Biden Is Poised To Make Freight Trains Less Safe. You Can Thank Special Interests.Once again, Washington is giving us every reason to believe it's selling favors to cronies even if it means everyone else loses.
By VERONIQUE DE RUGY
3.25.2022
It's well-known that President Joe Biden—who regularly rode the Amtrak train between Wilmington and Washington as a senator and to his 2021 presidential inauguration—loves trains, always touting their environmental efficiency and value to the U.S. economy. Yet the Biden White House has been noticeably hostile to the variety of trains that play a far larger role in American life than the ones that carry passengers: trains that carry freight.
Worse, this animus may lead to a more dangerous industry and is aided by crony special interests poisoning policymaking and sowing uncertainty among investors.
Specifically, the president's team at the supposedly independent U.S. Surface Transportation Board (STB) just finished a marathon two-day hearing on a controversial regulatory proposal. The idea would force private railroads to subsidize their own competitors and disregard their property rights through a burdensome regulatory change to what is known as forced "reciprocal switching"—the practice of allowing one carrier access to another's infrastructure and customers.
Reciprocal switching already occurs voluntarily through private agreements between railroads. Now, the administration wants to give more power to Washington bureaucrats to force open these privately owned networks for use by competitors and to offer below-market rates to shippers.
While the rule sounds like a backdoor price control, the government asserts that turning more control over to Washington will promote competition. Their argument is that the railroad industry acts like a monopoly. However, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that over the past few decades, freight rail rates have not significantly increased, a fact difficult to square with the claim that freight rail is abusing its position to charge its customers excessive prices.
More worrisome, my colleague Patrick McLaughlin makes a convincing case that mandated reciprocal switching would likely cause more railroad-worker accidents and casualties. In a public comment, he writes:
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/03/25/biden-is-poised-to-make-freight-trains-less-safe-you-can-thank-special-interests/
