A Tale of Two Amtraks

[Commuting Boston Student]

Earlier this month, the Brookings Institute released A New Alignment: Strengthening America’s Commitment to Passenger Rail. While the 30-page report covers a number of issues germaine to the state of Amtrak in 2013, there's one issue in particular I'd like to talk at length about - that being the "long-distance" trains which make up a non-trivial portion of all Amtrak service provided.

So, if I may, allow me to tell you a tale of two passenger rail services. Let's just call them service A and service B for now.

Now, service A is a tried-and-true corridor train. It doesn't go particularly fast compared to some of the world-class services furnished by other countries - but it knows what job it is meant to do, and certainly does it's job well. Ridership is breaking historical records, on-time-performance is acceptable, perhaps even good, and even though the trip is not "high-speed," it's more than fast enough for the most part, and it sees plenty of service to virtually guarantee that a train will likely be available when you need it to be.

Service B, on the other hand, is a long-distance route. It spans a vast corridor between two major metropolitan cities. Unfortunately, it takes nearly a full day to complete its journey, it doesn't hit very many major cities on its meandering way through the country, and only one train each way per day is provided for - making it, by and large, an extremely poor choice for commuters or business travelers in most circumstances. However, it does do one job excellently: passengers aboard this train ride in comfort and style, with full meals and plenty of opportunities to sight-see along the way. And there's plenty of sleeping space available in the form of bedrooms for the traveler who just can't manage to fall asleep upright, or for anyone seeking a little more privacy. As a tourism/travel train, it works impeccably.

If you asked the average person which of these two services the country needed more of, I predict that the answer would be A, nine times out of ten. And it seems obvious, too, when you think about it. Trains geared toward vacationers and backpackers and tourists and leisure riders have a place in the world - but that place is certainly not doing the job of a national mass transit network. A national network made up entirely of services in the pattern of A, rather than B, is vital to the economic success of any country.

Unfortunately, one of the largest problems inherent in Amtrak today is that the services provided by Amtrak skew heavily in the opposite direction. There are some corridor services, and most of them are highly useful - but the vast majority of all route-miles traveled by Amtrak are traveled over the long-distance corridors represented by Service B.

Allow me to digress for a moment. Anti-rail activists and politicians frequently point to Amtrak as an unnecessary waste of government money. They see it as a bloated, wasteful public money sink providing nothing of real worth to the people ultimately responsible for financing it - the taxpayers. I really very much wish that I didn't have to say that, in some cases, they're absolutely right.

Long-distance routes are, effectively, land cruises. The long distance routes themselves are even predominately marketed as significant components of grand "Amtrak Vacation" packages, in a yearly book of $1000+ getaways you can choose to let Amtrak help you take. These are absolutely wonderful travel services. They're great for the tourism industry of everywhere a long-distance route runs through. Indeed, some of these trains (such as the eponymous City of New Orleans) are national institutions and I do not expect them to disappear any time soon. However, at the risk of raising the unfortunate specter of anti-rail talking points, the government doesn't have any business being in that business - we should not be subsidizing these trains. The very notion of doing so is akin to proposing that the government step in and provide subsidy to Carnival Cruise Lines, possibly while declaring cruise ships valuable parts of the national transportation fabric and legitimate mobility choices. Ridiculous, right?

Now, on the other hand, we have the corridor services. The short-to-medium distance trains that make up the remainder of Amtrak's services. These routes are vital to the continued success of the country as a whole and most of its metropolitan regions, especially in today's economic climate - with an aging population walking away from their vehicles even as today's youth opts for "car culture" less and less with each passing day. To say nothing of the rising costs of fuel, land, and the rural/suburban lifestyle in general! No, it's becoming more and more apparent with every passing day that the United States really does need more corridor services, and badly.

We need to get out of the long-distance-land-cruise business. These trains provide fuel and ammunition to a diverse array of opponents to the national rail business. Despite system-wide ridership growth, the long-distance routes are nowhere near meeting anything that could be considered reasonable expectations for ridership. The excesses associated with a vacation that you can readily find aboard any long-distance train are also some of the largest sources of deficit on Amtrak's books, and extremely poor on-time-performance records drag the system-wide OTP well below any acceptable level. Should we continue to pour vast resources into services that are fundamentally bad transit, they will almost certainly drag down the legitimate and necessary services that Amtrak provides alongside them. That must not be allowed to happen.

