Underpaid Genius

Crash Puts Focus on Aging Rail Fleets

[via Many Cities Have Outdated Rail Systems - NYTimes.com by Michael Cooper]

“More than a third of the equipment in the nation’s seven largest rail transit agencies was rated in marginal or poor condition by the Federal Transit Administration this spring. Replacing all the equipment that has exceeded its useful life and finishing all outstanding station rehabilitations for just those seven large systems would cost roughly $50 billion, the agency estimated, and keeping the systems in a state of good repair after that would cost an estimated $5.9 billion a year.

By contrast, the $787 billion stimulus law contains only $8.4 billion for transit capital improvements across the nation.

[…]

When a northbound train on the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line derailed in July 2006, injuring more than 150 people, the National Transportation Safety Board noted that the line had been placed into service 55 years earlier, and that many components of the track had never been replaced. The board’s report described corroded rails and fasteners, and rotten wood on the ties, and questioned why the problems had not been identified and repaired before the derailment.”

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That’s why we need to spend a whole lot of money on infrastructure. Imagine the benefit to the country if working class and middle class people didn’t have to own two cars per family just to get to work everyday. But instead, the administration is more interested in keeping GM and Chrysler afloat.

Even stranger, though is the financial privatization of railcars, that leads to agencies being unable to take cars off track even when they are know to be dangerous:

“When Washington was warned in 2006 that the cars involved in Monday’s crash should be replaced or at least strengthened to better resist crashes, the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority’s hands were tied. Not only would replacing the cars right away have been prohibitively expensive, but the agency noted that it was constrained by a deal that it, along with many other transit agencies, had entered into to raise much-needed money. The deals essentially involved selling assets like train cars to private entities, which could then get tax breaks by writing off the depreciation, and then lease them back. There were penalties for breaking the deal.”

Smells like the mortgage crisis, only here the transit agency bundled up the depreciation of the cars as a financial instrument and sold it off. Now, they will have to pay the folks that bought those instruments if the agency takes the cars out of service, and they used the cash they got already. Let’s make that illegal, please?