In addition to providing the fast track for American automobiles, the Interstate System also hastened the end of the national rail-passenger network. Prior to the Interstate, most people who wanted to visit their cousins or just see the sights of America took the train. At that point air travel was too expensive. And without the Interstate buses were terribly slow and often got tangled up in local problems. Prior to 1958 trains went just about everywhere, so no problem.
As more highways were built more trains were discontinued. Today Amtrak has a skeleton of a national rail system. It carries a fraction of what trains carried 50 years ago.
To build and maintain the Interstate System, Congress established the Highway Trust Fund. Automobile drivers as well as trucks and buses were all taxed at the gas pump and money was plentiful. Then a decade and a half ago, Congress gave local communities the option to spend federal dollars on highways or mass transit.
Now a certain percentage of all federal Highway Trust Fund dollars goes to build primarily rail systems, although the Bush Administration has been pushing so-called bus rapid transit. Bus rapid transit is cheaper to build than rail but people don't like to ride buses and greatly prefer rail. Even if the so-called bus rapid transit were to become successful operating costs would continue to be far higher than rail. Cities such as San Diego, Sacramento and Portland run four-car articulated trains at rush hour. Each train can carry around 700 people. There is but one motorman. To carry the same number of people would require ten buses, each with a driver. With transit labor is where costs rise. In addition, with gasoline at $75 a barrel we are looking at close to $4 a gallon at the local pump. Rail systems almost all use electricity, which can be generated by coal or nuclear power. It is far less expensive than filling up the gas tank of a bus. Regardless, mass transit and highways have been forged into a partnership by the Congress and it was worked well. The problem is that the Highway Trust Fund is diminishing at just the time when costs for steel and cement and other components of both highways and rail are escalating.
Alternative sources of revenue need to be found if indeed the Interstate is to be enhanced and if transit is to continue to derive needed dollars for its projects.
The Congressional-chartered Commission upon which I serve is to offer recommendations in this regard. It won't be easy. In fifty years we have gone from no national highway system to one so crowded in major metropolitan areas that officials are seeking ways to build bypasses or even transit lines to get people out of their cars and on to light rail.
There are times I wish Ike had not been so successful with the Interstate System. But those are just times of nostalgia. The truth is we are a far better nation because of the Interstate System. And especially now that transit is part of the equation, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel. That light is a rail car. It beckons us to leave our automobiles and to ride transit. No decent transit in your area, you say? Hopefully in the next 50 years we will remedy that.