Amtrak has never turned a profit since the federal government took it over in 1971 and began shoveling tens of billions of dollars in subsidies its way. The only routes that actually do slightly better than break even are in the Boston-New York-Washington, D.C., corridor, which is little more than a really long commuter line. Yet, the writer lobbies for even greater subsidies.
Amtrak is slow, unreliable and lacks any significant creature comforts. I know. I made the mistake of taking Amtrak from New York City to ”” well, what do you know? ”” Vermont one winter not long ago. The ride took 13 hours and much of the countryside we passed through was not at all scenic. You don’t put railroad tracks in the good part of town. The journey ended with several railroad workers taking axes to the train’s doors, which had frozen shut, to allow us to disembark.
Read it all, a superb letter to the editor in the local paper.
There seems to be a somewhat logical fallacy in this argument, however. He seems to be arguing that large scale commuter trains can’t be economically feasible in this country because the population is only sparsely packed. This may, in fact, be true, but then he says they were viable in the 1940’s when the population in this country was even smaller than it is today.
I would argue that passenger trains are going to be viable, especially if the oil bubble builds back up. I know for a fact when gas was running near 4 dollars a gallon last summer that you had to order Amtrak tickets in advance because there was such a demand.
I will grant that I think a major part of the problem with Amtrak is poor service. At least here in the MidWest, the only time the Amtrak runs through is in the middle of the night. It hits Lincoln, NE about 2 in the morning, assuming its running on time, which, as the author of this piece correctly notes, is iffy at best.
I agree that regional trains are likely much more viable than cross country traffic. They have a commuter line that runs from Chicago to South Bend, Indiana that does quite well, and that’s about a 3 hour click. If and when the airline and automotive industries collapse, I think trains may again become a contributing factor.
I would also note that Amtrak is a federal operation, and as such, anything the private sector can do for X amount of money, the government can do for X squared amount of money. I think a little competition and private trainline ownership would do wonders for the train industry. The government keeps lines that aren’t viable open when private businesses would have long since closed them and found new venues that actually worked.
Euro-trains [i]might[/i] make sense if, say, Wisconsin and Minnesota had a combined population of about 85 million; roughly equivalent to Germany.
Before anyone jumps into new trains, however, it would be a good idea to compare schedules from the ’20s and ’30s with those of today. Generally, over the same routes Amtrak requires twice the time.
Note to lefties: before you have a chance of convincing me increased government involvement in health care is anything but a lousy idea, you’ll have to prove you can make Medicare into a fantastic, efficient program. And before you attempt to expand the government passenger train network, maybe you can get Amtrak to turn a profit and get the trains to run as well as they did back when Coolidge was President.
[blockquote]The reality is that in the U.S. trains are extremely important for moving freight.[/blockquote]
A fact [so I’m told] that seems to get lost in most of these discussions is that, while the govenment owns Amtrak, [i]the freight companies own the rails and rights-of-way[/i]. Therefore, the freights get priority over passenger trains at both the long-distance and local levels. I hear train-commuting friends complain regularly about their train stopping two or three times on the trip because of the freight schedule.
If I’m not mistaken, the airline industry is set up in the opposite way. The feds own the land (true/false?) and control the rights-of-way, but private companies own the rolling (flying) stock.
[blockquote]Amtrak is slow, unreliable and lacks any significant creature comforts.[/blockquote]
I can attest to this last part. Years ago, my wife and I took a trip to New Orleans in the summer (call us crazy if you wish). It was the only time I remember catching a cold in the middle of summer. The AC was on full-blast for the entire trip there and back, and I had to stand in the car-joiner-thingy just to find some measure of comfort. The (rather surly) conductors said that the AC settings were either on or off, and if they turned it off they couldn’t turn it back on again. Oh, and you can buy a blanket for $8.00 in the refreshment car.
The one or two Europeans in the car were most disgusted.
[blockquote] There seems to be a somewhat logical fallacy in this argument, however. He seems to be arguing that large scale commuter trains can’t be economically feasible in this country because the population is only sparsely packed. This may, in fact, be true, but then he says they were viable in the 1940’s when the population in this country was even smaller than it is today. [/blockquote]
But there were fewer alternatives then, too. Air travel was far more expensive and not everyone had cars (which, let’s remember, were also much less reliable than they are now). Trains were popular because they were the cheapest, most reliable long-haul passenger carrier around.
