Has The Time Come For A Great Lakes High Speed Rail Line?

When my wife was a summer advertising agency intern in Chicago and I was a law student in Ann Arbor, we actually used the Amtrak service between those cities quite a few times.

The case for a Toronto to Detroit high speed rail line is pretty strong. It would serve a huge share of Canada's entire population with urban centers that are all along a straight line that is flat and manageable to build a high speed rail line on, and Canada is more familiar with the benefit of high speed rail from its stronger connections to Europe.

I'd need to be convinced with more facts that a Detroit to Minneapolis high speed rail line (or parts of it) could be viable and make some kind of economic sense. It might be viable, it might not.

Another route not shown that has been seriously considered for more than thirty year, but never gone anywhere, and wouldn't be too expensive to build (its flat and a lot of the land between the major cities is farmland), would be a Cincinnati-Dayton-Columbus-Cleveland line connecting Ohio's major urban centers. It wouldn't require interstate cooperation, which could make funding it operations and the political process of getting it goin easier (much like high speed rail lines at various stages of development in California, Florida, and Texas). It might give Ohio a much needed economic boost, from construction in the short term, and good transportation infrastructure aggregating the connectively of its major urban centers in the long run. But it is also possible that Ohio's economy has declined so much in the last thirty years that there isn't enough traffic between its major urban centers to support it. Projects in Florida and Texas, however, have at least demonstrated, however, that being a red state isn't an insurmountable political barrier to support for high speed rail.

I do think that the approach of focusing on specific corridors that are either entirely in one state, or in a small number of states in a single region, is a better one than pie-in-the-sky national high speed rail network approaches.

The virtue of focusing on specific corridors also reflects the fact that the sweet spot for high speed rail is medium length trips. 

For long distance travel, the speed of commercial air travel and the lack of a need to maintain expensive infrastructure on the ground between airports through varied terrain with large swaths of low population density, gives commercial air travel a decisive advantage over high speed rail. 

For short distance travel, the high speed doesn't deliver enough of a marginal advantage relative to driving and intracity rail, and having lots of local stops destroys the speed benefits of high speed rail. 

But, for medium length trips of hundreds of miles to several hundred miles, high speed rail can provide significant benefits in speed and comfort over driving, and its ability to deliver passengers all of the way to a city center and its lack of long delays associated with security and checked baggage can give it an edge relative to commercial air travel (and also puts pressure on the commercial air travel system to reduce those delays). Combining it with low volume, high value mail, parcel, and freight service could also tip the balance in favor of high speed rail's economic viability.

The Pacific Coast, improvements in the Northeast Corridor, the connector in place between major Florida cities, planned Texas triangle, and LA to Las Vega routes, for example, do make sense.

I'm ambivalent about Colorado high speed rail proposals. 

In Colorado along I-25, sometimes including cities in Wyoming and New Mexico. I-25 south of Denver is quite fast, and it isn't particularly bogged down north of Denver either. Quality bus service on I-25 could fill the needs that I-25 high speed rail service would fairly well. But construction costs for high speed rail in the I-25 corridor are pretty low since its flat and much of its isn't densely populated. 

The analysis for and against high speed rail along I-70 in Colorado from DIA to Vail or Glenwood Springs is very different. The need for better, faster passenger transportation options there that are less prone to interruption from landslides and weather related accidents is much more clear. But construction costs in the mountains are very high indeed, and much of the demand for high speed rail along I-70 is seasonal.

The U.S. is a big and diverse national geographically and economically. There are many places in the U.S. where the better approach in the intermediate term would be to end Amtrak as a passenger transportation option entirely, in favor of boosting the quality of intercity bus service, and to relegate Amtrak or some other future passenger rail service to a fully private sector, unsubsidized, scenic/mobile tourism destination service that isn't really about getting people from here to there efficiently (something that doesn't require high speed service).

How Urban Are U.S. States?

This map from 2010 shows the percentage of the population of each state that is urban. Some of the results are odds with our intuition. While it isn't a full explanation, a lot of the red state, blue state divide is a rural-urban divide.

This in turn, sheds light on the use of transit in different places in the U.S. The West has lots of empty space. But the places with people in them are often urban and high density.

The Geopolitical Impacts And Timing Of The Decline Of Fossil Fuels

Colorado will not use any coal for electricity generation by 2031. It currently has ten coal fired power plants. It will take three of them off line in 2025. The rest are scheduled to be taken off line in the five years that follow.

Colorado will be more aggressive than most states in this time frame, but some states are already coal free, and almost all states are reducing the extent to which coal powers their electrical grids.

Greatly improved solid state electric vehicle batteries will start coming on line in 2025 and vehicles powered by them will make up a large share of new vehicles by 2031, greatly reducing gasoline and diesel consumption.

These developments, taken together, will greatly reduce U.S. fossil fuel consumption over the next seven years, and the reduction will be particularly dramatic for coal consumption. The falling demand for coal will hit Wyoming and West Virginia hard, because they are the two dominant producers of coal right now in the U.S. (the U.S. imports little, if any, coal). This will also heavily impact freight rail and barge transportation demand, because those are the two main ways that coal is delivered to power plants. Coal is the single largest revenue stream for both means of transportation.

The coal fired power plants are being replaced largely by wind, solar, and natural gas over the next seven years. So, the U.S. is going to see continued strong demand for natural gas, which is mostly sourced from North America, but should be seeing a gradual decline in petroleum demand (a fuel that the U.S. is largely self-sufficient in now, although global oil prices still influence domestic oil prices). The energy self-sufficiency of the U.S., however, buffers it from major macroeconomic shocks driven by rising oil prices like those seen in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The increase in the share of vehicles that are electric, spurred by solid state batteries, will be global. Indeed, many places in Europe are already in the lead on this front. And, since gasoline and diesel powered vehicles are the predominant end use of oil, this should drive down the price of oil in the global market. This will make high cost oil producers, like fracking wells and off-shore oil rigs, uneconomic first.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine War has put intense pressure on Europe, which has cut off or reduced access to Russian oil and gas, to be more efficient in order to reduce its fossil fuel consumption, to increase it share of renewable power, to delay shutting down coal fired power plants, and to keep its nuclear power plants on line. This may mean more insulation, more blankets and sweaters, more heat pumps, more electric vehicles, a shift to buses and trains, and fewer natural gas power plants.