Regrettably, the National Association of Railroad Passengers disagrees. Following shortly on the heels of the Brookings report, NARP issued a press release: "Railroad Passengers Applaud, Criticize Brookings Report." As part of the release, a white paper on long-distance trains was jointly furnished by NARP and the Midwest High-Speed Rail Association - its contents essentially boiling down to an ill-advised, misguided (at best) and (dare I say?) amateurish defense of a fundamentally broken system of long-distance money sinks as a vital underpinning to the nascent national rail network.

That's not to say that several valid concerns weren't raised by the aforementioned white paper and press release. No, the fact that introducing artificial gaps in the national network between the ends of corridors where continuing service in the context of either corridor (say, for example, the Chicago-Cleveland corridor and the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh corridor) will drastically reduce the number of people both able and willing to utilize the network is a very real concern. Pinching off huge untapped markets and entirely reasonable commute patterns (such as Cleveland-Pittsburgh) is absolutely unacceptable. That disposing of the long-distance routes also means ending the only service presently serving 22 US states is also a huge concern and a dire issue that needs to be immediately addressed.

No, the problem isn't the questions that NARP is asking - it's the answer they've provided. The 22 US states that see no corridor service at present do not need more long-distance services - they need new, efficient, frequent and fast corridor services. And where cities or commute patterns fall between two ends of useful corridors, the solution isn't to "underpin" them with a long-distance train spanning two or more full corridors just to serve the gaps between them. The solution is to extend one or both corridors along the length of the gap: Chicago - Pittsburgh may not make sense, but it's worth running such a train if Cleveland - Pittsburgh would go unserved otherwise.

Amtrak - the National Passenger Rail Corporation, is a vital service and essential to the success of America in the years and decades to come. The government - at the federal level as well as the state level - absolutely should continue to support this service. Indeed, all signs point to a non-stop upward growth trend for Amtrak. It's more than capable of thriving.

However, Amtrak - the National Land Cruise Provider, has no role in this future growth. The path to success might not begin with jettisoning those services, but it must happen, at some point, all the same.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

This same debate has come up over and over and over and over again for 40 years.

Once we start talking about getting rid of the LD's, it becomes an existential threat to all of Amtrak. It goes down that familiar foxhole of "privatize the NEC!" or "NO MOAR CHOO-CHOO SOCIALIZM!" and all kinds of unproductive shouting like that. The debate gets framed on that "self-sustainability" theme which at its heart is all about private enterprise turning a profit. Which of course is laughable, because no public service and no transportation infrastructure is supposed to turn a profit. But even the transit supporters end up getting subliminally duped into arguing their position along those narrow grounds.

So when it comes down to gaming out votes in Congress about reforming Amtrak, once the LD's go on the table there never ends up being a productive conversation about committing in a serious way to building up corridor service. If cuts to one thing go on the table cuts to everything go on the table, the avowed enemies of Amtrak get emboldened to start talking trash, and interference gets run on the supporters by virtue of the debate getting defined on "self-sustainability". It can start with noble intentions, but the corridor services end up getting threatened all the same. And when they do act on it, like they did in the 1990's with the major route-trimming cuts, it ends up being punitive for all flavors of Amtrak including the critical and outright profitable routes.

In the end, the LD's end up being worth fighting for...for sake of preventing the debate from falling down that same foxhole and doing collateral damage to the corridor services. By virtue of touching just enough of the flyover states they placate a few opposition votes from turning into zealot opposition votes. And end up being a sort of 'proof of life' for all of Amtrak by reinforcing that, yes, subsidies are required for transit and infrastructure and, no, there is no magic bullet. Hence, the Empire Builders, Southwest Chiefs, and California Zephyrs of the world end up being an unpleasantly critical existential defense. Inefficiency becomes its own form of protection, resisting reform a firewall against much bigger threats.



This sucks. I agree wholeheartedly with everything you're saying. But this is Congress, and Congress has never been more broken than it is now. I'm not sure what would get this debate to stop falling down that self-sustainability foxhole. They've been having this same debate about Amtrak for 40 years, and it hasn't advanced at all beyond loggerheads about profitability. No amount of shaming from the rest of the world running circles around us on nationalized transit seems to budge that. Pork's still king; people still believe roads are free-as-beer; and Congressmen believe even more than they used to that formerly no-questions-asked subsidized services like the Postal Service need to turn a profit, without bothering to ask themselves how.

Amtrak and USDOT have a brutally difficult job trying to maintain focus throughout this. By and large they have done a pretty good job the last decade getting some advancements in corridor services in a political environment that in many ways has never been more hostile. But I think even they know that the price of triangulation has required a vigorous defense of the LD's as means for getting more corridor investment. Because they remember all too well what happened in Clinton's first term when the LD's were last trimmed and it ended up going scorched-earth over the whole network. "Proof of life", indeed.


