Should the government be bailing out Amtrak?

Great Debates
21

“Not very many people take the train coast to coast.”
“Very few people would be willing to spend 36-48 hours on a train when they can get to the same destination in 5-6 hours by plane - even vacationers.”

One must always remember that trains are NOT airplanes, in that trains can – and Amtrak long distance trains do – stop at several places between their endpoints. The Chicago to Emeryville (essentially Oakland, CA) “California Zephyr” also serves Omaha, Lincoln, Denver, Glenwood Springs (resort area), Salt Lake City, Reno, and Sacramento. And those are only the CITIES with stations along the route.

From what I’ve seen riding the trains and all that I’ve read on the topic, there is MAJOR turnover of seats on long-distance trains. For example, one person may travel from Chicago to Omaha, another from Omaha to Denver, and a third from Denver to Reno.

In essence, a long-distance train is a series of corridors set end to end, with many of the travelers making shorter trips. Is it more efficient to run one train to serve all those trips or separate trains for each?!

One must also remember that not everyone lives in a city with frequent and cheap scheduled air service. Many places either have no scheduled air service at all or they’re served by a handful of planes a day at high “my way or the highway” fares. The economy depends on the MOBILITY of its workers and consumers, and that means ALL of them, not just the ones living within an hour of a major jet-port.

“This shows extreme mismanagement in my mind. Amtrack can not be expected to turn a profit, but it shouldn’t be operating at this much of a loss either.”

  1. Nobody in this thread has stated expressly WHAT Amtrak’s shocking, disgusting, excessive, wasteful, etc. subsidy is. It’s $521 million a year. A shade over half a billion dollars. That’s what Amtrak gets from the Federal Treasury to cover its loss AND pay for capital improvements for the entire system, long-distance and corridor.

IMHO, half a billion is tuppence in the Federal budget. To deny Amtrak a billion or two annually when the highways receive over $30 billions annually and the airlines received a $15 billion bailout is bad policy, and IMHO explains Amtrak’s skeletal system outside the NEC better than any inefficiency or waste ever could. We need a balanced transportation policy in this nation: a stool on two legs (dependence on highways and airlines) falls, a stool with three legs (solid financial support for roads, air, AND rail) is exceedingly stable.

  1. ALL of Amtrak’s routes are unprofitable. The NEC doesn’t turn a profit or cover its expenses any more than the long-distance trains do. The closest train Amtrak has to being self-sufficient is the Auto Train, and that’s a specialty route that makes only its endpoint stops in Virginia and Florida.

  2. If the long distance trains were abolished tomorrow, and every penny of the $521 million could be spent on the NEC, there would still not be enough money to pay for the capital improvements and simple equipment replacements that have been postponed on the NEC for lack of money.

  3. The figures of hundreds of dollars lost for each long-distance passenger have resulted from skewed applications of costs to revenues. In short, a faction inside and outside Amtrak that wanted to operate only corridor trains would heap system expenses like reservations, the big terminal stations (Chicago Union, LA Union, NY Penn, Philly 30th Street, etcetera) disproportionately on the long-haul trains even though the corridor trains. Amtrak inherited a cockeyed accounting system for passenger rail operations that was developed when the freight railways were operating passenger trains. There are NO hard and fast rules in said system on how to apportion non-train-specific expenses between trains.

Which brings me to my final point. I understand the frustration many have with Amtrak inefficiency. But Amtrak has hired a new president, David Gunn. This is the man who reformed the transit systems in New York, Toronto, and Washington DC. His specialty is bringing efficiency to rail systems without cutting service.* He is brought in only as a last resort, when no other hope is seen. He came out of semi-retirement to take on the job of fixing Amtrak. His reputation is scrupulous, even blunt, honesty. His first action at Amtrak was to eliminate most of the 70-odd vice president seats either by removing people outright or demoting them. He has sworn to install a realistic accounting system that gives real feedback on performance. Read about him, find out more about him, and give him a CHANCE to do what he has done successfully elsewhere.
*It’s been proven time and again in the public transit field that reducing losses by reducing service is a vicious circle. Anyone who lived in Chicago in the 1970s and 80s knows of what I speak: CTA, faced with a deficit larger than it was allowed by law, would eliminate bus routes and reduce frequencies on the trains. Passengers fled in droves. Less fare revenue came in. The deficit grew. Etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseam. When, in the latter 1990s, CTA decided to start EXPANDING service instead of cutting it, the result was obvious. The L trains are packed at night and weekends as well as during rush-hour, and ridership is at its highest in decades.

