(The following editorial was posted on the Albany Times-Union website on March 13.)
ALBANY, N.Y. — Imagine if the 25 million passengers who ride Amtrak each year were to take to the road instead. It could mean 25 million more cars on the highway if everyone drove alone, or half that if each car carried a driver and one passenger. Either way, it would consume a huge amount of gasoline and increase air pollution as well. If anything, then, Amtrak, the national passenger railroad, seems like one good answer to President Bush’s warning that America is addicted to oil.
Except Mr. Bush doesn’t seem to agree, to judge by his latest proposal of $900 million in Amtrak funding for fiscal 2007, which begins in October. On the surface, that’s a big improvement from last year, when Mr. Bush budgeted zero funding — a proposal Congress wisely rejected when it approved $1.3 billion for the railroad to keep it operating.
On closer inspection, though, the $900 million isn’t quite what it seems. By some calculations, a good chunk of that money would go to pay down debt, and another $400 million would be doled out as grants at the discretion of the secretary of transportation, with no guarantee that any of the money would actually be dispersed. That would leave only $210 million for Amtrak to count on as real money.
It’s no secret that the Bush administration wants to dismantle Amtrak. The railroad has never turned a profit, and its operating losses last year alone topped $500 million. But that view is myopic. As many critics of the administration have pointed out, highways don’t turn a profit, either, yet no one — especially those in Congress who represent Western and Southwestern states — would suggest dismantling the interstate highway network. And airlines aren’t exactly cash cows, either. More than a few of them have been kept afloat by federal bailouts. Yet no one has suggested abandoning air travel in the United States.
Of course, Amtrak’s best routes happen to be in the Northeast and in California — two areas of the country that have not supported Mr. Bush at the polls. So his readiness to see the major commuter rail links in those regions fail for lack of funding is politically understandable. What’s much more difficult to comprehend, however, if why Mr. Bush fails to see the benefits in mass transportation at the very moment he is trying to wean the country off oil. Has he forgotten his State of the Union message already?
If he has, Congress should remind him. Then it should give Amtrak, at the least, the same $1.3 billion it did in the current fiscal year — a sum, by the way, that is less than 1 percent of the nation’s total transportation outlay. A drop in the oil bucket, one might say.