How Do Reduce ‘Gross-Over Subsidies’ For Highways?’: Seth Moulton Asks Witness

6 months ago

During a House Transportation Committee hearing last week, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) questioned witnesses about improving transit safety and high-speed rail.

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Transcript

00:00Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Regan, unfortunately the MBTA in Boston

00:05has had some troubles with safety over the past couple years necessitating the

00:09federal government to get involved. We're not proud of this, but we want to

00:12fix it and we want to make it better. Can you share some of the best practices

00:16that you've seen across the country that we might apply back home in

00:19Massachusetts? Certainly, and thank you for the question, but I know that

00:24enclosures and reimagining the workspace for workers is an important aspect of

00:29that because at the end of the day, again, we are protecting people in their

00:32workspace and that's an important aspect. So the physical space is

00:36important, but also I think, you know, these safety plans that are going to be

00:41developed that are required now where workers have the opportunity to have

00:46their input and they have to be adopted jointly with the union and with the

00:49agency. It can't just be, you know, recommendations can't just be

00:53imposed by the employer in this aspect, which is important, but I think for the

00:57most part, I mean, there is not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to the

01:02safety problems. It's not going to be the same in Boston as it is in Las Vegas or

01:06as it is in Rochester, New York, where I'm from, because they're very different

01:09environments and different agencies. So I think the beauty of what the program

01:13that was put in place is, is it's going to take into account the local

01:17agencies, the reality of the local agencies, as well as what the workers, the

01:23eyes and ears on the ground of these systems, are seeing day to day and can

01:27help implement meaningful reforms that will protect both workers and passengers

01:31in those systems. Thank you very much. Mr. Scrivner, I appreciate some of your

01:36comments on high-speed rail and its viability in certain quarters, if I

01:39understand your background correctly, because I have long made the case that

01:45there are a lot of reasons to love high-speed rail, but one of them is that

01:47if you're a fiscal conservative, it's a good investment. It has a good return on

01:51investment. In fact, there's not some vast high-speed rail conspiracy that infects

01:55every other developed country in the world and just hasn't made it to America

01:58yet. It's just that a lot of other countries weigh the options. They

02:02actually have transportation policy that allows them to choose high-speed rail

02:06over highways with similar amounts of funding, which is not the case, of course,

02:10in the United States. The subsidies vastly favor airports and highways, and when

02:16they do that analysis, it often comes back that the cost-benefit ratios favor

02:21high-speed rail. In fact, I happened to co-author at Harvard Business School a

02:25study on California high-speed rail that reached two basic conclusions. This was

02:29ten years ago. One, it's going to cost more than they're saying. We know that's

02:32true, but the second is that it still costs less than making the

02:38comparable investments in airports and expanding highways that you would have

02:41to make to meet 2050 demand, and that's so often left out of this debate. I

02:47wanted to ask you, what are your views on how we should subsidize transportation

02:53and how should we be subsidizing transit? Should we be subsidizing highways, etc.?

03:00Yeah, thank you for that question. It's pretty expansive. My general view is

03:05that we should be trying to reduce subsidies across all modes and to

03:10stop distorting the choices of people who ultimately choose one mode over the

03:16other, the time they choose to travel, and so on and so forth.

03:23By the way, this is where I completely agree. If we just had a level

03:26playing field and we actually allowed sort of free market in transportation to

03:30determine the best solutions, there would be some quarters where we say it's too

03:33long for trains, you need to fly. Other quarters, it's just a better drive, but

03:38some quarters really make sense for transit or for high-speed rail, and we

03:42ought to do the economic analysis to determine that. We commissioned a study,

03:46my office did back in Massachusetts, to look at what are the subsidies for

03:51driving, because I don't think we think about that very much. We often think

03:54about the subsidies for transit agencies, and we hear these numbers about how much

03:58of each fare is covered by the taxpayer. We just asked, what are the subsidies for

04:03driving? It turned out that they determined in the state of Massachusetts,

04:07the state subsidizes driving to the tune of 64 billion dollars every year.

04:14That's $14,000 per taxpayer, regardless of whether you own a car, and these

04:21subsidies come in the form of everything from just building and maintaining

04:23highways to providing state police, providing emergency services. 40,000

04:29Americans died in car crashes. It's taxpayer dollars that clean all of those

04:34up. In contrast, by the way, not a single person has died in the entire history of

04:39high-speed rail in Japan, but as an aside, how do we think about reducing these

04:46subsidies, these gross over subsidies for highways? Well, when it comes to the

04:52interaction between subsidies for the road network and transit

04:58systems, for one, I think there is a synergy with congestion pricing,

05:04and not simply because of the revenue, but more for the incentive

05:09to not drive at those peak hours, and that may make transit more attractive. So

05:15I think there are ways to reduce the subsidies across modes and equalize

05:20across modes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I sure hope you can speak with the

05:22Governor of New York. I yield back.

05:26The gentleman yields, Mr. Owens.

How Do Reduce ‘Gross-Over Subsidies’ For Highways?’: Seth Moulton Asks Witness

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