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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by bobwilcox [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by futuremodal This country's rail system is still a mess, albeit a much retrenched one. Look at how much has been lost in railroad employment, relative market share (especially in terms of $$ share), customer access to rail lines, railroad responsiveness to customer demands, etc. There's enough evidence that railroading was in far better shape pre-Staggers than post-Staggers if you use these benchmarks. Indeed, if it wasn't for PRB coal and free trade policies (which have given new life to COFC) you can almost make a case that Staggers has accellerated the decline of railroading in this country, perhaps by allowing monopolistic management to hang themselves with their own rope, a rope that exists soley due to lack of head to head competition. The point I am trying to make is that neither the pre-Staggers era of comprehensive regulation, nor the post-Staggers era of comprehensive retrenchment, is doing much to guarantee that railroading will finally achieve it's promise. The only way to guarantee railroading's long term prosperity is to (1)make sure all rail customers have access to competitive rail rates and services (which will dramatically increase market share on the demand side), and (2) equalize the cost of constructing and maintaining the rail infrastructure with the cost allocation associated with constructing and maintaining highways, waterways, and airports, so that we may finally see if indeed railroads would assume a 70% natural market share. My views on how to achieve this are well known on this forum: Separate the current Class I oligarchy into infrastructure companies and transporter companies, regulate the infrastructure companies as public utilities while providing public track construction via a share of the federal fuel tax (which would be paid by all transportation modes and then reallocated to better reflect intermodal realities) and maintenance support in the form of maintenance tax credits (plus a property tax exemption, recognizing open access rail lines as public right of way by proxy), and then let the rail transporters go at it in a relatively unregulated environment, similar to trucking transporters. Market forces that have been absent since the beginning of the railroad era would finally be unleashed. Some transporters would fail, while others would prosper, and outsiders would finally be able to test their own theories of rail service innovations. The bottom line is this: If BNSF doesn't want to provide carload or small carset service offerings, then let someone else fill that void. Right now that void is being partially filled by truckers as best as the free market allows, but with predictable long term driver shortages resulting (due to the inherent inability of the trucking genre to handle large volume commodity movements on a consistent efficient basis), it is probably the consensus on this forum that some form of rail transport would be much better at filling that void, and it is a consensus that is well founded. But this can only occur if the proprietary closed acces system is opened up to competitors, or if we can somehow return to the days of multiple railroad company tracks laid into each customer's facility. Even the most ardent anti-open access opponents would probably prefer this scenario to that of pre-Stagger's regulation. [/quote] You certainly have a vision but it takes a majority in each House to pass this into law. None of the 537 people involved want to do that. [/quote] Actually, I would argue that none of those 537 people have the slightest clue about the economic fundamentals of transportation, let alone the negative effects the current closed access rail system has on the economy, such as it's inherent contribution to the U.S. trade deficit (e.g. there are no importers who are captive to any one railroad, while there are a significant number of U.S. exporters who are captive to one of the Class I's). Look at the latest debate over Amtrak funding. Even Republican representatives (who by philosophy should know better) were using the old standby argument of comparing Amtrak funding to highway funding, nevermind that one is a rail passenger service paid for out of the general fund and serving a limited number of constituents, while the other is public owned open access ROW utilized by motor vehicles and funded primarily from user fees. I am still waiting to hear even one politician who can differentiate between passenger services and infrastructure funding, perhaps by causualy mentioning that there is no Ambus, Amair, Amboat, Amblimp, etc. so why do we have an Amtrak? But, rather than re-argue that topic....... The truth is, the idea of open access is new, perhaps too new to have entered into legislative debates. Part of the problem is that the entities that should be be introducing the topic into the lexicon of public debate (such as those organizations that represent captive rail shippers) seem to rather prefer to reha***he concept of reregulation, a lose-lose proposition for both sides. Meanwhile, the Class I propoganda arm (know collectively as the AAR) did a pretty good job of misrepresenting the open access debate when it was just budding during the late 1990's. If history is any lesson, it will take some kind of economic catastrophy involving railroad/shipper relations before the topic will be able to take it's rightful place in the halls of Congress. Meaning alot of people on both sides have to be hurt financially before Congress will act. So much for the idea of pre-emptive economic policy foresight.
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