China is in the way of these developments strongly addressing global warming, because it seems to be increasing, rather than decreasing, its coal consumption in the short to medium term. 

But China is also a world leader in electric car production and in building a high speed rail network, so China may play an important part in reducing global petroleum consumption. And, China's path in electric vehicle development is likely to heavily influence countries in Southeast Asia that in its sphere of influence, and to a lesser extent, may influence Africa and South America in which China has attempted to expand its economic influence.

China is also a leading producer of high efficiency, low cost solar panels, and eventually this, together with its rapidly declining fertility rates and starting to shrink population, may make its current round of investments in coal fired power plants short lived.

As oil demand and prices fall, this will eventually undermine the often authoritarian leaning countries with heavily oil dependent economies, in the Middle East, but also Brunei, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria. It will also impact Norway, the U.K., Canada, and U.S. states like Alaska, Louisiana, and Texas that are major oil producers. Oil wealth is what has made ultra-conservative Islam feasible in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. It has been central to the economies of Iran and Iraq. It has been an important factor allowing Russia and Venezuela and Iran to continue to be authoritarian.

These countries will see a collapse in their standard of living and they will face intense pressure to convert to a commercial economy. Most of their "guest workers" will be sent home for good.

Amtrak Ridership By Route

By comparison Greyhound served about 25 million passengers in 2023 and commercial airlines served about 369 million passengers.

Why Are Buses And Intracity Rail In The U.S. So Crime Ridden?

The biggest reason for low bus and intracity rail usage in the United States by international standards is that crime in and around transit is high and these means of transportation don't feel safe. It is a long standing issue, and it isn't nearly such a serious problem in countries all of the world. 

Israelis, for example, packed buses in the course of living their every day lives, even when suicide bombers were terrorizing those buses.

A recent Denver Post story quantifies and characterizes the problem in Denver's transit system.

When Denver resident Jana Angelo rides the Regional Transportation District’s buses and trains, she feels trapped and says she sometimes hugs herself for fortitude.

She’s smelled fumes from passengers smoking fentanyl. She’s heard unhinged riders’ rants. Two “really high” men once fought right in front of her, said Angelo, 29.

“I was like, ‘Stop the bus!’ ” she said. “But the driver did not.”

Angelo packs a knife just in case, she said, and wears headphones, avoiding conversation. . . .

Passengers on RTD’s buses and trains were assaulted or threatened at the rate of one per day over the last three years, according to agency records obtained by The Denver Post. RTD drivers also are assaulted regularly — more than 100 times a year on average since 2019, records show — as they work amid crime and antisocial behavior, including riders using illegal drugs and unhoused people who sleep in station elevators and on climate-controlled buses and trains. 

. . .

The agency’s general manager, Debra Johnson, acknowledged the problems and said ensuring safety is critical. She’s discussed rising violence and crime in public transit with her counterparts in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

“We’re all adversely impacted by the same elements of society,” Johnson said in an interview, referring to mental health problems, substance use and homelessness. “These are societal issues. Whatever’s happening in a municipality is going to spill over into the transit system. What are we collectively doing to help minimize and mitigate these societal issues?” 

. . .

RTD bus driver Dan Day, 43, recalled how, on a cold day in 2020 during his first year on the job, he saw a man down, bleeding from his head, while another man kicked him at the Decatur Station along Federal Boulevard.

Day took the bleeding man onto the bus and handed him paper towels. As he steered the bus around the station, the attacker approached it, pointing a gun. He climbed on, aiming the barrel at the bleeding man. Day was caught between them, learned it was a dispute about a sister, and brokered a truce.

“I had a sense he wouldn’t shoot,” Day said. “…I was just trying to follow procedure, to call dispatch, let them know what happened.”

RTD supervisors offered him therapeutic counseling. He declined, turning instead to classic stoic philosophers: “My own tools to just cope with scary and difficult situations,” Day said. “Keep yourself in the moment. This is just a moment in time. It is going to pass.” 

. . .

RTD bus drivers and train operators were physically assaulted 463 times between January 2019 and April 2024 — a rate of roughly seven assaults per month, according to the records obtained by The Post through a Colorado Open Records Act request.

In addition, drivers have reported 501 verbal assaults and threats of violence since 2021 — a dozen per month on average, the records show.

Assaults and threats targeting RTD passengers happen more often, according to the records. Since January 2021, 1,375 passengers have experienced physical assaults and verbal threats along bus and rail routes, records show. That’s an average of 34 a month over the past three years.

The troubles appear concentrated along busy streets including Colfax Avenue, Broadway and Federal Boulevard.

RTD’s transit police have been busy. The agency’s tallies show that, during the first half of 2023, transit officers made a monthly average of 36 arrests. They responded to a monthly average of 60 assaults, 486 disturbances, 1,206 drug-related incidents, 389 trespasses and 58 instances of vandalism, according to an agency document.

This year, a homicide on an RTD bus in west Denver heightened concerns. A 13-year-old boy has been charged with murder in the fatal shooting on Jan. 27 of a 60-year-old grandfather whose leg was blocking an RTD bus aisle.

Illegal drug use happens almost daily, drivers and train operators say. 

. . .

Light rail operator Roy Martinez, who previously worked as a bus driver and endured assaults, said he regularly smells illegal drugs on light-rail trains such as the E Line that connects downtown Denver with the south suburbs.

Typically, a rider places a fentanyl pill on a piece of foil and crushes it. Then the rider lights the powder and, hunkering under a hood or blanket, inhales the fumes.

Those fumes rise and spread through the train’s air system, Martinez said, noting he detects odors inside the locked front cabin where he runs the train. There’s no option but to push through to the next stop. “Then you stop the train, open the doors, air it out,” he said.

From the Denver Post.

The story presents a mix of questions and answers, some tucked away behind the scenes.

One obvious issue is that the U.S. has a weak social safety net, and the highest percentage of people who drive their own cars, if their licenses aren't revoked, and don't use transit. Transit is disproportionately left with people who are too disabled to drive, people whose licenses have been revoked, and people who are very poor. Even people without licenses who have money often ride share instead.

