More Derailings

If you're an American fan of passenger rail, it must feel like being an Irishman who likes erotic art; there's not much in your own homeland for you to appreciate. And thanks to two incoming Republican governors in the Midwest, there's going to be a whole lot less for rail fans in the United States to cheer about.

In Wisconsin, incoming Republican governor Scott Walker says he plans to refuse federal transportation money specifically meant for high-speed rail. Walker insisted that Wisconsin needs more money to fix existing roads and bridges, not build more railways. Walker plans to refuse $810 million for such a project, citing the burden between $7.5 million and $15 million it would place on taxpayers to pay for operating expenses. Walker sounds reasonable, though, in comparison to former congressman John Kasich, the governor-elect of Ohio. Kasich, who's also refusing federal rail money, also cited hard numbers - $17 million in taxes to pay for more than half of the $29 million cost of operating it - but added, "We don’t have any idea who would even ride the train. This is just the federal government wanting to spend money, and they've got it all wrong."

Kasich doesn't "have any idea who would even ride the train?" How about people who need to travel to Columbus from Cleveland or Cincinnati - or travel across Ohio - who don't want to put up with driving on Interstate 71 because it's too much of a hassle? How about people who want to take the train to transfer to an Amtrak train to take them to New York or Chicago? Mr. Kasich, do you have any idea about the cleaner air, less congested highways, and new jobs high-speed rail in Ohio would generate? Or how much more cost-effective it would by than more highway construction? Do you have any idea at all? About anything?

Kasich, a budget expert and former Wall Street executive, knows his numbers. But, like any other number cruncher, he knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Walker and Kasich would have gladly taken stimulus money for more highways, but Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican, put his foot down. Trains or nothing. And nothing is what the residents of those two states are going to get. One Midwestern governor, Pat Quinn of Illinois, is happy to see his counterparts in Wisconsin and Ohio refuse the railroad money. Quinn, a Democrat who was just elected to a term in his own right after completing the infamous Rod Blagojevich's second term, is eager to get more money fort his state's high-speed passenger train program, and Illinois's senior senator, Richard Durbin, has said his state will be happy to take the money Wisconsin and Ohio don't want. LaHood, also from Illinois, might be happy to oblige.

It's enough to make me want to move to Chicago. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie has killed the proposed passenger rail tunnel to Manhattan. And as if that weren't bad enough, negotiations between NJ Transit and Amtrak on a shared rail tunnel to New York City have broken down.

So, apparently, has common sense.

Derailed

New Jersey governor Chris Christie has demonstrated his knack for understanding the price of everything and the value of nothing. This past Thursday, after $600 million had been spent to begin a new passenger rail tunnel under the Hudson River to relieve congestion in the existing 100-year-old train tunnel to Manhattan, Christie announced he was cancelling the project because cost overruns had made the price tag on the project - which he supported during the 2009 gubernatorial campaign - from less than $9 billion to about $14 billion. Christie explained that New Jersey can't spend money it does not have.

Except that the rail tunnel would create six thousand construction jobs and 45,000 permanent jobs once completed by the 2018 target date. It would also get 22,000 cars off New Jersey highways and relieve congestion in the Lincoln Tunnel between New Jersey and New York City. Christie also was ready to throw away $3 billion in federal money for the project, which cannot be allocated to other projects. Democrats in the New Jersey legislature and the state's two Democratic U.S. Senators, Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, tried unsucessfully to get Christie to reconsider. Appropriately enough, it took a Republican - Ray LaHood, the Secretary of Transportation - to get Christie to grant the project a two-week reprieve in an attempt to revive it. Some of have expressed speculation that Christie is trying to use the threat of stopping the project as a bargaining chip to renegotiate the costs.

The tunnel plan was not perfect. It does not connect commuters directly with the new Moynihan Station being built out of the old Pennsylvania Station in New York, and a planned connection to Grand Central Terminal was scuttled. But the benefits of the connection far outweighed the flaws, and Jeff Tittel, the director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, has suggested the reprieve be used to correct the plan's weaknesses.

Despite the need for new transportation infrastructure in this country, Christie's bid to cancel this rail tunnel project is likely to enhance his standing in the national Republican party as a disciplinary cost-cutter. Republicans in other parts of the country, after all, don't have to worry about commuting to New York by train. But it could also help Christie in New Jersey. First, he wouldn't have to raise any transportation taxes - least of all the gasoline tax - to pay for it. Second, most New Jerseyans wouldn't be affected by the cancellation of the project. Most New Jerseyans commute by car to suburban office parks in places like Paramus, Parsippany, Piscataway, and other godawful sprawlscapes whose names begin with the letter P. Thirdly, many New Jerseyans were unaware of the rail tunnel anyway.

Christie does not have New Jersey's interests at heart. All he cares about is saving money for himself and his rich cronies. And to think his petty, miserly agenda - which he has pushed through like the arrogant bully he is - is winning plaudits nationwide.

Mr. Toyoda Goes to Washington

I didn't learn much about or get any meaningful insight in the continuing story of Toyota's quality control problems after watching part of Akio Toyoda's testimony to the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the matter. Toyoda, the company president and grandson of the company's founder, apologized profusely for the malfunctioning breaks and accelerators that have caused many troubles - some of them serious - but I would have been happier if he'd sweated just as profusely. He actually took the time to say that Toyota remains a car company of good values whose quality control lapses are inconsistent with their business philosophy (why wouldn't they be?) and insist that electronics had nothing to do with the sudden acceleration problems. This latter statement contradicted that of James Lentz, Toyota's highest ranking U.S. sales executive, who said such a problem could not be ruled out.

