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For those who believe gutting Amtrak will help corridors, short distance routes and mass transit... These guys - supporters of light rail and the corridors - think Bush's wrong-headed plan is an attack on balanced transportation in general. Corridors support needed LD trains. LD trains support and feed into corridors. What's needed is balance, with good regional air service and good highways as well. Passenger rail is far from outmoded. It does have a use in short and long distance travel Amtrak is at a record ridership level. [url][/url]http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_amtrak_2005-03.htm[url][/url] QUOTE.... "In its unprecedented proposal to shut down Amtrak intercity rail passenger service, the USA's Bush administration portrays its move as an effort to "save" corridor trains and bolster regional rail service. Certainly, regional corridors are a critical element in any program of intercity rail passenger service, but, as our various analyses of Bush's "zero funding" plan demonstrate, killing rail service to "preserve" or foster corridor service is at best an absurd oxymoron, and at worst a calculated deception to decimate regional and intercity rail public transport on a wide scale. There is a veritable avalanche of evidence suggesting that long-distance passenger train services generate the greatest revenue per passenger, and that shorter-distance, purely "corridor" ridership is not the relatively ultra-remunerative traffic it's portrayed to be. Nevertheless, regional corridor ridership is certainly crucial, and a further essential interface with urban transit, both bus and rail. Yet there is a widespread misconception that decimating Amtrak's intercity operations will somehow bolster these corridor services and strengthen the financial performance of rail services (which, in the Bush proposal, include the fantasy of private-profit rail companies rushing to compete for supposedly lucrative, profitable rail passenger contracts). But the evidence, and a thoughtful analysis of the Bush program, suggest that this vision of supposedly nurturing regional corridors by delivering a coup de grâce to Amtrak is nothing but a cruel hoax, designed to flummox the gullible. For those that naively buy into this flim-flam, what is particularly being misunderstood is that Amtrak already provides the basis for regional service – and, in fact, for a huge swath of the USA, Amtrak is the "regional rail service". In this respect, long-distance travel serves as "frosting on the cake" in terms of additional, lucrative revenue. "
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