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Amtrak, The New York Times, and Public Policy That Doesn’t Change
Thursday, June 26, 2008
The June 21 front-page article by Matthew L. Wald, “Travelers Shift To Rail as Cost of Fuel Rises; Busy Days at Amtrak, but Strains Show,” for the most part did a good job of reminding the nation that Americans have been crowding onto trains and that we need more of them. It is particularly gratifying to read that “today Amtrak has 632 usable rail cars, and dozens more are worn out or damaged but could be reconditioned and put into service at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars each.”
But we still have to wade through old canards about the mandate for profitability. From the very outset, it was clear to anyone who cared to investigate that Amtrak would not be profitable. Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), who served for years as chairman of the authorizing committee with jurisdiction, and the late Rep. Brock Adams (who later became Secretary of Transportation) were among those who commented at the time of Amtrak’s creation on the inadequacy of its funding. The “for-profit” mandate was widely understood as the fig leaf that would enable a conservative President Richard Nixon to sign the National Rail Passenger Act into law.
On November 9, 1971, just six months after Amtrak began operations, a House hearing addressed the fact that Amtrak’s “expenditures and losses have been running at a much higher rate than anticipated,” and an additional $170 million (on top of the initial $40 million appropriation) was under consideration. At that hearing, Rep. Adams said, “I am not convinced that any part [of Amtrak] can break even under the way it is being run now, at what is in effect cost-plus to the railroads.”
Eventually, in 1978, Congress softened Amtrak’s profitability mandate by inserting the italicized words in the following phrase: “[Amtrak] shall be operated and managed as a for-profit corporation.”
So it is misleading to jump from the 1970 law to 1997 without acknowledging what went on in between.
A huge proportion of passengers on the long-distance trains are traveling between major city-pairs, not the small markets. These are people who do not want to fly; in some cases, they may be medically prohibited from flying. Others may have found air fares too high, particularly if traveling on short notice. So, while many people certainly like to ride trains, it trivializes Amtrak’s transportation importance to suggest that everyone on the long-distance trains is either going to a small community with no alternatives or is “going for the train ride itself.” Citing GAO’s reference to “low ridership” cross-country trains also demands a specific rebuttal—these trains in fact are heavily used, as some of the reporter’s other comments and statistics attest.
H. Glenn Scammel spent much of his House career badmouthing the long-distance trains, so his latest comments are no surprise. His suggestion that long-distance equipment should be transferred to short-distance routes is problematic. That equipment is not designed for short-distance travel and, if Amtrak had funds to spend on remanufacturing existing equipment, that money would better be spent on enlarging the fleet by putting back into service cars that are currently sidelined.
The GAO bean-counters have never been sympathetic to Amtrak and especially the long-distance routes, and the GAO paragraph quoted by The Times seems oblivious to the fact that much of Amtrak’s ridership growth in recent years has come from development of state-sponsored corridors that fit GAO’s apparent definition of the “only” appropriate use for intercity passenger trains. But, even though long-distance train capacity has only gone down the past decade, the Times sidebar showed 15.0% ridership growth in May (vs. May 2007) for the long-distance trains compared with 14.0% for state corridors and 9.2% for the Northeast Corridor. And the individual routes cited included Texas Eagle up 27.0% and Sunset Limited up 25.2%.
The statement that Amtrak “is not radically more energy-efficient than other means of travel” must be viewed in the context of an airline and automobile fleet that is constantly replenished with newer, more fuel-efficient models while Amtrak’s youngest over-the-road locomotives are seven years old with no new acquisitions in sight. Also, energy consumed per passenger-mile reflects load factors which on Amtrak have risen since the 2005 data which is the most recent published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The ORNL figures do not reflect the additional damage done by aviation emissions at high altitudes and of course do not give Amtrak credit for the fact that, in many cities large and small, the train station serves as a transportation center and a magnet for transit- and pedestrian-friendly development.
One cannot overstate the importance of the federal government actually setting up a fund to match state passenger train investments on an 80-20 basis, a vast improvement over the current federal share of zero percent. Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE), a former governor (and Amtrak board member) who should know, put it this way in yesterday’s Senate hearing on transportation and climate change: “When I was Governor of Delaware, if we wanted to build a road or a highway or a bridge, the federal government paid for 80% of it. If we wanted to do transit investment, the federal government provided 50% of it. If we wanted to invest, if it made more sense to put in inter-city passenger rail, the federal government provided nothing. And I’m sure we made investment decisions which were probably wrong decisions because of the difference in those measures of federal support.”
Notwithstanding strong demand for Amtrak, and lots of talk in the media and from politicians about the need for more trains, nothing has changed yet. The House appropriations subcommittee took the first step in the Fiscal 2009 appropriations process on June 20 and came up with a freeze for Amtrak with two exceptions: doubling to $60 million the small amount that matches state investments (it was $30 million this year); including $114 million for the back pay recommended by Presidential Emergency Board 242. Transportation has the misfortune to be lumped together in the same subcommittee (and budget allocation) as housing. The Project Based Section 8 housing program is the one place in Chairman Olver’s prepared remarks where he said “I wish we were able to provide more.” (In that program, the subcommittee provided $7.3 billion, $300 million above FY08 and $918 million above President Bush’s request.)
Bottom line: the transportation funding process is still largely business as usual, but the impending bankruptcy of the Highway Trust Fund will have interesting consequences.
--Ross B. Capon
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