(The Roanoke Times posted the following editorial on its website on November 11.)
ROANOKE, Va. — Amtrak’s board of directors fired the company’s president Wednesday, striking an ideological blow for the Bush administration that could prove fatal to the passenger railroad.
The impact would be immediate in cities along Amtrak routes. But repercussions also would be felt in communities, like Roanoke and others in Southwest Virginia, that lack passenger rail service but yearn for its return, and want it to link up to a national rail system.
Yet Amtrak’s failure seems to be what the White House has had in mind all along.
If so, it took a major step in that direction by ousting David Gunn, known as a railroad-turnaround artist as the head of transit systems in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Toronto. Gunn came out of retirement in 2002 to take the controls at Amtrak when it was in financial crisis.
In September, The New York Times reports, Amtrak Chairman David Laney said on Capitol Hill that Gunn had “righted a ship that was listing and about to spill over.”
Righted it, but did not pull it far enough to the right.
The administration holds the view that passenger trains, alone among all modes of U.S. transportation, should operate in a free market. It wants to break up Amtrak into regional rail services operated by the states with federal grants. It proposes to turn over Amtrak’s major asset, the tracks in the heavily traveled Northeast corridor between Boston and Washington, to a federal-state consortium.
Gunn adamantly disagreed, complaining the plan was designed by “policy wonks and politicians” who want to dismantle the railroad. The administration’s vision, he claims, is “zero funding, bankruptcy and break it up.”
Chairman Laney denied that those are administration objectives. But President Bush included no Amtrak funding in his 2006 budget proposal. And if he achieved his goal of eliminating federal subsidies, passenger rail service likely would survive only along the busiest routes.
Gunn was fired just days after the Government Accountability Office criticized Amtrak’s management.
But if the railroad has far to go, criticism must be viewed in light of how far back it started and how far it has come. Gunn cut costs, improved financial controls and repaired Amtrak’s rolling stock and antiquated tracks.
America is strangling on roads. It needs a nationwide passenger rail system, and it will have to pay for it.