If trains are going to capture a large percentage of travelers – business travelers – they’re going to have to compete with cars and airplanes on price and speed. I’m a project manager that specializes in job estimation, planning and execution. Cost control is a big issue for me, and one of the biggest issues I deal with in travel is the cost of travel time of our resources. If it takes 10 hours for an engineer to travel one-way from home to the job site by train, my round-trip labor cost is roughly $1,200. If the same trip takes 6 hours by car or 4 by plane, the costs are $720 and $480, respectively. So, to make economic sense, the train ticket would have to cost $480 less than the cost of the mileage charge (about $.050/mile) or $720 less than the plane ticket. And that doesn’t take into account the inefficiencies that would force an engineer to spend an extra night at a hotel or stand around waiting for a train when he could be on one of the several planes departing that day or simply hopping into his car and going home.
I like trains, I really do. I’ve been a model railroader for years, and I think there’s no better way to ship overland freight. But they don’t make sense for passenger service anymore, except as for people like me who just like the idea of traveling on trains.
Last fall my wife and I rode the Empire Builder from Spokane to Chicago. The service was excellent, the crew was friendly and helpful, and most important we left on time and arrived on time. No mean accomplishment for a journey half way across the country.
Most of Amtrak’s problems are not due to the system, but to Congress which has never taken passenger rail seriously, but seems to intend that it fail.
My father worked all his life on the railroads before he retired in 1964. He complained bitterly that the railroad corporations and the federal government had systematically destroyed any rational passenger service in the United States. And he was correct. As a boy and young man, I rode passenger trains and it was always a memorable (not Amtrak) experience. I have subsequently spent far more time in airplanes than on trains, and have hated every aspect of it – save for the few times I traveled first class. The hassles of parking at airports, the atrocities of the security “system”, the discomfort of plane passenger seating, the wretched service, and the price of air travel make me wonder why people tolerate such abuse. It’s worse than any train I’ve ever traveled. As for being “on time” – well, flying from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia often requires more time than driving the same distance.
Kendall, you thought this man’s letter was “superb”. Why? It’s just another indication that we will continue to deal unimaginatively (stupidly) with the problems of public transportation in a corporate-government environment that will do anything to preserve the automobile and the airplane – for what purpose? My father called it correctly a long time ago – and it’s obvious what he complained about is still the dominant issue today. It doesn’t have to be like this – but in order to make progress, we might be compelled to see how other nations have actually created rail systems vastly superior to ours. And worse, adopt some of their approaches. That, of course, would never do in the US of A.
[blockquote]Amtrak has never turned a profit since the federal government took it over in 1971 and began shoveling tens of billions of dollars in subsidies its way.[/blockquote]
For the record, the interstate highway system has also never turned a profit despite receiving even more federal money over the years. The provision of transportation infrastructure is not a profit-making activity.
I see no reason to expect Amtrak to turn a profit until or unless we expect I-95 to do the same.
[blockquote]For the record, the interstate highway system has also never turned a profit despite receiving even more federal money over the years. The provision of transportation infrastructure is not a profit-making activity. I see no reason to expect Amtrak to turn a profit until or unless we expect I-95 to do the same. [/blockquote]
I beg to differ. Fuel taxes more than pay for highway construction and maintenance. In fact, a large portion of the monies shoveled into public transportation boondoggles like light rail come from fuel taxes.
I couldn’t agree more with Dan’s jeremiad about air travel. I avoid it if at all possible. For individual trips under 450 miles, cars are easily as fast and more economical, with more than one person in the car, it’s even moreso. But there’s simply no viable alternative to go from, say, my hometown of Kirkwood, MO to LA. I can spend 6 hours on a plane or two days on Amtrak. I know what I’d pick, even if I detest flying.
i got this from the following website written in ’96 http://www.trainweb.com/travel/future.htm
“…For example, did you know that for every dollar that you spend on air travel, it costs taxpayers at least twice that amount for your trip? In other words, if it costs $100 to purchase a ticket for air travel, taxpayers foot the bill for an additional $200 when you total all the tax money that has gone into the construction and maintenance of air terminals and the operation of federally funded air-traffic control. That doesn’t even include the cost of the National Weather Service and the billions spent on weather satellites without which safe commercial air travel would not be possible.