So, transit is heavily weighted with very poor people and is not well counter-balanced, most of the time, with middle class and more affluent people. It is also heavily weighted with people who have lost driver's licenses due to illegal conduct and substance abuse.

Big cities in the U.S. with transit systems also tend to have riders who lack social cohesion that can impose order through nearly universally held social norms, in lieu of formal law enforcement.

But another issue is that policy makers and people who talk about policy and involved in politics, like me, struggle to understand why people who act in anti-social ways in and around transit are acting the way that they do.

I can completely understand why someone might become addicted to smoking fentanyl. But I can't fathom at all why someone would feel like this is an activity that makes sense to engage in while riding a bus or a light rail train.

I'm comfortable trusting that Debra Johnson, the general manager of Denver's Regional Transportation District has a better handle on what's going on that I do. She blames mental illness, substance abuse and homelessness.

In other words, mentally ill and homeless drug users tend to use drugs on buses and train cars because that's more comfortable than doing it on the streets, under a bridge, or in an alley.

Public libraries, which are one of the few places you can just hang out without paying money, in a place shielded from the weather, face similar problems, although seemingly, fewer violent assaults.

Anecdotally, at least, the assaults seem to be driven by poor people with a lack of an ability to control anger and impulse, and a lack of access in terms of both personal social skills and formal access to other recourse to resolve situations where they feel aggrieved. 

It isn't that working class and middle class people don't often do some of the same things. But they don't do that at bus stops, on buses, and on light rail trains. Driving a car reduces the amount of potentially triggering interactions you have with other people, although even that doesn't stop road rage incidents.

These situations on transit and in urban neighborhoods are something that urban people can't ignore, which is one of the reasons that urban people tend to be more liberal.

The whole situation is also an apt example of what makes illegal drugs a problem that we have invoked the criminal justice system to address, even if it has done a very poor job of it. Most vices, including illegal drug use, are primarily a problem because they are instrumental in creating a "bad neighborhood." 

If drug users were out of sight in an opium den somewhere, and didn't bother everyone else, we'd care less. And, modern opium dens might even be equipped to deal with overdoses and other forms of drug induced anti-social behavior.

Improving Government

Government has a mix of problems. Sometimes it regulates too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it owns too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it is just operated in the wrong way. This post is a grab bag of ideas about improving it.

* Sidewalks should be publicly owned and maintained. Individual responsibility of property owners for this doesn't work because low rates of non-maintenance (including lack of prompt snow removal) makes the network of sidewalks much less valuable.

* Bicycles should usually not share roads with cars and trucks. They should use sidewalks or dedicated, protected bike paths and lanes.

* Amtrak has failed and should be shut down outside the Northeast Corridor.

* The U.S. Postal System worked well for a long time, but in the era of widespread parcel delivery services and e-mails and texts, it no longer does. Strong Veteran's preferences and higher pay than private sector equivalents don't justify it. Free mail for incumbents in Congress don't justify it. Delivering junk mail is not a good enough reason for a massive public enterprise. Fewer and fewer letters of significance are delivered that way. Money orders are no longer economically important and can be provided by private commercial banks and money services. Subsidizing rural living isn't a good reason for it.

* Occupational licensing is required when it shouldn't be. When it is required, requirements like a lack of a criminal record are often inappropriate for people who have been non-recidivist for a long enough time (about five to seven years) when the risk of future crime fades to the background level. Worse yet is construction trade licensing at the local level when it should be at the state level, fostering a high level of non-compliance. Independent legal para-professions should be allowed much more liberally, although licensing that might be appropriate. There should be a common database of licensing discipline since many disqualifying acts for one profession should also apply to others.

* Zoning and land use regulation should be dramatically paired back and places like Colorado finally realize that this is true and driving high housing prices. Deregulating is better than mandating affordable housing or rent control. Development fees to mitigate externalities of government costs caused by development, however, make sense. 

* Involuntary landmark designation is almost always a bad idea and an unfunded mandate. If it is important enough historically to preserve the government should buy it and rent it.

* Building codes are critical and non-compliance with permit requirements is far too high. But building codes are also too restrictive and the processing of building permits is much too slow. A system of private building code compliance auditors similar to the CPA system might be better.

* We should do a better job of discouraging people from building disaster prone housing in flood zones, fire zones and other "stupid zones".

* We should do a better job of encouraging off site manufacturing of buildings and large building modules.

* Property taxes are a decent way to finance local government (and shouldn't exempt non-profits and governments other than the one imposing them) but are a bad way to finance public K-12 education which is the main way that they are used now.

* Electing coroners, treasurers, clerks, surveyors, secretaries of state, engineers, and judges (even in routine judicial retention elections) is a horrible idea.

* Electing sheriffs and district attorneys and attorneys-general isn't as horrible an idea, but is still a worse idea than having elected officials appoint them, directly or indirectly.

* State and local school and college boards would be better not elected by the general public. Local school boards should be elected by student's parents. College boards could be elected by alumni or appointed by the elected official who make their funding decisions. State school boards should be appointed by the state officials who fund state K-12 education.

* Shorter ballots are better. In the England, there is one nation election in which you vote for a single legislator on a partisan ballot in a single district, irregularly, but not less than every five years absent a world war, for a government that does everything that the state and federal governments do in the U.S., with no primary elections since parties nominate their own candidates internally, and there is one set of partisan local council elections for one or two posts, and there are few referenda a lifetime, and they are democratic enough, despite having a monarchy and a house of lords. Very modest public electoral input is enough.

* I don't favor a system quite as simple as England's. But we should still have much shorter ballots.

* Rare recall elections make sense for officials who serve longer terms and perhaps for judges and other public officials who are now elected but shouldn't be.

* State constitutions and local charters should have less detail and so that changes to them should be things that require voter approval and not housekeeping measures.

* Some referenda on tax and debt issues is appropriate, but Colorado, with TABOR overdoes it. New taxes, and not new revenues from existing taxes, should get public votes. Maybe bond issues that commit a government to substantial tax obligations from general revenues but not renewals of them.

* Citizen initiatives have their place in overcoming systemic flaws in the legislative system and making elections interesting to voters. But it should be a bit harder and more structured and generally should avoid spending and taxing decisions that need to be made globally.

