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Ain't gonna happen. You've got the problems of ROW acquisition, a regulatory agency mostly stuck in the 1890s (but wanting PTC on top of that), and the fact that every shovelful you dig and track you lay is going to require an environmental impact statement and the associated Federal and State lawsuits.
And of course the problem of convincing people to USE it.
Disagree. Railroads require massive subsidies. Restoring coal jobs dose not. It requires getting rid of some environmental regulations that I disagree with getting rid of, but if the metric is jobs/taxpayer dollars, coal kills railroads.
The whole gubmint spending creates jobs is, to a large extent, bunk economics. It pretends that money grows on trees. Spend $1 billion, gt 47,000 jobs! Uh, no. That $1 billion did not just magically appear. You took it from somewhere. Either you taxed the private sector $1 billion which removed $1 billion dollars that was out there producing jobs or you took the $1 billion from the future by borrowing which means $1 billion + interest dollars will be removed in the future that is out there creating jobs. If you want to create jobs, hands down the most effective method is just taking a billion dollars from the productive sector and giving it to the non-productive sector as cold hard cash welfare. Yes, you're stilling taking money from the productive sector making it less productive but that redistribution of wealth (effectively reverse trick down economics) creates jobs. Obviously you can't infinitely do that as eventually the productive sector gets tired of being bled dry, workers go join the unproductive sector as why work when you can just get paid not to work?
Stupid rail basically is just horribly inefficient way of taking $1 billion and giving it away in welfare. You end up with something of no value with ongoing carrying costs that constantly require money to be taken from the productive economy and shoveled into something that's not even useful just to keep it operating. Now if it's not stupid rail that's objectively worse than cheaper alternatives (namely the bus), then, well, it's not stupid rail. Still less effective at "creating" jobs than straight cash welfare but you end up with something at least semi-useful.
Disagree. Railroads require massive subsidies. Restoring coal jobs dose not. It requires getting rid of some environmental regulations that I disagree with getting rid of, but if the metric is jobs/taxpayer dollars, coal kills railroads.
If coal jobs are mostly disappearing from competition with natural gas and mechanization, railroads are a better bet as it's easy to produce jobs greater than a collapsing industry.
The article focuses on passenger rail; Amtrak employees 20,000 people. If in some fantasy expansion, ridership doubled, maybe employment would increase by 10,000 people [assuming some of the ridership just goes into filling empty seats and administration doesn't scale that much with ridership]. This is not high on a national level. Bulk of rail ridership in the country is from local and regional agencies. Amtrak annual ridership is about the same as MBTA (Boston) commuter rail ridership. But do they need more employees or less? They have conductors; the shorter lines are similar in western light rail lines. Turnstiles or pop inspectors would allow a more rapid-transit like service at similar or lower staffing. The high staffing keeps operating costs high.
A trend in "21st century rail" in closed rapid transit system is driverless. Rail without almost no employees.
A facetious article. Railroad employment has also been in decline for many years and for similar reasons. Less usage combined with automation. Also revised work rules. For example there used to be a crew of five, and a caboose. There were manned control towers at every junction. Abandonment of little used branch lines means fewer track workers. And coal is a major commodity shipped by rail.
Even commuter rail is losing employees. A lot fewer station agents.
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