MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 29 September 2007
Transportation and Cowboy Mythology
America
spends far more than other industrialized countries on health care, education,
and transportation, yet our health, educational outcomes, and transportation
are among the worst in the industrialized world. We must be doing something wrong.
That
"something" isn't hard to spot.
It's our tough-guy cowboy culture.
We're individualistic to a fault.
Consider
the horse—excuse me, I mean the car. Somehow, we lived happily without cars until Ford began mass
production around 1908. Since
then, mechanized transportation has multiplied our personal freedom many times
over, yet Americans appear ready to rise up in arms against most suggestions
that safety, the environment, or fiscal responsibility might require some tiny
restrictions on that freedom.
Ironically, narcissistic over-emphasis on our freedom to drive has
reduced our actual freedom to travel.
This
was strikingly illustrated a few months ago in a newspaper headline stating
"Commuters prefer to go it alone." The Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission
recommends carpooling to manage gasoline costs and congestion, but commuters
show few signs of giving up the independence of driving themselves to
work. The commission's executive
director comments, "You wonder how high gas prices have to go before
people change their minds. It looks
like mobility will be the last thing people give up."
We
now lag behind Mexico in travel to intermediate destinations, up to a few
hundred miles. For those
distances, intercity trains or buses are faster, cheaper, safer, and more
comfortable than cars or airplanes.
Mexico has extensive intercity bus service that's fast, cheap, safe,
clean, convenient, quite comfortable, and even includes TV with individual
earphones. In our country, you're
lucky to be able to get a bus connection at all, much less one that's clean,
comfortable, and safe. Like many
Arkansans, I must travel to Little Rock occasionally; I would prefer to take a
bus rather than gripping a steering wheel for the seven-hour round trip. On a good intercity bus I can sleep or
read comfortably. But the bus to
Little Rock is reportedly dirty, cramped, uncomfortable, with seats don't
really recline, and its passengers and bus station inhabitants are often loud,
obnoxious, or scary. I've ridden
many Mexican intercity buses, and they're nothing like this.
We
lag far behind every industrialized nation in travel to intermediate destinations. The cheapest, fastest, and safest way
to cities like Little Rock, Dallas, or Chicago, is trains. The 200 mph trains of Europe and Japan
can get you to Chicago in four hours plus a few minutes to change trains in
Kansas City and St. Louis—about the time it takes to drive to the
airport, deal with the airport waiting time, fly to Chicago, and get to where
you want to go (probably downtown, where the railroad station is). Trains for intermediate distances, or a
decent and widely-used intercity bus system, would end airport congestion by
allowing air carriers to concentrate on long hauls, reduce highway congestion,
prevent hundreds of thousands of injuries and tens of thousands of deaths every
year, reduce pollution, save energy, and save an enormous chunk of cash.
Yet
we keep laying asphalt. In
Northwest Arkansas, there's a fever to expand I-540 to eight, count 'em, eight
lanes. And as though that were not
sufficiently over-the-top, the geniuses on the Northwest Arkansas
Council—the renowned "good suit club" representing Wal-Mart,
Tyson's, etc.--who got us into this mess are already conjuring up another big
highway even further west, the "western beltway." Far be it from them to seriously
consider the system that many have proposed for the region: a light rail "backbone" from
Bentonville down at least through Greenland, fleshed out with an extensive bus
network focused on the rail hubs and other important destinations. There was real interest in such a
system a couple of years ago, and a delegation went to Washington DC to drum up
support for the needed million-dollar feasibility study, but rather than
supporting this project Rep. John Boozeman has dropped the ball. It seems clear that his Northwest
Arkansas backers favor asphalt over rails. As one example of his wrong-headedness about trains,
Boozeman recently proposed legislation to change a long-standing law giving
Amtrak first rights to use tracks owned by freight companies. This would make it impossible for
Amtrak to ever run on time. Fortunately,
he was persuaded by the National Association of Railroad Passengers to withdraw
his proposal.
There's
some recent good news for trains.
Congestion, airport delays, crumbling highways, and tolls are forcing a
move from planes and automobiles to trains. States are devoting more resources to mass transit while
expecting drivers to pay a greater share of their own enormous costs. Especially along Amtrak's Boston to
Washington corridor, people are abandoning the skies for the rails.
As
you've heard here before, few things would be better for America than high
gasoline taxes, provided the tax-rise was gradual, supportive of low-income
people, and coupled with income tax reductions. As rising gasoline prices urge people out of cars and onto
trains, we're already experiencing some of these benefits--although we have
unwisely handed the profits to the oil barons rather than to the American
people through taxation. Americans
are beginning to agitate for the kind of high speed rail that Europe enjoys. California is planning a $40 billion
bullet train linking San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San
Diego. Regarding the cost, the
deputy director of California's High-Speed Rail Authority argues "How can
we say we can't afford this in California, when these systems are being built
all over the world? ÉIt's a matter
of priority."
Our lone-ranger mentality costs this country a lot. It's time to get over it.