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[quote user="V.Payne"] "Continuing with the snarkiness or truth memes (depending on one's P.O.V.) how about seeing just how poorly the long distance routes' incremental costs would truly be if each paid rent to the freight rails that more accurately resembled the actual costs?" That sounds fine as a conceptual exercise, just apply the same standards to highway costing, namely private capital Weighted Average Cost of Capital equivalent discount rates to match those needed by investor owned railroads raising money on the market and paying property taxes. Where those rates to be used in the NPV analysis (I typically defalt to AAA bond rates) to determine highway costing, practically no mid or long-distance trucking could survive in the marketplace and practically all rail routes as a consequence would be multiple tracks with no fluidity issues, yielding infrastructure rental rates around 50% more per trainmile than current, or about $7/trainmile, that would cover all costs. You have to address the costing of freight to talk about ground infrastructure costs, this <a href="http://www.nationalcorridors.org/df3/df06242013c.pdf">paper</a> provides a simple method to price road freight that might be politically possible as it avoids automobile taxes. So again, why is it ethical to deny equivalent funding (measured off the interstate cross-subsidy) per person mile for the safer intercity rail alternative? This same mode also just happens to allow one to travel in comfort, accomodates handicapped persons better than any mode, and allows older individuals who have lost eyesight and the ability to sit still in a confined space for long periods to continue to travel to visit their families. After you get past this question and the sillyness of eliminating routes while not touching $600 million in G&A and large station costs, a rational basis for intercity rail for the rest of US is evident. If you answer that this is the way the Highway Trust Fund was configured in the past and rail cannot have the same benefits, I hope you understand that this is a much greater, unconsidered through-back than the scheduling and routes mentioned. The orginal intent of the HTF was inter-regional mobility, but the mechanism employeed intentionally destroyed financially solvent land use density in cities to solve traffic congestion problems through the taxing of use of local roads paid for by general city property tax funds to spread out daily destinations. [/quote] You want us to refer to your paper for an independent verification of your points of view?   The appropriate discount rate for federal borrowing for infrastructure projects is that for the 10 year Treasury note.   The average cost of the marketable Treasury debt as of 12/31/14 was 2.013 per cent, and the average cost of non-marketable debt was 3.182 per cent. The cost of state debt varies from state to state.
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