* Colorado mostly does the probate process right, although probate procedure could use more structure. Most states make the process too intrusive.

* When there is a single post in a candidate election, dispensing with primaries, having a majority to win requirement, and having runoff elections would be preferable to first past the post elections and to instant runoff elections.

* There would be merit to electing state legislatures and state congressional delegations by proportional representation.

* There would be merit to making state legislatures unicameral.

* The electoral college should be abolished in favor of a direct popular vote.

* The franchise should be expanded. The voting age should be reduced to sixteen. Non-citizens should be allowed to vote. Felons, even felons in prison, should be allowed to vote (in their pre-incarceration place of incarceration).

* HOAs are horrible but sometimes necessary institutions. They should be abolished or replaced where possible, and be restructured with fewer powers and less discretion where not possible. HOA covenants are routinely unreasonably restrictive.

* Municipal ordinances related to zoning and land use should have fines or other civil penalties, not criminal penalties.

* Arbitration on the U.S. model is usually a bad idea and should be banned in many circumstances.

* We should have a more pro-active way of intervening in cases where people are mentally ill or cognitively impaired, and the system for adjudicating these cases is too cumbersome.

* Single judges should not handle parenting time and parental responsibilities cases, and the best interests of the child standard should have more detailed substances to guide it. Alimony should also be less discretionary.

* There should be a right to counsel in all cases involving "persons" such as child custody cases, protective proceedings, and immigration cases.

* Forum shopping in the federal courts needs to be better restrained, and allowing a single forum shopped judge to issue national injunctions is problematic.

* After some rocky starts, regulation and technical private management of junk faxes, junk telephone calls, and even junk email has made some real progress. Social media junk is less well regulated.

* Privacy regulation often does more harm than good. Juvenile justice privacy does more harm than good in most cases, educational privacy goes too far, and Europe's GDPR goes too far. Secrecy around ownership of closely held companies is too great and the exception under the Corporate Transparency Act is far too complicated. There are places for privacy regulation but it needs to be cut way back. Secrets are often harmful in hard to quantify ways.

* Cryptocurrency serves few, if any, legitimate purposes, is an environmental disaster, and should be discouraged.

* Programs to help the poor need to have much less paperwork and red tape; means testing is rarely a good choice unless it is integrated into the tax system.

* Some tax credits for poor and middle income people, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Obamacare insurance premium subsidies, are far too complicated.

* State and local government funded free wi-fi for all would make lots of sense.

* There is a logic to allowing vouchers for religious private K-12 schools, but on balance it does too much to support religious institutions at public expense. Charter schools, i.e. public schools with autonomy from school boards, are a better approach. School choice of some kind does make sense among public ordinary and charter schools, ideally, statewide, rather than only within a school district.

* Boarding schools attached to high schools in more urban areas would be a better alternative to highly subsidized tiny rural high schools.

* We do a horrible job of managing the business of health care. The requirement that doctors be the sole owners of medical practices also forces them into being small business owners when they are ill suited to that part of their jobs and leads to bad systems and poor health care administration and bad financing arrangements. Almost every other country, in many varied models, does a better job. The current system results in overpaid health care providers (doctors, nurses, drug companies, medical equipment companies, private hospital system owners, etc.), for inferior results. Our drug prices and medical equipment prices and ambulance prices and ER prices are all vastly higher than in other countries and this isn't mostly driven by private pay medical education or medical malpractice lawsuits.

* We need to create more medical school slots. We have too few doctors and are compensating for that with too many senior paraprofessionals like nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, and midwives. We should also allow more non-M.D.'s to provide the care that psychiatrists do since the knowledge base for psychiatrists doesn't overlap heavily with that of M.D.'s and where it does overlap can be taught separately.

* The substance of pass-through taxation in taxing closely held business income once at roughly individual tax rates while allowing limited liability, is good, but the actual pass-through tax mechanism is not. Subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code is not a good approach for taxing closely held limited liability entities, it complexity, it phantom income, and more don't work well. A double taxation reducing or limiting variation on the C-corporation model would be much better.

* We do a poor job of taxing hot assets in international taxation.

* We lack adequate guidance for remote worker labor and tax regulation, and haven't updated our laws adequately to reflect the era of independent contractors.

* We over regulate many prescription drugs and under regulate supplements and herbal remedies and the like. Homeopathic remedies and other supplements need to be regulated more like drugs. Prescription drug approval when approved elsewhere should be easier. Prescription approval for experimental drugs for the terminally ill, or in a pandemic, should be easier. More non-abuse prone prescription drugs should be available over the counter or with pharmacist approval.

* Prostitution should be decriminalized or legalized to a greater extent.

* We vastly under-regulate firearms and explosives and military equipment.

* We do a poor job of commercial air travel security, imposing too much of a burden and delay for too little benefit in a security theater way, at an excessive cost and a greatly excessive externality cost. We also do a crap job of managing luggage charges and checked luggage, and we are more inefficient than we need to be in how quickly commercial aircraft are loaded and unloaded.

* Uber, etc. revealed that we over-regulate taxis, but that we do need some regulation to assure riders are safe from dangerous or dangerous to them drivers.

* Buses and intracity rail won't thrive until we make them feel safer and comfortable.

* Public energy utilities do mostly a good job, except in Texas which opted out of the national energy grid.

* Clean water and good sewage treatment should be expanded urgently to places like Indian Reservations and Flint, Michigan.

* To better disentangle church and state, the charitable income tax deduction (but not the gift and estate tax deduction) for contributions to religious organizations (but not the tax exemption for churches) should end, the parsonage exemption should end, the property tax and sale tax exemptions for churches should end, the investment income of churches should be taxed as a corporation, and the ban on politics by churches should end.

* There should be more power to compel road maintenance below some standard.

* There should be a power to compel HOAs to do their jobs for all members, similar to landlord-tenant maintenance claims.

Musings On Markets and Monopolies

There are some economic choices where not having "freedom to choose" works out reasonably well.

Untroubling monopolies

For example, I have no choice over:

* who I buy water and sewer services from;

* who collects my trash and recycling;

* who responds to fires;

* who builds and maintains the roads, bridge, and tunnels that I drive on and through (apart from one toll road in the Denver metro area); and

* who I buy natural gas and electricity from.

