on the “drawing board” for quite some time – is already a decade behind schedule. And its estimated cost of $35B has ballooned to $135B – and continues to climb. Only one fourth of this system has already been built – meaning it if far to late to stop it. The route has been altered numerous times for political reasons. Projected ridership has been “scaled back.” Funding is “uncertain.”
Such plans lie at an extreme end of the political spectrum that has been termed “woke” in recent years – often representing an enormous pie-in-the-sky squandering of taxpayer funds or social values not universally shared, and often considered extreme by many at various points along the political spectrum. Regarding the L.A.-to-S.F. rail project, state dreamers in Sacramento were counting on a Democratic win this past November to prevent a permanent derailment of this project. But regardless of the outcome our recent election had, this project will fly as high as did the much-touted high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. But I think it was impossible to place a bet on even that one, convenient as it might have been in Las Vegas.
States Rights and States Wrongs
As this article began discussing, there are some aspects of life and society that might make sense to be governed at the state level. The best eye-opening example of that is each state’s use of energy – and the commendable progress so many states have been able to achieve toward sustainable energy sources. But among the worst examples I can think of for allowing individual states to make decisions include both passenger and freight transportation.
One can only wonder what use will be made of the first fourth of the high-speed L.A.-to-San Francisco rail system already built. For those who forget, a terrific reminder is Mid-America Airport – now a lightly-used stopping point about 30 miles east of St. Louis that, in the 1970s, was intended to serve as a major “transfer airport” to thin out the loads at Chicago’s then-overcrowded O’Hare Airport. The airport is now so overcrowded, and with the airlines so sparsely overregulated (airlines are not required to have “spare vehicles” as most other transportation modes do, and the elimination of flights to consolidate passengers to ensure full loads – irrespective of the inconvenience to passengers as they are re-routed to distant layover points, or often delayed for a day or more altogether) that, in 2021, one half of the planet’s flights were cancelled altogether.
As Mid America Airport illustrates, costly boondoggles somehow fail to serve as reminders about why we never see white elephants in the wild. (At least we see grey ones – although 90 percent of them have been slaughtered so that rich Asians can dream of enhanced sexual prowess by ingesting the powder from their ground tusks.)
The True Cost of Mistakes, Corruption and Politics
Perhaps money does grow on trees. But we have yet to find those trees. And at the rate the rainforests, West Coast forestland and, more recently, forests in Europe are burning down, we may never find those trees. But fantasies about battery-powered freight and passenger trains that will likely squander more energy than they can conserve will not help address global melting and burning. Decades ago, one of the most beautiful and exotic cities on the planet, a tourist heaven, was Cairo. No longer. Now, with mid-day temperatures often reaching between 115- and 120-degrees Fahrenheit, residents are forced to work, shop and recreate between 8 PM and 5 AM – when the heat is tolerable, particularly in many indoor facilities without air conditioning. More tourists are visiting venues like Stockholm and Oslo.
So intense stupidity in one state does not affect only other states. Intense stupidity affects everyone in the world – other than perhaps Russia, building icebreakers at breakneck speed, and allowing its cargo ships to reach Portugal, via the North Sea. during the summertime, in a third the time the same cargo used to reach it by truck. At the same time, Russian’s distant proxies, the Houthis, have forced cargo ships that would otherwise have used the Suez Canal to sail south around the Horn of Africa, depriving a U.S. ally, Egypt, of much needed revenue, while this excess travel spews millions of cubic feet of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
So we should think more seriously about acting as an isolated country, and squandering tens of billions of dollars on domestic boondoggles that could otherwise be used to make our lives, and those of our international friends, last a few months longer. On the other hand, perhaps we will find those money trees after all – before we burn down most of our forests.
Photo credit Taylor Callery
