Hotline #295 - May 16, 2003

The Bush Administration on May 14 released its proposal for a six-year extension of surface transportation law, for fiscal years 2004-09. This would replace the current TEA-21 law that was enacted in 1997 and that expires this fiscal year. (Click here to see NARP's release on it.)

The Administration proposal would keep much of the basic framework of TEA-21 -- which is good -- but other areas have outraged environmentalists. Metropolitan long-range plans would have to be updated every five years instead of every three, reducing citizen opportunity to influence the plans.

The proposal, which purports to promote "surface transportation," very nearly ignores intercity passenger rail. Like its Senate predecessors did in 1991, 1995, and 1998, this proposal ought to give states the choice to spend some federal transportation money on passenger rail, as states already can do for virtually every other form of surface transportation. The proposal does renew Swift Act high-speed rail planning (but not construction) programs, but at a reduced level.

The proposal limits the federal share for new rail transit projects to 50% -- even though the federal share for new roads remains at 80%. The Administration claims that just codifies current practice, so a better approach would be to change current practice, and not give states more incentive to pick road projects over transit projects. At the same time, the Administration would broaden the rail transit "new starts" category to include busways, something the Bush Administration has been pushing hard for two years.

Guaranteed funding for transit -- trust-fund money not dependent on annual appropriations -- remains essentially flat. Additional money is authorized, but would depend on the volatile appropriations process (unlike any increases in highway spending). The proposal also greatly reduces the portion of "new starts" funding that comes from guaranteed, trust-fund sources from 80% to 18%.

The Bush proposal's prospects are unclear, given comments by Reps. Don Young (R.-Alaska) and Jim Oberstar (D.-Minn.) at a May 15 House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing that it would be better to approve a simple stop-gap bill, and wait a year for congestion to build up to the point where support would be much stronger for the spending levels they regard as adequate. At that hearing, disturbingly, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta was critical of the San Jose light rail system he helped initiate as mayor, where part of the system may be closed due to budget problems. The Silicon Valley has been devastated economically, but San Jose is the nation's eighth largest city and there is nothing odd about its having a rail transit system.

Based on what some observers fear is an overly optimistic view of locomotive reliability, Amtrak plans to run the Texas Eagle with a single locomotive starting in early or mid-June. NARP is concerned about the service-quality and even passenger-safety aspects of relying on a single unit in Texas in the summer.

Partly due to the single locomotive, and partly due to a car shortage, the Eagle will carry only one sleeper seven days a week. (Currently, on the three days when the Los Angeles through-car runs, there are two sleepers.) Amtrak is considering selling eight standard rooms in the transition sleeper. The transition cars were built at great expense to accommodate revenue passengers as well as staff, but have only carried passengers in emergencies. NARP strongly supports the full utilization of the transition cars.

A summary of the five-year investment plan released April 25 is now on the Amtrak web site.

The summer-long, weekday, bus substitution of the International -- resulting from a Canadian National track project -- will be even more inconvenient for westbound travelers than we reported last week.  It is still true that Amtrak will run a Chicago-East Lansing train. Eastbound travelers will transfer to a bus and connect to another train at Sarnia (not Port Huron). Westbound travelers have to ride a bus from Sarnia to Port Huron, and a second bus to East Lansing. Therefore, what normally is a one-seat ride between Toronto and Chicago now will involve two trains, two buses, and three transfers.

For the first time since serious planning work on the Boston North Station-South Station Rail Link began, Massachusetts has a governor -- Mitt Romney (R.) -- who does not support the project.  Massachusetts Transportation Secretary Dan Grabauskas has said the Rail Link has been mothballed, but project supporters are working hard to save it. Massachusetts residents are urged to ask their state senators to include funding for the Rail Link in the Senate's budget.

Meanwhile, two state representatives from the Fall River/New Bedford area are working to kill the Rail Link because they believe it will somehow make it more likely that commuter rail will be extended to their cities. While those cities should have commuter rail, the representatives' logic is backwards. South Station lacks capacity to support continued service expansion, and a major benefit of the Rail Link would be to provide additional capacity badly needed to permit decent service to places like Fall River and New Bedford. The real threat to rail development would appear to be policies of the Romney Administration, whose officials also have questioned the Fall River/New Bedford project.

The Massachusetts Chapter of the Sierra Club has on its web site a Major Investment Study/Draft Environmental Impact Study for the Rail Link, issued March 31, in pdf-format report.

Though a New York State Supreme Court justice struck down the recent Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) fare hike on May 14 and gave the MTA two weeks to restore earlier transit fares, that order has been frozen by an MTA appeal filed on May 15. The justice had ruled that the MTA "violated state law by misleading the public about its finances," according to the New York Times. Gene Russianoff, of the Straphangers Campaign, which filed the suit against the MTA, said (before the MTA's appeal), "This is really a victory for truth in government. Clearly the court saw that the MTA was misleading the riding public." The suit came after city and state comptrollers criticized the MTA for exaggerating the size of a projected budget deficit.

Amtrak informed the state of Oregon that it would not, after all, run the Portland-Astoria Lewis and Clark Explorer Train this summer, four days a week, starting May 23.  A May 17 inaugural train, for dignitaries, will proceed. According to reports in the Daily Astorian, Amtrak pulled out of the deal by citing the terms of the June 2002 loan from the U.S. Department of Transportation.  One of the conditions was that Amtrak not spend any of its own money planning or operating new services through fiscal 2003. Apparently, and this is not completely spelled out in the press reports, Amtrak belatedly decided that its involvement exceeded what the loan allowed. State and local officials have been trying to convince Amtrak and the DOT to allow the service, which has been in planning for months, to proceed.

This disruption comes at a time when Amtrak and local rail supporters have been trying to convince state legislators to continue funding the two Portland-Eugene Cascades trips through the next two fiscal years.

Gov. Gray Davis (D.) of California, in his new budget proposal, has dropped a proposal from a year ago to merge the California High Speed Rail Authority into the state DOT (Caltrans). Voters will consider whether to issue $9.95 billion in bonds for the project (and other rail projects) in November 2004.

Amtrak has added a feature to its web site that allows you to search for locations and driving instructions to train stations using MapQuest. The new feature is reachable through a separate page on the Amtrak web site, and seems to work well. However, though the Station Finder page seems to suggest that you can find a station without using a starting street address, in practice an address seems necessary. Also, the Station Finder page is not integrated into the reservations area of the Amtrak site. In other words, if you are making a reservation and click onto a station name, you will see hours and location, but not the MapQuest information.

Amtrak is running a contest to find a photo for its 2004 wall calendar. By July 7, send in an 8x10-inch color photo of an Amtrak train that displays the current Amtrak logo (no digital images accepted).  You may be an amateur or professional photographer. The winner will also get a $250 gift certificate from Amtrak's on-line store. See Amtrak's web site for more about the contest, entry rules, and safety issues.