DOT Sec'y Mineta displays his ingorance of Amtrak

[CG9602]

Go to www.narprail.org , clink on "hotline," and then select the March 5 edition.
Post your comments below.

Especially telling is 1. when Mineta cites the figure for per-passenger. the industry uses Revenue Passenger-MILES as the measurement, because "per-passenger" figures are incorrect and misleading.

Also note that Mineta, and our other elected officials, ignore the salient fact that many passengers don't travel from end-point to end-point. A train picks up and disembarks passengers all along its route. They only cite the cost of what it would take for flights. Obvioulsy they didn't compare what it would cost for folks to fly from Meridian, MS, to Sanderson TX, or Deming, NM to Pensacola, FL, or Tallahasse to San Antonio. (Sarcasm) folks only fly from one big market to the next. They also don't compare or estimate what it would cost for folks to fly anyplace if the airlines had to pay for the terminals, runways, and air traffic control entirely from their own funds (i.e., no Trust Fund, nothing from the Feds, company capital only) .

With friends like these, Amtrak needs no enemies.

Obviously, support for rail needs all the friends it can get - including friends who would characterise support for passenger rail as an investment in the economy, just the same as improving the roads or airports. [:(!]

Mmembers of the forum are wlecome to post their opinions below.

[Anonymous]

Dosen't evey one expect Tommy Thompson hat Amtrak?

[CG9602]

Thompson has made statements in the past to the effect he was kind of hoping to get the D.O.T. Sec'y job, but then Bush decided to keep Mineta on. Thompson also said that he was disappointed when he learned that Amtrak was limited in how many members of the Administration it was permitted to have on the Board of Directors. Thompson had to leave. If Amtrak has any "friends" or "allies" in the Administration, Tommy Thompson would be it. I think he still is a voice of reason regarding Amtrak matters in an Administration full of short-sighted, narrow-minded ideologues.

What gets on miy nerves is that they insist on measuring things on a per-passenger basis. You'd think that an Administration full of business people would insist on using the industry-standard Revenue Passenger Mile as the measurement of choice. I think that some of them can't, or refuse to, tell the difference between the two measurements. [:(!][V]

[tree68]

When you are trying to kill something, you use the statistic that makes it look as bad as possible...

[Anonymous]

I wrote this and erased it several times [soapbox] related items and distilled it to just two sentences....here they are.

They can argue in the Ivory Tower of our Government as happened since Amtrack's creation.

What I would like to see is a British Style Intercity routing between our cities and small communities so we can at least get around with minimal problems with bad highways going to worse.