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If Amtrak carried 120 million passengers

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Subsidies are good for tax accountants, tax lawyers, politicians, etc. Unfortunately, they tend to distort pricing points and cause users to make sub-optimum decisions. Whether they serve the public interest in the long run is debatable. In an ideal world we would eliminate all transport subsidies and require each mode to stand on its own merits.  Had we taken this approach we probably would have had a better balanced transport system. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal, rational world. We live in one highly charged with emotion. Accordingly, subsidies probably will not go away, but we should strive to reduce them to as small an amount as possible. Increasing the subsidies for passenger rail so that they are on a par with the perceived subsidies for highways, airways, waterways, etc., is not a good financial strategy.  This is especially true for a country that is staring more than $19.7 trillion of government debt in the face, which is relevant since the subsidies usually come from the taxpayers. It is akin to saying that we need to run up the debt for our household because the neighbors are going broke, and we need to go with them.   Government investment is desirable for start-up projects where there is a reasonable probability that the users will eventually pay for it.  This was the rationale for the citizens of Baltimore to buy the city's bonds to help build the B&O railroad.  The investors believed that it would be a going concern, and they would get their money back with interest. The same idea underlies most infrastructure investment, i.e. road users will pay for them, air users will pay for the airports, etc.  For the most part they do, although sometimes indirectly.  But not in all cases thanks largely to politics, which at the end of the day is emotionalism run rampant.   The key questions is where do passenger trains make sense, what should they look like, and how will we pay for them.  For me it is in relatively high density, relatively short corridors. Claiming that we will get the money from the Department of Defense or other dark holes to pay for trains is not a working plan.
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