Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editorial

“Don Young’s Railroad to Nowhere.” That was the headline in the July 10 edition of Politico, an online news operation based in Washington, D.C. The article went off the rails in its analysis of federal transit funding sent Alaska’s way.

Nevertheless, the views it promoted should be a warning signal for the Alaska Railroad.

Young successfully defended that railroad’s funding in June after the Senate threatened to cut it. His effort will bring about $31 million annually to the Alaska Railroad via the Federal Transit Administration for the next two years. It’s a bit less than the state-owned corporation received this year, but it’s an essential funding stream that backs up bonds the railroad has sold to raise money for track work.

Politico cast Young’s work as a sneaky earmark — “the words Alaska Railroad don’t even appear in the bill,” it noted. Everyone involved on the Transportation committee knew what he was doing, though, and his “earmark” treated Alaska fairly when compared to the rest of the nation.

The federal government spends huge amounts of money on passenger rail in two ways. It subsidizes subways and commuter rail operations through the transit administration, and it makes direct appropriations to keep Amtrak afloat.

The FTA receives about $10 billion annually, and about 20 percent of the passenger miles subsidized by that money are traveled on commuter rail systems. Amtrak receives about $1.5 billion in federal funding annually.

Figuring out how this funding compares to the $31 million that the Alaska Railroad will receive could occupy a statistician for a few months. However, rough calculations indicate that Alaska’s per-passenger, per-mile subsidy is higher but in the same general universe as many rail subsidies received elsewhere in the country.

The Politico article tries to make something of a distinction between those subsidies. It focuses on the fact that the money Young secured is delivered via the transit administration and therefore is “meant to help mass transit lines carry commuters, not send cargo and tourists through the Alaskan tundra.”

Besides mischaracterizing the vast majority of the landscape between Fairbanks and “nowhere” (by which Politico must have meant Anchorage?), this statement is mere opinion masquerading as fact. Congress does not limit the transit money to urban commuter routes. Eligible entities simply must operate, at least in part, within municipalities greater than 200,000, which Anchorage is. Thus, the Alaska Railroad qualifies.

In 2005, Young boosted the amount of money the Alaska Railroad receives by linking transit funding to track miles. Obviously, the Alaska Railroad has far more track than commuter transit systems. But Alaska doesn’t get any federal funding through Amtrak, which provides passenger rail service around the nation, just like the Alaska Railroad does here. So the track-mile funding is merely compensatory, in a way. The pot from which the money is drawn doesn’t matter; one federal dollar isn’t any different from another just because of the acronym attached to it.

Nevertheless, because of opposition from a few fellow members of Congress, Young had to accept a compromise in the most recent bill that allows the transit administration to count only 22 percent of track miles that lie outside an urbanized area when calculating the funding linked to such track. Thus, the railroad will receive about $5 million less annually than it did in the most recent funding year.

Planes, trains and automobiles — they’re all subsidized by the federal government to one degree or another across the nation. The only way to rationally create a transportation system based upon need is to turn the whole thing over to private toll companies. That isn’t likely to happen, so instead we have a political system that decides what is built and how it is funded.

Today, Alaska is getting its fair share, perhaps even more than that, from that political system.

Maybe passenger rail subsidies will be pared back in a new age of federal austerity. In that case, Alaska and the rest of the nation’s passenger rail systems need to start adjusting for a much leaner future. But no one should blame Alaska and its lone representative for seeking what everyone else has enjoyed.