Posted on 08/25/2007 1:59:36 PM PDT by Graybeard58
These are boom times for Amtrak. The passenger railway is seeing big increases in ridership on the Northeast Corridor and other routes that provide fast, reliable, comfortable service. Medium-distance commuters are finding it's better to ride a train than sit in an airliner for hours on the tarmac or battle urban traffic jams after landing.
The Bush administration, meanwhile, continues to press its vision for Amtrak, though in a somewhat desultory manner. The president essentially wants to take the money-losing long-distance routes out of the hands of Congress and let more pragmatic state leaders decide their fate. The worst of them would be shut down, freeing Amtrak to develop its high-ridership routes in pursuit of fiscal stability, or even profit.
Amtrak's high-speed Acela train, which passes through southern Connecticut on its route linking Boston with Washington, D.C., has seen ridership increase 20 percent over the past 10 months, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Acela's June on-time rate was 90 percent, compared with about 70 percent for commercial airline flights at LaGuardia Airport in New York between June and Aug. 15.
It would cost Amtrak $625 million to improve its Northeast Corridor system enough to reduce travel times between Washington and New York 15 minutes, to two and a half hours. It would cost billions to deliver European-style high-speed service. David Gunn, former Amtrak president, said, "If you really want a super-zippy train from Washington to New York, you have to build another railroad."
Such goals might not be quite as daunting if Amtrak were not weighed down with slow, little-used, unreliable intercity routes such as the coast-to-coast Sunset Limited, which requires a taxpayer subsidy of $400 per passenger. Congress tried and failed in 2005 to cut the Sunset Limited and 17 other long-distance routes that doom Amtrak to deep deficits year after year.
Amtrak deserves credit for outperforming the airlines on a number of important travel benchmarks this year, and increasing its market share as a result. It also deserves a chance to operate in an atmosphere of fiscal sanity, where it could shed services no business executive in his right mind would continue to provide.
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disapointing editorial, we need to privatize amtrack
Yes, we do. The death of railroads wasn't due to airplanes, at least not entirely, but due to the heavy hand of government interference(and Unions didn't help either).
Much of the increase in traffic is solely due to folks taking the Acela on the BoWash corridor. This should have been divided up along time ago and given over to the state transportation authorities or private operators. I am sick of subsidizing the two people who take a train from Wichita to Reno when I buy a ticket to go from Metropark to DC.
>These are boom times for Amtrak
Is this guy on crack? That boom is probably the red ink hitting the floor.
Where’s the security on the trains??? I saw ZERO. They had better address this lack ... or they will have a Spain on their hands... mark my words.
I agree security on trains is virtually nil.
A few years ago my family and I rode the train from Chicago to Minneapolis. We were in the sleeper car. The next rooms over had what had to be 4-5 drug dealers. There was a
gun fight between drug dealers and the police at the Amtrak station in Chicago a few days after we rode the train.
High-speed trains may not be necessary.
Altering the timetables might help. For example, if a route drops off five people and picks up two new passengers at an isolated rural station but experiences significantly higher passenger movement at an urban station, does every single run on that route really need to stop at the rural station?
Eliminating the five minutes of dead time spent at stations with very little passenger movement, several times over, on particular runs of a route, will give you that extra fifteen minute savings, without "billions of dollars." Such a move might even save some fuel!
Another reason why the United States is the world's only super power: the power of the brains of her citizens.
You’ve got that right. The last time I rode Amtrak they showed me every reason in the world not to ride their trains and none for doing so. I got the message.
I take the Delta shuttle between NY and Boston all the time, and I can tell you that the increased traffic on Amtrak is a direct result of the airlines horrible on-time record, especially in the summertime. Just the hint of a thunderstorm means your 6:30 flight will be delayed 2 hours, at least. I know a lot of business travelers who are going for the Acela instead. I would too, if my company let me.
I would really like it if a non-subsidized railroad could get me and my vehicle from Cleveland, Ohio to Orlando, Florida in 6-8 hours at a price competitive with the airlines. That would be wonderful. And, I would bet that such a railroad would be profitable.
It’ll never happen, though, which is why I either drive or fly (reluctantly).
Yeah, Lord knows that we can't have people travelling with a pocket knife or ((gasp)) a sidearm. Why, they might actually defend themselves!
That being said, I'd like to take a long trip on some of the refurbished lines, with the old Pullman cars, Bar cars, Dining cars.
Rail service in the NE corridor would work, if I lived there, but I don't, and never will.
My wife travels a lot on business. Missed connections, delayed or cancelled flights adds up to many hours sitting around in air ports. 22 hours from Burbank to Chicago is one example, when she finaly got to Chicago her flight to our area had been cancelled, it was either get a motel, stay in the air port or rent a car for the extra 200 miles home. She rented the car.
That was not an uncommon occurence either.
She flies either American or United because that's the ones her company has contracts with.
Try limoliner.com
well, that's an interesting theory; certainly for its creative logic and laissez faire emotional appeal, if nothing else.
But I think it's also ridiculous. Rail would have collapsed under its own weight a very long time ago, as would the airline industry have more than once, as the auto industry nearly did, as the steel industry did.
1. You want the train to carry your vehicle and expect it to price compete with an airline which does not?
2. Doesn't government funding of air traffic control and airport construction count as a subsidy?
BTW I once heard from a railroad employee that there was a train on the east coast that carries personal vehicles to Florida. I don't know if it is still running.
“I would really like it if a non-subsidized railroad could get me and my vehicle from Cleveland, Ohio to Orlando, Florida in 6-8 hours at a price competitive with the airlines.”
May I suggest wishing to be able to walk on water? You’ll be able to do that before trains with auto cars cars can average speeds of well over 150 mph.
The death of railroads was due to government building highways and absorbing the costs so transportation was close to free for end-users. Inter-city railroads all over the country were torn up and replaced by roads, driven by the auto, rubber and petroleum lobbies. The car killed the railroad, not the airplane.
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