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Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

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Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#21

Post by AnimalMuppet »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #3
SoftTalker wrote: post #2

Why doesn't Amtrak simply pay UP adequately to get priority? UP is prioritizing freight because it pays better. Fix that.

Alternatively, nationalize the rail lines and make UP pay for access. Privatization of critical infrastructure, historically, leads to poor outcomes with profits getting siphoned off in the process. Rail workers aren’t getting sick days and trains are longer (leading to delays) because of investors squeezing rail infra and those who operate it. Why allow it to continue? The whole “privatizing profits socializing loss…

You say "nationalize" awfully glibly. Private enterprise, on private land, not bankrupt. Nationalizing that isn't an easy thing to do in the US.

Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#22

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jeffbee wrote: post #9
toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, nationalize the rail lines and make UP pay for access. Privatization of critical infrastructure, historically, leads to poor outcomes with profits getting siphoned off in the process. Rail workers aren’t getting sick days and trains are longer (leading to delays) because of investors squeezing rail infra and those who operate it. Why allow it to continue? The whole “privatizing profits socializing loss…

You don't even need to nationalize it. It makes perfect sense for the federal government, or even a large state like California, to simply buy it on the open market, as a hostile takeover. The UPRR is dirt cheap compared to how much it is costing society for the UPRR to exist. We're talking low tens of billions. If the Obama administration had funded a takeover of the UPRR ten years ago it would have slashed the futu…

How, exactly, is the existence of the UP costing society tens of billions of dollars?

Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#23

Post by rsj_hn »

pengaru wrote: post #15
SoftTalker wrote: post #2

Why doesn't Amtrak simply pay UP adequately to get priority? UP is prioritizing freight because it pays better. Fix that.

> Why doesn't Amtrak simply pay UP adequately to get priority? UP is prioritizing freight because it pays better. Fix that. Is it really that simple? Freight trains are _long_, Amtrak passenger trains are relatively short. It's far easier to sideline an Amtrak train to let a multi-mile-long freight train pass than it is to sideline that same freight train for Amtrak to pass. It's not my area of expertise at all, but…

To put thing in perspective, US rail moves:

    61 tons of freight per American each year
    94 tons of freight per mile for each passenger-mile on rail
    1/3 of all export goods move by rail
    1.7 trillion ton-miles of freight
    40% of US long distance freight by volume uses rail
So you have a problem in that increasing the costs to freight will affect all Americans in making them pay more for goods, whereas it will only benefit those passengers using rail. So politically, this is a tough sell. I think you need to put down dedicated track for passenger rail if you want it to be prioritized in our existing rail system, as it's currently a rounding error compared to freight.

That said, I think you will find that there are transportation corridors where there is the political will to fund laying down dedicated track for passenger rail. The way to think about it is that rail maybe costs $X per mile of track, but provides 100000X benefit for freight, and maybe 10x benefit for passenger traffic, so while you would never prioritize passenger traffic over freight, or even treat them equally, it still makes sense to build dedicated tracks for passenger rail.

Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#24

Post by woodruffw »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #19
woodruffw wrote: post #7

The history of the US's Western freight lines is fascinating (and frustrating): we've allowed these massive companies (UP, BNSF) to extract rent for well over a century, in exchange for having laid down the original lines (which, mind you, were also paid for in land and bonds[1]). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts

Extract rent? Seriously? They sell transportation. They face competition from the highway system, which is provided at public expense. Nothing about this looks like rent (even in the economic sense).

Selling transportation doesn't make it not rent extraction: these companies were given the land they operate on, plus government bonds to offset their capital expenses. Most operate as monopolies or duopolies in their regions, which is the efficient condition for rent-seeking behavior.

(The fact that they experience brisk competition from other subsidized forms of transportation doesn't alter this.)

Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#25

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jrockway wrote: post #6
SoftTalker wrote: post #2

Why doesn't Amtrak simply pay UP adequately to get priority? UP is prioritizing freight because it pays better. Fix that.

Here's a brief history of railroads in the US: 1) The federal government gave railroads massive amounts of land completely free of charge. 2) The federal government applied some regulations, including around transporting passengers. The automobile and plane hadn't been invented yet, so it wasn't that oppressive to railroads. Passengers were making them money. 3) The world changed and passenger service became massivel…

Not completely free of charge. The deal was that they had to carry the US mail at a rate that was beneficial to the US government and less than beneficial to the railroads. That added up over a few decades. The railroads bought themselves out of that part of the deal during World War II, when the government was eager to take short-term money even if it was long-term a bad idea.

I've seen one set of calculations that the railroads lost quite a bit of money on the deal. It's been decades since I saw it, though, so I can't give you specifics.

Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#26

Post by xyzzyz »

woodruffw wrote: post #20
IIAOPSW wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its long and complicated. Amtrak exists in the first place because once upon a time these freight operators were also the passenger operators. While today they look like "extracting rent", once upon a time they were forced by regulation to carry the burden of passenger service. The situation with Amtrak was basically the government agreeing to take over that before it killed the companies, but Amtrak would retain cer…

This is all important context, and I thank you for including it. I agree it's not as clear cut as "public versus private." But there's a recurring theme here: public money enabling private growth, followed by public money softening private decline. Railroads are just one instantiation of this pattern: it shows up in agriculture, industrial manufacturing, medical and materials research, &c. At some point, it should ma…

The railroads were sure funded by public money, but it most certainly has not been taxpayer money. Instead, it was money invested by private individuals. Government did help the railroads with vast grants of lands, but most of the value of the granted land stemmed from the railroads that were built nearby. It was in fact a great deal for taxpayers, a win-win situation.

> One wonders what the US's rail infrastructure would look like had the US Government bought (and continued to operate) it outright,

US federal government certainly is not known for providing high quality service at low cost, quite the opposite in fact.

Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#27

Post by vinay427 »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #17
bmc7505 wrote: post #16

As a frequent Amtrak passenger, I can attest to the unpunctuality of the Union Pacific and other freight operators. On several occasions we have been delayed by a passing freight train that was an hour or more behind schedule, causing us to miss our scheduled connection. During one such occasion, while traveling on the Coast Starlight from Eugene this summer, I was treated very rudely by the conductor, who kicked me…

The real problem here is that freight trains have so much priority in the US, unlike every other major country in the world. It doesn't matter how many or what kinds of trains we have. This sort of policy will always makes trains an unreliable and therefore impractical mode of transportation. And this is a major reason for the US leading the world in carbon consumption per capita.

Nit: I couldn’t find a source that indicated the US leads in carbon consumption per capita, although it is near the top.

For instance:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

More to the point, as several other comments noted the official policy is to prioritize passenger rail, which clearly wasn’t happening, so hopefully events such as these will begin to change that.

Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#28

Post by jeffbee »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #22
jeffbee wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need to nationalize it. It makes perfect sense for the federal government, or even a large state like California, to simply buy it on the open market, as a hostile takeover. The UPRR is dirt cheap compared to how much it is costing society for the UPRR to exist. We're talking low tens of billions. If the Obama administration had funded a takeover of the UPRR ten years ago it would have slashed the futu…

How, exactly, is the existence of the UP costing society tens of billions of dollars?

In a pretty straight-forward way. All their insane demands about how far everything has to be from their rights of way in California's Central Valley is bloating up the cost of the passenger rail project. Ordinary road crossings, instead of having normal dimensions, are all 26 feet above the tops of the rails and have 100 foot clear spans. The "intrusion barrier"—a huge wall between adjacent freight and passenger tracks—is unprecedented anywhere in the world, even in places with shared corridors like France, Germany, and Sweden, and it costs an absolute fortune. Imagine a wall hundreds of miles long and strong enough to deflect a train.

That's on top of the other things that UPRR does, like preventing any semblance of reasonable service between the Bay Area and Sacramento.

My proposal is quite simple. Spin off virtually all of the UPRR into a new operating company with the same name and almost all of the capital assets, but retain the rights of way under Not A Bunch Of Dicks Track Corporation.

Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#29

Post by toomuchtodo »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #21
toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, nationalize the rail lines and make UP pay for access. Privatization of critical infrastructure, historically, leads to poor outcomes with profits getting siphoned off in the process. Rail workers aren’t getting sick days and trains are longer (leading to delays) because of investors squeezing rail infra and those who operate it. Why allow it to continue? The whole “privatizing profits socializing loss…

You say "nationalize" awfully glibly. Private enterprise, on private land, not bankrupt. Nationalizing that isn't an easy thing to do in the US.

Socioeconomic business logic is up for constant debate, as is when unconventional implementations are warranted.

I don’t believe I used it in so much a glib fashion, but more matter of fact. It is a tool, and it can be used.

Re: Amtrak asks fed regulators to investigate Union Pacific handling of Sunset Ltd

#30

Post by jeffbee »

woodruffw wrote: post #24
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extract rent? Seriously? They sell transportation. They face competition from the highway system, which is provided at public expense. Nothing about this looks like rent (even in the economic sense).

Selling transportation doesn't make it not rent extraction: these companies were given the land they operate on, plus government bonds to offset their capital expenses. Most operate as monopolies or duopolies in their regions, which is the efficient condition for rent-seeking behavior. (The fact that they experience brisk competition from other subsidized forms of transportation doesn't alter this.)

They were given not just the land under their tracks, but 10% of the rest of the nation as a sweetener.
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