The first three are provided by local government. The fourth is provided by a combination of local and state governments with some state funding. The fifth is provided by a state regulated utility company.

Sometimes there are quality of service issues and customer service issues with each of these four services. But I don't believe that competition between firms to provide them would be significantly better, and I don't perceive the prices charged for any of them to be excessive.

Toll roads, where they exist, are generally regulated monopolies used to finance road construction and maintenance. They are generally underused relative to freeways and are modestly expensive but not all that hugely profitable. There are also public sector toll lanes on free roads which seem to work better (and are free for high occupancy vehicles and buses and motorcycles).

Leaky monopolies and near monopolies

Postal service

Postal service is a federal government monopoly, in theory, but in practice, there is considerable competition in parcel delivery, there is some competition in junk flier delivery, and email and other online communication tools have provided a lot of competition in delivering the messages and payments which were historically sent by mail. 

For reasons that are a mix of technology issues and governance issues, the quality what is done by the U.S. Postal Service is falling, and the price of that service keeps going up. The U.S. Postal Service did its job quietly, efficiently, and well when I was younger, but has slipped steadily over the last thirty years, and has plummeted since U.S. Postmaster De Joy was appointed.

Telecommunications

There is a de jure monopoly on cable television, although streaming and satellite TV make this a leaky monopoly, and there are only about two significant providers of high speed Internet service: the cable company, a regulated utility, and a DSL provider affiliated with the legacy local landline phone service company which is also a leaky monopoly due to cell phone service. The cable company is too expensive, has miserable customer service, and really displays none of the reasonable cost, reliability, and stability of government owned and regulated private utilities that have worked well. Competition in the cell phone and long distance telephone service industries, in contrast, has worked reasonably well.

Intercity passenger transportation.

Amtrak has a de jure monopoly on intercity passenger rail in the U.S., although private high speed rail ventures, all from the same parent company if I understand it correctly, have been authorized with operations in Florida, Texas, Nevada, and California, although only Florida's medium speed passenger rail is up and running. There is also some separate scenic or limited service rail service.

This is a leaky monopoly, because it has competition from private intercity bus services, at least one publicly owned intercity bus service in Colorado (Bustang), and commercial air traffic.

Basically everywhere outside the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is a dismal failure. It is slower than passenger rail was in its heyday in the 1950s. It is unreliable and plagued with long delays. It has infrequent service. It runs huge operating losses per passenger mail. Bus service between cities is comparably fast, varies greatly from more comfortable to less comfortable, is cheaper, and operates without subsidized operating costs. Commercial airlines are much faster, are often less expensive than Amtrak's operating costs, and are sometimes cheaper.

Intracity Transit

In theory, the Regional Transportation District (RTD) is a regional local government that has a monopoly on intracity bus and passenger rail service in the Denver metro area. In practice, this monopoly is also not all that strict. There are private cabs, Uber and Lyft, hotel shuttle services, a school bus system, apartment and church shuttle services, and more that compete with it in particular niches.

De facto monopolies

On the other hand, there are some services that are not formally monopolies, but are monopolies in substance. 

Commercial airports

Denver International Airport, which is owned by the city and county, is the only commercial airport in the metro area, even though there are several general aviation airports in the area that could offer commercial airport service. And, it works reasonably well.

Pro-sports

We have pro-football, soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey, and lacrosse teams that are not formal monopolies, but are part of dominant national pro-sports leagues that allow only one team in our metropolitan area and region. The teams are privately owned although their stadiums are publicly financed. On the other hand, these pro sports teams do compete with myriad high school and college sports teams for spectator interest.

Software

Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Adobe Acrobat are all de facto monopolies with dominant market share because compatibility between users in different firms and households is so crucial to their usefulness. In the case of Microsoft Word, this is unfortunate, because the product quality is poor. Microsoft Excel and Adobe Acrobat are better quality products, so this is less troubling in those cases.

Unnecessary competition

There are some areas where we have competition we don't really need. 

Oil Companies

There are several very profitable and heavily polluting large oil companies that extract, refine, and distribute petroleum for use as gasoline, diesel fuel, airplane fuel, boat fuel, heating oil, plastics, and fertilizers. But while there is arguably value in having competition between local gas station/convenience stores that dispense gasoline and diesel fuel, these are standardized products. It isn't at all obvious that we are better off having competing oil companies rather than nationalizing this industry as a great many countries do. 

Hospitals, ambulances, and their competitors

All but one of the hospitals in the metropolitan area are non-governmentally owned, either on a for profit or non-profit basis. Denver Health and the VA hospital system is the only governmentally owned hospitals in the metro area. And, there are many privately owned ambulatory surgery centers, free standing emergency rooms, and urgent care centers that perform services that compete with hospitals.

But, as a practical matter, emergency room patients have virtually no choice over whose emergency room they seek treatment in. Often they aren't even conscious, and in major disasters, ER availability trumps patient choice. Patients are also typically ill-equipped to meaningfully evaluate the available hospital choices which are typically constrained by what their insurance will cover anyway.

Similarly, patients have essentially no choice over which ambulance service providers choose them and don't really benefit from having multiple competing providers of that service.

Two year college and trade school programs

Publicly owned school district trade schools and community colleges are the dominant provider of higher education and professional training short of a bachelors or gradate degree. These schools and community colleges are inexpensive, available close to home, and generally speaking provide a good value to students who earn degrees, and are available to almost any student interested in attending, although the community college drop out rate is extremely high.

There is very little competition in this sector from private non-profits who make up a large share of colleges and universities that offer four year and graduate degrees.

There are for profit educational institutions that compete with the public sector in this market. But they are expensive, are mostly financed with federal government grants and loans, and with just a handful of exceptions in the entire United States are offer educational services that are greatly inferior to those of publicly owned trade schools and community colleges.

Choice without much private sector competition

Everyplace in the United States has public K-12 schools which are the dominant providers are education in those grades. Most places in the United States also have some private K-12 schools for at least some grades owned by either religious affiliated non-profits, or secular non-profits (the market share of "for profit" private K-12 schools is negligible although there is a private tutoring industry that supplements other schools).

