(The following editorial appeared on the Boston Globe website on March 30.)
BOSTON — Free-market believers look at Amtrak and see a subsidy-devouring rail system just waiting to be handed over to small, entrepreneurial transportation companies that would run trains on tracks owned and maintained by compacts of state governments. At the other extreme, advocates of a European-quality, nationally owned high-speed train service in this country yearn for a leader with the vision to do for railroads what Dwight Eisenhower did for the Interstate Highway System.
Each year, these conflicting scenarios provide the backdrop to grueling budgetary negotiations on Capitol Hill that end up giving Amtrak just enough aid to function but much too little to catch up on its multibillion-dollar backlog of improvements to tracks, bridges, stations, switches, and overhead wires. For each of the past two years, the total subsidy has been $1.2 billion, a rounding error in a $2.5 trillion budget. This year will probably be no different, though Amtrak might have to commit to more staffing efficiencies.
Clearly the status quo is not sustainable. But the Amtrak reform plan favored by the Bush administration is itself based on faulty assumptions.
If Amtrak had more and better trains riding at higher speeds on better infrastructure, millions more Americans might give up their cars or plane tickets and use it. This would reduce congestion and pollution and enhance the value of residences in city centers. To achieve this level of service would require not just an Eisenhower but also a dedicated revenue stream for the railroads — the equivalent of the gasoline tax that has financed the interstates. Such a revenue source should be the centerpiece of any reform plan for Amtrak.
The principal hitch to the free-market plan, which the Bush administration will present to Congress next month, is that the financially strapped states want no part of taking over responsibility for maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure of the rail lines. There is also deep skepticism about a system in which the firm’s operating trains would not also be in charge of the tracks and other gear. Amtrak owns all but a small Connecticut section of its Northeast Corridor track but has to deal with freight lines that own track elsewhere, a source of many of its problems.
Even the chairman of Amtrak, David M. Laney, a Bush appointee and campaign contributor, has made clear that his board is not ready to embrace the Bush proposal to turn the Northeast Corridor tracks from Boston to Washington over to compacts of states. An efficient mass transportation system answers so many national needs that it only makes sense to keep its management at a national level –and to provide it with an ample and reliable source of revenue.