(The following article by Rubina Madan was posted on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website on August 24.)
ATLANTA — Though cheap plane tickets and superhighways may have curbed its popularity, the Brookwood Amtrak Station still bustles with travelers twice a day as the Crescent train stops in Atlanta.
But the fate of the last long-distance passenger rail service serving Atlanta could depend on the outcome of a funding fight that will resume when Congress returns from its summer recess next month.
Amtrak officials have said they need $1.8 billion in subsidies next year to keep operating, more than the amount voted on by either the Senate Appropriations Committee or the House. President Bush, meanwhile, has been pushing to cut all federal operating subsidies for Amtrak, which is billions of dollars in debt and continues to lose millions annually.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a longtime critic of Amtrak, is among those who believe the subsidy should be eliminated. He has said that since the bulk of Amtrak’s service is concentrated in the busy Northeast corridor between Washington and Boston, it is unfair for taxpayers in other parts of the country to keep paying for it.
Ending the subsidy would leave it up to the states to either fund Amtrak’s longer routes — such as the New York-to-New Orleans Crescent — or let the service die.
Before the break, the Senate Commerce Committee approved a bill introduced by Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) that would keep Amtrak going, at least in the short term, by increasing the amount the federal government provides the rail service to maintain current operations and upgrade equipment. But it would cut subsidies by 40 percent and require the company to restructure its debts and provide periodic performance reports.
Though fewer Amtrak lines cross the Southeast than run through the Northeast corridor, there is still a high demand for them in the region, said Cliff Black, Amtrak’s director for media relations in Washington.
“Americans want and need passenger train service,” Black said. “They’ve demonstrated that by riding our trains wherever we operate them in large numbers. It is a myth that no one is interested in riding long-distance passenger trains.”
But in Atlanta, originally established as Terminus in 1836 because it was the southeastern end point for the Western and Atlantic railroad, the decline in railroad passenger traffic has been precipitous.
When the Brookwood Amtrak Station opened in 1979, it served 14 arriving trains and seven departing trains a day. Now the only survivor is the Crescent, which stops twice a day, along its northbound and southbound routes.
Last year, about 86,000 people departed or arrived on Amtrak at the Brookwood station, according to an Amtrak Governmental Affairs report. That is about 236 passengers per day, or 118 passengers on each train that passes through Atlanta.
But critics say Amtrak service is too infrequent in Atlanta for it to be an effective transportation system.
“Atlanta is a city of 4.7 million, and we have two trains a day that come through, very slow trains,” said Terry Chastain, executive director of the Southeastern Economic Alliance. “They come in at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., and they’re really in no shape or form competitive with airplanes and roads.”
Much of the popularity of train travel in Atlanta diminished once it became convenient and affordable to fly out of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, now the world’s busiest.
“When you talk about train travel in general, it kind of takes you back to a time before planes were really a common form of transportation, when they were still a novelty,” said Lauren Kenworthy of the Georgia Convention and Visitors Bureau.
But Hal Wilson, administrator of Intermodal Programs at the Georgia Department of Transportation, pointed out that, while Chicago has two airports, one of them nearly as busy as Hartsfield-Jackson, eight Amtrak lines run through Chicago’s station, and it gets more than 25 times the rail traffic of Atlanta.
“They seem to be our competition in air transportation, so we ought to try to emulate them a little bit in rail service,” Wilson said.
It seems unlikely, however, that Southeastern states will fund the Crescent if federal subsidies are cut or eliminated, said Steve Polzin, deputy director of the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transportation Research.
“It will certainly be challenging to establish stable long-term multistate commitments to funding for services, as each state has its own priorities and budget and political challenges,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) said rather than increasing funding for Amtrak, it would be beneficial to bring a high-speed rail system to Georgia. Amtrak’s most financially successful routes in the Northeast corridor include its Acela Express trains, which can reach speeds of 150 mph.
“It’s time that we got rail to stand on its own two feet whenever possible, and high-speed is the way to make it the transportation of choice,” Isakson said. “Transportation isn’t any good if it doesn’t solve a commuter’s problem.”
The state Department of Transportation has plans for a multimodal passenger terminal that would put the Amtrak station next to the Five Points MARTA station downtown. It would also eventually include the high-speed rail system, a multibillion-dollar effort for which there is as yet no construction funding.
But the current location of the Amtrak station reflects that it isn’t part of the city’s mainstream transportation system. While Hartsfield-Jackson is directly connected to the MARTA line, the Brookwood station is more than a half-mile from the nearest MARTA station. And though it overlooks I-85, its connection to the highway can be confusing for those who aren’t familiar with the area’s streets.
“One of the problems we’ve seen over the years that Amtrak has had is that Brookwood is a good station, but it is not located where all the travelers could go. It’s not very accessible,” Wilson said. “So we’ve always been supportive of locating that to a more central-city location.”
Though Amtrak is not the primary way people visit Atlanta, it does have an impact on the city’s tourism.
“The large majority of our visitors travel to the state by automobile or airplane,” said Dan Rowe, deputy commissioner of tourism for the Georgia Department of Economic Development. “However, we are concerned about any possible changes in the public transportation system that might affect the ability of visitors to travel to or through Georgia.”
Some also see long-distance trains as a potential tourist attraction themselves.
“Regional travel has been really popular not only among domestic travelers, but [among] European travelers,” Kenworthy said. “That’s true particularly of the South. Amtrak makes them feel like they’ve experienced all of our region, not just a city or two.”
Ross Capon, executive director of the National Association for Railroad Passengers, said Amtrak still needs more funding to develop its potential.
“Amtrak is really the foundation for rail passenger development, for practical purposes. So the first priority has been to get Amtrak adequately funded so that there is a good foundation for further development,” he said.
But he acknowledged that Amtrak has its enemies. Questions about its continued funding come up every few years in Congress.
“Obviously, we have some people who think Amtrak should go the way of the stagecoach, or we wouldn’t have these kinds of cliffhanger votes,” Capon said.
But Amtrak also has its fans. At Brookwood station on a recent weekday, they included Gloria Smith, a retired preschool teacher from New York who hopes it continues to have adequate funding. “You can get up, walk around,” she said. “It’s like a hotel. And the conveniences are much more than on airplanes or buses. You can take a shower, you can change your clothes.”
Auburn University student Josh Lafayette used an Amtrak vacation package to plan a two-week trip to New York, Boston and Washington.
“It was the ‘Explore America’ path, which was just totally awesome. It was the cheapest, too,” he said.
Angela Tate, whose whole family takes the Crescent line when they visit from New Orleans, likes relaxing and talking to other passengers on the journey. “The train is more convenient, and it is such a long ride,” she said. “On the bus, it’s dark and gloomy. On the train, it’s well-lit and somehow makes you feel more safe.”