In Denver, the public school system offers many school choice options, some between programs at ordinary public schools, and some set up as "charter schools" which are public schools that are governed by private non-profits that are autonomous from the school board that runs ordinary private schools. There are also some places that offer school vouchers that allow parents to use public money to send their children to truly private schools including private religious schools, typically in amounts a little less than the average per child funding level of the public schools.

Studies of school choice systems reveal two things. First, the main benefit of school choice systems is that they force poorly performing schools that parents don't choose, to shut down and allow parents to not send their children to those schools. Second, adjusting for the socioeconomic status of the students attending them, private voucher funded schools and charter schools don't consistently outperform ordinary public schools.

The economic importance of choice

In general, choice matters primarily because monopoly government owned good and service providers allow poorly performing and poor quality parts of their operations to continue at losses without being shut down or reformed.

When a private non-profit or for profit venture can't secure enough customers and patrons to cover its expenses, it promptly goes out of business. And, this happens organically, location by location, transit route by transit route, and not necessarily all at once, although mass downsizing via a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is fairly common. 

Sometimes, this happens dramatically. Essentially the entire subprime mortgage lending industry and the entire investor owned investment bank industry collapsed in the financial crisis. Blockbuster, which used to be the biggest video rental store in the country, went from 9,000 stores in an early 1990s peak, to just one store in the nation thirty years later. Chains like Radio Shack, Sears, Kmart, JC Penny, Big Boy, and Bed, Bath and Beyond are gone or nearly so. Thousands of dollar stores are closing. Dozens of airlines have gone out of business over the years. 

At other times, it happens gradually. There are significantly fewer bank branches in the United States than there were at the peak perhaps a decade ago. Diner style restaurants have shut down one by one. There has been some consolidation and closing of locations in the legal marijuana industry in Colorado. A few marginal private liberal arts colleges have shuttered each year in recent years as demand for them as declined, in part, due to demographics and, in part, because the subjects they specialize in aren't as popular anymore.

This doesn't happen in the government owned sector until the situation is grossly out of hand. The vast majority of Amtrak routes outside the Northeast Corridor provide poor service at a high cost, but keep running. Suburban bus lines that carry few passengers at a high cost keep running. Public schools in school districts without school choice continue to operate even when they are very poorly run and have poor outcomes for their students, and even when they see marked declines in the numbers of students they serve due to demographic shifts in their area. Shutting down a local post office that doesn't have enough business to make sense any more rarely happens.

The number one reason that the Soviet Union was less economically vibrant than the West was that it failed to shut down poorly performing factories and businesses and operations within businesses quickly enough.

In the case of monopoly businesses that everyone needs for the foreseeable future, this isn't a problem. The people of Denver will continue to need water and sewer and trash collection services indefinitely, so shutting these services down entirely isn't something that will ever need to be done. And, these are mature enough fields that their basic business model isn't likely to be upended any time soon.

The government owned monopolies that are more problematic are leaking monopolies in industries where technological change has made their historic business model no longer viable, like the Post Office and AMTRAK.

Rants And Good Stuff

Rants

* I am sick and tired of our nation's unnecessary gun violence, gun facilitated crime, and gun suicides. A lack of strong national gun control is the biggest problem, and the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment is also at fault.

* It is appalling that our society is so callous that every major city has thousands of homeless people. Some of this is due to land use regulation and building codes that make the best the enemy of the good. Some of this is due to poor pay for entry level workers in many places. Some of this is due to a weak social safety net. Some of this is due to a deficient mental health care system.

* It is too hard for young adults to get started in life, mostly because of high housing costs in desirable cities with good jobs. More than any other reason, this is because land use regulation is too strict and building codes demand more than health and safe buildings.

* Another reason it is hard for young adults to get started in life is student loans. Too many academically able young people don't go to college, or don't finish college, because the cost of higher education deters them. We need better financial aid for people academically able to benefit from it, and should be admitting fewer people who are doomed to fail to higher education.

* We pay far too much for health care, but we don't have universal coverage and our population wide outcomes are poor. We have declining life expectancies and people are getting shorter, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. To a great extent this is because market failures pay medical industry providers of all kinds too much, and because we lack the political will to adopt the universal health care systems found in every other developed and not so developed country.

* I am sick and tired of a nation where we make bad decisions because we have a democracy, a huge share of our citizens are deeply disconnected from reality, and opportunistic demagogues cultivate their ignorance and fear and hate. Honestly, I really have no idea how to solve this, although holding their craven and criminal leaders and activists accountable when they engage in wrongdoing and defraud people would be a good start.

* I am frustrated with people who continue to advocate for more surface warships and tanks despite their clear extreme vulnerability, with people advocating for obsolete amphibious invasion forces, with Air Force planners who disregard their logistics and close air support duties, and with military planners who resist including unmanned systems in our military.

* I am mildly irritated that roughly three federal government agencies are preventing the fax machine from being retired.

* I am irritated at the uncomfortable, poor service, luggage issues, and unreliable schedules that commercial air travel has devolved into.

* I am mildly irritated at two-factor authentication, absurdly inhuman passwords, and voice mail.

* I am annoyed at how badly DeJoy has mismanaged and degraded the U.S. Postal Service.

* I am depressed at the demise of Roe v. Wade and the cruelty that this has spawned.

* I'm frustrated that we can't seem to adopt a public health approach to the opioid epidemic, resist fully legalizing marijuana, and think that making psychoactive drugs illegal is the solution.

* I'm frustrated that we aren't more vigorously supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia, when decisive support could make a difference.

* I'm frustrated that we aren't taxing the rich and big businesses enough, while enduring some bad tax policies from the Trump era. We need to increase corporate tax rates, integrate individual and corporate taxes better, end gimmicks like the pass through entity tax break, tax capital gains more heavily, close tax loopholes, restore the casualty loss and cost of earning income deductions, abolish a lot of ineffectual tax credits, and end subsidies for fossil fuels.

* I'm frustrated that insurrectionist and secessionist Republican politicians aren't punished and shut down more vigorously. Politicians who defy the law should see swift, certain, and catastrophic consequences.

