There was an article in yesterday’s Everett Herald about the Sounder train that runs between Everett and Seattle. It’s not cheap. A former planner estimates that each rider costs $57, though the fare is only $7.50. Now catch this:
One of the biggest expenses for the system is $258 million the agency paid up front to Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad for the permanent right to use the rail lines between Seattle and Everett.
I took the Sounder once. It’s a pleasant enough ride, taking one along Puget Sound and providing spectacular views of the water and the mountains. Yet, the route reflects our collective stupidity.
There aren’t very many people who live next to the railroad track on the shoreline. We taxpayers shelled out $258 million to lease private tracks that mostly serve commercial purposes. The Sounder can run only four times in the morning to Seattle and four times coming back, because the railroad company needs the rails to haul freight.
I’ve never been to Europe. Heck I rarely travel outside my downtown apartment. On occasion, though, I catch Rick Steves’s programs. There are trains all over the continent moving millions from town to village to city and from country to country—along dedicated tracks.
Before he died, Tony Judt railed against the threats to rails.
In continental Europe, despite some closures and reductions in services, a culture of public provision and a slower rate of automobile growth preserved most of the railway infrastructure. In most of the rest of the world, poverty and backwardness helped preserve the train as the only practicable form of mass communication.
America desperately needs public rails, and I’d run them with electricity generated by renewable resources like hydro. It’s dumb to take a plane from Seattle to Portland, and almost as dumb to drive your car. But how nice and convenient it would be to hop a train when you wanted to transport yourself those 300 174 miles.
How crucial timing is. We paved over paradise, ripping out rails in the process. How expensive it is now to run trains where we need them—between population clusters. Yet, it was okay to build a freeway right through the middle of Seattle, displacing thousands and destroying neighborhoods, my wife’s family’s included. But we love cars, right? Such freedom. We can drive anywhere at any time. This worked okay for a while, until too many humans wanting to do the same thing made driving a curse rather than a pleasure.
We’re paying four bucks for a gallon of gas these days. Lets’ say that you average 20 miles per gallon. A trip of 100 miles will consume five gallons and cost you $20. If you commute 30 miles to your job, by the end of the week you will have put 300 miles on your car. That’s $60.
You’re not alone, though. You’re joined by thousands of other commuters who transform the freeway into a barely moving parking lot. Let’s suppose there are 10,000 people driving to Seattle along I-5 each morning and evening and they average 30 miles each way. In total they will travel in a typical work week three million miles (60 miles x 5 days x 10,000). At 20 mpg, they will have spent in the aggregate $600,000. Their combined monthly bill for gasoline alone is $2.4 million. Over 12 months they will have paid $28.8 million just for gas.
Can you imagine what kind of rail system you could buy for $28.8 million a year? If you were to invest that amount each year at five percent interest over three decades you’d have over $2 billion.
Actually, there are more than 250,000 cars that pass each day by milepost 169, which is downtown Seattle. So we could multiply the above numbers by 25, and we’d get $720 million. Now we’re up to $50 billion. That could buy a pretty nice rail system paralleling the I-5 corridor.
But we don’t think this way—collectively, I mean. We are decided individualists, so we take into account only our particular costs of transportation. We buy a car. We purchased gas for it. We pay the maintenance costs, and so on. Few of us bother to consider the aggregate costs of all of us. Fewer still think about what we could collectively do differently with all that money.
Instead, if a politician said that she wanted to build a splendid rail system and it would cost $50 billion, we’d tell her to go to hell. That’s too much money. Period.
Well, Californians voted to spend about $10 billion, or a fifth of the above amount, on a high-speed rail system connecting Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento. If, and it’s a big if, the project is completed and its total costs are even double the bond issue, the collective value would exceed the sum of all the individual costs of those traveling by car to and from those major cities.
Americans, for all our strutting nationalism, can’t build things any more, even when we could actually reduce our societal costs. Building railroads is just one example. We don’t like planning. We don’t like government. We don’t like big ideas, period. Unless our leaders call for war. Then no expenditure is excessive, even if total spending soars into the trillions of dollars.
I have a hunch that keeping us divided, confined to our own individual, impoverished lives, allows us to be conquered by you know who. As the Rest of Us eat our own, making choices in our own perceived best interest while ignoring the sum of our costs, the One-percenters steal us blind.
To overcome this, in my humble opinion, requires us to get smarter. And we get smarter by thinking collectively, communally, and not as individual agents in a huge scheme designed and operated by just a thin slice of the population, those making millions and billions siphoned from the Rest of Us.
Or, you can continue pursuing the myth of free agency, believing that you are master of your own destiny. The One-pecenters prefer things that way.
