Biden Is Poised To Make Freight Trains Less Safe. You Can Thank Special Interests – By Veronique De Rugy (Reason) / March 25, 2022
Once again, Washington is giving us every reason to believe it’s selling favors to cronies even if it means everyone else loses.
It’s well-known that President 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.
Worse, this animus may lead to a more dangerous industry and is aided by crony special interests poisoning policymaking and sowing uncertainty among investors.
Specifically, the president’s team at the supposedly independent U.S. Surface Transportation Board (STB) 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.
