News & Events: Library
A History of Federal Transportation Infrastructure Funding
A speech presented at a rail advocates meeting on
April 6, 2002 in Champaign, IL.
By FRITZ PLOUS
Rick, thanks for asking me to appear at the meeting today. In addition
to all of its other benefits, the visit to Champaign gives me a
chance to visit with some old friends from Downstate who can't always
make it up to Chicago for meetings there.
It also gives me a chance to meet somebody I esteem very highly
and have talked with from time to time by phone but have never met
Mark Reutter whom I consider the preeminent rail historian practicing
today.
Mark works in the University of Illinois public-relations office,
but to those of us in the movement he is better known as the editor
of Railroad History magazine. Mark's research has been the inspiration
for a good deal of the work I've done for Jim Coston in the past
five or six years, and I think Mark's 1994 article in the Wilson
Quarterly on the rise and fall of the American passenger train,
should be standard reading for everyone who makes transportation
policy decisions in this country. I have distributed copies of that
article to congressional staff members and state DOT officials,
and I urge everyone in this room to read it. Mark, I'm really excited
about hearing what you have to say this afternoon.
Now, Rick, although I had to rise with the sun and spend three
hours in your car to get down here in time for the meeting this
morning, I want to thank you for the drive. That experience only
serves to focus me on the pathetic lack of passenger-train service
between Chicago and Champaign-Urbana.
You really don't appreciate how committed you can become to the
cause of passenger-rail reform until you've been forced to fold
your aging bones into America's most over-rated gift to civilization,
the automobile, and stare through the windshield at 135 miles of
suburbs and prairie. No offense to Illinois' legendary topography,
but I have always felt that the essential charm of a soybean field
is best appreciated from the window of a moving train. A very fast-moving
train.
We once had them, you know. I forgot to mention it, but this is
not my first time in Champaign- Urbana. I attended the University
of Illinois here from 1958 to 1966, and almost every trip I made
between here and Chicago was on the Illinois Central Railroad.
Most students from Chicago or its suburbs did the same. Very few
students at that time had cars at school, and I don't think most
of us missed having one. When it was time to go back to Chicago
for the weekend or a holiday, we had our choice of five daily trains,
plus the extra-fare, all-reserved City of Miami every second day.
When a big holiday loomed, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter,
the IC ran student specials made up of old Harriman standard heavyweight
coaches. They left from stub tracks north of the depot actually
the old grade-level main-line tracks left over from before the time
when the new depot and elevation were constructed in 1926.
Even on ordinary college weekends, when the surge traffic up to
Chicago was not big enough to merit a special train, the IC always
added extra coaches to No. 8, the Creole, when it pulled into Champaign
at 4:15 p.m. on its daily 22-hour all-stops run from New Orleans
to Chicago.
We would leave our classes, go back to the dorm and pack, then
get a friend with a car to drop us off here at the depot around
3:45. After buying a weekend discount round-trip ticket you would
go up on the elevation and board one of the three, four or five
heavyweight coaches sitting there connected to a switch engine on
track 1.
When the Creole pulled in on track 2, the engine would pull
the coaches back to a switch at the south end of the platform,
cross over to track 2 and gently shove the coaches against
the rear of the train. In a few minutes we'd all be on our
way to Chicago at 85 miles an hour, and we always got there
on time at 7 p.m.
But enough with the reminiscing, already. I'm sure there
are plenty of people in this room who can do it better.
Besides, I didn't come here to talk about railroad history.
I came here at Rick's request to talk about highway history,
airport and air traffic control history, and even a bit about
the history of another major American transportation system
that few of us ever get to see unless we live in places like
St. Louis or Peoria or LaSalle-Peru the Inland Waterway System.
Now, why, you ask, does somebody come to a conference of passenger-train
activists to talk about roads and airports and waterways?
There are two reasons:
First, the federal government's decision to pour vast amounts
of cheap government capital into a highway system, a civil-aviation
infrastructure and a 25,000-mile network of locks, dams and
dredged channels for barge traffic explains a great deal about
how and why the privately owned railroads in this country
became obsolete and almost became extinct.
From 1920 on, the railroads of the United States were overwhelmed
by a tidal wave of federal investment in competing transportation
technologies. We need to understand that history if we are
going to design a new future for American passenger trains.
As Mark Reutter makes clear, it was the federal government
that put this nation's privately owned passenger-train system
out of business and came very close to ruining the freight
railroad business as well.
