Login
or
Register
Home
»
Trains Magazine
»
Forums
»
General Discussion
»
Could have the SP survived without UP
Edit post
Edit your reply below.
Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote]QUOTE: <i>Originally posted by greyhounds</i> <br /><br />[quote]QUOTE: <i>Originally posted by futuremodal</i> <br /><br /> <br />If Staggers had been true deregulation, it would have forced railroads to submit to business laws that are applicable to other industries instead of exempting railroads from these constitutional protections. A true act of deregulation is not supposed to allow special rights exempting the parties from the equal protection clause of the constitution, yet that is exactly what Staggers has done, to the detriment of the nation. <br /> <br /> <br />[/quote] <br /> <br />OK, no act of congress can "exempt" anything from any part of the constitution. You see, the constitution defines what laws may/may not do. If it was possible to "exempt" things from the constitution by law then the constitution would be meaningless, which it isn't. <br /> <br />I don't know what your agenda is. You seem to want economic deregulation extented to include open access. The two are vastly different concepts. <br /> <br />Dereg removes (basically silly, ignorant and repressive) restrictions and allows natural economic activity (which will mean growth). Open access would involve confiscation of private property. <br /> <br />Now you may argue for open access, but please don't mix it up with dereg and please don't say things like "congress 'exempted' something from the constitution." <br /> <br />I'm of the firm beliefe that seperating the train operating company from the right of way ownership is a "BAD IDEA", and I haven't seen any resonable arguments to the contrary. (Hint!) <br /> <br />[/quote] <br /> <br />Greyhounds, <br /> <br />I appreciate your arguments, but you are still simply repeating the talking points and the skewed framing of the subject via AAR. What you need to do is to step back and take a comprehensive look at the entire freight transportation spectrum, and ask yourself if there isn't something amiss in that other transportation modes are open access, while only railroads are such that the owner of the ROW has sole discretion to operate over the ROW. Why is it necessarily bad to project what the transportation picture would look like if the ROW playing field was eqalized, either all transportation ROW's in the owner-operator mode, or all ROW's in the open access mode? Isn't it possible, given the economies of scale presented by railroad technology, that the rail industry could achieve 50% or 60% of commercial freight activity in this country? <br /> <br />As for exemptions from constitutional law, are not railroads exempted from the Sherman Anti-trust Act and other comprehensive business regulations, since railroads historically have had their own sets of rules for governence? <br /> <br />You and others on this forum have yet to provide evidence that open access would necessarily involve confistication of property. As far as I know, a federal takeover of rail ROW's with due compensation is only one option being considered. The logical option is to split rail companies into ROW owners and rolling stock owners e.g. infrastructure companies and transporting companies, respectively. Other lesser acts would simply invoke current STB caveats of allowing one operator to access another's ROW as a condition of some merger or other operating procedure that results in a lack of rail competition in certain sectors of the country. Given the difficult nature of building new rail lines to compete for market share, the STB recognizes this anomaly and is supposed to address the competition issue whenever it surfaces. <br /> <br />Sadly, during the 1990's the STB was lax in its enforcement and public protection functionality, allowing the creation of monopolistic and duopolistic fiefdoms out West. If the STB had been doing their jobs as dictated by their charter, then they would have made sure we had at least three rail operating companies competing throughout the entire Western U.S. (BN, UP, and one other), and would have made sure that at least three companies continued to compete in the East (CSX, NS, and Conrail). The only region of the country that has been spared from the monopolistic/duopolistic oligarchy is the Midwest, where up to six Class I's are still in effect, and the extreme Northeast, where CN and CP have made inroads into the Empire State. <br /> <br />Deregulation is supposed to address both the supply side and the demand side of a particular industrial sector. Staggers liberated the supply side, allowing railroads to function more in the free market vein, but it did nothing for the demand side, forcing more and more captivity among rail shippers. The similarities between the Staggers partial deregulation of the railroads and the California partial deregulation of the State's energy markets are striking. In both cases one side of the market was freed, while the other side was kept locked up. The consensus among both liberals and conservatives is that the California partial dereg was a bad idea. Shouldn't we judge the railroad partial dereg in the same vein?
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag
Update Reply
Join our Community!
Our community is
FREE
to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.
Login »
Register »
Search the Community
Newsletter Sign-Up
By signing up you may also receive occasional reader surveys and special offers from Trains magazine.Please view our
privacy policy
More great sites from Kalmbach Media
Terms Of Use
|
Privacy Policy
|
Copyright Policy