Was able to catch part of the Senate debate on CSPAN 2 this morning on the authorization bill by John Sununu of NH that would have allowed atleast two routes to be contracted out to a private operator. It failed to pass 64-27.
lt is my understanding that the bill already allows two routes to be contracted out as an experiment to see if it would really work. The Sununu amendment would have allowed any number of routes to be so done. I don't think it would hurt to try it and see what happens, but I see no point to the amendment except as a delaying tactic.
Of greater concern was an earlier amendment by Sununu which would have shut down any route with a loss per passeger (fully allocated, one must assume) of $200 or more. That would shut down every long distance train in the system. It was defeated 66-28.
SFb... Do you have any insights from the debate, such as who was arguing for and against, and how they presented their arguments?
Debate continued this morning. Kit Bond had an ammendment on the floor seeking accountabilty. I didn't get to follow it absolutely/clearly so I won't try to interpret it. He emphasized accountability
Accountability is fine, but Amtrak has to operate with handcuffs, and a straight jacket.
Sununununununus ammendment would have effectively killed Amtrak; of course this prejudicial legislative stunt did not propose an improvement, or compensatory arrangement, and was an embarrassment for him based on the inherent silliness of the proposal.
You don't understand NH politics. Amtrak has little support there as evidenced by the state's attitude towards the Boston-Portland passenger operations, even with the Democrats having taken control of the state. I suspect this, if anything, helped him improve his image as a fiscal conservative in the state.
As for the non-union lower paying jobs, if that's what it takes to improve service, that's fine with me. As with any government program, its supposed to be what's best for the US citizens as a whole, not what's best for the unions and their membership!!! (Having to constantly deal with Federal and various states' employees for the last 24 years of my work career, the attitude expressed by SFbrkmn is held by way too many of them and is a major reason why government has such trouble accomplishing anything these days. And there is very little that can be done about it since they all have both Civil Service and iron-clad Union protection.)
The issue is whether one is a passenger rail fan or a passenger rail super fan.
I'm a Packer fan as much as anyone in Wisconsin or Upper Michigan, but I am not a Packer "super fan." When Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long get on the TV and opine "yeah, the Packers are 4 and 1 but they still don't have much of a running game and they don't look like Super Bowl prospects" I don't call Bradshaw and his colleagues "uninformed" or say they are "embarrassing themselves" -- I am a Packer realist and until there is an effective and sustainable running game, the Pack will get tripped up.
We might be upset with Senator John Sununu, but he is certainly not uninformed, and if he is pushing this $200/passenger subsidy threshold, maybe he wants to kill Amtrak. That Amtrak is this Good Thing is not immediately self evident to the vast body of non-foamerdom.
If Amtrak is operating under too many restrictions, what latitude or freedom should they be given that would help them out? I ask this because a lot of the restrictions come from the rail advocacy community fighting the elimination of trains. It is a different game than the pre-Amtrak railroad discontinuance petition game -- if Amtrak is given a certain pot of money, discontinuing one train may allow them to apply more resources to another train.
If Amtrak is underfunded, what is an adequate level of funding? Senator Sununu's $200 per passenger subsidy cap may be a political maneuver, but it is a clever maneuver in that it frames the question in a way that we don't want to engage the debate. What is a more appropriate subsidy cap -- $400 per passenger boarding? $1000 per passenger boarding? No cap, whatever it takes to provide the service? If the in excess of $200 per passenger boarding for an LD train is a ficticious number owing to accounting practices, what is the correct numbers, or are we just going to wave our hands that we don't know the correct number, but it has to be less than $200?
I just read David P Morgan, April 1959, Who Shot the Passenger Train?, Trains, and nothing has changed in 50 years, especially the 1959 discussion about how sleeper and dining car service is particularly high cost and now the 2007 rail advocacy community bristles at the suggestion that diners and sleeper service are high cost -- the fight over LD trains is essentially one over sleepers and diners because in the absence of sleepers and diners you are in effect running the Pacific Cascades-type service over the Mountain West routes.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
alphas wrote: (Having to constantly deal with Federal and various states' employees for the last 24 years of my work career, the attitude expressed by SFbrkmn is held by way too many of them and is a major reason why government has such trouble accomplishing anything these days. And there is very little that can be done about it since they all have both Civil Service and iron-clad Union protection.)
(Having to constantly deal with Federal and various states' employees for the last 24 years of my work career, the attitude expressed by SFbrkmn is held by way too many of them and is a major reason why government has such trouble accomplishing anything these days. And there is very little that can be done about it since they all have both Civil Service and iron-clad Union protection.)
Civil Service and iron-clad Union protection??? Obviously spoken by someone who's never been in Civil Service.