22

Hasn’t Amtrak historically gotten the short end of the federal funding stick? That could be why few people use it, because it’s never gotten enough funding to stay in good shape and attract/keep riders.

23

I’m at a loss as to how it takes half a billion dollars to run a local subway system for a year. That, to me, just seems like a ridiculously large amount of money. Still, I love Boston’s T system. I do wish they ran until 3AM or so, shutting down service at 12:30 is about as stupid as the 93/95 interchange in Woburn, but for all that I am very glad to live in an area where I don’t need to know anything but which train to hop on.

If I cared enough about the city I might even take the regular train system to New York now and then… but it isn’t the trains that stop me :slight_smile:

I would appreciate some facts in this debate along the lines of how much the government spends on roads, airlines, and public transportation. Perhaps Amtrak’s “bailout” is a toss in the pot.

24

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by MGibson *
**Isn’t that just rail systems which rely on passengers for income? I thought rail companies that primarily moved freight made profits. **Yes, freight can make profits. I had hoped that passenger rail was implied when I said “not a single rail system in any country turns a profit.” Perhaps I was not specific enough.

I like John Bredin’s three legged stool analogy here. Sure, the highway system may be able to take some of the strain after a 9-11 type of attack, but why not pursue a more balanced approach including rail? The more options we have the more resilient we will be in an emergency.

Fed-Ex makes a profit. UPS makes a profit. The Post office can also be expected to make a profit because mail shipping is a completely different industry from passenger rail. As I stated before, Amtrack can not be expected to make a profit. I’ll change my mind if you can show me one single nation-wide passenger system on the entire planet that makes a profit. There is no UPS or Fed-Ex equivalent.

25

(1) It’s a bit off topic, but a good question: “I’m at a loss as to how it takes half a billion dollars to run a local subway system for a year. That, to me, just seems like a ridiculously large amount of money.”

I quote from the MBTA website, since you give the “T” as an example and the MBTA happens to have an annual operating buidget in the half-billion dollar range. “Approximately 819,700 one-way passenger trips per day are taken on the subway, bus and commuter rail systems of the MBTA.” Divide the operating expense by this number of passengers and 365 days in a year, and you get about $2 as the cost per passenger per day. Considering this includes both bus and subway (85 cent fare, IIRC) and commuter rail (a good bit higher fare), that sounds about right to me.

To move the greater part of a million people daily, the “T” employs 6,500. Pull a salary out of one’s ass, say $35k a year, and you easily get over a quarter-billion before you ever count things like electricity, fuel, spare parts, etcetera.
(2) “I would appreciate some facts in this debate along the lines of how much the government spends on roads, airlines, and public transportation.”

To quote Nixon – who incidentally signed the law that created Amtrak – I’m glad you asked that question.

The following data are all from the U.S. Department of Transportation Fiscal Year 2003 Budget In Brief, on line at http://www.dot.gov/bib/bibindex.html The numbers are from the 2002 appropriations, as the 2003 numbers are pending in Congress at this point.

Federal Aviation Administration: $14.2 billion. This includes $3.4 billion in federal grants for the construction and improvement of airports.

Federal Highway Administration: $28.8 billion.

Federal Transit Administration: $6.9 billion. Of that, $6.4 billion is available in grants to local transit authorities for large capital projects, smaller capital expenditures like the purchase of buses and trains, and operating expenses.

Federal Railroad Administration: $844 million. The Amtrak appropriation of $521 million is included here for book-keeping purposes (it has to go somewhere in the budget), as is $115 million for the FRA’s main task of regulating the safety of public and private railroads.

