Opinion: Biden Administration’s wrongheaded approach to freight trains
It’s well known that 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.
Specifically, the president’s team at the supposedly independent U.S. Surface Transportation Board 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.
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.
Based on 2019 and 2020 accident incident rates, McLaughlin calculates that “a 1 percent increase in switching hours would lead to 107,185 additional switching hours, which would, in turn, lead to 4.18 additional casualties and 11.59 additional accidents.” These assumptions are conservative.
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