(The Denver Post published the following column by John Esty on its website on August 8.)
DENVER — Last week, the Bush administration gave Congress its long awaited Amtrak proposal. It required reorganizing Amtrak into three entities, pledged no new money and passed much of Amtrak’s operating costs on to the financially strapped states. The next day, a bipartisan group of senators, led by a Republican from President Bush’s home state, countered with a much more generous proposal.
In a nutshell, that has been the history of Amtrak for the past 32 years since the federal government rescued the troubled railroad industry by agreeing to relieve them of their money-losing passenger trains. The National Passenger Railroad Corporation, as Amtrak was originally called, has been a political football for practically all of its existence. Some presidential administrations and members of congress have been supportive and others have not.
Consequently, over the past three decades, sometimes Amtrak has received minimal funding as the result of a congressional compromise, and sometimes it has received nothing.
Most business executives will tell you this is no way to run a business. Amtrak doesn’t know year to year what it will be able to spend on capital investments and what it will have for operations. Amtrak managers have gotten demoralized and have finally left after attempting to run a business that simply has not been adequately funded.
Like highways and airports, which for decades have received government subsidies in excess of user fees from gasoline and airline ticket taxes, intercity rail is an expensive enterprise and can not be run on the cheap.
Despite the squabbling in Washington, opinion polls show increasing public support for intercity rail. Citizens who have ridden high speed trains in Europe and Japan have returned asking why we can’t have the same thing here. More and more people are realizing that there must a better way to travel than driving our congested highways or flying our crowded air corridors.
Although the U.S. population is more widely dispersed than in other industrialized countries, there is still a role for passenger train service in this country. Amtrak currently operates a national network of trains connecting 450 communities, many of them rural towns with few other travel options. These trains provide the public with a comfortable and safe alternative to driving and flying over long distances.
The most promising role for the passenger train in the U.S., however, is serving corridors ranging in length between 100 and 300 miles. In these corridors, modern high-speed trains can effectively compete with airlines and highway travel times. This competition is currently happening on the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C., Boston and intermediate cities where Amtrak has captured nearly 50 percent of the total air/rail travel market.
Several newer corridors between Chicago and Milwaukee, Seattle and Portland, Sacramento and San Jose, and Los Angeles and San Diego also have initiated frequent services throughout each day. Though there is considerable room for improvement in the speed of these trains, they also have gained considerable popularity with the public.
In recognition of the increasing interest in train travel, the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT) has established ten corridors around the country where high speed trains could provide an option to highway and air congestion. Last year, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) asked that a passenger rail link between Colorado’s Front Range cities be included as a US DOT designated high speed rail corridor. Although US DOT officials made no commitment on the request, CDOT initiated a public benefits and cost study, in conjunction with private railroads, which examines ways passenger trains might serve the Front Range.
No significant funding has been provided for high-speed rail development. However, there is growing awareness in Washington that something must been done with Amtrak, while still providing viable rail options for the public. This is the background that produced the flurry of legislative activity by President Bush and Congress last week. Both the administration and Congress appear determined to finally formulate a long term solution for passenger rail.
Hopefully, this new effort will result in a well-organized and adequately financed network of intercity passenger trains.
(Jon Esty is president of the Colorado Rail Passenger Association and lives in Denver. He is a retired clinical psychologist.)