- Chapter 3 -

        - Building New Railways, Waterways, and Highways -

Three times in the past twelve years, Lyndon LaRouche
has put before the U.S. electorate proposals for
rebuilding the nation's transportation grid. Such
proposals were key features of his economic recovery
programs in the 1980 election campaign, again in 1984, and
also in 1988. 
     LaRouche told people that the deregulation of
trucking, airlines, and railroads which had been launched
during the presidency of Jimmy Carter in 1978, and has
continued to this day thanks to the
``magic-of-the-market-place'' free enterprise fanatics of
the Reagan and Bush administrations, was {economically
insane}, and a sure recipe for disaster. 
     Was he right, or not? The disaster LaRouche warned of
over more than a decade ago has already happened. 
   @sb|{Air Traffic:} Before deregulation, U.S.
airlines were world leaders. Where are they now? The
once-proud flag fleet, led by Pan Am, Trans World, and
Eastern is either in bankruptcy court, or about to be.
Equipment replacement and maintenance schedules have been
sacrificed to the debts incurred in the course of
post-deregulation price wars and leveraged buy-outs.
Consolidation of carriers has concentrated traffic in
fewer and fewer, but larger and larger airports. The
result? Traffic congestion in the air and on the ground
and millions of passenger-hours wasted ({Figure
1}). No new airport has been built since 1978.
   @sb|{Railroads:} 1980 passage of the Staggers
``RRRR'' Act did for the post-Penn Central bankruptcy
railroad system what deregulation did to airlines. Mergers
and the so-called consolidation of the industry have cut
railroad employment in half, and track mileage by 25%. The
production of railroad rolling stock--locomotives,
passenger cars and freight cars--plummeted to below
500 for each category in 1989 ({Figure 2}).
   @sb|{Highways:} To keep the nation's highway
system as it is, pot-holes, collapsing bridges and all,
would require government expenditures in the order of $100
billion per year. To maintain the present capacity of the
congested system would require a 30% increase in urban
highway miles before the end of the decade. To keep up
with population growth, $150 billion and more would have
to be allocated {each year} by government, for
highway construction and maintenance. The Surface
Transportation Act passed into law before Christmas,
provides $150 billion over the next five years. Economic
costs of congestion have already exceeded spending on the
highways in some parts of the country. 
     @sb|{Waterways:} There is no East Coast or
Gulf Coast port capable of handling the size of vessel--in
excess of 100,000 tons--which for the last generation has
been the standard in world shipping. Long Beach and Puget
Sound on the West Coast can handle bulk carriers up to
150,000 tons. The Louisiana Off-shore Oil Port (LOOP) can
handle large oil tankers. But the U.S.A. is no longer
producing large ships ({Figure 3}). The famed St.
Lawrence Seaway was rendered obsolete before it opened to
traffic, because of the growth in international vessel
size. Great Lakes traffic is further constrained by
refusal to invest in improvements at the Welland Canal and
locks at Sault St. Marie. Internal waterways, such
as the Monongahela and Allegheny reaches of the upper Ohio River
have been constrained by lack of investment in the
improvement of locks and dams. 
     Separately, each of these crises is a matter of the
nation's very existence. Taken together, they are a leading
symptom of the economic breakdown which has been caused by
the policies which have prevailed, not just since 1978,
but for the 28 years since the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy. 

                  - What Is Required? -
   The transportation network is to the economy as a
whole as the arteries and veins of the circulatory system
are to the body. It ought to be capable of moving goods
and people where they are needed, in the most timely and
effective way. By the end of the 1980s, the U.S. transport
network as a whole was moving about 5 billion tons of
goods through the economy every year. This can be assumed
to approximate the total physical goods throughput of the
economy. Truck movements accounted for over 40% of the
total, rail for about 28%, pipelines for about 17%, and the
waterways for about 12% ({Figure 4}). Approximately
half of the total freight moved was accounted for by the
combination of coal shipments and movements of crude oil
and refined petroleum products. Grain shipments, at about
13% of the total, were the next largest commodity item
shipped. About 56 tons of goods moved through the economy
for each household in the nation. 
      Not since the 1950s has the per-household volume of
goods shipped been so low. Back in 1967, 82 tons of
freight were shipped, by all modes of transportation, for
each of the country's households. This was the highest
level reached in the postwar period ({Figure 5}).
The transport network's capacity to deliver the goods has
collapsed since then by more than 30%, though over the
same period the number of people per household has also
collapsed by more than 20%, from 3.4 to 2.7. 
     To reverse this collapse would require a transport
grid with the capacity of moving between 6.5 and 7 billion
tons of goods per year, and an economic policy which would
create the employment opportunities which would permit the
needed goods to be produced. 
     If the total goods moved are divided by the
goods-producing operatives of the manufacturing sector,
450 tons of product enter into circulation for each person
productively employed. To produce the increase which would
restore the per-household goods throughput of the late
1960s requires the capital investment to create in the
range of from 3.5 to 4.5 million new productive jobs in
the manufacturing sector. 
     LaRouche's present campaign commitment to create 6
million jobs in basic economic infrastructure and
manufacturing would set a floor for the present capacity
required to move freight at about 8 billion tons per year,
or nearly 90 tons of goods moved per household, per year. 