It's not pretty to watch, but the one thing you can consistently say about Amtrak is that they know how to survive. Survival forces some unattractive choices like vouching for the LD's for the sake of the big picture. It forces lowered expectations. It's not efficient...LaHood et al may even wince at their own defense of the LD's...but given how broken the politics are there is some logic behind their duality. The fact that they have gone a dozen years and an entire transit-hostile 8-year Prez. Administration without a repeat of the Clinton-era service cuts is at least a little bit of empirical evidence that defense of the LD's has worked...in its own fugly way.

I hate it. You hate it. We should all hate it. But it's the broken politics of the country that we should hate a whole lot more than Amtrak's survival pivot and using the LD's as a pawn to keep the riff-raff from threatening the rest. I don't know if there is anything to propose here because it's systemic political insanity rotting this and a whole lot of of other aspects of this country's world competitiveness. I would like to think that if the "self-sustainability" trap got closed and there was actually a Congress and few dozen state Legislatures who'd debate this on ground of where's the best bang-for-subsidy to invest...that Amtrak would adapt and shape-shift full bore onto corridor services without need for the LD's to justify their existence as a tactical shield.


But how exactly do we get there?

This is much, much more vexing than Amtrak, trains, any individual piece of the puzzle. It's expunging New Gilded Age politics.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

The trick to getting anything done in the realm of zero-sense pure-ideology politics is to convince everyone involved that what you want to do furthers their agenda while hurting the other guy's. Doesn't matter if that's true or false - most ideologies are full of contradictions that don't stand up to close scrutiny anyway. As long as it sounds good and passes the smell test, we're making progress. It's unfortunate that most of Congress exhibits the same sort of lizard-brain behavior that draws ire anywhere it pops up in life, but the trick is to get the party lines working for you.

Fake right to go left. Point out that privatizing Amtrak accomplishes nothing when the government has to step right back in in five or ten years and bailout / reassume control from whoever bought up Amtrak because, much like banks, it's too big to fail. Privatizing Amtrak must therefore start with preparing the system to survive on its own without significant government involvement - and that means investment.

Point out that one of the biggest obstacles to Amtrak's success is the continual intrusion upon its services by oppressive regulations of an out-of-date government bureaucracy known as the FRA. Remind everyone that back in the 70s, our freight rail network was doing about as well as Amtrak is now, and then imply that the partial deregulation that came from the 4R and Staggers Rail Acts was what "saved" the national freight rail network. Let the NO MORE BIG GOVERNMENT crowd draw their own conclusion, and then point them at the FRA. After all, even if Amtrak got privatized, the FRA would still be "in the way" of private enterprise and "profit". Same too with bullshit legislation such as the law preventing Amtrak from ever marking Acela tickets less than 50% of their maximum price. There's no reason to assume that private operators wouldn't be subject to all the laws presently burdening Amtrak, so those have to go too, right?

On the marketing/lobbying end, work hard to dispel myths about what Amtrak is or isn't. The average person who shits on Amtrak probably hasn't taken it anywhere recently, or is repeating back "good" party line talking points. And far more likely - the average person doesn't care enough about Amtrak to even draw such a hard conclusion, whether for or against. Amtrak comes up a lot less in the national/non-rail-activist news media a hell of a lot less often than OBUMMERCARE, SOCIALIST COMMUNISM, WELFARE ABUSE, REFORM ENTITLEMENTS et cetera et cetera. It flies under the radar, which means half the job of convincing Joe Average that Amtrak's a good thing is already done because he isn't being bombarded with AMTRAK BAD nearly as much as he is other things. In fact, you don't even have to convince him it's a good thing only if he takes it - maybe it isn't the best possible outcome, but if you can get the average suburbanite to support transit because it frees up road capacity for people who don't have ready access to transit (ie them), that's better than no support at all.

Along the same lines, money in is money in and money out is money out. It doesn't matter where $2 billion for project X "comes from" unless you specifically say "and we're tapping the [insert 'dedicated' road funding source here] revenue stream to pay for this." That's great for rallying support amongst anti-road folks, but that's also great at starting fights with the auto/highway lobby and perpetuating the myth that roads are still free. (After all, the only reason the highway fund is in such bad shape is because EVIL TRANSIT ADVOCATES keep stealing money out of it!!) "Take" the money from literally anywhere else - fighting the no more taxes people on their own will not be nearly as difficult as fighting both them and the auto lobby.