That's the bad news, although it's pretty old "news"
by now.
The good news, however, is that the federal government's program
of making long-term capital investments in highway, civil-aviation
and waterway infrastructure contains clues and guidelines
and lessons for rail advocates who want the federal government
to start funding a similar program of improvements for the
nation's rail infrastructure particularly the kind of infrastructure
we need if we're going to introduce fast, frequent, high-capacity
intercity passenger trains into the nation's "mobility
mix," if I can coin a term.
I also have a third purpose, however: I want to bring the
history of our nation's transportation infrastructure programs
before the rail-advocacy community in particular, because
we who advocate rail have to become more effective, and we
have to become effective fast. I think a better understanding
of our infrastructure history can help us do that in two ways:
by sharpening our arguments and softening our attitudes.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
First, about our arguments. Too often, we who advocate passenger
trains weaken our case and waste our effort by using unfocused
arguments that don't really register with the transportation
policymakers or the public.
For instance, we often advocate passenger trains by saying
that Americans need a so-called "alternative" to
highway and air travel.
Now, what's the problem with calling passenger trains an "alternative?"
The problem is that we don't always realize what our fellow
Americans hear when we say "alternative." Well,
here it is: Most people understand the word "alternative"
to mean "standby," or "reserve," or "overflow,"
or "spare," It means an inferior choice or a mode
of last resort that people can default to if bad weather grounds
the airlines or causes a backup on the Interstate.
Next Friday Jim Coston and I are going to be in Washington
to meet with congressional staffers from the key transportation
policy and funding committees. Believe me, we're not going
to be asking these staffers to go back and try to persuade
their bosses in Congress to vote hundreds of billions of dollars
to fund a default mode of travel for this country. We expect
those dollars to be used to fund passenger trains that will
become the mode of choice which is what passenger trains can
be when they get the right infrastructure in the right corridors.
In Germany, the InterCity Express trains between Frankfurt
and Munich now carry 40 per cent of all travelers between
those two end points. I don't mean 40 per cent of the air-rail
market. I mean 40 per cent of all travel air, rail, bus, private
auto, motorcycle you name it.
This in a country where you're allowed to drive your BMW or
Jaguar down the Autobahn at 140 miles per hour. Those trains
are so appealing that they have become the preferred way to
go.
I said that while we need to sharpen our arguments we need
to soften our attitudes. Let me explain why a better understanding
of U.S. transportation history can help us with our "attitude
problem" as well.
If you attend a lot of these advocate meetings, you very often
encounter well intentioned but not- very-well informed people
complaining about a conspiracy against passenger trains and
against passenger-train investments by the federal government.
You will hear rail advocates complain that the airlines, the
auto manufacturers, the waterways lobby, the asphalt and concrete
people, the rubber interests, the petroleum companies, the
airline lobby, the airplane manufacturers and their suppliers
get whatever they want from the federal government and won't
let the passenger-train advocates get a seat at the table.
There's a certain amount of truth to those charges, but not
as much as the conspiracy theorists would have you believe.
More important, by focusing on the current imbalance between
financing for rail and financing for the other three modes,
the conspiracy theorists overlook a major historical fact
which I hope everyone in this room will keep in mind after
this meeting ends today:
The fact is that each of these three non-rail transportation
modes had to fight, fight, fight for decades before they were
perceived as legitimately deserving of federal funding. I
will begin showing you in just a minute how long it took,
and how much effort was expended by their respective advocacy
communities, before highways, airports and waterways were
taken seriously by the federal government.
Let's start by taking a look at what is probably the least
known and most poorly understood part of the federal government's
transportation infrastructure systems, the Inland Waterways.
Today, the Inland Waterway network stretches for over 25,000
miles, most of it in the Eastern half of the U.S., where the
relatively low terrain and sprawling basins give rise to rivers
of great length and breadth and relatively slow current.
But until the federal government improved these rivers in
the 20th century with locks and dams to regulate the depth,
as well as navigational aids to guide shipping, most of these
rivers could not be used for serious transportation purposes.
Now you might ask, "Wait a minute? What about the great
steamboats that plied the Mississippi and Ohio and Missouri
in the 19th century?" Didn't they carry a lot of cotton
from the South to mills in the North and manufactured goods
from Ohio and Pennsylvania to markets in New Orleans and St.
Louis?
