New Rail Study

[nachoman]

The government does quite a bit of this with the airlines, professional sports teams, and various other things. The cost to take Amtrak is, I believe, much closer to the real cost. I'd love to see a study comparing the true costs for planes vs. trains. vs. cars.

That would be a whole lot of math and statistics that nobody will believe anyway, unless it re-enforces their agenda. And there are plenty of other examples of things that are subsidized so that people don't pay the "full" cost of. For us in southern arizona, water is an excellent example. The infrastructure was all paid for through tax dollars, but only the operating costs are what you see in your water bill. If we were required to pay back all the dams, canals, and wells through our water bills, we would be paying dollars per gallon rather than cents per gallon.