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Why Amtrak hasn't kept up with market share

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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by DSchmitt [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Modelcar ....If we would have funded the interstate highway system to be a 2-lane highway...I wonder how successful it would have been....That's about the equivalent to how Amtrak's been handled from the beginning and still..... [/quote] True, but then people would be calling the good ol USA a second rate country for not having a highway system a good as France and Germany. The Interstate Highway system was funded by user fees. Taxes paid by auto and truck owners and users. Only local streets and roads are financed in any substantal amount from non-user fee sources. [/quote] I seriously doubt so-called user=fees paid a dime to build the mammoth high-speed highways system. Gasoline only cost what like 20-30 cents a gallon during the 1960s. Highway taxes weren't at all like they grew to be during the 70s and 80s. Face it, this country got a free ride, with the feds funding every conceivable form of transportration with billions v. crumbs for more efficient forms. -- Much is made of the $30 billion spent on Amtrak over the last 30 years, but in that same period the federal government spent $1.89 TRILLION on air and highway modes, according to the New York Times and Washington Post. Since 1946, the federal government has poured billions of dollars into airport development. In 1992, Prof. Stephen Paul Dempsey of the University of Denver estimated that the current replacement value of the U.S. commercial airport system-virtually all of it developed with federal grants and tax-free municipal bonds-at $1 trillion. Not until 1971 did the federal government begin collecting user fees from airline passengers and freight shippers to recoup this investment. In 1988 the Congressional Budget Office found that in spite of user fees paid into the Airport and Airways Trust Fund, the taxpayers still had to transfer $3 billion in subsidies per year to the FAA to maintain its network of more than 400 control towers, 22 air traffic control centers, 1,000 radar-navigation aids, 250 long-range and terminal radar systems and its staff of 55,000 traffic controllers, technicians and bureaucrats. - James Coston, member, Amtrak Reform Council, 2001. http://www.trainweb.org/moksrail/advocacy/resources/subsidies/transport.htm
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