As you can see, your instinct that Amtrak’s financing is “a toss in the pot” was quite correct. The data above also shows that your skepticism in putting “bailout” in quotes was well-founded. Spending money on Amtrak, whether $200 million now to keep it afloat or the requested $1.9+ billion general appropriation, is not out of line when compared with what the government spends on other modes of transportation.

I ask the following question not to you but to the hard-core “Amtrak must make a profit” people: Are $3.4 billions GRANTED to local airports, or over $28 billion for Interstate and Federal highways an investment, but $521 millions spent on Amtrak a “subsidy”?!?!

26

The question shouldn’t be whether or not Amtrak should recieve a ‘bailout’.

The question should be ‘Why not privatize the system?’. Who knows, maybe there is no interest in the private sector for MT. But with no competition, there is little incentive for this gov’t bureaucracy. (Look at the less-then-stellar performace of the various agencies that know they have infinite job security!).

Competetion breeds success. I am sure that there is SOME way to properly privatize our rail system, and it should be looked into ASAP.

(Over here, the only train trips I take are from Windsor, Ont to Toronto, during the winter. I love the 401 in the summer, but soon as it turns white and I want to visit family, trains it is.)

27

The “airports” get a bigger subsidy argument leaves a pit in my stomach, I’m much more interested in what the new Amtrak president is going to do to reform the system.

I’ll argue that it’s not hard to spot an organization that’s full of people collecting a check. I’m working in one right now. The corridors are quiet, nobody’s hurried, you never hear voices raised in excitement or anger. That, to me is Amtrak all over. Any organization of that sort is dangerous in a double sense: it’s wasting money, sure, but even more importantly, there’s often something that’s a “national priority” – or whatever – that causes people to need it so badly that they become blind to its failings. And in such cases, the very business that we have some basic need for ends up becoming, instead, unusually ineffective. Amtrak.

Surely, railways can lose money. Japan has been struggling to get the costs of its famous railways in line for years. I read they were consuming something like 10% of their GNP. (?)

There’s an attitude problem in America, which is that airplanes are the wave of the future, and trains are technology of the past. THAT is a major problem in reform. If the SST had proved practical, this illusion might have persisted more strongly, but unbelieveably it’s still around.

When BART was put into the Bay Area, I remember as a boy being so upset that it was not high speed, but neither did it duplicate the convenience of the London Tube that I was familiar with, that I wrote my first letter to a company pointing out the problem. Of course I got no reply. Another letter, later, however, did get me shiny blueprints of the cars. Great. People in the United States just do not understand how comfortable, informal, convenient and fast railways could be in their own backyards. It can take two hours in business hours to cross Los Angeles or the length of the SF Bay Area! Two PAINFUL hours!

Before we’re going to get real railway reform, somebody needs to put in a 200 mph service between trial cities and blow away the public cobwebs.

I said TGV, but I’m really thinking: an improved version of what we buy from France, our own: a high tech train with unheard of features for passengers, such good service from the employees, such a good record of meeting schedule, that it causes people to take a second look at railroads.

28

**

It was a nice analogy but I’ve not seen any evidence that it is particularly valid. I don’t think Amtrak is vital to the mobility of consumers or the workforce on a national level.

**

And why can’t Amtrak be expected to make a profit? Maybe because the golden age of rail was the 19th century and Americans prefer planes and automobiles. I’d rather drive from Little Rock to St. Louis then take Amtrak. Not only will I get to leave when I want to leave but I’ll have my own means of transportation once I get there.

I’d like to see someone demonstrate the importance of Amtrak to the nation as a whole.

Marc

29

The system was “privatized” for many years. The railroad companies didn’t want to bother with passengers any more. Passengers are a pain. They have to be kept comfortable, on long trips they have to eat, they take up a lot of space. Freight doesn’t need any of the amenities and can be packed much denser than passengers. For these reasons, and probably some that I haven’t thought of, the railroads made passenger service so bad that nobody wanted to use it.

Most of the criticism I see in the posts about Amtrak losing money is because of the long, national runs from east to west. These routes are mandated by Congress because midwesterners want passenger rail service. They just don’t want to ride on trains. Amtrak would love to restrict its operations to the northeast corridor, the Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Louis area and the West coast from San Diego to San Francisco and the Northwest coast.

