PHILADELPHIA — The end of the line is not in sight for Amtrak, according to Knight Ridder news service.
Passenger trains will continue to run, certainly in the Northeast and probably nationwide, for years to come, say both Amtrak officials and others in Washington who control its future.
But what is going on in Congress is the fiercest debate in years about how Amtrak is managed and how it should spend an annual taxpayer subsidy of more than $1 billion.
Ultimately, Congress must decide among divergent views about the best long-range plan. But most of the approaches have in common a call for making the largest investment ever in modernizing the nation’s passenger rail system.
Two bills pending in the Senate call for spending at least three times more on passenger rail each year than the $1.1 billion operating subsidy Amtrak received in 2001. The Bush administration has promised it will have at least an outline of its long-range plan for Amtrak’s future ready in the next few weeks.
All the scenarios made public so far call for putting billions of dollars into track, bridges, tunnels, stations and equipment, which people on all sides of the debate say have been neglected for years.
“The real issue is . . . the capital shortfall,” Kenneth Mead, inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in March. “There is no future for Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor or anywhere else if we don’t deal with the capital issue.”
Much of the debate, especially since Sept. 11, centers on Amtrak’s role as part of an integrated transportation system that includes highways, aviation and rail.
Amtrak President George Warrington, who is leaving his job this spring to run New Jersey Transit’s commuter-rail and bus system, described the debate in Congress as a fundamental examination of what Americans want in a passenger rail system.
“We spend more money in this country on cleaning up roadkill and on road salt than we do on intercity rail service,” he said. The debate “is much less about what’s broken historically and, fortunately, much more focused on this as a vital organization – not perfect but vital – and about making sure we define (Amtrak’s) mission, and align its resources within that public policy.”
When the nation’s airline system was thrown into crisis on Sept. 11, Amtrak’s ridership went up temporarily. In the fourth quarter, Amtrak carried 1 percent fewer passengers than it did a year earlier, while domestic airlines carried 31 percent fewer passengers.
Amtrak has received more than $25 billion in federal subsidy since it took over passenger service from private railroads in 1971. But its supporters point out that in that same time, the federal government has spent $750 billion on highways and aviation programs, much of it from special tax accounts that channel money into the programs. Amtrak has no special tax revenue designated for it, depending instead on Congress’ allocating money each year.
While Amtrak’s ridership has not grown much in the last decade, it has increased by a total of 19 percent since 1996, the year after it reduced the number of trains it runs because of a budget crisis. Its ticket revenue has grown by 40 percent since 1996.
Amtrak’s widely publicized Acela Express service was two years late and $300 million over budget by the time it started in December 2000, but it is steadily turning into a moneymaker, Amtrak officials contend. The trains carried more than a million passengers in their first 14 months. And while an Acela ticket bought at the last minute costs $300 round-trip between New York and Washington, that is $100 less than a full-fare airline ticket.
Competing pieces of legislation that would carry out two scenarios for the future are pending in the Senate.
Legislation sponsored by Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C., chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, not only would keep Amtrak intact but would authorize spending $4.6 billion annually for five years to operate trains and make capital improvements.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the ranking Republican on the committee, has legislation that would provide nearly $3 billion annually for five years, with the goal of turning Amtrak service over to private operators after four years.
Congressional staffers and others, including Paul Weyrich, a conservative political activist who is vice chairman of the Amtrak Reform Council, say Hollings’ bill has a good chance of passing in the Senate, but faces an uncertain fate in the Republican-controlled House.
Even the reform council, a panel Congress set up five years ago to determine if the federally owned rail corporation could operate trains without taxpayer subsidy, has concluded that the nation wants and needs passenger trains – provided someone other than Amtrak runs them.
The reform council concluded that Amtrak is a bloated bureaucracy, with poor accounting practices, that never will be able to efficiently run its own network, properly maintain and improve the track it owns in the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor, or extend high-speed trains to other parts of the country.
“The council’s view is that there should be a bright future for passenger rail service in America,” Tom Till, the panel’s executive director, testified at a House subcommittee hearing in February. “But the council believes that passenger rail service will never achieve its potential as provided and managed by Amtrak. A new and different program is needed to move forward.”
Till, in an interview, said one thing the reform council did not recommend was emulating the way Britain sold its rail infrastructure to private operators. There, system reliability has plummeted, fares on many lines have soared, and Railtrack, the company created to maintain tracks and stations, went bankrupt in October. Government officials estimate that it may take $100 billion to make the system reliable again.
Amtrak President Warrington, defending Amtrak’s performance, said investment in rail needed to be coordinated with the tax money the federal and state governments put into highways and aviation.
“It’s time for the federal government, the Congress and the administration . . . to accept responsibility for defining the system this country wants and needs over the next 10 to 20 years,” he said. “The highway and aviation systems are built out. If you look forward to growth . . . the most underutilized asset this country has is rail.”