                 - How Do We Compare? -
     How does this compare with other developed economies?
In the late 1960s, the transportation systems of both
Japan and Germany moved roughly the same volume of goods
per household per year as the United States. By the late
1980s, Germany's transport grid had grown to the point
that 114 tons, double the U.S. level, was being
transported per household. Japan was transporting 170 tons
per household, more than three times the U.S. volume
({Figure 6}). Both countries produce for export,
to pay their way in the world. A U.S. economy which was
functioning as a world-class exporter would be generating
between 10 and 15 billion tons of goods to be shipped each
year. 
     As the nearly 200-year history of national
infrastructure development in the United States attests,
infrastructure, like transportation, ought to be built to
last, not from year to year, but from generation to
generation. What should be on the agenda now is not simply
the matter of what volume of goods and passengers we ought
to be capable of moving through the transport grid, but
what kind of grid ought we to be designing and building
now, to be improved on over the period from 2020-2050.
This, after all, is simply considering in what shape the
country will be during the adult lifetimes of our
grandchildren and their children. 
     Deregulation and budget-cutting has brought us to the
point that merely fixing up the system is no more
possible. The nation's infrastructure needs a massive
overhaul, with a price tag of trillions of dollars. If
LaRouche was right, then those who opposed, or ignored
him, were wrong. Have we learned our lesson?

                  - And, the Solution -
   The cheapest mode of transportation is by water, but
water-borne commerce is limited in speed, such that the
mode is suited to movements of those bulk goods, such as
coal and grain, which do not require speedy delivery. 
   For most other purposes, rail ought to be the mode of
choice. The standard for assessing relative costs is
provided by the measurement of how many tons each mode can
move how many miles in an hour. On this basis, a
two-track railroad operating three trains an hour, at only
60 miles per hour (mph), moves the same bulk of goods as
far in an hour as a fleet of 330 20-ton trucks driven at 60 mph for
an hour. Relative labor and energy costs follow from this
performance ratio. Additionally, the same two-track
railroad requires only one-twelfth the land area of the
highways used by trucks. Since the speed of trucks is
relatively bounded by the limitations of internal
combustion engines, the advantage in favor of rail
increases dramatically with increases in speed. Diesel
engines cannot function above 125 mph.
   But high-speed rail systems function for passenger
traffic at speeds in the range of 200 mph. France, with its
Train a@ag Grande Vitesse and Japan with the Shinkansen, have
pioneered the development of rapid rail transit over the last
20 years. The next step, being pioneered in Germany, France,
and Japan, is employing the technology of magnetic
levitation, in which passenger and freight trains can reach
300 miles per hour travelling without friction along a
cushion of air generated between the train and the track.
European nations are now moving to construct a high-speed
rail network which will integrate their continent from east
to west and north to south. 
   The United States should undertake to develop such
high-speed rail systems, with the objective of rebuilding
the railroad system as the freight mover of choice.   This
high-speed rail network should be interfaced with water
transport, through ocean and internal waterway ports, to
take advantage of the benefits of both modes for
rebuilding the country's industrial base. Our program to
rebuild the nation's transportation grid should begin with
the depression-ravaged areas along the Eastern Seaboard,
the area known since 1978 as the ``rust belt,'' bounded by
the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and centered on Chicago,
and the area bounded by the Tennessee, Tombigbee, and
Mississippi Rivers. 


----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com