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NARP Leaders Educate and Advocate on Capitol Hill
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Each year, members of NARP’s Council of Representatives, our all-volunteer governing body, meet with Members of Congress and their staff to educate them about passenger train issues and urge their support for more funding and broader policy support for intercity trains. This year, in addition to our perennial, yet always essential, ask for full funding of Amtrak, we also joined with a coalition of other rail advocacy and public interest groups in calling for $4 billion in fiscal 2011 funding for the nascent yet highly oversubscribed High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail (HSIPR) grant program to states.
In addition to Council members, several general members of the Association joined our Day on the Hill this year. According to their reports, many Senators, Representatives and staffers—even those who haven’t supported Amtrak in the past—appeared open to hearing our case. No matter where the lawmaker stands on the issue, the most important thing about in-person meetings is to demonstrate the extent of public support for better transportation choices. And that we did very well.
Here is a report from Council member Dennis Lytton, which was posted yesterday on the California High Speed Rail Blog:
Last week I attended the National Association of Railroad Passengers annual meeting in Washington, DC. NARP is the largest national membership advocacy organization for train and rail transit passengers. In fact, it’s the only group in Washington, DC with a staff dedicated to this purpose.
The most important part of our three day meeting is our “Day on the Hill” visiting Senators and Members of Congress followed our reception in one of the House office buildings. This year, along with other NARP council members from California, we visited our two senators, Boxer and Feinstein, as well as our House members. Our primary asks (lesson one visiting your Congressmember, always have a concise “ask”, with a handout) were:
* $4 billion for intercity and high speed rail capital grants, and
* Full funding of Amtrak’s appropriations requests for this year.NARP as well as Californians for High Speed Rail is a member of the Fourbillion.com coalition, which is advocating for this. Please visit and register to let your Congressional representation know that you want HSR and intercity rail. (I think my take away this year may be to always have a website for my “ask” each year!)
Secondly, we were also pushing for passage of the stalled transportation reauthorization bill in Congress and for High Speed Rail to have a dedicated funding source. There is a consensus that this won’t happen before the November election. Which of course scares many of us since the next Congress may not have as friendly a composition as this one. More than one source on the Hill thought that the thorny issue of raising the gas tax would be brought up by the lame duck Congress in November or December.
My overall impression? Having participated in NARP’s Day on the Hill since 2006, things have certainly changed for the better. The Congressional majority and Administration of that time barely noticed that the issue of trains for a sustainable, mobile future for our county existed. The federal DOT famously released a report during these years decrying road congestion but never mentioning rail for passengers or freight. Republican administrations since Reagan had regularly tried to write Amtrak out of the federal budget and even under Clinton a Gingrich inspired reauthorization of Amtrak passed in the late 90s that mandated Amtrak to become profitable with no investment.
Our biggest fight now in Washington will be to get the $4 billion for HSR nationwide. The administration has only asked for one billion, just a year after their groundbreaking inclusion of $8 billion in ARRA (the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act). Anaheim to San Francisco is about $20 billion. We have almost $10 billion from the Prop. 1A bonds. We received a little more than $2 billion from ARRA early this year. Four billion a year, with California getting its fare share as it did in ARRA, will get us to completion of the first segment.
Which leads me back to an earlier point – getting high-speed passenger rail into the transportation reauthorization bill stalled in Congress will be a great accomplishment. Funding HSR isn’t a political football in other countries in Western Europe, for instance. Once we get HSR into our federal transportation funding machinery funding it will be automatic and non-political. Just as it is for highways in this country.
Posted by Malcolm Kenton
Tags: advocacy, amtrak, appropriations, capitol hill, congress, dennis lytton, four billion, funding, high-speed rail, lobbying, narp, passenger trains, representative, senator, volunteers,Capon’s Statement to House Transportation Committee
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Below, reconstructed from notes and memory, is what I said when Chairman Mica invited me to speak at his roundtable in the MTA Board Room on Thursday, January 27. (I did not quote all the numbers in the table, only the average speeds. The top speed in the UK is 125 mph; the only exception is the Eurostar London-Channel Tunnel route (185 mph).
Petra Todorovich, whose testimony I seconded at the outset, serves as Director, America 2050, on the staff of Regional Plan Association, and was representing the Business Alliance for Northeast Mobility.
We strongly endorse the testimony of Petra Todorovich, and join her in emphasizing the importance of continuing to progress the existing Northeast Corridor to a state of good repair and beyond, as provided for in the multi-agency Northeast Corridor Infrastructure Master Plan. The country will not be well served if the Corridor fails apart while we are talking about the vision of a brand new railroad.
One immediate concern is replacement of the elderly Northeast Corridor bridge over the Hackensack River (“Portal”) a few miles west of here. This was to have been replaced in conjunction with the now-defunct ARC project. We are not sure but fear that the Portal project died with the ARC, which will present a huge problem if what is supposed to be a movable bridge stops moving.
Passengers want reliability, attractive trains, and—especially for business travel—reasonable speed. It is worth noting that the highly-regarded Virgin trains in the UK have relatively modest average speeds, as does the Keystone Corridor which has received much favorable comment today.
