New Mexico’s Rail Runner: bad for the environment

The Rio Grande Foundation has been implacably opposed to the heavily-subsidized New Mexico RailRunner Express since its inception during the Richardson Administration. Mostly this is due to the high cost of the train system which has seen ridership decline over time and then plummet during and in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic.

While we have long questioned the outrageous waste of tax dollars and urged policymakers to shut the train down, the Legislative Finance Committee recently reported (as did the Santa Fe New Mexican) recently reported that the train needs to increase ridership by 23% to BREAK EVEN in terms of CO2 emissions. In other words, as it stands now and until ridership increases dramatically, the Rail Runner is bad for the environment.  Of course, even that calculation fails to consider the emissions that went into building the train sets, laying the track, and more cost (and carbon) effective alternatives like commuter buses (which we advocated for at the time).

While exact comparisons are difficult to make because the report strictly considers weekday ridership, we believe that the train would need to return to 2019 levels just to break even on CO2 emissions.

Of course, while the Rail Runner continues losing millions of taxpayer dollars annually and spewing unnecessary carbon into the atmosphere SOME would like to EXPAND the system even further. Left wing State Senator Bill Soules has for years been pushing a taxpayer-funded train from the Mexican city of Chihuahua to Denver, Colorado. While Soules would undoubtedly describe himself as an “environmentalist” (as would the vast majority of Democrats in the Legislature who gave us and keep funding the Rail Runner) what Soules and others fail to understand is that trains like the Rail Runner are only “green” if they are ridden by large numbers of people.

Will New Mexico’s political leadership do anything useful with this information? It’s highly unlikely. Barring a major budget crisis it is hard to see anyone addressing the environmental or budgetary harm of the Rail Runner. But, we have yet another thing to say “we told you so” about.