Well, yes, those steamboats were a wonderful chapter in our
nation's history. We all know about the colorful gamblers
and entertainers and ladies-of-easy virtue who rode those
craft as well as the colorful characters, like Mark Twain,
who commanded them and wrote about them.
But the fact is, the paddle-wheeled steamboats were more colorful
than effective as a transportation system. In the summer,
low water and sandbars often prevented them from reaching
many destinations. In winter, the frozen Mississippi was not
navigable above St. Louis. There were no navigational aids,
so boats and cargoes, as well as human lives, were lost frequently.
The technology was unreliable, and boiler explosions were
common.
The steamboat industry was colorful but frail, and it proved
extremely vulnerable as soon as reliable train service arrived.
Within a decade after the Civil War, the river transportation
industry began to crumble as shippers switched to rail transportation.
The glamorous and busy riverfront districts of Memphis, New
Orleans, St. Louis, Vicksburg and other cities began falling
into decay.
By 1910, America's water transportation system was barely
functioning. No new boats or barges had been built in the
previous 30 years. The technology of inland water transportation
was not advancing, and what little water transportation still
operated used the same paddle-wheel propulsion and the same
wooden barges that were standard at the close of the Civil
War.
In 1910 the last common carrier operating on the rivers went
out of business. The only remaining river traffic was a small
amount of Pennsylvania coal shipped downstream on the Ohio
by in-house barge tows owned by the mining companies. Rail
transportation had triumphed, as the shippers and farmers
had feared and foreseen, much as rail advocates in the 1950s
would foresee the coming deterioration of the passenger-train
system at the hands of the new federally financed airports
and Interstate highways.
In fact, the alarmed shippers and farmers of the late 19th
century took the same steps as alarmed railroad passengers
did in the late 20th. They began lobbying government for a
solution. As early as 1881, members of the National Grange
began holding meetings demanding that Congress improve the
waterways so that farmers would not be totally dependent on
the railroads to move their crops.
In 1895 the Ohio Valley Association was formed to advocate
a federal infrastructure program to build modern locks, dams
and navigational aids. The OVA carried on the same type of
campaign as the National Association of Railroad Passengers
and the Midwest High Speed Rail Association and other groups
have been doing for more than 30 years.
And it took them almost as long to have an effect. In fact,
the parallels between 19th-century waterway advocacy and 20th-century
passenger-rail advocacy are striking. When shippers and communities
complained about congestion on the rail system and extortionate
railroad rates, Congress listened and sympathized but did
little.
Repeatedly the advocacy groups called upon Congress to fund
some improvements to the rivers so that modern waterway transportation
could offer shippers of bulk materials a way to bypass the
congested rail system and get their products to market at
more reasonable rates. But the money just didn't get appropriated,
and no federal agency was designated to take charge of planning
such improvements.
For a while it sounded as if President Theodore Roosevelt
would be the "white knight" who would ride to the
rescue. For one thing, TR was anti-railroad and a strong advocate
of tougher regulation, which finally came in the form of the
Hepburn Act in 1906. For another, he urged the development
of inland waterway improvements repeatedly.
But Teddy turned out to be a disappointment too. When the
Rivers and Harbors Act passed in 1910, all it offered was
some dredging to create deeper channels. There was no money
for a real infrastructure, like dams to regulate water depth,
and locks to get tows around the dams. Without that kind of
improvement you can't turn a river into a high-volume freightway.
Twenty-eight years went by between the formation of the Ohio
Valley Association and the first real move by the federal
government to build a waterway infrastructure.
Can anybody tell me what finally changed Washington's mind?
And when?
It was World War I or the "Great War" as they called
it then (they didn't know there was going to be another one.).
Congress, as we are often told, is not a long-range planning
organization. It only acts in a crisis. Things have to get
worse before Congress agrees to make them better.
In 1916 that crisis came. The United States entered World
War I and discovered that its railroad system was not up to
the job of moving soldiers and supplies to the East Coast
for trans- shipment to Europe. Vital shipments of ammunition
wound up in yards hundreds of miles from their intended ports
of embarkation. Troop trains were stalled on sidings. Basically,
the system broke down.
This time the waterway advocates knew their hour had struck.
They said, "Aha! We told you this railroad system was
not responsive to the nation's needs. We told you it was congested
and that its owners were not building enough new capacity.
And now look what's happened. We can't get troop trains through
because the yards and main lines are jammed with freight.
