What would America do without socialist European "experts" to guide us?
New York Times reporter Nicola Clark, reporting from Paris for Thursday's edition, delivered the latest Euro-flavored knee-jerk response to the deadly Amtrak crash May 12. Clark assumed the crash was caused by insufficient funding, even though findings indicate the train was going double the speed limit around a tight curve when it derailed: "Low U.S. Rail Spending Leads to Poor Safety, Experts Say -- Investment is Low by Global Standards."
The text box: "A fatality rate almost twice as high as in the European Union."
Clark suggested that travel solutions for the enormous United States will still come from smaller, densely packed (socialistic) Europe and Asia:
Across Europe and East Asia, hundreds of millions of train passengers a year are routinely whisked, at speeds that often exceed 200 miles an hour, over extensive rail networks that, for many, present a more reliable and affordable long-distance alternative than even air travel.
....
In the aftermath of the wreck, and apart from House Speaker John A. Boehner’s dismissal of a question about railway funding as “stupid,” analysts say that if there is one lesson from abroad for preventing accidents like last week’s, it is this: You get what you pay for.
By a global standard, the United States has not been paying much. For the size of its economy, it lags far behind many of the world’s most developed countries in spending on rail networks.
As a consequence, industry experts say, the United States has among the worst safety records despite having some of the least-extensive passenger rail networks in the developed world. Fatality rates are almost twice as high as in the European Union and countries like South Korea, and roughly triple the rate in Australia.
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According to the International Transport Forum of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States invested less than 0.1 percent of its gross domestic product in rail systems in 2013, a quarter of what was spent by Britain and one-sixth of the investments by France and Australia.
Over the past decade, even developing countries, including India, Russia and Turkey, have consistently spent far greater shares of their G.D.P. on rail.
The blame shifted to the Republican-dominated Congress.
The House Appropriations Committee this month knocked back President Obama’s $2.45 billion request for Amtrak for the coming fiscal year to $1.1 billion. That would be $251 million below the current funding level. The transportation spending bill that funds Amtrak will reach the House floor early next month, and a fight on rail spending is assured.
By comparison, Japan spent nearly three times as much as the United States -- more than $100 per person -- with the 28 member countries of the European Union investing similar sums.
Clark is retweeting similar stories from left-wing groups like Think Progress making the same link between alleged lack of funding and the accident. One obsessive talking point: Lamentations over the lack of "positive train control," a safety technology the Times and liberal groups have pushed intensely since the crash to back its premise of a fund-starved Amtrak. Though if it's such a clear and obvious way to prevent rail accidents, it's puzzling why the paper's own reporters have mentioned the phrase precisely once in the last nine months, according to a nytimes.com search. Perhaps they're all just hearing about it now, just like everyone else?
And such glib talk ignores the typical federal bureaucratic blockades. House Speaker John Boehner was quoted on CNN: "The train was going twice the speed limit. Adequate funds were there -- no money was cut from rail safety, and the House passed a bill earlier this spring to reauthorize Amtrak and authorize a lot of these programs." From that same article: "Republicans are instead faulting inefficient allocation of funds and are also now touting a 2012 report from Amtrak's inspector general that showed Amtrak has struggled to implement the PTC [positive train control] mechanism because it has struggled to get the greenlight it needs from the Federal Communications Commission."
National Review editor Rick Lowry explained in a column how subsidized, inefficient Amtrak loses $80 million in food services alone – throwing money at it isn't necessarily a solution. Also, liberals haven't quite faced up the fact that America isn't cut out for high-speed rail -- once you get past urban areas like the Northeast Corridor, it's too vast a place and air travel has an enormous advantage in time and money.
Yet according to Clark and her European "experts" on America, not only must the U.S. spend big on trains Americans don't really like riding, they must spent big consistently.
Their more consistent upkeep of rail systems has allowed European and Asian countries to devote a growing share of spending to state-of-the-art high-speed trains that run on dedicated rail lines fitted with sophisticated sensors and signal technology.
Even on conventional train lines, rail operators are spending heavily each year to expand the share of their networks that are covered by such continuous-monitoring systems, known as automatic train protection in Europe, or positive train control in the United States.
