Re:End of an American tradition: Amtrak kills the traditiona...
by dageshi on Sunday September 22, 2019 @04:54AM
(#21040358)
This seems like it might be the entire crux of the issue? If taxes are incentivising people to reduce lines to the bare viable minimum then that's what you're going to get in terms of service.
Re:End of an American tradition: Amtrak kills the traditiona...
by jazzyjackson on Sunday September 22, 2019 @05:46AM
(#21040513)
In all my days of Amtrak criticism I haven’t heard about property taxes, can you link me a source? (Not doubting you, I would like to read about it)
Re:End of an American tradition: Amtrak kills the traditiona...
by bobthepanda on Sunday September 22, 2019 @11:45AM
(#21041877)
This varies by state, but:
Minnesota does: https://www.revenue.state.mn.us/railroad-property-tax#
New Jersey does: https://www.state.nj.us/treasury/taxation/railroadtax.shtml
Missouri does: https://apps1.mo.gov/stcoriginalassessment/report/CompanyRep...
The problem was so bad at one point that one of the steps taken to arrest the rail industry's decline was to ban property tax discrimination against railroads: https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2014/dec/tax-clinic-10....
You never see this in Amtrak discussions, because Amtrak does not own the vast majority of the rails it runs on, and people couldn't care less about private companies. For highways and airports, they're pretty much all on publicly owned land, so they don't pay property tax because that would be silly.
This is because unlike other forms of transportation, railways are required to pay property taxes, so they're incentivized to have as little improved property as possible.