That's why this country needs a waterway system to take some
of that coal and iron ore and limestone and cement and chemicals
off the railroad and open up the tracks for high-priority
traffic."
Congress acted swiftly, passing the Army Appropriations Act,
which allowed President Woodrow Wilson to seize private transportation
facilities for national-defense purposes. In December, 1916,
President Wilson seized the railroads. He didn't nationalize
the carriers, in the sense of expropriating them and transferring
ownership to the federal government.
But he did appoint Army officers to each railroad to make
sure that military shipments took priority. And he created
the U.S. Railroad Administration to redesign some of the operating
practices and to get new locomotives built. In fact, he named
his son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo, to head the USRA.
Now, very few people know this, but just after McAdoo seized
the railroads, he also nationalized what was left of the only
other private transportation asset that existed before we
had an airline or trucking industry. It was the U.S. waterway
industry, and McAdoo put the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
in charge of building it up so the government could begin
using the waterways as a supplemental transportation resources.
That should answer your question of why the Army Engineers
build all those locks and dams. Their authority came from
the 1916 Army Appropriations Act.
McAdoo didn't get much when he nationalized the so-called
waterways industry as it existed in World War I. All the industry
had left was five towboats and 28 barges, none of them working
and all of them built in the 19th century. Railroads had totally
devastated inland water shipping. But at least the federal
government now had a basis for assuring those disgruntled
shippers that it felt their pain and was going to do something
to jump-start a waterway system.
And it did. McAdoo chartered a towboat company called Federal
Barge Lines, which in 1918 hauled its first load a tow of
Alabama coal down the Warrior River and into the Tombigbee
River, the Mobile River and on to New Orleans. Federal Barge
Lines was a sort of floating Amtrak. It didn't make a profit,
but it gave the shippers an alternative and showed them that
government understood there was a problem and was going to
be there for them. The government even ordered some new towboats
and steel-hulled barges for the company.
But a towboat line is not an infrastructure. The rivers were
still wild, and still flooded, frozen or too low to navigate
most of the year. No private carrier could make a profit competing
with the railroads over that primitive river system.
But after the war, in 1920, Congress got serious about building
a waterway infrastructure and passed the Transportation Act,
which included some money for enlarging the docks at St. Louis,
East St. Louis, Cairo, Memphis and New Orleans and installing
some experimental electrical equipment at Vicksburg.
The real beginnings of what we now call the Inland Waterway
System, however, did not begin until 1923, when President
Warren G. Harding signed a record $57-million appropriation
that assured complete canalization of the Ohio by 1929. This
was genuine civil engineering, moving millions of cubic yards
of earth and leaving real concrete locks and dams in its place.
This happened 42 years after the first demands for federally
sponsored waterway improvements had broken out in 1881.
In 1924 Congress took Federal Barge Lines out of the Secretary
of War's jurisdiction and chartered it as a federal corporation.
The understanding with the shippers was that the government
would keep furnishing them with subsidized barge transportation
until the Inland Waterway system was sufficiently built out
to support private, for-profit carriers.
President Calvin Coolidge committed an additional $71 million
into river and harbor improvements in 1927 enough to assure
completion of the Intracoastal Waterway between New Orleans
and Corpus Christi and to finish the Illinois Waterway into
Chicago. That may not sound like a lot of money, but for 1927
it was a huge amount, equivalent to several billion dollars
today and Calvin Coolidge was dedicated to reducing federal
expenditures.
When the Great Depression hit, waterway spending just increased.
In addition to providing the United States with a badly needed
transportation infrastructure, it also enabled the New Deal
to create jobs for those who had no work and flood control
to end disasters like the great flood of 1927, which killed
more than a thousand people in Mississippi.
As the Inland Waterway infrastructure grew, private operators
began going into competition with Federal Barge Lines, and
many of them became successful as more and more mines, quarries,
chemical companies, grain elevators and other handlers of
bulk materials began building major terminals along the rivers.
By 1953 it was clear that a government-subsidized water carrier
no longer was needed, and the federal government sold Federal
Barge Lines to the St. Louis Ship & Steel Co. Federal
Barge Lines is still in business, but it no longer has any
connection with the federal government. Barge transportation
has continued to flourish, and the Inland Waterways network
has continued to expand along the Arkansas River into Oklahoma,
way up the Tennessee as far as Knoxville and up the Allegheny
to Oil City, Pennsylvania. It's a huge and successful system.
