This Is Spending On Rail That I Can Support
The Kansas City Star is reporting on the opening of a new sidetrack along Missouri’s Amtrak route connecting St. Louis and Kansas City. This expenditure of $8 million will have immediate, quantifiable benefits for transportation in Missouri. It isn’t some pipe dream of spending enormous sums of money in the hope that a small number of people will ride more rail or transit. Rather, it is an engineering-based improvement that will begin improving our rail service right away. I cited this as an example of well-directed resources in my testimony two month ago before the Joint Transportation Oversight Commission.
Needless to day, this improvement is a far better use of tax money than some dream of high-speed rail that will get someone from Kansas City to Chicago in 7 hours at best, when they can fly there for the same price in 1 hour and 20 minutes.
David, what would the ride time be from city to city? If it’s 3.5 hours or more, why bother?
Comment by Doug R — December 11, 2009 @ 8:14 a.m.
Doug,
Unsure if you are referring to the ride time under the current system, or under a proposed high-speed rail system. I’ll answer under both scenarios. Under the current system, as I understand it, the ride time is not automatically cut at all. What is cut is the chance of a delay at that junction. The average delay will be cut by 17 minutes, while also reducing the total trains delayed in the first place. If you got lucky on the current route and caught a train with no delays, which is about a six hour ride between St. Louis and KC with about 8 stops in between, then you won’t notice the improvement. But if you, like most riders, experienced delays, than this expenditure will improve the ride in a cost-effective manner.
Far more expensive, and wasteful, is the proposal to spend billions on high-speed rail in the midwest. That would involve new tracks in many places, new crossings, reduced (or eliminating) stops serving small towns, and other very expensive changes, all so people who work downtown can get travel to other downtowns extensively subsidized by the taxpayers.
As someone who has ridden the train to both Chicago and KC, it is not the length of the trip that bothers me as much as the delays, which you can’t plan for. Spending smaller amounts of money to improve performance in our current rail system is far better than spending huge amounts of money for a new system (high-speed rail) that will still serve just a limited amount of people.
Thanks for the comment.
Comment by David Stokes — December 11, 2009 @ 10:40 a.m.