Those are all broad things that I think can help get the tides to turn back in Amtrak's favor on a general level. But more germaine to the long-distance routes question - defending the long-distance routes is a hell of a lot different than calling for more of them. Even calling for better long-distance routes (read: more investment into the ones we've got now) is a lot different than calling for more of them. The goal should be to gradually unentangle the long-distance network from the corridor services. And you're right that trying to just axe them all right now helps nobody and opens us up to corridor service cuts as well. But just because that's the unfortunate situation and we have no choice but to grin and bear it now doesn't mean we should try and further entangle ourselves in it.

Instead of calling for more than 1x daily trains on the long-distance routes "so that every city on the route can see daytime service," we should be calling for new corridor trains that serve those cities which only see service at awkward hours instead. Adding two or three more round trip Crescents isn't at all useful, but extending the Piedmont out to Atlanta and tripling its frequency would be. More named Silver Service trains might be a huge boon to vacationers, but an actual Silver Service with five round trips daily from Jacksonville to Miami and three more round trips each Jacksonville - Tampa and Tampa - Miami would be about a hundred times better. Even some of the most ridiculously bad long-distance routes - the California Zephyrs and the Sunset Limiteds of the network - have two or three fertile corridors ready for new services buried within their long, meandering journeys through nowhere. We should be calling for new investment into trains between Denver and Salt Lake City, between Denver and Omaha, between Salt Lake City and Reno. We should NOT be calling for two or three more California Zephyr round-trips.

It is, in fact, the amateurish call for more frequency and on the long-distance routes and more new long-distance service that NARP is making which inspired me to start this thread.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

And this hasn't been tried before???

The political climate is what frames the debate at the Congressional level about Amtrak. It puts a lots of issues inclusive and beyond Amtrak in a straightjacket. It's all about ideology, and it drives the conversation top-down. You can't change that conversation with a bottom-up 'repackaging' of Amtrak's mission statement. That's been tried for 40 years (and not without merit, because for Amtrak to exist they must vouch for a viable, coherent, and evolving mission statement). But bottom-up efforts don't trump top-down fervor.

I don't know how you get rid of the national dysfunction about public service subsidies. It's such a huge and pervasive problem that neither side can even aim their ideological shouting within 10 miles of practical action. It is one of the prevailing threats to our sovereignty in the New Gilded Age. But that's where the problem is: top-down and in the 'believe harder' abstract. Not with a murky bottom-up messaging problem. Not that the *right* speech hasn't been made about what to do with Amtrak to satiate every peg on the ideological spectrum as if they're going to say, "Oh, NOW I get it...let's talk turkey." Forget it...permutations of the *right* speech have been given continuously for the last 40 years. "Do X, do Y, get rid of that"...etc., etc. It's been done. You can't just say "Do X better, do Z, get rid of this instead, and you'll have more success." That doesn't matter. Because it never even penetrates the upper levels, much less alters the debate. It's misdiagnosing the problem: a top-down problem about ideological histrionics preventing ANY rational discussion about subsidies-cum-general. On both sides.

Nothing is going to change until the top-down problem gets licked. It's not about Amtrak at all. It's about ideological paralysis on the role of government to fund services and infrastructure. Now, talking about specific change at the Amtrak and FRA level is useful in the sense that they have to game out every conceivable what-if and pounce effectively at every little scrap of opportunity that comes their way. But this is not going to turn on somebody making that one *perfect* magic bullet "Do this. . ." argument. That's bottom-up, not top-down. Bottom-up doesn't move the debate about subsidies, and never has.

 

[novitiate]

Another advantage to the LDs is that they keep service alive- a line with a single round-trip a day still has stations of some sort, it still has agreements with the freight operator (however unwilling), still is being maintained to some passenger standards. Adding more passenger service to a line where such service exists is a lot easier than starting from scratch.

 

[Commuting Boston Student]

How do you expect the top-down fervor to be changed, exactly? Perhaps one day, most of our elected officials will wake up, look in the mirror and cry out as one "My God, What Have We Been Doing!?" No.

It's the bottom-up retrenching and re-framing of the arguments that is going to eventually reach the top and have some sort of profound impact on the highest levels of government. It's not going to be immediate - in fact, it might take decades just to re-direct the top-down system out of its default state of inertia - but saying "well, we tried to change the message and saw no dramatic shift this month / this year / this election cycle, better just give up" is the one way we can guarantee that a whole lot of nothing continues to happen.