Toyoda's statement, for all of its contrition, seemed to be divorced from reality, as he declared that his "personal confidence level is 100%" that there is no defect exists in his company's electronic throttles. Toyota wasn't always like this. Back in the seventies and eighties, they would be all over a car on the first report of a problem, but now they've waited for the problems to pile up before even acknowledging that something might be wrong.

I feel sorry for Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who has been diligently investigating this matter based on patterns of complaints regarding the cars but has come under fire for not moving aggressively enough, despite all the evidence that he's done the best possible job. I don't feel particularly sorry for Toyoda, who says he takes this matter personally because his name is on every car his company sells.

Well, a variation of it anyway.

Meanwhile, good riddance to Hummer, which GM has announced will be discontinued after a deal to sell the brand fell through. Like anyone really needs an oversized SUV with military capabilities.

You Call This Moving Forward?

Toyota has finally gotten around to doing something about the sticky accelerators in eight of their models, now that the company has been forced to admit that the problem was far greater than a case of bad floor mats. Toyota has recalled 2.3 million cars in the U.S. to replace a plastic piece in their gas pedal setup in cars dating as far back as 2005 to avoid unintended acceleration in the future, just as the company has stopped their assembly lines to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again.

Then the previously unaffected Prius turned out to have faulty brakes.

This is the biggest disaster involving a foreign car company since Volkswagen was sued by the federal Trade Commission in the early 1980s for failing to warn customers of high oil consumption in the original Rabbit, the car that began the long malaise for VW in the United States. Toyota's quality issue is similarly damaging, and now their popular hybrid model has a separate issue entirely. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, easily one of the most diligent and thorough Secretaries of Transportation in his agency's 44-year history, even went so far as to suggest that Toyota owners should stop driving their cars. He meant that Toyota owners should get their cars fixed as soon as possible, and he apologized for his poor choice of words, but damage was still done - Toyota stock plummeted on Wall Street today.

Oh yeah, and the National Highway and Traffic Satety Administration had to send someone to Japan to get Toyota to take this case seriously.

The big winners in this sorry affair, of course, are General Motors and Ford, whose quality is improving and who suddenly have an advantage of Asia's - and possibly the world's - biggest automaker. Europe's biggest automaker may come out ahead as a result as well; Volkswagen has been emboldened in the European market, where Toyota has become a serious competitor, and VW is also on track to increase its U.S. sales to 800,000 by the end of coming decade with several new models, including their Camry-style intermediate sedan which will be made in their new plant in Tennessee starting next year. Several other auto fans must be looking at Toyota with some schadenfreude. After all, Toyota's executives had a sense of smugness about them, while the company expanded relentlessly even as so many of their competitors were struggling. In fact, this gas pedal problem began with the 2005 models, even as Toyota was acting as if nothing was going to stop its long, steady rise.

Indeed, it seemed preposterous back in thirty years ago that Toyota would ever have quality problems . . . just as it seemed improbable sixty years ago that Detroit would ever be seriously threatened by foreign competition.

Nothing is forever.

Transportation Orientation

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced on Thursday that the Car Allowance Rebate System. popularly known as the "cash for clunkers" program, will end tomorrow at 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time, in recognition of the $3 billion allotted for it about to run out. This will give dealers time to finalize the paperwork on deals handled so far, and announcing the end of the program four days in advance has allowed those interested in getting a $4500 government rebate for a more fuel-efficient vehicle to get in on it before the program ends.

The program has proven to be wildly successful, getting several old gas guzzlers off the road, resulting in a 60% increase in the fuel efficiency of the American private vehicle fleet, and it gave a big boost to automakers hurt by the recession. However, all has not been perfect - the bureaucratic red tape means that some dealers will have to wait awhile to get their money from the government.

And although it's gotten more people into a Ford Focus and out of a Ford Explorer, it's not enough. The next thing the Obama administration has to do is work toward more public transportation - not just modernized intercity rail (which is slowly getting traction; witness my blog entry on Bobby Jindal from late last week), but on commuter rail, streetcars, light rail with exclusive rights of way, and city buses, not to mention more transit-oriented development and retrofitting as much urban sprawl as possible to a transit-based transportation network. It won't be easy, but it could provide more jobs and boost the economy.

We can start with public buildings. Government rules dictate that post offices, for example, have to be built to accommodate cars without any meaningful requirements, if any, for pedestrian access. This is how the post office in my hometown was built; dedicated in 1975, the West Caldwell, New Jersey post office sits on the outskirts of town, off a county highway, with no sidewalk access and plenty of parking. (By contrast, the post office in neighboring Caldwell, built in 1934, is in walking distance of my house - ironic, you'll agree, since I don't live in Caldwell - and there's only parking for three vehicles on the street, with a fifteen-minute restriction.) Oregon House member Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat representing transit-friendly Portland, has sought to get these federal rules repealed, without success so far.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't mind seeing the cash-for-clunkers program continue a bit longer, and I say this as someone who's not in the market for a new car at this time.