The economy of using highways for travel are as equally distorted. Without tolls, they appear to be free to use. In reality, highways are the most expensive of all transportation infrastructures to build and maintain. But you never see that cost directly as it is all paid through mandatory taxes on gasoline and from general state and federal revenues.
Of all means of transportation, rail is the only one where passengers are expected to pay their own way in the price of a ticket! Every year the government tries to reduce or eliminate the subsidies to Amtrak and require riders to pay the full cost of Amtrak. In the meantime, goverment subsidies continue to grow every year for highways and air transportation!
With the price of flight tickets and highway travel being held artifically low to travelers (while travelers still bear the full burden invisibly through taxes), it is no wonder that rail travels appears to be the more expensive alternative. This unequal treatment of rail transportation is unique to North America. Elsewhere in the world where rail travel is on an even playing field with other modes of transportation, passenger rail construction and usage is growing at an ever faster pace!”
in addition all new roads here in texas are endless toll roads; they will never be paid off; that, in addition to taxes.
and…i would have to disagree with the writer regarding europe; i rode high speed rail from london to the tip of wales and that train stopped in every little town along the way and it was really crowded on the way back to london in the a.m.-my thinking was that those people were probably able to live in their towns and work in london. think about how great that could be if you could live in a reasonable outlier town and still work in your closest city without congested polluted traffic and rude drivers. yah, we need rail…badly.
I have been riding passenger rail for 50 years, and have 50,000 miles in non-commute travel. I confess to a certain amount of rail nostalgia, but I am also a pragmatist. I find the article unhelpful because it conflates multiple issues and generally dismisses passenger rail efficacy with no real analytical support.
There is potential for passenger rail, even long distance. But one of the major problems with transportation choices is that there is no accurate way to measure the full cost of alternatives. Yes, there is a direct subsidy for AMTRAK. But how many direct and indirect subsidies are there for air and auto? Until we know the true, full cost of each alternative we are not making accurate decisions.
Others have noted the unfairness of comparing a govt entity to private. As is typical in govt, there are wide variations in levels of service. But until we see what private rail could do, the comparison is not apples to apples.
Another reason the rail-air comparison is skewed in air’s favor is that air has massively upgraded over the last 50 years. But that results almost exclusively from improvements in aircraft. Upgrading rail, on the other hand, involves two separate components. Not only must the rolling stock be upgraded, but so must the tracks. While AMTRAK began a large-scale rolling stock upgrade in the Nineties, as noted above, AMTRAK could not upgrade the tracks because they are privately owned. Until the tracks are upgraded, we can never realize (or even know) the full potential of rail travel.
Not to pick on Jeffersonian, but the air-rail comparison is often too narrow in its focus by just comparing schedule travel time. For several years I arranged group trips from California to Winter Park, CO [where btw we met a wonderful retired priest, Fr. Cranmer, now gone]. We would always take the California Zephyr from Oakland to Winter Park. The trip took 28 hours through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Add an hour to or from the depot for a total of 29 hours.
Some of our hardcore type A friends would say, “Oh no. We don’t want to waste all that time on the train; we’ll fly into Denver and meet you there.†They spent two hours to the airport, two hours waiting, and three plus hours flying. Upon arrival it took another one to two hours to collect all the baggage, schlep through the airport, meet the shuttle for a two hour ride suddenly at alpine altitude. So after arrival they had saved 18-19 hours.
But let’s look closely at the savings. Eight to nine hours was sleep time. Another 2-3 hours was meals. So the true net time savings was more like 6-9 hours.
