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Why the Democratic infrastructure bill is radically inadequate and why we should incentivize rail over highways and radically expand public transit

The Democrats have passed in 2020 in the House an infrastructure bill, that didn´t pass the Republican-controlled Senate and now it´s being speculated that the next big bill done by the Democrats could be the infrastructure bill. Here´s why the Democrat infrastructure bill of 2020 was wholly inadequate and what should the Democrats push for instead.

The infrastructure bill is in its basics a bill about the apportionment of federal funds to be used in the construction and maintenance of infrastructure, which is mainly transport and communication infrastructure. The communications part of the bill is not so important for our analysis, but the transport infrastructure is very important from a standpoint of fighting against climate change. Because about 20 % of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by transportation, this bill will have lasting impact on the reduction or increase of those emissions, as infrastructure spending determines to a large degree which transportation mode is being used. From the 1950s until today and that includes also the House Democrat bill of 2020, car travel and car infrastructure has been heavily supported and the funds apportioned according to the primacy of car travel in the then-existing philosophy of America. Car travel is subsidized until this day to a great degree, because all the highways and roads in America are mostly funded by taxpayers, that means the car user doesn´t have to pay for most or any of the costs associated with building roads, as tolls don´t cover most of the expense of building highways. Air travel is also heavily subsidized and to a greater amount than rail, especially in the Coronavirus crisis. However, car travel is in comparison to rail and public transit heavily subsidized and supported much more. About 50 % of all federal transportation subsidies flowed before the pandemic into highways and roads, and the next 23 % into air travel and 11 % into ports, which are also a place of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2020, the percentage of subsidies into air travel skyrocketed to 47 %. Rail got before the pandemic only 16 % of federal subsidies, which increased in the pandemic to 19 %. Public transportation subsidies aren´t listed in this statistic by the US government, however they got approximately 11 billion dollars in federal subsidies in 2011, while the statistic of railroad subsidies may also include public transit subsidies.

Rail and public transit are compared to car travel the more energy-efficient and decidedly the more ecological mode of transportation. Trains are four times more energy efficient than cars and buses are two times more energy efficient than cars. Trains are more than ten times as fuel efficient as cars and produce five times less emissions, while buses powered by combustion engines produce about half of emissions petrol cars produce (while this statistic comes from the UK and cars in the US could be even less ecological because of size). The continued massive subsidies for car, air and water infrastructure is a tale of subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and the continued preference of the government for fossil fuels. The lack of subsidies given to rail and public transit affects the relative low ridership of these modes of transportation. 87 % of all transportation miles in the US were done by car and 70 % of these were done in an urban area. The low amount of investments into mainly public transit have caused that public transit is mostly unavailable or a very bad choice for most Americans in cities and they have to resort therefore to cars. This situation and the preference for car travel and air travel over rail and public transit, coupled with the very bad support of electric cars, is still a fact even in the Democrat infrastructure bill in 2020. It is to be expected that this won´t change until some pressure is applied on the legislators and the done bill could be even worse than the Democrat bill of 2020 because of the preferred bipartisanship with Republicans that Democrats pursue.

The amount of federal subsidies needed in rail and public transit is even greater than it should be by just shuffling existing money around because of the Republican hesitation and resistance to support public transit and rail in red states with state and local funding and because of the need to build wholly new and radically more infrastructure for rail and public transit, which means building high-speed rail in California, Texas (in the triangle between Houston, Dallas and Austin) and the East Coast (first between Boston and Washington DC, then between Chicago and Washington DC) and buying massively more buses, ideally electric buses, who would serve the suburbs of cities. Federal subsidies for rail should not only go into high-speed rail projects, but also into providing more available services for big cities with intervals of trains being more often and by subsidizing Amtrak making it cheaper than car and air travel. Ideally would this mean that about 400 billion dollars would go to rail in five years and 500 billion dollars into public transit in five years, which would allow the cities to buy enough buses to serve all suburbs of major cities. This would be a one time investment, as high-speed rail projects would be built and run on own costs, subsidies for Amtrak would sink and public transit would be subsidized only in operation and not in buying buses, which needs more money.

This seems like a hefty price tag, however it could be seen both as the much needed stimulus for the post-pandemic economy, a way to counter the influence of China in the world of climate change and a necessary step in the fight against climate change. One alternative argument against this ambitious project is to say that electric cars would replace combustion engine cars in the right time, even without government help and that the government doesn´t need to invest so heavily into rail and public transit. It is true that electric cars need to be a part of the solution, however they cannot be the whole solution because public transit makes just more economic and ecological sense and has to be part of the solution to achieve a 90 percent reduction in emissions and because high-speed rail is the only alternative to the very dirty fossil-fuel-powered air travel. But, mainly electric cars won´t replace combustion cars in time without a robust subsidies scheme which is much more extensive and robust than the current one.

The current subsidy scheme for electric cars provides up to 7,5k in direct purchase subsidies for new electric cars, however only for the first 100 thousand cars produced by a certain brand. This means, that for Tesla, this subsidy already run out and for other brands will run out soon. Mass adoption of electric cars will require more subsidies in the amount and duration of their running. To see where have been electric cars already massively adopted and comprise more than half of the purchased new cars we look to Norway, where electric cars are cheaper than combustion cars because of these policies: for the purchase of an electric car one does not pay special purchase taxes and the 25 % sales tax which is paid in every sale in the country, one does not pay mostly or wholly tolls, parking fees and fares (relevant because Norway has a lot of fjords) and one can drive in the bus lane. Except the last policy all of these policies are very good policies with few bad outcomes and have led to a massive adoption of electric cars, as 67 % of newly purchased cars are electric cars. However because Norway has a much higher sales tax than the US, 25 % compared to the 5,7% sales tax in the US, the US has to provide a direct purchase subsidy for the duration of the program, which goals should be the widespread adoption of electric cars, so the subsidy should be paid until 50-60% of newly purchased cars are electric, phased out from a 50-60% adoption rate to a 90 % adoption rate.

Equally as the adoption of the prioritization of rail and public transit in the infrastructure bill it is uncertain if electric cars will be supported as robustly as in Norway. This depends on the position of the leadership of the Democratic Party and key conservative Senate Dems to bipartisanship, the abolition of the filibuster and the programs discussed in this article. It is almost certain that if Democrats can´t pass these much needed programs in this election cycle and will lose either the House or the Senate in 2022, because of the stance of conservative Dems to abolishing the filibuster, progressive reforms and DC statehood, or the White House in 2024 because they won´t pass the Democratic platform and voters won´t see the sense of Democrats being in power, Republicans won´t pass any of these much needed programs and the world will then most certainly achieve 2 degrees of warming, as the zone of tipping points sketched out by climate scientists, after which warming can´t be controlled. On the passage of these policies depends the outcome of the fate of hundreds of millions, which will look in anger and resentment to their predecessors and ask why in the hell they didn´t do the right thing.

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