In his Feb. 20 letter, “Flunking the test for high-speed rail,” Air Transport Association President James E. Landry makes comparisons between high-speed trains and commercial aviation that range from the dubious to the unsubstantiated to the patently false.
“To construct a line between Chicago and Detroit, for example, would cost more than $5 billion,” Mr. Landry writes.
But nobody is proposing to “construct a line” between those cities. In its Aug. 31, 1992, application for federal funding assistance, the Michigan Department of Transportation proposed merely an upgrading of the existing Amtrak-Conrail route. The total bill: just over $750 million, including high-tech signaling and a fleet of Swedish X2000 “tilt trains” capable of maintaining 100 m.p.h. speeds through the old line’s curves.
Mr. Landry claims that high-speed rail systems require government subsidies while commercial airlines pay “far more than their fair share” of the tax-supported airport and airways systems.
He cites no evidence for the claim that airlines pay the full price for their use of federal air traffic control and municipal airport facilities.
A December 1989 Congressional Budget Office report, “The Status of the Airport and Airways Trust Fund: A Special Study,” concludes: “. . . aviation excise tax revenues . . . have been insufficient to finance the trust fund as a full user-pay system . . . private-sector users of the aviation system have been subsidized by general taxpayers since the beginning of the Trust Fund in 1971. . . . Since 1980, the Trust Fund share of FAA operations spending has averaged 25 percent.”
The CBO investigators said that in the 17-year period they studied, user fees paid by airline passengers and freight shippers covered only 45.1 percent of what government spent to run airports and airways.
High-speed rail and commercial aviation work better as partners than as rivals. Across Western Europe, transportation planners are connecting high-speed rail lines directly into airport terminals so that intermediate-distance passengers can transfer directly from fast, comfortable, all-weather trains to wide-body, long-distance airliners without using the cramped, money-losing feeder flights that congest major airports. Valuable landing slots and gates are released for long-range flights that make money, and construction of new airports is avoided.
Lufthansa has been operating leased feeder trains at the Frankfurt and Dusseldorf airports for over a decade; Swiss Federal Railroad’s inter-city trains connect the Geneva and Zurich airports with virtually all of the nation’s medium-sized cities. Alitalia began operating high-speed trains last summer from Rome’s airport to Florence and Naples. French TGV trains will begin serving the Paris and Lyon airports next year.
Instead of fighting the future, Mr. Landry should get on the same wavelength as his colleagues.