Thoughts on the airline industry vs. the railroads

WorldNetDaily: Southwest Airlines: When mercy trumps accountability:

"Several years ago an analyst added up the cumulative profit of the publicly held airlines that had existed up to that time. The result of the computation was approximately zero. Consequently many investors, such as the redoubtable Warren Buffet, have concluded that the airline industry is not worthy of their investment dollars."

The point of Gerald R. Chester's article for Business Reform magazine is to criticize Southwest Airlines for its policy of avoiding discharging workers. Considering that he levies this complaint against the best performing company in the industry is a question for another time. What intrigued me was the paragraph quoted above.

As someone who hates air travel (for the same reason I hate buses, the seats are uncomfortable, the air is stale and the trip is noisy) and likes train travel, but does little of either (I'd go to Europe if you could drive there), it always irritates me when my fellow rightwingers single out Amtrak for condemnation as a wasteful, subsidized form of transport and say nothing of the subsidies that keep the airline industry afloat (and only just barely, at that) - at least partly at the expense of rail travel.

Of course, part of the problem is that a large amount of air travel subsidization is not done by the federal government and involves no appropriations even from the states and localities shouldering the burden, so it is hard to get good numbers. But consider what it means financially if a metropolitan airport operated by a local government or some state or local authority occupies hundreds of acres of valuable real estate which goes untaxed. Even if the authority makes some payment in lieu of tax (PILOT), it is seldom comparable to what the assessed value of that land would be if it were occupied by homes or businesses. Meanwhile, railroads pay taxes on real estate (sometimes based on track miles or other measures rather than acreage) which indirectly enter into the cost to Amtrak to operate on their tracks.

I'm not going to extend this analysis here, just a thought made more relevant by the recent hurricanes. One essay I read asked why Amtrak wasn't used to evacuate N.O. - and the answer is it could have helped a little if anyone (the governor or mayor) had asked in a timely manner, but passenger rolling stock is limited in that region. Another recent article (which I blogged recently) had to do with urban evacuation plans, especially for New York City. Railroads were mentioned as an important part of some of those plans.

You won't have trains to do much of the heavy lifting in future emergencies if we get out of the passenger business now. Most urban rail systems have little or no capacity to move people outside the city and maybe its close-in suburbs. That's another reason we ought to think carefully before pulling the plug on inter-city rail transport. Of course, we could maintain a strategic fleet of passenger coaches and use the freight roads to move them in emergencies, but I suspect that would be more expensive and we would lose most of the facilities for embarking and disembarking passengers.