Then let’s look at several quality factors. By having 24+ hours to acclimate to altitude, we were ready to go on the first ski or work day. Our friends were sucking air and miserable for up to two days due to the sudden altitude change. Even coach seats on the train are more comfortable than 1st Class air seats. The extra space on trains makes train travel far more conducive to working or socializing with friends –especially if you book a sleeper, which could more than offset any actual time lost. Finally, after a relaxing trip home, I would return to work far more rested than our jet-lagged friends.
I am not suggesting some nostalgic, idealized view of train travel as a complete model. But I am noting that there is far more to the inquiry than a simple comparison of timetables. We have never let trains demonstrate their full potential. I strongly suspect that at full potential trains could compete favorably on trips up to 1000 to 1500 miles. But I have yet to see a complete analysis.
[blockquote]The economy of using highways for travel are as equally distorted. Without tolls, they appear to be free to use. In reality, highways are the most expensive of all transportation infrastructures to build and maintain. But you never see that cost directly as it is all paid through mandatory taxes on gasoline and from general state and federal revenues.[/blockquote]
That’s not really a “distortion,” though, is it, not a subsidy? We can argue about the level of taxes on fuel, but there’s no doubt that the users of the roads are the ones paying for them, and probably quite closely to the relative wear and tear they put on them. I’m all for toll roads, so long as they can be done efficiently. Until then, fuel taxes are a really good way to approximate user fees.
Rail passengers haven’t been expected to pay their own way for decades. I’d agree about the subsidizing of air travel, though.
I meant “nor” a subsidy. Fingers!
If I needed to go from Dallas to San Antonio today, the Amtrak ticket would cost $38 — and the trip would take 10 hours. A bus ticket would cost $44 — and the trip would take 6 hours. Driving would take about 5 hours and cost $151 using the IRS standard mileage rate. Or I could fly — and the trip (not counting time spent in the airport) would take 1 hour and cost $148.
The most efficient way of moving both freight and people is train. What the problem with Amtrak here is that (1) it must yield to every freight train, (2) it stops at incredibly small burgs along the way and (3) the meager schedule (one run each way each day).
For years people have been advocating high speed rail between Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. The primary opposition comes from American, Continental and Southwest Airlines. Guess what — they operate flights between these cities and a good rail alternative would cut into their traffic.
Car isn’t economically competitve now. It will get worse when $150 a barrel oil and $4 a gallon gas return — and they will return. It will get even worse when oil goes to $250 a barrel and gasoline to $6 a gallon — and they will.
And if you want to talk about “energy independence,” then there will have to be a drastic reduction in auto travel.
The car becomes economically competitive when the most valuable, non-renewable resource is factored in: Time. A person can jump into a car this minute and be in San Antonio in 5 hours. When does the flight leave and how long is the trip door-to-door? A lot longer than one hour, I guarantee you. When does the bus leave? Amtrak?
You’ll find that overall costs are far higher with mass transportation for all but long trips
There’s also the “last mile” factor. With a car, I can start from my house in City A and arrive directly at my final destination in City B. If I were traveling by train, bus, or plane, I would first have to use some other means of transportation to get to the train station/bus station/airport in City A, and subsequently do the same thing in City B to get to wherever I’m actually going. That adds both time and (most likely) dollars to the cost of traveling by means other than car.
Look, we can complain about costs ’til we’re blue in the face, but passenger rail service just can’t compete with road and air travel. Sure, it’s fine if you’re just going on a relatively short trip, but across the continent? If I had to choose between sitting for six hours in a plane, or three days in a railroad car, I’ll take the plane over the railroad car. I flew as a crew member in the Air Force, so flying doesn’t bother me. And for shorter trips, I’ll take our nice freeways for 450 miles, thank you!
My family and I have taken the train many times from Baltimore to Whitefish, MT and back. It is a marvelously civilized way to travel. If you haven’t traveled across country on a train, while on vacation and you have time to burn – do it!
I arrive rested and ready to engage my vacation. Flying? Takes me a couple of days just to decompress from the flight….