The right speech has been made before, and it'll be made again. What has to happen is for the right speech to be made repeatedly. And not just here. In everything that government does, there needs to be people at the bottom sending the message up. The effects of adjusting the way politics happens at the ground floor aren't going to be apparent on the national level, but it's a prerequisite of changing the way politics happens at the county level, and that's a prerequisite for getting things to change at the state level, and that's when you start seeing changes on the national level.

Bottom-up works. It doesn't work quickly, and it doesn't work if you abandon your position when it doesn't cause an overnight shift in the discourse down in Washington, but it does work eventually - as long as people keep at it.

We just have to keep trying.

Another advantage to the LDs is that they keep service alive- a line with a single round-trip a day still has stations of some sort, it still has agreements with the freight operator (however unwilling), still is being maintained to some passenger standards. Adding more passenger service to a line where such service exists is a lot easier than starting from scratch.

Those agreements, that maintenance, and those structures are not predicated on there being long-distance service (and ONLY long-distance service.) And, yes, bad things would very likely happen if all the LDs were just ripped away with nothing to replace them.

But, again, that doesn't mean we should be running more long-distance service. And I, frankly, have a lot of trouble believing that it's going to be any easier to work out the logistics of a new Southwest Chief roundtrip that leaves exactly 12 hours after the existing one does as opposed to simply adding new corridor trains between Los Angeles and Flagstaff and between Kansas City and Albuquerque.

And in the case of running brand-new services - such as a connector between the Sunset Limited and the Southwest Chief via Phoenix - the argument that there's existing service and architecture (legal or otherwise) in place that would favor new long-distance service evaporates. A brand-new corridor train from Los Angeles to Tucson via Victorville and Phoenix is more than sufficient - there's no need to try and introduce another garbage long-distance route between Chicago and Los Angeles (or between St. Louis and LA, or between Dallas and LA) to get Phoenix onto the network.

About the ONLY case where framing new service in the pattern of a long-distance train would ever be useful is the restoration of the remainder of the Sunset Limited - between New Orleans and Jacksonville. And that's only because there was historically service there as the Sunset Limited (and it's still indicated as Service Suspended on the official route-maps et cetera) where no such corridor service is available for ready reactivation.

Even then, that stretch of the Sunset Limited was not at all well liked and historically particularly awful even by the Sunset Limited's low standards, so I somehow doubt that restoring it would even make a good stop-gap measure.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

How do you expect the top-down fervor to be changed, exactly? Perhaps one day, most of our elected officials will wake up, look in the mirror and cry out as one "My God, What Have We Been Doing!?" No.

It's the bottom-up retrenching and re-framing of the arguments that is going to eventually reach the top and have some sort of profound impact on the highest levels of government. It's not going to be immediate - in fact, it might take decades just to re-direct the top-down system out of its default state of inertia - but saying "well, we tried to change the message and saw no dramatic shift this month / this year / this election cycle, better just give up" is the one way we can guarantee that a whole lot of nothing continues to happen.

The right speech has been made before, and it'll be made again. What has to happen is for the right speech to be made repeatedly. And not just here. In everything that government does, there needs to be people at the bottom sending the message up. The effects of adjusting the way politics happens at the ground floor aren't going to be apparent on the national level, but it's a prerequisite of changing the way politics happens at the county level, and that's a prerequisite for getting things to change at the state level, and that's when you start seeing changes on the national level.

Bottom-up works. It doesn't work quickly, and it doesn't work if you abandon your position when it doesn't cause an overnight shift in the discourse down in Washington, but it does work eventually - as long as people keep at it.

We just have to keep trying.

I don't know. At all.

What I am saying is that Amtrak is too small an entity pivot to bottom-up a game-changing message about the role of subsidy-cum-general, when it's the screwed up politics around that that are dragging down all manner of investment downwind. Even in countries that have world-class transit systems; it's nth on the list of brick-and-mortar public services they do right.

That Amtrak speech has been given. It's been given repeatedly for 40 years. Every permutation of it has been given. The speech you're giving right now has been given. There's no squinting at that message that's going to come up with a eureka moment if this or that were tweaked and it were given again. Or point where trying harder is going to get the message through. Speaking up gets them slapped. That's Amtrak's lot in life. When they've had pushier leadership they've been made to pay for speaking up.

