Steven Douglas Maloney

Posts Tagged ‘Privitization’

Matthew Yglesias wonders about expanding train service as a way to offset fuel consumption.  I have often wondered if this is not a great opportunity to test out some private/public partnership strategies.  If passenger rail became a viable option for lots of commuting Americans every day, it would seem beneficial to open up competition between private carriers. The problem with this, as I understand it, is that the maintenance costs on the rail is prohibitive for private enterprise. It seems the government could make arrangements with companies to pay for rail maintenance and new construction and let the businesses manage their rail cars and service.  

If it did turn out to be a profitable enterprise (which I don’t know if it actually would) – one could imagine deals proposed for newer tracks that can carry more innovative rail designs, and for new routes where businesses have unearthed profit potential.  The government could, in exchange for lending some of its vast startup money, could recover some of the cost by having a small tax on tickets, so that users would be paying down money spent on infrastructure and new routes, and presumably, the government would decrease new spending in a plan like this because they would have to spend less on road maintenance and air transportation.  

Which brings me to my last point – it seems of interest to maximize the amount of shipping that can be sent over rail over the rail instead of via air or big rig.  If we did nothing else but reduce Truck traffic on American interstate highways, the value recouped from decreased  less wear and tear on the roadways, requiring less construction cost, perhaps even less emergency costs for truck related automobile accidents seem to me to be at least worth investigating.

Ultimately, all of the ways the government could help offset costs are also placed in the context of a larger good we are concerned with: decreasing energy consumption.  Any opportunity to decrease energy consumption is the best way to deal with the peak-oil world.  We will possibly never have an energy source as cheap as oil was when demand was low and supply was enormous - which means using energy will likely never be that inexpensive ever again. What will we do? What we always do in economy, we will do the best we can with what we have.  A lot of that will be solved by the market through the changing cost structure for each household, but any and all public policy that changes those cost structures favorably for the public interest should be on the table.