I wish our public transportation system was still what it was when I was younger. I took the train to college and home again. There was a train each way stopping here every three hours night and day. During the middle fifties and into the sixties the service deteriorated. The cars were old, the equipment worn out, the seats bad, the floor asnd windows dirty, but I took the train anyway. You couldn’t beat the price of $17 coach one-way for a trip of 350 miles. Plus the diner was still the best food around. Today our transit authority is having a free-ride day to lure us away from the car. One bus every 90 minutes isn’t good service. In the days when I rode the train, I got to the station on the streetcar. There was one every fifteen or twenty minutes on every line all day. It was just easier to ride the streetcar than to get the car out of the garage and then try to park downtown. Now, I can get a bus to work but I can’t get one home. The last bus on my line leaves at 430pm and I don’t get off until five, and have a ten-minute walk to the transit center because the buses don’t come down Main St. anymore.
Dumb Sheep.
What the writer of this article does not mention, and what we tend
to forget, are two events that disrupted air and highway transpor-
tation. First, there was the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Next was the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that resulted in the shutdown of all air
travel. These two events show how we are too reliant on only two modes of travel. Suppose those events noted happened at the same
time? Without viable alternatives, we would be almost immobile.When
people quibble about Amtrak subsidies, They should be reminded that
as far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans all forms of transportation have been subsidized. It baffles me why some get so
worked up over Amtrak funding, and ignore all other financial support
to air and roads. As one railroad executive said: Susidize none of them, or subsidize them all.
There are flights from 6:40 am to 8:40 pm in the evening — some 14, roughly at 1 hour intervals. Last time I flew, the door-to-door time passage was about three hours — two hours less than driving. Plus the fact that I was considerably less tired than I would have been had I driven.
Buses have a similar schedule.
Yes, there’s only one train each way for Amtrak — and the hours are pretty wierd. Dallas to San Antonio puts you in San Antonio in the evening; San Antonio to Dallas leaves in the middle of the night.
But that is one of my points. What makes rail work in England and Europe is precisely that there are frequent, fast runs between major cities. If Eurail worked like Amtrak in Texas, no one would use it. Last summer I was in England; I stayed in London and did rail day trips to Canterbury, Salisbury, Bath and York. I did similar things in France and Germany while there. You can leave in the morning, arrive in you destination when things are opening, depart when things are closing and be back at a reasonable hour. You can’t do that the way things are currently structured in Texas.
[blockquote]When does the flight leave and how long is the trip door-to-door?[/blockquote]
This is one of the great advantages of the train, particularly in a heavily-populated area like the northeast corridor… when you’re going to New York City or Washington DC, Penn Station or Union Station is MUCH more convenient to just about anywhere you’d want to go than Dulles, BWI, LaGuardia, JFK, or Newark–even National is across the river from DC proper (though unlike Dulles and BWI, it is served by the Metro).
In almost every city, the airport is farther from downtown than is the train station.
[blockquote]It baffles me why some get so worked up over Amtrak funding, and ignore all other financial support to air and roads. [/blockquote]
Roads are not subsidized, they are subsidizers.
I agree that costs of the air infrastructure should be borne by air carriers.
In #22, Jeffersonian wrote:
Roads are not subsidized, they are subsidizers.
In #22 J wrote, “Roads are not subsidized, they are subsidizers.”
Actually, that is half right. An estimated 90% of the cost of Highways is attributable to the requirement to strengthen the road to carry long-haul trucking. So auto gas taxes probably do pay more than their @10% share of road costs. But trucks pay vastly less than their 90% share.
However, I have seen no reliable figures for indirect costs such as the cost to remedy environmental damage. Moreover, it can fairly be argued that the portion of the US budget attributable to protecting oil supplies is an indirect cost. So under an honest, fully-costed approach, I doubt any form of transportation is paying its true share. And the greater the subsidy, the greater the distortion in economic decision-making.
Rail is one of the less bad ways the government can waste money, even if I think it would only really work in the high density corridors (like New York-Washington and New York-Boston which I travel; I only wish they would fix up the tracks so the Acela could make better time).
The fact remains: Highways pay for themselves, independent of the cross-subsidy from cars to trucks. And since trains, light rail, aircraft, etc. all use some form of energy, it’s pointless to heap ephemeral costs onto any one to inflate its individual cost. Even electric trains have a power plant at the back end, pushing electrons.
