Half truths, innuendo, and pseudo-science form the basis of a response to my recent Cato paper, Intercity Buses: The Forgotten Mode. The response is produced by America 2050, a project of the Regional Plan Association, a New York City–area regional planning organization. The response’s basic thesis of the response is that intercity buses have a role to play in a “balanced transportation system,” but they are “no replacement for high-speed rail.”

Of course, my report never argued that buses were a replacement for true high-speed rail. But it did show that existing bus schedules in many corridors are faster, more frequent, and charge far lower fares than Amtrak in the same corridors. Of course, there is a “replacement” for high-speed rail: it is called “air travel” and it is far faster and costs about a fifth as much per passenger mile as Amtrak’s Acela.

In any case, America 2050 says my report ignored “one of the most powerful arguments for rail: providing an alternative to highway congestion.” I didn’t address that argument in the paper on buses because, as I’ve shown in other papers, it’s a bad argument. Highways move about 85 percent of all passenger travel and more than a quarter of all ton-miles of freight in this country. If they are congested, maybe we should relieve that congestion rather than spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an elitist rail network that won’t relieve congestion and won’t carry more than a tiny fraction of the number of people (and none of the freight) moved on the highways.

But we can’t fix highway congestion, says America 2050: “providing additional road space does not solve congestion; in fact it creates additional demand for driving.” That’s another bad argument, for four reasons. First, my bus paper never advocated building new roads, and if asked, I would have suggested relieving congestion using congestion pricing of roads before building new capacity.

Second, the idea that building roads creates demand is totally absurd. As my friend, Wendell Cox, says, it is akin to saying that building maternity wards leads people to have more babies.

Third, those who argue that we shouldn’t build roads because people will drive on them are effectively arguing that government shouldn’t provide anything that people will use; only what they won’t use (such as high-speed trains). If that’s the case, government should just get out of the transportation business entirely and leave it to the private sector.

Finally, most congestion is in cities, not between them, so building rail lines between cities isn’t going to help much. Of course, planners don’t want to relieve congestion anywhere because they hope congestion will persuade a few people to stop driving.

America 2050 goes on to say that “one railway with a single track in each direction has the capacity to transport as many people per hour as sixteen lanes of highway.” While I could dispute that number, even if true, capacity doesn’t matter unless people actually use that capacity. Amtrak has 6 percent of the passenger market between Boston and Washington; highways, mainly Interstate 95, have 80 percent. Interstate 95 and parallel roads probably have less than 16 lanes, yet they carry 13 times as many passenger miles.

“High-speed trains allow passengers to bypass this congestion,” America 2050 goes on to say, “bringing passengers directly into center cities.” Yes, but who wants to go directly into center cities? Less than 8 percent of American jobs and less than 1 percent of America’s population lives in city centers (which is why I call high-speed rail “elitist”). In many, if not most, urban areas, more people and more jobs are located near airports than near train stations, and virtually everyone is near a highway.

America 2050 then challenges some of my numbers that it says are “flatly incorrect.” “To count passenger miles,” says the article, “O’Toole uses the American Bus Association’s 2005 Motorcoach Census, which counts passenger-miles logged by intracity airport shuttles, sightseeing tours, and private commuter buses, amongst other categories that are not making cross country or intercity trips.” America 2050 clearly did not read my paper carefully: first, I used the 2007 Motorcoach Census, but, more important, I counted only those passenger miles (about a quarter of the total) attributable to scheduled intercity buses.

When comparing bus to rail safey, “O’Toole counts passenger miles only for Amtrak trains, while counting fatalities for all passenger trains, including commuter rail,” says America 2050. Again, America 2050 did not read carefully. National Transportation Statistics reports that commuter trains suffered about 20 to 60 fatalities per year over the past two decades; the fatalities I reported ranged from 3 to 24 per year (except in 1993 when there were 58), which obviously does not include the commuter rail fatalities. That 1993 number may have skewed my data upwards; but rail fatalities are nevertheless higher than bus fatalities per billion passenger miles.

America 2050 then goes into the topic of subsidies, noting there are large subsidies to highways. “Recently, the Highway Trust Fund has received bailouts of $8 billion in 2008, $7 billion in 2009, and $20 billion in 2010.” As I’ve noted elsewhere, those bailouts were not subsidies to highways; they were subsidies to pork barrel. If Congress had not diverted a third of gas tax revenues to non-highway projects, and then mandated spending on those projects even if gas tax revenues fell short, the bailouts would not have been necessary.

Admittedly, there are highway subsidies, mainly at the local level. But when compared with highway usage, which is on the order of 4 trillion passenger miles and 1 trillion ton miles of freight per year, the subsidies are trivial: about a penny per passenger mile at most. Since intercity buses operate with about twice the occupancy rates of other vehicles, subsidies to them are probably much lower (and were taken into account in the numbers my paper cited). By comparison, subsidies to Amtrak are close to 30 cents a passenger mile and subsidies to most high-speed rail lines will be much more.

America 2050 concludes by saying, “Intercity buses provide a valuable service and are an important part of a complete and balanced transportation system.” Who can argue with “balanced”? With respect to buses, America 2050 would give the high-use transport corridors—the cream of any transport service—to subsidized rail, leaving the dregs to buses (which would then require subsidies to serve those dregs).

The question is: How do you measure “balanced”? Apparently, America 2050’s answer is “balanced means taking the fees you pay to drive and spending them on my favored mode of transport while you sit stuck in traffic.” By contrast, my answer is: if it can be done without subsidies, it is balanced. Let’s just end the subsidies to all modes of transportation and see what happens.

Just for fun, and because it’s a summer Friday afternoon, here’s the text of a court order handed down July 19 by Kentucky judge Martin Sheehan in the case of Kissel v. Schwartz & Maines & Ruby Co. (ScribD, h/t Nicole Black and Daniel Schwartz):

ORDER…the parties having informed the Court that the herein matter has been settled amicably and that there is no need for a Court ruling on the remaining motions and also that there is no need for a trial;

And such news of an amicable settlement having made this Court happier than a tick on a fat dog because it is otherwise busier than a one legged cat in a sand box and, quite frankly, would have rather jumped off of a twelve foot step ladder into a five gallon bucket of porcupines than have presided over a two week trial of the herein dispute, a trial which, no doubt, would have made the jury more confused than a hungry baby in a topless bar and made the parties and their attorneys madder than mosquitoes in a mannequin factory;

IT IS THEREFORE ORDERED AND ADJUDGED by the court as follows:

1) The jury trial scheduled herein for July 13, 2011 is hereby CANCELED…

If you’re curious to know more about Judge Sheehan, a quick Google search indicates that he’s a judge who’s thrown out a lawyer’s libel suit against a critic (a prosecutor!) on the ground that it was constitutionally protected opinion; that he’s adopted civility rules to keep lawyers from beating up each other and each others’ clients over much in his courtroom; and that he struck down as unconstitutional an overreaching state law that retroactively sought to restrict where past sex offenders could live. Better and better….

Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:

• If it is true that a failure to increase the debt limit on August 2^nd has the potential to bring about economic Armageddon, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves if it’s a good idea to allow the political class in Washington to continue to collectively play God with our lives?
• The ratchet effect: agriculture edition.
• Chris Edwards testifies to the Senate Finance Committee on federal spending and debt.
• These are the times that try budget analysts’ souls—especially budget analysts who’d like to see Washington dramatically cut spending.
• House Speaker John Boehner’s first budget plan wouldn’t have cut spending. His new plan won’t cut spending either.
• Chris Edwards wants his post office closed.

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