The airlines lose money quite frequently. If they also had to build, maintain and operate the airports and the air traffic control system they would rarely be profitable.

30

I agree that in some cases, expansion may help Amtrak. A rather expensive initial outlay could reap big profits. An Auto Train from L.A. to Las Vegas would be a great relief on the I-15 (especially on Sunday afternoons, when it is a parking lot). This is a highway with two lanes each direction between two of the largest tourist destinations in the country. I’m working on cites for you on just how bad this congestion is.

The government should not “bail out” Amtrak. They should let David Gunn have money that he needs to do projects like those above, those that have a possibility of turning a profit. They should give Amtrak a real budget and some years to get a good grasp on results.

31

JB’s figures emphasize my thoughts, but hint at far more complicated calculations.

IMO, large scale train travel is most reasonable in limited corridors. In the midwest, for example, a hub centered in Chicago could connect Detroit, Minneapolis, St Louis, and Indy. But, train travel will not be a viable option if plane travel is cheap and readily available, and train travel currently is not fast, dependable, and frequent enough. Add in the low cost of gas and the primacy afforded road improvements/maintenance making medium-distance car travel a preferable option.

Would it be possible to structure government “investment” in air travel to subsidize short-haul less than long distance flights? Could that $ be applied to railroad construction/improvements?

Where do airlines make their $? On long flights? On short flights? On certain classes of tickets?

If we could wave a magic wand and have efficient rail transport in such corridors instead of air/car travel being the predominant mode, what would be the effect on air, water, and noise pollution? Energy use? Land use? Employment? Public safety? And what would be the total dollar cost - and government investment required - to establish and run such a system.

Tough questions. But hey! Who said designing Utopia would be easy?

32

“Maybe because the golden age of rail was the 19th century and Americans prefer planes and automobiles.”

The train is a 19th Century invention? :rolleyes: Guess what, so is the automobile, the telephone, and the safety elevator. If something works and serves a purpose, it doesn’t matter whether its brand new or 200 years old.

Your statement doesn’t seem to be aimed at long-distance trains only, but trains in general. Nobody rides trains, because cars are simply so convenient.

Except that where traffic and parking are making driving a hassle and not a convenience, trains ARE popular and well used. I’m not just talking about cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, or Washington. Who would have guessed 20 years ago that Saint Louis, or Dallas, or Salt Lake City, or (gasp!) LOS ANGELES would build rail systems? All these systems have growing ridership, they’ve all either just expanded or are in the midst of expanding, and they all have consistently full park-and-ride lots at their stations. Full to the point that people complain in the local newspapers that more spaces are needed! Well-used park and ride lots are the greatest proof that people who HAVE cars are choosing to ride the rails for particular trips instead, that the ridership isn’t just people who can’t or won’t drive.

Even for intercity trains, it’s easy to say that Americans prefer planes and cars because in much of the country they have NO OTHER CHOICE. It’s circular reasoning of the highest order to state that people prefer the automobile when that’s the only means of travel available!

Everywhere in this supposedly car-crazy country where people HAVE been given a real choice, the trains have been busy.

  1. The Northeast. This SHOULD go without saying, but when you get people posting that trains are obsolete and Americans won’t ride them, it apparently has to be said. On the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is giving the airlines a run for their money. Even before the new Acela trains were added, long before September 11, Amtrak had 70% of the total air-rail market between New York and Washington, and 30% of the air-rail market between New York and Boston. Since Acela brought fast trains to the New York-Boston part of the NEC, and since September 11th resulted in long security lines and locked airplane bathrooms ( :eek: ), both of those market shares have only risen.

  2. California and the Pacific Northwest. “California?! You’ll never get CALIFORNIANS out of their cars!” That’s what people scoffed when the state of California started paying Amtrak to run additional trains between LA and San Diego, between San Jose, Oakland, and Sacramento, and from Oakland and Sacramento down the San Joaquin Valley. But the ridership on all three routes has grown steadily, new train cars have been bought repeatedly to keep up with the demand, and new trains added to the schedules. The Vancouver-Seattle-Portland “Cascades” trains tell a similar story.

