Send to a Friend <% dim printurl printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Version

June 26, 2002, 8:45 a.m. America Doesn’t Need Amtrak It’s a northeast thing. By Patrick Ruffini

s a frequent rail customer who depends on Amtrak, I am outraged.

And if I had a congressman or senator who would listen, I'd tell them to act in the best interests of Amtrak customers and taxpayers — and shut the railroad down before writing it yet another blank check.

Listen to any zealous Amtrak partisan, and they will tell you that the company, burdened by a lack of adequate federal support and careening towards bankruptcy, stands at Armageddon. That's a fitting place for it because, in its present form, Amtrak needs to perish.

The problem begins and ends on Capitol Hill. Amtrak and Congress have long maintained a mutually exploitative relationship. The train operator commenced highly unprofitable train service to the home states of key committee chairmen and board members; it got munificent subsidies in return. Amtrak never needed a business plan to achieve anything even closely resembling profitability. The railroad was being kept alive by a political protection racket.

However odious these abuses, we shouldn't think of Amtrak as a straightforward example of good intentions gone horribly awry. Amtrak's problems stem from its very origins, when it was conceived as a national rail network servicing every corner of the continental United States. This has always been an impractical goal that ignores fundamental realities about geography and the American economy.

A salient distinction is often made between Amtrak's Northeast Corridor service, which is (just barely) profitable, and its national long-distance services, the source of its embarrassing losses. Indeed, there are very good reasons why Amtrak succeeds in the Northeast and fails everywhere else. Trains are economically viable only over short distances in densely populated regions. Currently, Amtrak has a fee structure in the Northeast that is competitive with that of the airlines. A roundtrip Metroliner ticket from Washington, D.C. to Penn Station in New York will run you $256. A typical midweek flight from Reagan National Airport to LaGuardia costs $206. Factoring in cab rides to and from the airport, along with the time needed to go through security, and taking the train almost makes sense. The economics of the Northeast Corridor are such that trains actually command more market-share than airline shuttles from New York to Washington.

This is a remarkable and anomalous achievement in a country that has voted with its feet against train travel, taking 660 million trips in airplanes to 22.5 million trips on Amtrak. In the lightly populated five-sixths of the nation that live outside the Boston-Washington corridor, long distances, cheap gasoline, and deregulated airlines conspire to make train travel irrelevant. Traveling from Chicago to San Antonio by Amtrak, your 3:30 p.m. train would get you to your destination by 11:45 p.m. — the next day. Given this delay, Amtrak must charge less for a seat than an airline would, and it does ($260 vs. $337) — but Amtrak's operating cost for its long-haul Texas Eagle train is triple its break-even level — with $2.37 in net losses for every $1 in revenue. When Amtrak proposed cutting the line, which served just 148,578 passengers in fiscal year 2001, Congress howled its disapproval and refused.

Even now, Amtrak's apologists in Congress stand against reform. A bill sponsored by Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D, S.C.), favorably reported out of the Commerce Committee on a 20-3 vote, would quadruple Amtrak's subsidy to $4.6 billion over the next five years, without forcing any fundamental changes. Hollings and Sen. Joe Biden (D, Del.) are trying to push this new Amtrak funding by conflating it with post-9/11 security concerns — hence Hollings's "National Defense Rail Act." In fact, only a fraction of the funds would be set aside for new security measures.

The legislation also provides "seed money" for the greatest boondoggle yet — high-speed rail, an initiative which would come with a total price tag of at least $100 billion according to the Heritage Foundation's Ronald Utt. Here again, simple geography dooms the whole enterprise from start to finish. Our continent is too vast, our travel options too varied, for trains, even fast ones, ever to be viable. We should quit trying to impose the idiosyncratic travel patterns of the Northeastern U.S. and Europe on the entire country. America doesn't need an Amtrak.

Senators Hollings and Biden, along with their allies in the transport-workers unions, argue that subsidies should continue indefinitely, reasoning that no other railroad in the world is asked to operate at a profit. The train Biden rides to work every morning is proof to the contrary. Northeast Corridor service runs at a slight profit, and there's every reason to expect it can do even better. Airlines charging similar prices are expected to run comparable routes at a profit without operating subsidies, in the face of what one would think are much higher fuel and personnel costs. An Acela train can pack in four times as many passengers as a Boeing 737 — and doesn't require 52,000 lbs. of jet fuel.

It's an old Washington cliché that privatization and service cutbacks require "painful choices." But if Amtrak were wiped off the map in all but a few metropolises, it's doubtful most Americans would even notice. Overnight, Amtrak could be transformed into a profitable company, saving taxpayers $1.2 billion in annual subsidy payments. The only thing that's "painful" about Amtrak is keeping the white elephant of long-distance train travel in existence.

— Patrick Ruffini is a writer living in Washington, D.C.