How to Waste $100 Billion
We’ve recently seen some stellar demonstrations on how to make tens of billions of dollars disappear. You could buy a social media network and then arbitrarily fire half the staff and scare away your only revenue stream. You could start a hyped cryptocurrency company and simply not keep track of any of your revenue or expenses until the credit card gets declined.
One much lower key but no less wasteful effort is the plan to “fix” the DC-to-Boston rail corridor.
In October, the Northeast Corridor Commission released a plan to spend $100 billion on the Northeast rail corridor from DC to Boston. What will we get for that $100 billion? No new stations. No new lines. No line extensions. A lot of promises to fix deteriorating infrastructure but very few ideas on how to make it better.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, $100 billion buys an awful lot of cool stuff that makes trains run a lot faster or to places they didn’t previously go. The Grand Paris Express is 125 miles of new track, 68 new stations, and four new lines with two line extensions. It will transform the greater Paris region, and it will cost a third of the NEC’s plan. That’s just one of many examples in my recent article on the subject. And nobody in a position of power or influence seems to care. If you want to get depressed about U.S. infrastructure, you know where to click.
A Word About The Freight Rail Strike That Wasn’t
You may or may not have seen a lot of headlines about the freight rail labor dispute. Those headlines, and the articles therein, probably referred to “sick days” as the main point of contention. This was always puzzling to me. I’ve been talking to hundreds of freight rail workers on and off for various stories over the last 18 months. And I never actually heard any of them talk extensively about sick days. But I did hear them talk extensively about lots of other stuff. So I wrote an article about what they did talk about.
And, just to recap, here are the main stories I’ve done on the freight rail beat:
‘It’s Going to End Up Like Boeing’: How Freight Rail Is Courting Catastrophe
‘The Worst and Most Egregious Attendance Policy’ Is Pushing Railroad Workers to the Brink
‘What Choice Do I Have?’ Freight Train Conductors Are Forced to Work Tired, Sick, and Stressed
28 Freight Rail Workers Tell Us What They Want You to Know About Their Lives
Thanks everyone who wrote in with bike ride and hot sauce recommendations! I’ve got a long list of both I can’t wait to try.
Cheers,
Aaron