* I'm depressed at how bad the U.S. is at getting people vaccinated against COVID and everything else. We need to make spreading disinformation more costly.

* I'm sick of how poorly we treat immigrants. We need to welcome more immigrants, legalize immigrants who are here, and make the path to citizenship easier.

* I'm tired of how we neglect poor children and struggling single moms and families. We need a better social safety net. And we need a solution to men who aren't that smart and can't find a place for themselves in our modern economy.

* I am outraged at how bad our country is at correcting wrongful criminal convictions. This process could be vastly improved.

* I'm am frustrated that our courts are too slow because they are understaffed and have procedures that our slow and expensive and unfriendly to people who can't afford expensive lawyers. Simply hiring more judges and providing independent limited practice legal professionals would go a long way toward improving the situation.

* I am tired of our nation spending way to much money to subsidize a non-Northeast Corridor passenger rail system that performs worse than it did in the 1950s and undermines decent intercity bus service.

* We need to resist and shame book banners.

* I am livid at the scapegoating of transgender people we are seeing these days.

* We need to end the power of individual Senators and minorities of Senators to block popular legislation.

* We need a less extremist Supreme Court to bring about real justice.

* Puerto Rico needs to get in a position to choose between independence and statehood, with no middle ground.

* D.C. needs to have equitable representation in Congress.

* The President should be directly elected.

* First past the post voting should be replaced by either a majority to win requirement with runoff elections, or instant runoff voting, in single member districts, to reduce anti-third party spoiler effects.

* I am depressed at how much worse Ohio and Florida have become.

* I am baffled and sad about how many people support Trump despite his painfully obvious and well known profound flaws.

* I am concerned about the geopolitical impact and militancy of Russia, Iran and it proxies, and North Korea.

* I am concerned about the rise of political violence and threats of political violence as a tactic in the United States.

Good stuff

* We are doing an excellent job of reducing coal consumption.

* We are doing a good job of increasing wind and solar power supplies.

* We are energy independent and doing a decent job of replacing petroleum fueled vehicles with electric vehicles and other green alternatives. 

* Slowly, but surely, we are recycling more, wasting less, and composting more.

* We are slowly starting to build higher speed rail and improve higher speed rail in places where it makes sense.

* I am in awe that videoconferencing is now cheap and commonplace.

* The range of music and video we can access via inexpensive streaming services is amazing.

* I like the ability that social media provides to stay in touch with more distant family and friends from my past that I would otherwise have lost touch with.

* I am delighted to see our society rapidly becoming less religious.

* I am glad that we have the legal protections for gay rights that we've secured.

* I like the fact that groceries, household goods, and clothes are far cheaper than they used to be.

* I'm glad to be living in an era when scientific inquiry and research are vigorous.

* I am glad that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact Eastern European alliance collapsed.

* I am glad that Russia has suffered massive losses in the Ukraine war that undermine its ability to make war with other countries.

* I am glad that China has taken a more capitalist course and has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of deep poverty.

* I am glad that overpopulation of the planet is no longer a real worry.

* I am glad that wages are way up for lower income workers in Denver.

* I am glad that pro soccer finally got big.

* I am amazed at what computers and the Internet can do now.

* I'm glad that we're making progress in removing lead from pipes, and have already removed it from almost everything else.

* I'm impressed by the great variety of foods, both in grocery stores and in restaurants, that are available to us, and I'm a fan of the surge in food trucks.

* I'm pleased to see xeriscaping go mainstream.

* I'm glad that hunting is in a steep decline and that the wolves are being reintroduced.

* I'm glad that a smaller percentage of households own guns.

* I'm glad that rural areas are depopulating, and that our society is continuing to become more urban.

* I'm glad that supersonic commercial flights are soon to return.

* I feel good about the surge in the extent to which people can work remotely.

* I think its good that Plan B and Narcan are now available over the counter.

* I feel good about the strengthening YIMBY movement.

* I am glad that Colorado has gotten a lot more liberal, and that the state of Georgia seems to be heading in that direction.

* I am cautiously optimistic that junk robocalls are becoming less common.

* I think noise cancellation technology is cool.

* I don't miss landline home phones.

* I prefer electronic payments to paying for things by checks sent in the mail.

* It is good that marriage as an institution is strengthening among college educated couples.

* It is good that teen pregnancies are less common.

* It is good that many kinds of crime are still near record lows.

* It is good that fewer people are dropping out of high school.

* It is good that Florida Governor DeSantis is finally seeing his political star fall.

* It is good that bad cops are being held accountable more often.

* It is good that interracial marriage and dating is on the rise.

* It is good that roundabouts are being used more widely.

* It is good that Denver has a much more robust passenger rail system than it did when I moved here.

* It is good that Colorado has gotten some respite from a 1200 year plus drought.

* It is good that we know what causes M.S.

More Thoughts On The Economics Of Rail In The U.S.

The dominant cargo carried by freight rail in the United States is coal delivered to electric utilities, a dramatically contracting market. This uses rail because it is the cheapest option, because last-mile delivery isn't much of a concern, and because the demand isn't very time dependent since utility power plants can stockpile coal. 

But this means that there is little incentive to improve the very slow speed of freight rail which is slower than it was in the 1950s and maybe averages 45 miles per hour. 

A very large share of all other freight goes by long haul trucking instead, even though it is more expensive, because it is faster and provides point to point delivery.

Amtrak, outside the Northeast Corridor, shares tracks with freight rail to reduce infrastructure costs, but this makes Amtrak passenger rail slower than passenger rail was in the 1950s and unreliable. As a result, even with heavy subsidies, non-NE corridor Amtrak service has a tiny market share, because it isn't speed and reliability competitive with cars, buses and trains, even though it pays basically nothing for the freight rail tracks it uses.

This is a shame, because rail of all kinds has high fixed costs and low variable costs per trip, so the higher the volume of traffic it gets, the less expensive it is per passenger mile. Even as it is, if Amtrak trains outside the NE-corridor ran full, the cost per passenger mile would be much lower and the immense subsidies per passenger mile on many routes could be greatly reduced.