The LA-San Diego “Surfliner” route operates 11 daily round trips, including four that extend north of LA to Santa Barbara and one all the way to San Luis Obispo. The “Capitol Corridor” from San Jose to Sacramento runs 9 round trips a day, and the “San Joaquin” runs 6 daily round trips, recently increased from 5 due to high ridership. And the Cascades route has four trains daily between Portland and Seattle, with one going on to Vancouver, Canada.

Could all the passengers on those trains be carless? Surely they must be, because according to you, Americans simply prefer cars, period, end of story. :rolleyes:

Why does there have to be a pissing contest between the auto and the train for supremacy? There is no one winner, nor should there be. People who advocate trains are (with a few radical exceptions) NOT trying to take everyone’s cars away. :rolleyes:

My three-legged stool analogy is because we need roads, air, AND rail, and each serves its role in the transportation system. I ride the train to work each day, but I use a car to get to the train. For some intercity trips, I have taken the train, including long-distance trains. For others, I flew. Every task has the right tool, and the fact that a hammer is not the right tool for some jobs doesn’t mean the hammer should be removed from the toolbox. Similarly, every trip has the right mode, and the fact that the train doesn’t serve for ALL travel – a fact I fully admit – doesn’t in any way prove that trains are useless or obsolete.

33

But if this is the case, it is because we publicly dump so much money into the airports! And even at that airlines can barely turn a profit (except for the genuis-level Southwest). Christ, they are practically handed the infrastructure and they can’t manage it, but a stinkin’ railway asks for a little help and people shit on them! LOL (not saying you are, but the more I read of this debate, the more frustrated I become)

John, thank you so very much for your earlier response to me. Posts like that make me so very thankful to have ever found this board.

34

Well, the San Francisco-San Jose route is well-travelled. Equally, I’ve heard that the CalTrans people would like to cut the service entirely. For this route, it isn’t a freight vs. passengers situation, the line’s hardly used, except for passengers. And it’s the only freight line to San Francisco! (Bordered by water on three sides.)

That brings up another point, which is that it isn’t a three-legged stool, but four-legged. Shipping, where practical, is by far the cheapest way to move material.

The pissing contest will continue because the people who profit, and who benefit by each of these forms of transportation are different. Improve a road on subsidies, every car owner benefits. Improve a shipping dock on subsidies, car owners get nothing.

What’s annoying about not subsidizing trains is that in the US they aren’t even running close to the current top speeds, so they aren’t playing on an even ground with planes and cars. Commerical airplanes are not going to get faster, cars are probably not going to get much faster (unless they become automatically controlled), ships are not going to get much faster. But there’s existing technology to make our trains run twice as fast!

Here’s a cite with a table showing that our fastest train’s average speed is 53 mph slower than the TGV-A’s average. And our overall national average seems to be in the neighborhood of 90 mph slower! Train Speeds by Country

35

Amtrak has been hobbled, budget-wise, since day one. They tell Congress that they need (as an example) 100 million dollars. Congress gives them 50 million, then demands that the service be better, and to make a profit! Then , when (surprise!) Amtrak CAN’T, because of a lack of funds, Congress blames management, and then gives them even LESS money (percentage wise) the next year.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Congress needs to realize that Privatization is a STUPID idea, as the Railroads have already shown that the trains can’t be profitable - Hell, that’s why we have Amtrak in the FIRST PLACE!!!

I, personally, LOVE Amtrak, and would gladly take it for long vacation trips, if my work schedule allowed it. Hell, I might even try to take two weeks off at X-mas this year, and take the train to Arizona (from Seattle). And WITHOUT a sleeping car seat, even!

36

**

The telephone and the automobile play a major role in the lives of almost every American these days while passenger rail has a much smaller impact. Maybe you just didn’t understand what I meant about the golden age of rail being over so let me explain it to you slowly. :rolleyes:

A long time ago it was quite common for Americans to take trains to travel long and even relatively short distances. The rail helped open up the west, it made vacation destinations accessible to the middle class, and it provided an economic life line to many cities and towns. In the 20th century many things happened that made travel by rail to decline in popularity. Automobiles became affordable to the masses, massive highways were built connecting major cities, and air travel became safe, reliable, and cheap.