But not until 1990 70 years after the first federal appropriations
were voted did waterway users begin paying for this marvelous
facility with a 4-cent-a-gallon diesel fuel tax. I was writing
free- lance articles for a transportation magazine at that
time, and I remember doing interviews with towboat-company
executives who predicted that the end of civilization as we
know it was approaching because they would have to pay a tax
to the wicked federal government for the privilege of using
the waterways. Do I detect a little entitlement complex here?
Let me switch now to a federally sponsored transportation
system we're more familiar with the airports and the air-traffic
control system operated by the Federal Aviation Administration.
How long do you think it took before the federal government
finally heeded the activists and began investing in civil-aviation
infrastructure?
Depending on when you start the clock ticking, anywhere from
25 to 35 years. The Wright Brothers, of course, first flew
a heavier-than-air machine 99 years ago, in 1903. The first
passengers were carried on a regular basis across Tampa Bay
in 1919, but that business died out, and real scheduled passenger
service didn't start again till 1926.
In that same year the U.S. Post Office paid for the installation
of some beacons that enabled Air Mail pilots to fly the mail
24/7 between San Francisco and Chicago. The beacons were erected
pretty much along the Overland Route of the Southern Pacific,
Union Pacific and Chicago & North Western railroads.
But beacons really weren't much help without modern airports,
and it took a long time before airport construction became
federal policy.
In 1925, Orville Wright told the House Committee on Interstate
and Foreign Commerce, "The greatest present drawback
to the use of aircraft for civil purposes, such as commerce,
mail, travel and sport, is the lack of suitable airports."
At the time Wright submitted that testimony, all airports
were funded either by private interests or by municipal or
county governments. There was no federal program to build
a network of airports, no federal funding and no federal effort
to design a uniform, common procedure and technology for managing
the flow of commercial air traffic.
How long do you think it took before the federal government
responded to Orville Wright's appeal?
It took 21 years. Even the Father of Powered Flight couldn't
get Uncle Sam to act any faster. Finally, in 1946 Congress
passed the Federal Airport Act, which appropriated $520 million
to be shared 50/50 with local governments so that they could
build airports with runways long enough to handle commercial
aircraft.
As was the case with the first appropriations for waterway
improvements, that $520 million was a huge sum of money for
its time. And it was not the only sum. In 1953 Congress extended
the Act and allowed the money to be used to build airline
terminal buildings as well as runways, approach lighting and
other safety features.
Interestingly, 1953 was one year before Alfred E. Perlman
was named president of the New York Central Railroad and began
assigning accountants to document what it really cost a privately
owned railroad to maintain its own stations in high-tax downtown
business districts while its fast-growing airline competitors
were getting their tax-free stations from the government.
The federal government's giveaway to the airline industry
continued. The Act was extended again in 1961 and 1966, and
the 1961 Act ordered the federal government to prepare a National
Airport Plan to promote the growth of a commercial airline
industry.
Again, as we saw with the buildup of the waterway infrastructure,
the federal government did not demand that users pay for the
system it was building. For the first 25 years of the airport
and air-traffic-control buildup 1946 to 1971 there was no
airline ticket tax and no Airport and Airways Trust Fund.
The federal money just took money it had collected in income
taxes, or went into deficit mode and used money it didn't
really have, and cycled those billions of dollars out to the
cities, first on a 50/50 basis, then on an 80/20 basis, until
it got a system of modern airports built. The first user fees
and their associated Trust Fund did not start until 1971,
well after the conversion to jets was under way and well after
the American public had been converted to using air travel.
Even after those fees went into effect, the system was not
self-supporting. In 1988 the Congressional Budget Office found
that user fees paid by airline passengers and airfreight shippers
covered only 45.1 per cent of the Federal Aviation Administration's
budget for years 1971-1988. The balance, $54.9 billion, was
paid by a subsidy from the general fund meaning all taxpayers,
including those who didn't use the airline system.
I'm sorry I haven't been able to locate any studies showing
to what extent the economics of aviation have changed since
the 1998 study.
Let me complete this little survey with a look at the federal
transportation infrastructure with which all of us are intimately
familiar the road system. Most of us know the streets, roads
and highways well, but we don't know much about their history.
Throughout most of the nation's history, of course, the federal
government did not engage in road-building or road-funding.
