(The following column by James P. Repass appeared on the Hartford Courant website on May 25. Mr. RePass is president and chief executive officer of the National Corridors Initiative.)
HARTFORD, Conn. — Amtrak, the nation’s publicly owned passenger rail system, will in a very few weeks shut down its operations on the 156-mile stretch of the Northeast Corridor that runs from New Haven to Boston to replace the Thames River bridge in New London and do some major track repairs. By concentrating forces on this corridor segment, it will accomplish a year’s worth of repairs in four days, a brilliant decision that will make service, when it resumes again, safer, more comfortable and more reliable.
It is therefore a complete puzzle why at the same time — June 14-17 — it has decided to simply shut down that segment and let customers fend for themselves. Aside from one or maybe two very slow trains via Worcester and Springfield, Amtrak has elected to do nothing to protect its franchise by at least organizing a bus-around of the affected segments, using one of the many large bus companies in New England such as Peter Pan or Greyhound.
“There’s a bus counter right there in New Haven’s Union Station,” one Amtrak manager told me. “What’s wrong with that?”
Everything. Everything.
In the first place, Amtrak is the monopoly provider of intercity rail service in America, excepting certain luxury trains. In and of itself, that confers special obligations on the railroad. Nearly 11 million people used the D.C.-to-Boston Northeast Corridor in 2007, before $4-a-gallon gasoline. A four-day shutdown without a work-around plan in place is simply unthinkable.
Never mind the gross inconvenience to passengers left completely to their own devices: What if things go wrong and the bridge replacement takes longer? That probably won’t happen, but it is the height of irresponsibility to gamble the economic health and transportation sanity of the region on one roll of the maintenance dice. There is a reason trapeze artists usually don’t work without a net.
In the second place, it is equally wrong to do any of this without the courtesy of direct communication by senior Amtrak executives to the governors of the affected states. Planning meetings deep within the Amtrak bureaucratic structure involving mid-level DOT officials do not count as such notification, as Amtrak would like Gov. M. Jodi Rell and others, who are just learning indirectly of this feckless non-plan, to believe.
This is not a public affairs problem. This is a management problem.
Although trained as a journalist, and working as that and as a management consultant following my graduation from Wesleyan University, I have spent the better part of my professional life, via a nonprofit organization, the National Corridors Initiative, advocating for the survival and success of the nation’s passenger railroad system. No one forced me to end my business career and become a public citizen: I did it out of choice, because I believe we are obligated to give something back. I have, and I regret nothing.
But I do worry that Amtrak, whose hand-to-mouth existence is brought on by lack of any national transportation policy or financial mechanism, is shooting itself so squarely in the foot with this project. I want them to win.
In 2007, 2.2 million people got on or got off the train at Boston; 566,000 did so at Providence; 640,000 at New Haven, and so on. Those 3 million people deserve better treatment than, “Here’s a quarter. Call someone who cares” from the nation’s monopoly passenger rail system.
I hope they get it.