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[quote user="John WR"] [quote user="dakotafred"]But continued improvement to air travel and highways finally defeated their [railroad's] best efforts. [/quote] I would emphasize highways, Fred.  The Eisenhower Interstate and Defense Highway System was free to users.  Much of it was not needed for transportation but it was justified by the defense argument.  It was and is an enormous subsidy given to both auto owners and the automobile industry. And yes, there was no way the railroads,who not only paid for their right of way but also pay taxes on it, could complete with government doling out a free highway system.  [/quote] As Earl Swift has outlined in The Big Roads, the concept for the interstate highway system was on the drawing boards long before Eisenhower was president. He simply signed the act that made the system politically possible. The interstate highways were not free to the users. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 created the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) to help pay for the interstate highways. Federal fuel taxes, license fees, excise taxes on heavy vehicles, etc. were (are) collected from motorists, deposited in the HTF, and used to pay 80 to 90 per cent of the cost of the interstate system, with 20 to 10 per cent contributed by the states. The percentage paid by the states changed over the years. Beginning in the 1980s, if I remember correctly, approximately 22 per cent of the HTF monies have been transferred from the HTF to the Mass Transit Administration, used for other federal transport activities or transferred to the U.S. Treasury for deficit reduction. Users of the federal highway system have been subsidizing mass transit as well as other transport activities, i.e. bike lanes, rails to trails, etc. According to Table 4, Net Federal Subsidies per Thousand Passenger-Miles by Mode: FY1990 - 2002, federal highway system users flowed back to the general fund 95 cents per thousand passenger miles of the federal monies collected for the federal road system. Although the data has changed since 2002, it shows that for a significant period of time the users of the federal highway system not only paid for it, they returned the excess monies (user fees) to the Treasury.     Initially the HTF received $25 billion in federal starter funds. The users (motorists) paid off this initial infusion of federal capital. As late as 2005 or thereabouts the HTF had a surplus of several billion dollars. However, by 2007 or 2008 (I cannot remember the year) the surplus was gone and HTF required an infusion of monies from the general fund. Congress had refused to increase the federal fuel taxes since 1992 or 1993. As mentioned, the HTF had run through its surplus, and it did not have the monies necessary to expand and maintain the federal highway system. In FY11 the net transfer was $11.3 billion. Many toll roads (Pennsylvania Turnpike, New York State Throughway, Ohio Turnpike, etc.) had been built and paid for by motorists prior to the implementation of the interstate highway system. These toll roads, as well as numerous toll bridges, have been incorporated into the interstate highway system. Most of them still collect tolls from motorists to pay for the maintenance of their portion of the system and to fund other highway projects.   Passenger trains, especially long distance trains, lost out to the airplane and car for a variety of reasons. At the top of the list is the fact that they are better technologies for most users. They pay for the infrastructure to support them, although they don't always see the true cost.
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