**

Well this is a thread about Amtrak not systems like DART.

**

What do these rail systems have to do with Amtrak? Does Amtrak handle the local rail in Dallas, New York, Chicago, and Boston?

**

:rolleyes: Wow, you’re so cool because you know how to use the little emoticons. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: Most Americans do prefer cars over trains. If so many people love to take the train :rolleyes: how come Amtrak can’t even break even? Do idiots run the company?

**

:rolleyes: Maybe we should just let the locals take care of rail systems instead of Amtrak. :rolleyes:

**

I understood it I’m just not convinced rail is as important a leg as air or auto.

Marc
Oops, I almost forgot. :rolleyes:

37

“Wow, you’re so cool because you know how to use the little emoticons. … Most Americans do prefer cars over trains.”

I gave you two examples of places in the United States where Amtrak rail travel is significant, the Northeast and the West Coast. I gave solid numbers showing that these routes are well-used. When you don’t respond to two clear examples of people with cars choosing to take trains, except to merely parrot back the mantra that most Americans prefer cars over trains, then I reserve the right to throw in a rolleyes or two.

“If so many people love to take the train how come Amtrak can’t even break even? Do idiots run the company?”

Follow the bouncing ball from lawoot’s posting and from my answer to erislover:

  1. Amtrak is starved of capital compared to the other modes, which DO receive much of their capital (roads, airports, the air traffic control system, even loan assistance to buy some of their planes with the understanding they’ll be used as troop transports in a war) paid for by the Federal treasury. The numbers are in the reply to erislover and direct from the DOT Budget.

  2. Amtrak cannot afford to buy new passenger cars. It has gotten to the point where they haven’t even enough money to fix the cars they have, and damaged cars have to be replaced by swapping cars from other trains.

  3. Without enough passenger cars to make up more trains, they only one one train a day on a handful of routes outside the Northeast and West Coast.

More people would ride the trains if there were more trains to ride. There AREN’T more trains to ride in most of the country because Amtrak doesn’t have the money to buy them!

38

I agree that Amtrak trains seem to seldom run on time. [When I was over in Japan, I was told that if one of the “bullet trains” was running 10 or 15 minutes late, it might make the news and the conductor would certainly come on and profusely apologize to the passengers! I only half-jokingly told that person that if an Amtrak train was running 10 or 15 minutes late the conductor would probably come on and brag about the fact that he was getting them in “just about right on time”.]

However, I was recently told that this may be something that is often beyond Amtrak’s control. At least here on the Boston-Chicago line running through Rochester, what someone told me is that the freight trains get priority and so the reason your Amtrak train stops and sits for no good reason or trudges along at an annoyingly slow pace often is because it has to wait for a freight train to clear the track.

This would also jive a bit more with my experience in Japan (admittedly based on limited data) that trains can actually run a fair bit late when you take one of the smaller lines which I presume might have been shared with freight trains. [The bullet trains definitely have their lines to themselves.]

Anyway, I don’t know the hard facts on all this, but it is something to look into.

39

I agree that Amtrak trains seem to seldom run on time. [When I was over in Japan, I was told that if one of the “bullet trains” was running 10 or 15 minutes late, it might make the news and the conductor would certainly come on and profusely apologize to the passengers! I only half-jokingly told that person that if an Amtrak train was running 10 or 15 minutes late the conductor would probably come on and brag about the fact that he was getting them in “just about right on time”.]

However, I was recently told that this may be something that is often beyond Amtrak’s control. At least here on the Boston-Chicago line running through Rochester, what someone told me is that the freight trains get priority and so the reason your Amtrak train stops and sits for no good reason or trudges along at an annoyingly slow pace often is because it has to wait for a freight train to clear the track.

This would also jive a bit more with my experience in Japan (admittedly based on limited data) that trains can actually run a fair bit late when you take one of the smaller lines which I presume might have been shared with freight trains. [The bullet trains definitely have their lines to themselves.]

Anyway, I don’t know the hard facts on all this, but it is something to look into.

40

Urgh!!! Sorry for the double post!