Re:Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
by belorn on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @12:52PM
(#20868500)
Yes, a 1000x error there :).
The numbers I read was that since 1950 the railway infrastructure budget has only increased by 30%. US budget in 1950 was around 70 billions, while 2018 it is 7 trillions. (https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed_spending_1950USbn)
The proportional funding should thus have went down by basically the same amount as the government spending went up. I might very well be wrong, and The Federal Railroad Administration was created in 1966 so I am not sure exactly which part of the government paid for railway before that point, and the 30% claim could of course be wrong. Department of Transportation has had a increase in funding by about 10x from 1970 to 2008, but I could not find exact numbers for the Federal Railroad Administration.
Confirm that it's 1/640th of the 1950 budget?! That seems insane. (Is it perhaps 1/6.4 [0.156% or 0.00156x] instead?)
The Federal Railroad Administration alone has a budget over $1.5BB. Does that mean we were spending the equivalent of almost a trillion of today's dollars a year (~25% of receipts) on rail in 1950? That seems several orders of magnitude wrong.