Paul Milenkovic wrote: If Amtrak is underfunded, what is an adequate level of funding?
If Amtrak is underfunded, what is an adequate level of funding?
I'm going to stick may neck way out there and invite the ax by providing an answer to your question. I will not offer a number because I am no accountant and no economist, and I could never calculate exactly (to a dollar figure) what Amtrak needs as a proper level of funding other than this: per capita funding that is equivalent to what the government of japan or the governments of Europe provide there. Or, maybe even half of that.
Considering the wealth of this country I think the requirements of Amtrak are affordable. The Missouri train only costs that State $5m a year; are you kidding me? That wouldn't even pay for the repaving of an ice/salt damaged cloverleaf in that State?
Amtrak's image is constantly tarnished by the treatment it gets from being preempted by freights. No one in the public ever calls the Union Pacific on the carpet for the way it shafts Amtrak in Missouri every-week-of-every-year, but Amtrak gets the blame; and this sets up the circumstance for this private "not-for-profit" corporation to get kicked around by Congress and the press.
Anyone know the European numbers (I think Japan can be considered a special case on account of ultra-high population density in coastal areas with a sparsely-populated mountain interior region)? Anyone know their subsidy per boarded passenger numbers? A side-by-side comparison of European ridership and subsidy rates with Amtrak may be helpful in creating a vision of what a scaled-up Amtrak would be like.
As to a 5 million dollar state subsidy being a pittance compared to salt damage repair on one highway cloverleaf, I think one has to look at the usage figures. For all I know the one cloverleaf provides more utility to more people than one state-supported passenger train.
As to what the Union Pacific is doing to Amtrak schedules and damage to repeat ridership and taxpayer support, I think one needs to look at a big-picture comparison between the U.S. and Europe. Europe has nowhere the freight railroad traffic of the U.S. -- part of that is because of better European access to coastal and riverine shipping, part of that is that they have a really bad freight coupler, and part of that is the entire short-haul nature of transportation patterns, both for people and for freight.
NARP has long promoted the claim that one track has the passenger capacity of 20 freeway lanes. That may be true if it is a double track line with the proper kind of block signals running 11 car trains of full gallery cars on short headway during rush hour, but that kind of capacity is hardly true of single-track lines carrying long freight trains at 20 MPH average speeds. My understanding is that a daily passenger train is quite highly disruptive of the normal flow of traffic on such a line. While Amtrak points the finger at Union Pacific (and CSX and NS), these railroads claim that they give Amtrak trains a slot in their traffic pattern and that when Amtrak cannot keep their schedule, they get put in the hole.
I suppose one can insist that UP, CSX, and NS live up to their public accomodation duties as common carriers and under the terms of the Amtrak founding -- does this mean that the rebuild and maintain double-track lines, and does the double-tracking get to be fully allocated against Amtrak operations. We haven't really solved the passenger train problem as it was recognized by David Morgan in 1959.
Do we really want to force UP, CSX, and NS and others to provide a high level of Amtrak traffic priority without paying them a lot more money? If we had public money to subsidize track construction, would we get more bang for the buck if we concentrated on getting more freight traffic off the highways?
This thread has gone off on a lot of tangents. I'm just going to tackle a couple, taking issue with both sides of the debate.
SFbrkmn wrote:Please don't be fooled by this yaking going on up there of sub contracting out routes. First it is an attempt by the anti Amtrakers, pro airline bunch to slowly kill the system.
Though I am very pro-passenger rail, I am not wedded to Amtrak as a concept. I don't care who is running the trains as long as they are running. Having said that, I have yet to see an alternative proposal put forth in sufficient detail to convince me it will work any better than, or even as well as what we have now, but that doesn't mean there aren't any good ideas out there somewhere.
I'm keeping an open mind about the privitization issue. There are several ways it might be done successfully, and if it makes train travel more economical it is all to the good. One must be careful not to step blindly into a proposal, but the Senate bill's option to open two routes to experimentation seems like a cautious way to test new ideas.
One such idea might involve returning passenger service to the private railroads who own the tracks, with some sort of tax incentives, publicly funded infrastructure improvements, or even direct subsidies in exchange for meeting a prescribed set of service standards. Another scenario might keep Amtrak as the operator of reservation systems, locomotives, and operational crews, while contracting out everything behind the locomotives to operators who would be required to maintain certain service standards. If they fail to meet those standards or another operator bids for a lower cost, another operator might be chosen. I'm not saying these would work, but I don't want to automatically say they can't, either.
Moving on to...