And I was wrong about air travel…[url=http://reason.org/blog/show/1007391.html]it pays for itself[/url]:
[i]More important, the aviation and highway systems pay for themselves—the user taxes and fees people pay cover the capital and operating costs of airports, air traffic control, and inter-city highways. By contrast, a national system of high-speed rail for trips up to 500 miles would take something like $500 billion of taxpayers’ money. And after that massive subsidy, maybe the operating costs would be recovered from passenger fares (though even that is doubtful, based on overseas experience). Reason’s analysis of the California high-speed rail proposal found “the San Francisco-Los Angeles line alone by 2030 would suffer annual financial losses of up to $4.17 billion.”[/i]
[blockquote]There are flights from 6:40 am to 8:40 pm in the evening—some 14, roughly at 1 hour intervals. Last time I flew, the door-to-door time passage was about three hours—two hours less than driving. Plus the fact that I was considerably less tired than I would have been had I driven.[/blockquote]
Well done! You are fortunate indeed to live so close to the airport, to not check bags, to be able to ignore the two-hour pre-flight arrival time, not have delays, to not pick up luggage at your destination and to have a car waiting to your close-by destination. Because my last “1-hour” flight took every minute of 5 hours to go door to door. In fact, average door-to-door speed of air travel lately has dropped to under 70 mph (it was 66 mph last I read, a few months ago).
I still say the most efficient method of constructing a viable ‘rail’ system is to abandon the traditional ‘rail’ and put in a monorail system, powered by electro-magnetic propulsion. They can be constructed along the rail-way right of ways, one on each side so as to not worry about coming and going transportation (oops, forgot about tunnels!), so as to NOT compete for rail space with freight trains.
Give the contract to Disney, who has already proven it workable, and worked out the bugs, and we have it made.
No one seems to have mentioned the other cost factor which makes driving more tempting: families. I live in England, and we do indeed have a pretty good rail network (though given that our whole island is smaller than California, that’s perhaps not so difficult). If I’m going up to London from Bournemouth (on the South Coast) where I live, I’ll go by train. But if my husband and I are both travelling, we’ll use the car – even more so if our three sons are coming. With tickets at 75 pounds return (about $125) each, to take a family of five to London costs us $550 or so – two of my sons have student railcards which gives them a discount). By car, it costs us 40 pounds – about $66 – plus about 20 pounds for parking for the day. There really isn’t a comparison.
The writer’s experience has not been mine. The Downeaster runs from Boston to Portland,Me. It is of course much more expensive than it ought to be. However, the cars are comfortable and clean, there isal always a food and bar car, and in winter, what a blessing to sit in comfort while someone else drives! Besides, there is a real pleasure in sitting on the train as it leaves Boston so that you can see the traffic piled up on the overpasses – and knowing, “I’m not THERE.”!
Round trip for me, seniorcitizen, is $42. See #29 however. It is practical for one, but not financially sensible for more than one. The the car is much cheaper. Unless one takes into account the misery of driving in Boston, the misery of looking for a parking place, but eventhen it is toopricey. But why is it so damn expensiveto run the train? The system is a far more efficient user of power than a car and it sure is greener. Larry
26. Jeffersonian wrote:
The Dallas Morning News reports this morning:
One does wonder why there is a $13 billions dollar deficit in the Federal Highway Trust Fund if highways pay for themselves. It becomes even more puzzling when one realizes that hundreds of billions in necessary maintenance and enhancements have been deferred.
If one further considers that the current federal fuel tax rate was set in 1997 and that the cost of everything has substantially increased in the subsequent 12 years, the notion that federal taxes cover the cost of new roads, improved roads and maintained roads becomes even more dubvious. And the situation is similar in most states. If you take it down to the neighborhood street level, that usually comes out of property and general sales tax revenues, not any tax on gasoline or vehicles.
The economic downturn has indeed impacted negatively on fuel tax revenue. That’s does not negate the truth of fuel taxes having paid entirely for the construction and upkeep of the federal highway system. Keep in mind, also that (and I’m going from memory here) about 20% of fuel taxes are skimmed off for things like light rail systems. If there’s a deficit in the highway trust fund, perhaps we should stop building these perpetual money-losers first.