transportation infrastructure

By Nick Wurst, Matt Weaver, Mark Burrows, Ross Grooters, and Maximillian Alvarez - The Real News, March 6, 2024

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 1, 2024

To mark Climate Equity Day 2024, LNS Transit Organizer Bakari Height wrote in an Op Ed published in five newspapers:

For far too long, policymakers in Washington have prioritized highways and cars over public transit. This has devastating impacts not only for the climate crisis but on the budgets of local transit agencies and communities across the nation.

The fix?

>A new piece of legislation introduced last month by Congressman Hank Johnson from the Atlanta area would change that. The bill titled, “Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act” will provide high-quality transit to communities across the country.

A Newsweek op ed by John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union and John Costa, international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, explains how the Act would work:

The legislation would allocate $20 billion annually for four years, specifically so agencies could “make substantial improvements in transit service.” That’s $80 billion for operations, not capital projects.

>With such financial support, agencies could significantly boost their current schedules and run buses and trains more frequently. They could robustly extend the hours of operation on routes and lines that now are shut down for the night. And they could add entirely new service, like a local or express bus route, in tragically underserved neighborhoods.

>

For Height’s full op ed: https://chicagocrusader.com/honor-rosa-parks-not-through-words-but-action/ 

For Samuelsen and Costa’s full op ed: https://www.newsweek.com/working-people-need-congress-fund-mass-transit-opinion-1866491 

By Tom Heap - Climate Cast, February 9, 2024

By Eddie Hall - America's Workforce Union Podcast, February 1, 2024

By Christa, Chris Albright, Jessica Albright, Stella Gamble, Daren Gamble, and Maximillian Alvarez - The Real News, January 31, 2024

By Todd Smith - Safe Landing, January 28, 2024

By Alex Press and Maddock Thomas - Jacobin, January 7, 2024

Nearly one year ago, on the night of February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Videos of the smoke and fire released by the nearly two-mile-long train went viral, and residents in the community reported severe health effects.

The rail disaster triggered an outcry: Why did this happen, and what can any of us do about it? Soon, there were articles detailing the alarming state into which the country’s railroads have fallen: accidents are up, and oversight is hard to come by. Plus, there is a severe squeeze on rail workers, many of whom lack sick days of any kind and are effectively always on call.

Railroad Workers United (RWU), a caucus of rank-and-file workers spanning all thirteen national rail unions, recently released a video offering one answer to the rotten state of US rail. “Putting America Back on Track: The Case for Public Rail Ownership” opens in East Palestine, with a resident of the area showing the viewer photos he took the night of the Norfolk Southern derailment. The video goes on to make the case for public ownership of rail, which has been a focus for RWU over the past year.

As Ross Grooters, RWU cochair and a union locomotive engineer, told Jacobin, the workers came out with the demand amid their ugly contract fight in 2022, which ended with Joe Biden intervening to quash a potential rail strike.

“It became really clear between the contract negotiations and the fact that the railroad companies are making obscene amounts of money operating the railroads purely for the purpose of extracting wealth from what should be critical infrastructure, that the only way for rail to work would be outside the for-profit model that it exists in currently,” said Grooters.

So RWU passed a resolution endorsing the campaign. The case has been articulated by RWU members in several publications, from Jacobin to In These Times to FreightWaves, but with the release of RWU’s film, I wanted to hear more about the models under debate, so I called up Maddock Thomas, who is writing a policy paper on public rail ownership for RWU. We spoke about the current structure of rail ownership, alternative public models, and which country has the most functional rail system. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

By Union Jake, Adam, and Matt Weaver - Valley Labor Report, December 22, 2023

By staff - National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), November 5, 2023

As Britain ‘celebrates’ 30 years of rail privatisation, RMT reveals that the three-decade debacle has seen at least £31 billion leak out of the system, mostly into shareholders pockets, while passengers are paying 8% more in real terms to travel on a deteriorating system.

• Renationalising the railway and creating a single, integrated publicly owned railway company would save around £1.5 billion every year which could be used to cut fares by 18%, helping to encourage more people back onto Britain’s railways.
• At least £1.5 billion and very likely more leaks out of Britain’s railways every year in the form of profits extracted by train operating companies, rolling stock leasing companies, subcontractors and other costs that arise the fragmentation of the railways.1 Throughout privatisation, the annual outflow of funds would have enabled, on average, a cut of 14% in fares (Table 1.)
• If the railways were nationalised now and the flow of funds into the private sector was cut off, the money saved would fund a cut of 18% in fares.
• The cost of travelling by rail is now almost 8% higher in real terms than it was in 1995, before privatisation. This figure has dropped in the last two years only as inflation as risen above 13%. Until the cost-of-living crisis, when fare increases were decoupled from RPI inflation, fares were consistently 15-20% higher in real terms than before privatisation.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).