Local Rail Revisited in Light of High Gas Prices?

Knoxville News-Sentinel – Funding, culture could derail dream of rail service:

Pete Claussen, chairman of Knoxville-based Gulf & Ohio Railways Inc., said he likes the concept of passenger rail and doesn’t want to pour cold water on the idea, but there are some tough realities that have to be addressed.

One is that somebody is going to have to pay for passenger rail, because it generally won’t pay for itself. “Nobody in the world makes money hauling passengers,” he said. “There are no passenger train operations in the world that sustain themselves with the money they get selling tickets.”

Though many observers deride Amtrak’s financial record, it is actually one of the most successful rail systems in the world, recouping 75 percent to 80 percent of its operating expenses through revenues, Claussen said. Remaining expenses, as with most all rail systems, have to be subsidized.

Or as PJ O’Rourke put it, “There are just two problems with mass transit. Nobody uses it, and it costs like hell.”

Next, there has to be a Point A and a Point B, each with sufficient population density and demand for travel between the two. He used the example of a railroad to the Great Smoky Mountains. “This is why a rail to the Smokies won’t work,” he said. “You’ve got B – you’ve got the Smokies- but you don’t have A, because people come there from everywhere,” he said.

And then, there is the “bus test.” “Let’s suppose you have A and B, which is Knoxville to the (McGhee Tyson) airport,” Claussen observed. Many people want to get from one destination to the other, so would a rail link succeed? No, according to Claussen, because there is no regular bus service between Knoxville and the airport and that would come first. “If you can’t support a bus, you can’t support a train,” he said.

Buses are far cheaper to build and operate, use existing roads, involve less disruption and political turmoil, and are far more flexible in terms of adding and dropping routes as usage changes and populations shift. They certainly make sense as a test case before ever building a rail route.

One local example illustrates difficulties in even a seemingly straight-forward project. A commuter line from Knoxville to Farragut or to Lenoir City via the existing Norfolk Southern rail line would seem possible.

“You have one track and there are probably 18-20 trains a day on that line and you’d have to be able to find a window in there that you could put passenger rail on a single track line, and again, this is private track and the preference is hauling freight and it’s much cheaper to haul freight,” Welch said.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone say it, so I will. Trains are similar to circuit-switched phone systems, where only one caller can use a line at a time. Buses are more like packet-switched phone systems (or the Internet), where multiple calls or data packets are interspersed for more efficient use of the system.

Previously:
- Everything You Need to Know About Mass Transit