Historically, that was the job of county road commissions,
which were important centers of political and economic power.
But in the late 19th century the same rural interests that
demanded federally sponsored waterway improvements also began
demanding that the federal government provide some sort of
assistance to counties so that roads could be paved.
Particularly in the Midwest and South, spring and fall rains
made the roads impassable five or six months of the year.
Farmers could not hitch up the wagon and deliver their grain
to the local elevator, nor could they get to town to fetch
the tools and implements and household goods waiting for them
at the local freight house.
By 1916, when many farmers already had Model Ts and trucks
at their disposal, they were unable to make full use of these
new inventions because their vehicles got stalled in mud up
to their hubcaps.
America's pretensions to world leadership had become a laughingstock
because of our primitive roads, much as American passenger
trains today have made us the laughingstock of European and
Asian travelers. The French had had paved highways since the
time of Napoleon, and a widely publicized congressional study
during the late 1890s showed that a French farmer had to pay
only 8 cents to haul a ton of produce over Napoleon's roads,
while a typical American farmer had to pay 21 cents in labor
and time to do the same work. Another study said it cost more
for a Georgia farmer to ship a bushel of peaches twenty miles
by road to Atlanta than it cost a California farmer to ship
a bushel by rail to New York.
The concerns of the turn-of-the-century farm lobby show why,
when the federal government started its first road program
in 1893 under President Grover Cleveland, the program was
established as part of the Department of Agriculture. The
motto of American road advocates became, "We've got to
get the American farmer out of the mud!"
This pioneering federal program didn't build or fund any roads
at first. It was simply called the Office of Road Inquiry,
and its sole job was to "furnish information" about
road-building techniques to county road commissions. It had
an annual budget of $10,000 and was headed by a dedicated
civil engineer and Civil War veteran named Roy Stone. He traveled
all around the country by train crusading for a national paved-roads
program. When people complained that taxes would have to be
paid to pay for all these wonderful roads he wanted to build,
Stone would foil them by saying that Americans already were
paying a "mud tax" the extra expense and lost time
and effort caused by trying to run a modern industrial society
with unimproved roads. He estimated it was costing American
farmers $500 million a year.
Makes you wonder what kind of "track tax" America
is paying today by using a 19th-century railroad plant to
meet the demands of a 21st-century economy.
Stone's rhetoric was successful as an attention-grabber. Within
four years he had turned the Office of Road Inquiry into a
research program. It began constructing short stretches of
paved highway in selected locations around the country. These
were called "Object Lesson Roads." Every time one
of these demonstration sections was opened the Office would
hold a "Good Roads Day" and invite farmers and county
highway officials to drive over the stretch and experience
what modern travel could be like. Farm families would pack
a lunch, climb into the wagon or the Model T and meet their
neighbors at the road-testing site for a community exposure
to modern transportation. Soon Stone had a nationwide "buzz"
going about paved roads.
Stone's Object Lesson Roads were successful, especially as
the turn of the century approached and more and more Americans
bought bicycles and automobiles, neither of which could operate
in mud. In 1905 the Office of Road Inquiry became the Office
of Public Roads, and a little later the Bureau of Public Roads.
Each year its budget increased, and each year the county road
commissioners who learned from the Bureau's propaganda built
more and more miles of road as Americans bought more and more
automobiles and as the early highway lobby began to coalesce
into a really powerful political force.
But a funny thing happened on the way to federally funded
paved highways, and I think today's rail advocates need to
take a close look at it, because it contains some real lessons
for us as we close in on getting the federal government to
fund a modern passenger-train infrastructure. In fact, a couple
of funny things happened before we got decent roads in this
country.
First, the effort to get a federal road-building program going
was not easy. Yes, Americans were buying more automobiles
and bicycles. There were half a million of them by 1910, 187,000
of them purchased in that year alone. Yes, the economy was
growing and there were more people and more goods moving every
year. Yes, the American people and particularly American farmers
and small manufacturers hated the railroads and yearned for
the federal government to establish some kind of alternative
or supplemental transportation system to give Americans more
choice.
Nevertheless and today's railroad advocates need to remember
this major federal road-funding initiatives failed in Congress
for 13 successive sessions that's 26 years before a really
serious bill came before the 64th Congress in January, 1916.
This is just my opinion, but I suspect that 1916 was the year
of change largely because of two unique events:
The first was the federal income tax, which first started
being collected in 1914. The receipts from this tax just may
have made Americans a little less uncomfortable about spending
some tax money on a new national transportation system.
