Obama’s New Cabinet Can Make Trains Run on Time
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-13/obama-s-new-cabinet-can-make-trains-run-on-time.html
By
Stephen Smith
Nov 13, 2012 3:55 PM PT
As President
Barack Obama selects
his second-term Cabinet, all eyes are on the big departments --
State, Treasury, Defense and Justice. Yet he can set the
tone
for his new term with changes in a less-likely place: the
Department of Transportation.
The current secretary, Ray LaHood, is probably stepping
down in 2013, and Obama’s signature transportation policy, a
national high-speed-rail network, is in disarray. The
president’s original goal was to give 80 percent of Americans
access to high-speed rail within 25 years, but so far only
California’s increasingly embattled system is scheduled for
completion by then.
High-speed-rail lines in Wisconsin and
Florida were
canceled by the states’ Republican governors, and Amtrak’s $151
billion plan to bring real bullet trains to the Northeast
corridor is a nonstarter.
With a divided Congress unlikely to finance any significant
portion of Obama’s high-speed-rail
projects, he has to nominate
a secretary who cares as much about reform and good engineering
as securing funding and undertaking flashy projects. A focus on
efficiency over spending should please
House Republicans, whose
support the administration will need if it ever hopes to
increase federal transit funding.
David Gunn, the president of
Amtrak from 2002 to 2005,
cited a lack of technical knowledge as the biggest problem at
the Transportation Department, which he said has devolved into
“an agency that just distributes money.”
Misused Money
“If you look at the
Federal Railroad Administration and the
Department of Transportation, they’ve never really had
professional leadership,” argued Gunn, who managed most
passenger trains on the Eastern seaboard at one point or another
during his career. (Gunn was fired by President George W. Bush’s
Amtrak board in 2005 after objecting to what he viewed as the
administration’s politically motivated attempts to break up the
railroad.)
Although most transit advocates view a lack of funding as
American transit’s biggest obstacle, some, such as
David
Schonbrunn, a longtime
San Francisco Bay area transit activist
who is suing to change California’s high-speed-rail plan, agree
with Gunn’s assessment.
“We’re spending our money in incredibly stupid and
political ways,” Schonbrunn said, “and the only answer from the
leaders of these agencies is ‘Give me more money.’”
Gunn was also critical of the way the Obama administration
allocated the $8 billion in stimulus funds for high-speed rail.
“There are two groups that are absolutely critical to
getting high-speed rail done: freight rail and Amtrak,” he said.
Yet the administration went to state transportation departments
and local politicians, who, Gunn said, don’t know what they are
doing.
The administration has shut out the freight railroads and
Amtrak California from its high-speed-rail plans, instead
vesting
power in the new California High-Speed Rail Authority,
which has little operational experience and a barebones staff.
Another problem, Gunn says, is the silo approach that the
Department of Transportation takes to financing air, highway and
rail projects.
“They desperately need somebody who understands the
interaction between modes,” Gunn said. He cited a costly O’Hare
International Airport
expansion in
Chicago, where he says
passenger capacity goals may have been better addressed by a
high-speed-rail network for the Midwest.
Bad Projects
Right now, air, highway and rail interests frequently
compete against one another to fill the same need. The
government often finances projects to widen and build new
highways parallel to new rail routes, depressing ridership and
limiting the cost-effectiveness of transit.
David Schonbrunn had praise for Peter Rogoff, the current
head of the Federal Transit Administration.
“Peter Rogoff made some really excellent comments about how
we can’t continue to throw money into new projects without
maintaining our current infrastructure,” Schonbrunn said. He
credited Rogoff with canceling the federal contribution to a
widely panned elevated-rail connector from the airport in
Oakland, California, to a Bay Area Rapid Transit station.
But Rogoff also signed off on and
defended federal
appropriations for San Francisco’s controversial Central Subway
under political pressure from House Minority Leader
Nancy
Pelosi. Transit advocates have
roundly criticized the
project
for its high cost and limited utility.
Beyond spending existing funds more responsibly, the
Transportation Department must make regulatory changes if
Obama’s goals for high-speed-rail access are to be met.
The Federal Railroad Administration is already making
progress on one long-overdue reform: rationalizing crash-safety
rules for suburban and intercity passenger rail.
The agency’s current safety standards require trains to be
bulked up to survive crashes, whereas regulators outside of
North America allow lightweight trains, which are faster,
cheaper and more efficient, on existing freight and intercity
tracks. Crumple zones built into modern European and Japanese
designs protect passengers during accidents, and advanced
signaling technology makes such accidents unlikely to occur in
the first place.
In June, federal safety regulators issued a waiver to a
small Dallas-area commuter rail line to use lightweight Swiss
railcars, and the FRA also indicated a willingness to grant more
such waivers in the future. This first move toward modern trains
was driven from within the agency, and reform could be sped up
with political support from higher-ups in the department.
Another aspect of rail policy under the administration’s
control is labor. The president nominates members to Amtrak’s
board and could use this power to push for desperately needed
staffing reforms.
California Success
One candidate whom Gunn said he could recommend for
transportation secretary is Eugene Skoropowski, who made a name
for himself managing California’s Capitol Corridor between
San
Jose and
Sacramento via Oakland. During his tenure, ridership
tripled and the number of trains scheduled per day quadrupled,
turning it from a lowly intercity line into a bustling commuter
system. And he did this without any additional state subsidies.
Because Capitol Corridor trains run on tracks owned by the
Union Pacific Railroad, Skoropowski had to work with the freight
carrier to achieve these ridership gains. Today he works for
Florida East Coast Industries, a freight railroad that is
starting private passenger rail service between Miami and
Orlando, the first in more than a half-century.
Skoropowski’s history of cooperation with the freight-rail
industry stands in marked contrast to the California High-Speed
Rail Authority’s hostile
relationship with the Union Pacific --
hardly the cooperative partnership that David Gunn suggested is
necessary for high-speed rail to succeed in the U.S.
Other transit analysts, such as Joshua Schank of the Eno
Center for Transportation, a research group, agreed that it
might be time for a transportation secretary from a technical
rather than
political background. (The office is sometimes used
for bipartisan gestures: LaHood, Obama’s first-term
transportation secretary, was a Republican U.S. representative
from
Illinois, and Norman Mineta, who served under
George W.
Bush for five years, was a Democratic congressman.)
“With a technical nominee, you usually give them more
leeway,” Schank told me in an interview.
Whomever Obama nominates, the administration should learn
from the failures of its grand and expensive first-term
ambitions. If the White House is willing to listen to the
engineers and technocrats within the department, it might find
some of its goals within reach.
As Gunn put it, “They need somebody that understands how
you accomplish physical things.”