All other things being equal, however, having freight and passenger rail share rails is efficient, and unless your passenger rail volume is very high, if the two kinds of trains are traveling at similar speed, it isn't a problem. It is a problem for freight and passenger rail lines to share tracks now primarily because the speed and reliability standards for freight lines delivering mostly bulk products like coal are low in the interests of keeping costs as low as possible for low value cargo.

But imagine a post-coal world. 

What if we basically started over from scratch rebuilding a combined passenger-freight rail system with far fewer rail crossings over busy roads, that was designed for highly reliable 125 mile per hour to 150 mile per hour speeds for both freight and passenger trains, pulled by electric powered locomotives (whose electricity was generated with greener power grids)?

This could capture a large share of traffic that currently travels via interstate highways, and a large share of short to medium distance air travel, by offering greater speeds for freight and faster trips for passengers (who would also escape the long security lines and boarding process of airplanes). 

This would have to be combined with a system of last-mile regional/metro-area scale transportation that would take shipping contain sized rail cars and passengers from train stations to their final destinations. But for passengers, services like Uber and Lyft, as well as on demand car share systems, in addition to traditional car rentals and existing intracity transit options, could meet this need and could grow to meet demand. And, containerized shipping by a mix of rail and trucks is not exactly a radical new technological innovation. Reducing the amount of long haul trucking needed would also favor a conversion of more of the trucking industry to electric vehicles.

Passenger trains, run full, are faster than cars, are vastly more environmentally friendly, and result in far fewer transportation related deaths.  If the trains ran full, they could be cheaper per passenger mile than driving too.

The cost of maintaining a mixed passenger rail-freight rail system for 125-150 mile per hour rail service in good condition would be cheaper than the cost of maintaining an interstate highway and major state highway system designed to serve that much traffic, although the major upgrade of the rail system would have to be compete with the sunk costs of the initial build out of the interstate highway system. It would also remove the pressure to build more and bigger intercity highways in the status quo as traffic was diverted to rail.

But if the interstate passenger-freight rail system were upgraded in this way, the scope and scale of  and use of the interstate highway and major state highway system could be greatly reduced, which would ultimately reduce the maintenance costs for those major intercity road networks. The trucking jobs that remained would place far less of a strain the truckers and their families, as short-haul truckers, who would become a much larger share of the overall trucking industry, wouldn't have to spend lots of nights on the road, far from home.

Colorado Passenger Rail: Cool But Unnecessarily Expensive

The federal government will provide $500,000 in seed money to help kick-start construction of Colorado’s Front Range Passenger Rail project between Fort Collins and Pueblo — a decision that brings the prospect of millions more in future funding. 

The U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration are set to announce that the rail project will be included in the Corridor Identification and Development Program, according to a news release issued Wednesday by U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat from Lafayette. The program is a major component of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that aims to facilitate the development of intercity passenger rail corridors across the nation. Front Range rail’s inclusion could mean significant money from the federal government over the coming years as the project moves closer to reality. 

Among its chief boosters is Gov. Jared Polis. “This corridor stretches across more than 160 miles, connecting 13 of the most populous counties across the state and acting as a transportation ‘spine’ for the Front Range,” Neguse said in a statement. “I am excited to see this project become a reality for our growing communities.” . . .

Early estimates have put the cost for a starter system — likely to be operated by Amtrak in a partnership — at $1.7 billion to $2.8 billion, with as many as six trains a day running mostly on shared freight tracks connecting cities including Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Denver and Fort Collins.

The first passenger trains between Fort Collins and Pueblo could be rolling within the next decade, Karsian said. Later upgrades to speed up service and add more frequent trains would add billions of dollars to the cost.

From the Denver Post. 

The Front Range railway plan is in flux but calls for passenger service that potentially would start as far north as Cheyenne, Wyoming, and go as far south as Pueblo or Trinidad, eventually linking with Amtrak’s Southwest Chief.

Last week, Amtrak officials expressed strong support for the regional line and said they would work to help pay for it. Costs for an initial route have been estimated at $2 billion or more, making use of existing freight rail corridors, with a full buildout costing as much as $14 billion. State legislators are considering a bill that would create a Front Range Passenger Rail District in all or parts of 13 counties to oversee the effort.

From the Denver Post.

Front range passenger rail is cool, but it doesn't makes much economic sense.

Front range passenger rail would be much cheaper than passenger rail in the I-70 corridor from DIA to the mountains (by a factor of ten or more) where the need is arguably much greater (I-70 is routinely locked in stop and go traffic in the mountains), because building both road and rail in the mountains is expensive as a result of the difficult terrain.

The Limited Benefits In Speed

I-25, making maximum use of HOV lanes as a luxury bus would, is quite fast for much of the route from Fort Collins to Pueblo route: 75 mph for much of the trip and 55 mph or more for the rest.

Traditional Amtrak service on rails shared with freight trains averages 45-60 mph. Enhanced shared freight line service would be hard pressed to exceed average speeds of 75-100 mph. 

True dedicated high speed rail with average speeds of 125-200 mph is possible and would be a meaningful improvement in speed, but would be much more expensive than what is proposed for $2 billion or so, and wouldn't serve all that many people even considering increased traffic made possible by higher speeds.

Time spent going to and from airports, security, and boarding time destroys the time advantage for airplane travel between Colorado's front range cities (even though commercial aircraft on short flights are going 350-550 miles per hour when actually flying), and those flights are pretty expense compared to the current alternatives as well.

The Intercity Bus Service Alternative

Luxury bus service would be at least 10 times less expensive to implement the front range passenger rail sharing freight rail lines, even with some added stretches of HOV lanes, new electric powered luxury buses to be environmentally comparable to electrically powered passenger rail engines (if used), and nice new dedicated intercity bus stations (or upgrades to existing bus stations) to make it more attractive to would be passengers.

We already have a state subsidized luxury bus service filling this need from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, called Bustang, which gets modest but steady use, and makes one or two round trip runs a day. Current adult one way, one time Bustang fares are $10 from Fort Collins to Denver and $12 from Denver to Colorado Springs.

The drive from Colorado Springs to Pueblo, in particular, is very fast, in part, because there isn't much traffic on the route. The cost-benefit ratio of adding existing freight line passenger rail to Pueblo, compared to expanded Bustang service, is particularly low because of the reduced speed benefits and low levels of traffic.