The other was World War I, which was already causing problems
on the U.S. rail system and making people think a little harder
about the need to give Americans some travel and shipping
options.
But even with the national consciousness about good roads
rising almost daily, another funny thing happened on America's
way to automotive paradise: class war and sectional conflict!
Just as the U.S. was learning how to build good pavement,
and just as the auto manufacturers and the tire companies
and the petroleum refiners and the fast-growing concrete industry
and all the other suppliers and vendors in the highway lobby
were beginning to feel confident about the future, an acrimonious
debate began breaking out:
Who exactly are these new highways being built for? Who is
going to use them? Are all of the taxpayers going to pay for
a new transportation technology that's only going to be used
by a few? And if so, maybe those few should pay for it.
It started when the new American Automobile Association, which
represented mostly people who lived in cities, began arguing
that the money for a federal road program should be used to
build long-distance intercity roads "touring roads,"they
were called--so people could drive from Cleveland to Detroit
or Knoxville to Atlanta or Minneapolis to Des Moines. Some
of the early truckers also got into the act.
This infuriated the rural interests who had always controlled
the Bureau of Public Roads. They, of course, felt that the
Good Roads movement was all about "getting the American
farmer out of the mud." But now, with more and more Americans
moving off the farms and out of small towns and into big cities,
and more and more of the votes in the House of Representatives
coming from urban districts, the farm lobby began to panic.
Their spokesman was Rep. Dorsey W. Shackleford of Missouri,
who just happened to be Chairman of the new House Committee
on Roads. And he made it clear how he saw the future. He said:
"It is an idle dream to imagine that auto trucks and
automobiles will take the place of railways in the in the
long-distance movement of freight or passengers."
Shackleford had the votes to make his words stick, so the
Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, which got the federal government
into the highway-funding business for the first time, was
founded on a classic political compromise that would have
won the applause of a Lyndon Johnson or a Tip O'Neill or a
Tom Daschle or any other of the great mediators and negotiators
who later became famous for getting controversial ground-breaking
legislation through Congress.
The 1916 bill contained $75 million that the federal government
would distribute to the states in $25-million increments over
each of three years. However, and here's the compromise, half
the money would be distributed on the basis of state populations,
which made the urban states with densely populated intercity
corridors happy, and half the money was dispensed according
to the road mileage over which the Post Office was performing
Rural Free Delivery. And that made the farmers happy.
Wonderful! Now everybody's happy. President Wilson signed
the bill July 11, 1916. The U.S. government was in the highway
business and it's been there ever since.
I haven't the time and you haven't the patience to sit through
a recitation of the next 80 years of the federal highway program.
We all know it lived happily ever after. Or did it? Contrary
to those romantic journalists who keep claiming that America
has a "love affair with the automobile," history
shows that the highway program went forward only because some
very commanding personalities, like Thomas Harris MacDonald,
who served as commissioner of the Bureau of Public Roads from
1919 to 1953, kept pushing.
MacDonald also worked very closely with the road lobby, which
skillfully and relentless lobbied Congress to fund MacDonald's
programs. The highway people knew what they wanted and they
worked hard to make sure they got it. It was a struggle, and
the struggle never really stopped. Most people today assume
that the Interstate highway program just evolved naturally
out of the earlier two-lane highway network built by MacDonald.
But there was nothing natural or easy about the Interstates
or their proposed predecessors. In fact, when the first four-lane,
grade separated national highway plan was proposed during
the Depression, Congress rejected it, partially because of
its $8-billion price tag, but also because the class-war question
had not been settled.
In his Wilson Quarterly article, Mark Reutter quotes a critic
who called the new roads "extravagant speedways for the
luxurious few." It was assumed that only the rich owned
cars capable of crossing the country at 60 miles per hour.
That was sports and games, not serious transportation worthy
of federal support.
When the Interstate program was proposed by President Dwight
D. Eisenhower in 1956, it encountered serious headwinds. The
road lobby was appalled at the cost $50 billion to be spent
over a period of 20 years, at a time when the entire federal
budget was $71 billion a year. That meant Ike was proposing
the 2002 equivalent of an expenditure of well over a trillion
dollars.
People who drive the Interstate today and swoon over the so-called
American love affair with the automobile apparently have no
recollection of how Ike had to fight to get that highway funded
and how desperately his administration floundered around trying
to find a funding method that would get through Congress.