Now, I am most definitely NOT saying give up. The conversation is useful for defining what Amtrak should do when it gets even a nugget of flex to do something. They shape-shift well. So it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing revolution to net something useful. What I am saying is that the issue is so much larger than trains that repeating a speech about trains is missing the point and thinking too small. It's about infrastructure investment, the role of subsidy in infrastructure investment and public services, our screwed up notions of subsidy vs. privatization (e.g. take-your-pick of profitable private industries living off the public teat), world competitiveness, and political graft and corruption (oink-oink-oink). In a throw-the-bums-out scenario all of that is part of the argument, and the argument is capped off by something ideology-piercing such as "We're getting our asses kicked in the world." That's attacking the problem top-down. Amtrak can be an Exhibit Q about how we're getting our asses kicked. But it's pretty far from Exhibit A; making them front-and-center in the argument puts transit on auto-ignore. Time and again. If there's a more perfect speech to be given, it's the one that hits home top-down and threatens the moneyed interests on their turf. Where trains are Exhibit Q, not Exhibit A.

Amtrak itself is adaptable. It's a survivor. The constraints on them today force them to go to the mat for LD investment as a means for vouching for ALL manner of routes. Because history has proved that when the LD's get the axe the corridor services, their ability to buy vehicles or do basic maint, their ability to charge competitive prices...everything...suffers. They are trying to ramp up by undoing some of the cuts from the 1990's. In their pivot LD re-investment has to be part of the push. It sucks. It's not where they want to grow their business. But it's their best-proven survival tactic. It's not their place to be at the forefront of a re-framing of politics. It's their job to get shit done with what they have.

So Amtrak and Amtrak advocates strutting around looking for that *perfect* speech isn't necessarily helpful. Attacking the top-down problem of screwy attitudes to subsidy-cum-general is where the action is. Attacking the top-down problem of "I got mine" private interests buying and pitting our elected officials against their constituents is the problem. I have no idea what that perfect speech is or what action is going to shake us out of the New Gilded Age, but that's where the energy should be when vouching for specific public services downwind. At the state level, too.

Don't waste your energy on a speech too small.

 

[choo]

F-Line, I think your point is well taken. While long distance lines do serve a purpose, they are not a viable alternative for many people to flying or driving depending on the distance. It's kept open often for political reasons, ironic sense it runs through primarily 'red' states, but don't want to give up their train. Meanwhile, on the corridors where it works and profits, the bad wrap of inefficient and overly-subsidized amtrak keeps service levels below where they should be.

If the NEC got to keep all the money it made on that route and make investments in it, I think we would be seeing a lot of progress. But instead it has to go and prop up lines that are mainly frequented by tourists and serve little practical transit purpose.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

F-Line, I think your point is well taken. While long distance lines do serve a purpose, they are not a viable alternative for many people to flying or driving depending on the distance. It's kept open often for political reasons, ironic sense it runs through primarily 'red' states, but don't want to give up their train. Meanwhile, on the corridors where it works and profits, the bad wrap of inefficient and overly-subsidized amtrak keeps service levels below where they should be.

If the NEC got to keep all the money it made on that route and make investments in it, I think we would be seeing a lot of progress. But instead it has to go and prop up lines that are mainly frequented by tourists and serve little practical transit purpose.

Yeah. No doubt about it, it's not what they want to do. But the Clinton-era cuts gave everybody pause...where arguably needed cuts to the LD's ended up going scorched-earth and setting the corridors back 10 years at a time when Amtrak was seeing healthy ridership rebound approaching records. It even kneecapped the NEC. When you look at the 1994 HSR scoping report that was the ultimate basis for the Acela upgrade funding vs. what actually ended up getting built, the scale-back is a little depressing. All that stuff they're proposing through the 2025-2030 range (i.e. not the 2040 Vision, but all the short/mid-term stuff) is pretty much finishing the job they thought they were going to be to do in the 90's until they ran into a buzzsaw in Washington.

When cuts of any kind go on the table, the politics are so all-or-nothing that cuts to everything go on the table. Always. Every time. So to get corridor expansion they have to--probably to their own chagrin--reciprocate at some token level with the LD's. And vouch for their expansion.


I don't have a problem with that if it's the only path for getting things done. I accept the fact that Amtrak probably wouldn't be taking this tact if the politics followed any logic instead of ideological total war. I accept the leverage they have to employ on the LD's to keep eyes on the corridor prize, because of what happened in the 90's. It is what it is. If there's something to get hot and bothered about it's the whole stinking lot of New Gilded Age politics. And there's plenty for both sides of the political spectrum to get hot and bothered about.

 

[JohnAKeith]

Acela Express.