Posted by Malcolm Kenton
Tags: amtrak, average speeds, british passenger trains, high-speed rail, house transportation & infrastructure, john mica, keystone service, narp, northeast corridor, passenger trains, portal bridge, ross capon, testimony,HSR, commuter rail and transit discussed at RailPac/NARP meeting in L.A.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Yesterday I attended the joint meeting of RailPac and NARP at the Los Angeles Metro headquarters building at [Los Angeles] Union Station.
The day of presentations included updates from Metrolink’s CEO on future plans including express service to start in May and PTC implementation. Californians for High Speed Rail’s Daniel Krause talked about their vision for seeing HSR implemented in California and Friend for Expo Transit and the Sierra Club’s Darrel Clarke discussed lessons from grass roots organizing for light rail in Los Angeles.
NARP Chairman Bob Stewart updated the group on national efforts for passenger rail and HSR, affirming as one of the organization’s goal’s as seeing a true HSR system established in the US in the next several years. Gene Skoropowski gave an excellent presentation. Known to many of us as the managing director of the Capital Corridor, he is now a consultant at HNTB working on the LOSSAN [Los Angeles-San Diego] corridor. He gave a very good presentation on the success of the Capital Corridor working with Union Pacific, updates on trying to rationalize service on the Surfliner corridor and establishing commuter service to Santa Barbara.
Remarking on the Florida Governor’s rejection of federal HSR funding (despite the guarentees potential builders made for the project’s financing), Skoropowski said that Alstom and other contractors feel thoroughly burned by Florida, a state that was once on target to have America’s first true HSR
Posted by Malcolm Kenton
Tags: bob stewart, california high-speed rail, commuter rail, daniel krause, eugene skoropowski, hans van winkle, los angeles, los angeles metro, metrolink, narp, railpac,NARP Council Member defends California HSR
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Ryan Stern, a member of NARP’s Council of Representatives and a Director of Californians for High-Speed Rail, penned the op-ed in response to the Los Angeles Times’ editorial criticizing the decision to construct the first segment of the planned Los Angeles-San Francisco high-speed line in the Central Valley.
Elsewhere, Garl Latham points out that, for the same price as rebuilding Dallas’s fourth freeway loop, the city could build or expand multiple rail transit lines, and for the money it took to rebuild one interchange on Washington, DC’s Capital Beltway over eight years, Amtrak could have purchased 200 new cars including expensive sleepers and food-service cars. And Grist says artists and designers have a role in galvanizing public fervor for high-speed rail.
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The interstate freeway system is the mainstay of urban transportation in cities across America, including Los Angeles. But the first interstate construction project didn’t happen in a city. It was a lonely stretch of road in central Missouri that received the first federal interstate funds in 1956. More money followed, and the system grew rapidly, connecting cities and creating jobs.
California’s high-speed rail system—for which the first tracks will be laid in the Central Valley, a plan The Times decries—will follow a similar path of growth. Grass-roots supporters of the high-speed rail project can’t wait to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours. That’s why we are more concerned than almost anyone else in the state that this project be built efficiently. However, the proposals advocated by The Times would so severely weaken the voter-approved project that we would probably never see it built at all.
Posted by Malcolm Kenton
Tags: california high-speed rail, construction, infrastructure costs, interstate highways, los angeles times, narp, ryan stern,NARP’s Warning About Amtrak Shut-Down Bill Echoes Across the U.S.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Furor over a House transportation spending bill budget that would force a shutdown of the entire Amtrak system—and which explicitly attacks short corridor passenger train service across the U.S.—has spread in the days following last week’s disclosure of the draft-bill’s details.
The GOP-led House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation & Housing on September 8 approved a fiscal year 2012 spending bill that would slash Amtrak’s operating grant by 60 percent, prohibit the use of federal operating dollars to fund operating expenses for state-supported routes, and zeroes-out the High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail Program.
In an effort led in large part by NARP, transportation groups and media outlets across America are warning the public about the very real threat this budget proposal poses to hundreds of passenger trains across the country:
- NARP’s Action page lets you reach out directly to your Representative and let them know you support trains in America;
- Streetsblog picks up NARP’s warning about the shut-down budget;
- The Albany Times-Union quotes NARP Board Member (and President of the Empire State Passengers Association) Bruce Becker in saying the bill would be “devastating for New York.” The Times-Union also publishes an illustrative Amtrak map of the corridor trains targeted by the bill. [You can also see an Amtrak PDF listing corridor trains];
- The Longview News-Journal speaks with NARP Vice-President Sean Jeans-Gail about a worst case scenario, and how the bill would undermine the transportation improvement efforts of “hundreds of communities”;
- The Kansas City Business Journal looks at the danger to service in Missouri;
- The Baltimore Sun’s editorial board calls the budget proposal a “short-sighted assault on passenger rail”;
- The Charlottesville Daily Progress in Virginia mocks the logic behind killing successful short intercity corridors like the recently launched Lynchburg-Washington, D.C train (which also serves Charlottesville) that has been selling-out trains since its inauguration.
| Image: Amtrak, via Albany Times-Union |
Posted by NARP
Tags: albany, amtrak, appropriations, baltimore, bruce becker, charlottesville, kansas, missouri, narp, sean jeans-gail, short corridors, streetsblog,©2010 National Association of Railroad Passengers | » NARP website
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