First, Eisenhower's old war buddy and member of the Council
of Economic Advisers, Gen. John Stuart Bragdon, urged a system
of toll roads. But Eisenhower's other old war buddy, Gen.
Lucius D. Clay, hated toll roads and proposed the creation
of a national highway corporation that would sell bonds to
be paid off over 30 years with a federal fuel tax.
But the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Harry Byrd
of Virginia, went ballistic when he heard about the bonding
scheme and absolutely refused to obligate the government over
such a long period. He demanded a pay-as-you go financing
plan.
Meanwhile, the cost of the Interstate project ballooned to
$101 billion as the engineers at the Bureau of Public Roads
now part of the Department of Commerce went back to their
drawing boards and their slide rules and took a serious look
at the scope of the project.. It took two years and two agonizing
legislative failures before an acceptable Interstate bill
finally passed both houses of Congress.
What did the trick was an agreement to raise the federal gasoline
tax from 2 cents to 3 cents and to pay the proceeds into a
Motor Fuel Trust Fund that would be used only to build the
Interstate system, and only on a pay-as-you-go basis, as insisted
upon by Sen. Byrd.
Even with this tax in place, however, the Interstate program
began running out of money, and the tax had to be raised to
3.5 cents, and then to 4 cents, and finally, in 1959, Congress
had to vote a $2.2-billion subsidy from the General Fund to
keep the Interstate construction program going.
Contrary to the assurances of its original proponents, the
Interstate was not, and never has been, a pay-as-you go public-public
works project financed solely out of user fees. Neither are
our other roads.
In 1992 a study by the World Resources Institute showed that
in 1989 motor-fuel taxes and other user fees covered only
about 60 per cent of the $33 billion the federal government
spent on road building and repair.
In 1994, Chicago's Metropolitan Planning Council revealed
that of the $2 billion spent the previous year on highways
in the six-county Chicago region, only $1.3 billion came from
fuel taxes. The other $700 million was a subsidy from unrelated
taxes, largely the property tax.
Let me wind this up with two conclusions that passenger-train
advocates should have no trouble absorbing from the account
I've just given.
The first is that financing transportation infrastructure
all transportation infrastructure--is a struggle, and getting
transportation infrastructure qualified for federal funding
for the first time is particularly difficult. Even after the
principle is established and funding begins to flow, opposition,
objections and other hazards continue to make life very difficult
for the people who plan, finance and build infrastructure
in this country.
The second lesson I think rail advocates need to learn is
that the current debate over what kinds of rail infrastructure
should be built and what kinds of trains should be operated
is not unique to the rail question. Remember, we went through
this before with the highway program, when some advocates
sincerely believed that highways were essentially a rural
resource, that intercity shipping and travel were the "natural"
market for the railroads and that precious federal dollars
should not be committed to building roads for intercity trucking
and automobile tourism that belonged in the "recreation"
category rather than the transportation category.
This is very close to the argument currently going on as to
whether the federal government should sponsor only high-speed
intercity daylight corridor passenger trains, or whether it
should sponsor, fund, subsidize or otherwise support long-distance
cross-country trains, express trains, overnight business trains
or other forms of intercity passenger rail transportation
as well.
In other words, other Americans have gone before where rail
advocates find themselves going today. Rail advocates are
not unique, nor are they making unique or specious demands
on government for services or expenditures that cannot be
justified.
And that, my friends, means that means that advocating passenger
trains is as American as a tailgate party or a weekend in
Las Vegas. It means it's time for us rail advocates to stop
the whining, drop the paranoia, and take our places in the
century-old campaign for federally funded infrastructure improvements.
Let's shed the inferiority complex and brace ourselves for
more struggle like everybody else did before us.
Just make sure you check your history book first to see what
worked and what didn't.
And while we're at it, let's remember some encouraging words from
the late, great Milton Berle. When he died last week the Chicago
Sun-Times published a wonderful review of Milton Berle's career,
which was a long and often disappointing struggle until he broke
into the new medium of television in 1948. But after he'd finally
become successful, he told a reporter something we rail advocates
need to remember. He said: "Too many people simply give up
too early. You have to keep the desire to forge ahead, and you have
to be able to take the bruises of unsuccess. Success is just one
long street fight."
So let's sharpen our arguments, soften our attitudes--and get back
to work.
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