(The following article by Patrick McGeehan was posted on the New York Times website on September 16.)
NEW YORK — The next time Amtrak officials decide to spring a hefty fare increase on their most loyal customers, they may want to pass along an early warning to the members of Congress among them.
Their failure to do that last week fueled a backlash in Washington that forced Amtrak’s chief executive, David L. Gunn, to call off a plan to raise fares on Tuesday. Amtrak said yesterday that it would postpone the increases while it takes more time to explain its plan to elected officials and riders.
Amtrak waited until late last Friday to announce a systemwide increase that would coincide with a sharp rise in the prices of the monthly passes that allow commuters unlimited use of certain trains. The average one-way ticket would have gone up $4, but for hundreds of commuters in the Northeast, the price of a pass would have risen more than $350 next month.
Despite the unprecedented size of the increase, Amtrak had not planned to announce it at all, said Cliff Black, a spokesman for the railroad in Washington. “But it began to create a lot of reverberations and so we announced it,” he said.
But by then, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democrat from Delaware, and several of his colleagues who ride Amtrak trains to Washington, had heard chatter about the looming increase from fellow travelers, conductors and ticket agents. Senator Biden, who has been one of Amtrak’s biggest boosters, got the word from a conductor last week.
Representative Michael G. Fitzpatrick, a Republican from Pennsylvania who is chairman of the Passenger Rail Caucus, found out from a constituent.
Amtrak’s stealth, coupled with the outcry from commuters who said they could not absorb such a sudden blow to their budgets, brought an angry reaction from those lawmakers and several of their colleagues, according to Amtrak officials, members of Congress and aides on Capitol Hill.
“There’s been such a broad public uproar about this, from Republicans and Democrats, urban and rural,” said Representative Robert E. Andrews, a Democrat from New Jersey. “It’s hard to find anybody who thought that this was a good idea.”
The furor could not have come at a more precarious time for Amtrak, which is awaiting Senate action on its financing for the fiscal year that starts in two weeks. A Senate committee recommended appropriating $1.45 billion for Amtrak, but the matter probably will not come up for a vote before next week.
The debate over money for Amtrak, a private company that relies on federal and state subsidies, has become more contentious in the past year. The Bush administration has been demanding that the railroad cover more of its own costs, and extracting more money from commuters would have been a step in that direction.
“Customers understand that the cost of fuel is going up and that Amtrak is running a large operating deficit and that there is not an appetite to forever write larger checks in Washington,” said Senator Thomas R. Carper, a Democrat from Delaware. “There’s a built-in understanding that from time to time, there’s going to be rate hikes.”
Senator Carper, who once sat on Amtrak’s board of directors, said he had no quarrel with the idea of sharply raising the fares, only with the way the railroad went about it. “Amtrak could have done a better job of communicating with its customers,” he said.
Still, the potential gain from squeezing the small but vocal band of regulars is relatively small. Only about 2,000 people buy multiple-ride tickets each month, with most of them paying from $500 to $750.
Even if all of them continued buying the higher-priced passes, the additional revenue to Amtrak would not amount to much more than $5 million a year. That’s a rounding error to an operation that takes in about $2 billion and spends about $3 billion each year.
Some commuters wasted no time in trying to head off the price increase. Brann J. Wry, a professor of arts administration at New York University who lives in Trenton, spent more than $3,100 to buy passes for six coming months at the current price of $522. He said one of his fellow commuters laid out more than $5,700 to buy a pass for each of the next 11 months, the maximum Amtrak will sell.
Amtrak had planned to raise the price of a pass to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan from Trenton by $288, or 55 percent, to $810. So, Mr. Wry figured he had saved more than $1,700. He declined to venture a guess as to what Amtrak would do now.
“This year has been so stressful because we don’t know which way Amtrak is going next,” he said.
Representative Fitzpatrick, who met with Mr. Gunn yesterday morning to protest the fare increase and Amtrak’s plan to cease service to a station in Cornwells Heights, Pa., north of Philadelphia, was pleased to hear that Mr. Gunn had decided to shelve both ideas, at least temporarily. But he said that Mr. Gunn did not commit to revising the fare increase, only to taking more time to explain it.
“I think there’s a reason that Amtrak postponed its proposed fare increase,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “I hope it’s because there’s another way.”