The money pit that is Passenger Rail

Ever wonder how much of the passenger rail system cost is subsidized by the taxpayer, instead of paid by fares? Well, it depends on the rail system, of course: your local subway is not Amtrack.

Well, Coyote Blog wondered about his local light rail system, started crunching the numbers, and figured it out: 93%:

Totaling the $91 million with the other operating expenses, we get a 93% subsidy for light rail. This means the true cost of the $1.75 ticket for a light rail ride is actually $25! METRO says that light rail riders love the service. I should think anyone who gets a $25 service for $1.75 should be happy.

Another way to look at the subsidy is on a per rider basis. So far, METRO has averaged about 17,000 round trip riders per weekday (based on about 34,000 boardings per day). The $115.8 million annual subsidy (capital+expense minus revenues) works out to just over $6,800 per rider per year that the rest of us (who may not live or work near the line**) pay each current rider.

Your mileage (so to speak) may vary. But it's going to be expensive. Megan McArdle points out why:

Maybe. But I think there are a number of problems with this. First of all, many of the people flying between Dallas and Houston are not actually ending up in those cities; they're going somewhere else, because Dallas is a major hub. When I want to fly up to see my family in upstate New York, I don't take Amtrak to Penn Station and then trek out to LaGuardia, even though I much prefer rail travel to air travel. So high speed rail doesn't readily substitute for air travel unless you have a lot of connections running out of Dallas. I don't think it's an accident that the two places in America where rail kind of works--the northeast corridor, and the LA-San Diego route--are coastal runs where the regional links run down a basically straight line. And the reason that they are conveniently in a straight line is that both regions happen to be sandwiched on a narrow strip between the coastline and a big mountain range that limited inland development during the formative years. In the middle of the country, where you need to add an east-west axis to your planning, things rapidly get more expensive.

Population density, combined with distance between destinations in the USA works against passenger rail. The two corridors where passenger rail works (almost) are the Northeast and the San Francisco/LA coastal routes. Even there, it's prohibitively expensive to take the european approach and build entirely new tracks. McArdle again:

The Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor, established in 1992, is expected to finish its final environmental impact statement sometime in 2011. Some unspecified time after that, it will begin building out the links between Washington DC and Charlotte, North Carolina. For somewhere between 2-5 billion dollars, and three or more decades, we will finally be able to travel from Washington to Charlotte in 6 hours and 50 minutes--just 30 minutes more than it takes to drive the same route.

But on the plus side, it lets statist busybodies spend lots of the Public's money on a project that they find to be congenial.

These are the folks who think they know better about your healthcare than you do.