There’s talk of attempting to improve passenger train service between Pittsburgh and Altoona. But it’s difficult to imagine the effort would fare any better than it did over a two-year span 35 years ago.
That’s when the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) subsidized Amtrak with $547,000 in public money. But the service attracted only 30 or so daily passengers. The plug was pulled in 1983.
As the Post-Gazette’s Brian O’Neill recently reminded, that $547,000 would be $1.4 million in today’s dollars.
PennDOT now will spend $200,000 on a private consultant to gauge demand along the 117-mile route. Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian takes just under 3 hours to make the trek. One can drive to Altoona from Pittsburgh in just under 2 hours.
And lest one forget, it takes a painfully long 5 ½ hours to Amtrak it between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. It’s a 3-hour drive.
The train consultant claims there surely must be greater demand these days along the Pittsburgh-Altoona corridor because of what she described to the P-G as a “passenger rail renaissance” in eastern Pennsylvania.
Never mind that rail always works best in the most densely populated areas, not in the largely rural western half of the Keystone State.
It’s never been good public policy to throw good money after bad. But, sadly, government officials keep doing their darnedest to do so.
PNC Financial Services has sold its 185-room Fairmont Pittsburgh hotel in downtown Pittsburgh for $30 million. The buyer is Xenia Hotels and Resorts, based in Florida.
The hotel was incorporated into the heavily taxpayer-funded 23-story Three PNC Plaza, of which the hotel took the top 10 floors.
You might recall that the project cost $178 million to build. But taxpayers subsidized construction with $48 million. There was $30 million from the commonwealth and $18 million in tax-increment financing.
Of course, taxpayers never should have been turned into venture capitalists for this or any other such project. And it was a particularly galling situation, considering it was a giant and most profitable banking corporation constructing the complex.
All that said, it should strike reasonable people as apropos to expect at least a modest return on their 10-year-old “investment.” After all, one can assume PNC is turning a profit on this deal. (Conversely, if it’s not, tax dollars were conscripted to help underwrite a very suspect deal.)
Interestingly, back in 2006, Bill Peduto, now the mayor of Pittsburgh, was the only member of City Council to oppose the such corporate wealthfare for the banking behemoth. PNC didn’t need the help, he said then. No kidding.
We should all trust that Mayor Peduto now will spearhead the effort to return some of the profit that PNC made on the backs of taxpayers to those taxpayers.
Yeah, right.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
