For years, Congressional Republicans have sought to eliminate government subsidies for Amtrak. Wasteful! Unnecessary! Harrumph! Let it die if it can’t pay its own way!
This year, the Republican majority passed a highway bill that would strip out all funding for mass transit. Wasteful! Unnecessary! Harrumph!
But there’s one kind of mass transit the Republicans don’t mind subsidizing at all: the air travel system. “Airports inherently lose money,” an airport manager once told me. Kinda like Amtrak? And local transit agencies? Huh.
Huge quantities of public money are poured into our air travel system every year. Some of it supports essential service. But a lot of it benefits business passengers and “general aviation,” i.e. private planes.
Yep, public transit for the rich. Now that deserves a subsidy! Not like those dirty buses, trains, and subways.
After the jump, a case in point: Lebanon, NH.
The Lebanon Municipal Airport is in the news again. The Airport’s been losing money for years, and things aren’t looking up. So city and airport officials have called an “Airport Summit” for Tuesday, March 20.
Last year, the airport brought in $728,000 in revenues. Expenses totaled just under $1 million, leaving a deficit of $270,000. Almost 33%. But when you factor in hefty federal subsidies, the airport’s numbers look a lot worse than that.
Lebanon Airport offers passenger service through Cape Air: four daily flights to Boston and two to New York City. Those are small planes, and the average one is less than half full. For providing this service, Cape Air gets a big fat government check through a program called “Essential Air Service” — $2.3 million in 2009. The vast majority of Lebanon’s passengers were business travelers; most civilians prefer to use Manchester or Burlington, where flights are more frequent, destinations more numerous, and tickets far cheaper.
Without that EAS funding, Cape Air would almost certainly pull out of Lebanon Airport. That, in turn, would have a domino effect on the Airport’s traffic and revenue numbers, and on its other big source of government money: the Airport Improvement Program, or AIP.
Lebanon gets about a million dollars a year from AIP. (Not included in its budget, because AIP can only be spent on improvement projects, not general operations.) It would lose that money if passenger loads fall below a certain limit. Even with Cape Air’s massively subsidized service, the Airport is in danger of suffering an 85% cut in AIP funds. And if Cape Air were to pull out entirely, the AIP money would disappear. Without AIP, the airport’s facilities would deteriorate in short order.
Its own manager says that if Lebanon Airport lost passenger service, its deficit would increase by about $400,000 a year. That would be catastrophic for a facility that many in Lebanon are already tired of underwriting with their own tax money.
(Also, it must be noted, the Airport sits on a piece of extremely valuable real estate: on a plateau just above the busy Route 120 shopping strip, with an incredible view of the Connecticut River Valley. If Lebanon shut the airport and sold the land, it’s get a windfall profit and a sustained addition to its tax base.)
The EAS money is supposedly intended to support passenger travel at rural airports that would lose service if left to the tender mercies of the free market. (EAS was established after airlines were deregulated in 1978, because the carriers were fleeing small and medium-sized airports.) But in truth, certainly at Lebanon, the money’s real purpose is to make airports more attractive for general aviation.
There are places where it makes sense to subsidize travel. Places where the next-nearest airport is hours away. But Lebanon is a 90-minutes drive from two airports with much better passenger service, and a little over two hours away from Boston. You can make the drive in less time than it takes a passenger plane to take off, fly, and land. There’s already bus service linking Lebanon to Manchester and Boston, which could be significantly beefed up with a relatively tiny federal subsidy.
But this isn’t really about passengers. It’s about subsidizing business passengers (who are also subsidized by tax deductions for business travel), and it’s especially about maintaining facilities for private and corporate planes.
The federal government is considering a user fee of up to $100 for private planes. The revenues would much more fairly and directly pay for the costs of general aviation. But pilots and plane owners are up in arms. Private planes, especially corporate planes, are job creators, after all! Promoting business activity, boosting the economy.
That’s the kind of welfare Republicans can believe in.
Look, I’m not necessarily saying we should eliminate all the subsidies for aviation. There are arguments to be made for the system. I’m just pointing out a big and obvious inconsistency. In reality, there is no form of transportation that can fully pay its own costs. If we can afford to underwrite business travel through massive subsidy programs, we can spend an equivalent amount of money on trains, buses and subways.
And if we can’t do that, then we shouldn’t spend government funds on air travel for the One Percent.
The Republican argument against public transport and Amtrak subsidies bugs me too.
Air travel is one of the most inefficient uses of fuel there is. One of the reason so much connectivity by rail has been lost to passengers is that back when I was young, the Federal Government began favoring airport construction and promoting air travel while doing nothing to encourage people to use the extensive passenger rail system that still existed at the time.
One could argue that the passenger rail industry was given a death sentence by the military-industrial complex, and passenger air travel was built on its rotting bones.
I’d say that passenger rail (which would be environmental boon), and the small destinations that are served by passenger rail, has more than paid the price for any subsidy they might get today.
Subsidizing roads — as poor an investment as tar strips may/may not be relative to railroad infrastructure — is a subsidy. It is the government’s choice to replace the marketplace by awarding subsidies. The transportation bill tips the scales in directions other than railways. It tips the scales in favor of rail competition.
I’ve been driving along at 125 km/per hour and watched as one of these works-of-tranportation-art appeared in my rear view mirror. As quickly as it appeared behind me, it passed me as if I were standing still. High speed rail is ultimately less expensive, fast and effective, more comfortable, and environmentally safer than so many of our poor transportation policy decisions. In countries, for example, such as France, Germany, Netherlands etc., rail transportation, helps keep them more competitive within the world market.
Priorities: By comparison, the U.S. “invests” billion$$ in offensive, degrading, worthless, naked body scanners. Scanners (btw) that are unable to protect us from the non-existent risks, which the War-On-Being-Afraid contractors fraudulently tell our subsidy throwing federal government lurk in every grandmother’s armpit. Now THAT is transportation infrastructure that further helps the US economy tank, and gives our global competitors a disdainful laugh at our frightful foolishness.
The “Fueling Vermont’s Future” report noted that if we paid the true cost of driving in gas taxes (which we now subsidize using income taxes) the price of a gallon of gas would increase by $3.20. All of us are being subsidized whenever we stop for gas.
Back in 2002 the feds offered up $15 billion (with a “b”) to the airlines to tide them over the post 9/11 slump. That would have kept Amtrak going for 30 years.