Paul Milenkovic wrote: Senator Sununu's $200 per passenger subsidy cap may be a political maneuver, but it is a clever maneuver in that it frames the question in a way that we don't want to engage the debate. What is a more appropriate subsidy cap -- $400 per passenger boarding? $1000 per passenger boarding? No cap, whatever it takes to provide the service? If the in excess of $200 per passenger boarding for an LD train is a ficticious number owing to accounting practices, what is the correct numbers, or are we just going to wave our hands that we don't know the correct number, but it has to be less than $200?
It may be a clever political tactic, but it is simplistic (as most political tactics tend to be.) It ignores the complexities involved in the accounting. I don't think Amtrak even reports "loss per passenger" figures anymore. When they did, they reported fully allocated costs, not direct costs, and there is a huge difference.
Direct costs are those associated with the day to day operation of a train, such as labor, fuel, supplies, cleaning, maintenence, etc. They do not include costs for reservation centers, real estate, infrastructure, and other fixed costs.
Fully allocated costs refer to every thing Amtrak pays for, right down to the wages of the janitor who dumps the trash in Alex Kummant's office. These are allocated to each train as part of each train's costs. However, most of these costs are not directly related to a particular train's operations. More importantly, these are costs that won't go away if a few trains are shut down. If a train goes away, those costs are simply reallocated to surviving trains, making their losses "increase" even though their individual financial performance, measured in direct costs, doesn't actually change.
Fully allocated costs give you a picture of what is happening with Amtrak as a whole, but is useless in measuring the financial performance of an individual train. Thus Sununu's tactic is erroneous in its premise and ineffective at actually reducing losses.
I take the opposite view. If eliminating trains does not reduce fixed costs, then why not add trains to spread those fixed costs over a greater number of routes so the loss per passenger or passenger mile could also be reduced while at the same time increasing mobility and choice for the traveling public? Amtrak can't achieve economies of scale with its present skeletal network. I don't know how large Amtrak's system would need to be to achieve critical mass (URPA estimates about three times its current size - in passenger traffic if not route mileage), but I am convinced that cutting routes won't help Amtrak's bottom line.
Here's and Amtrak fact sheet on this subject: http://www.amtrak.com/pdf/LongDistanceTrains.pdf
As long as we are dismissive of Amtrak critics as engaging in a "clever political tactic" and providing "simplistic analysis", we will continue to lose the battle as we have been losing the battle on trains since the end of WW-II.
The argument about "fully allocated" vs "direct operating" costs has been going on since the petition the ICC for train discontinuance days -- it is all layed out in the April 1959 Trains Magazine article. The problem then as well as now is not only are the trains operated at large losses fully allocated, they are operating at considerable losses direct operating. Folks at URPA claim that Amtrak cooks the books and that the LD trains break even by some measure of direct operating cost. They claim that but I haven't seen any hard numbers on this.
I would just love to write to my Congressional and Senate representatives and say, "for all of the talk about buying airline tickets for all of the people riding Amtrak, the Empire Builder breaks even on its direct cost, and we need a second Chicago-Milwaukee-Minneapolis day train to provide a proper alternative to airline service out of O'Hare and the terrible road congestion in and out of Minneapolis and Chicago." But I can't say that because no one knows if it is true, so we just bluster about how Amtrak critics are taking cheap shots, and our main political position is give us more money.
Another stick my neck out for the axe question, giving some other turkey a 30 minute repreive.......
So, just just how many billions of dollars do the airlines and supporting industries kick into the construction of airports, homeland security, air traffic control, the power grid, fuel tank storage on site, and everything else that keep the friendly skies friendly to the tax paying public? Do they contribute a fair share or is there just a little subsidy, here and there?
Well, that is the problem right there. One argument made in rail advocacy circles is that you can't really trace all of the subsidy going into airlines -- the power grid largely is a private undertaking, just like the freight railroads, but there are various direct and indirect subsidies such as military spending on advanced jet engines, and so on.
If you look at one major subsidy, in rough round number, the FAA gets about 12 billion to run the air traffic control system of which 10 billion comes from airline tickets and av fuel taxes and which 2 billion comes from general revenue. Furthermore, airlines carry about 100 times more passenger miles than Amtrak does in intercity travel.
If you look at Federal highway spending, that budget is around 30 billion per year in rough round numbers and is supported by about 50 cents per gallon tax on gasoline which is split between Federal and individual states. The intercity auto passenger miles is about 500 times what Amtrak handles.
Another way to look at it is that if there is 50 cents per gallon paying for roads, there might be another 50 cents per gallon not levied against the gas tax but coming out of property tax -- you are paying the gas tax as soon as you turn the key on your car, but the initial mile of any trip is on a local road. If we assume in rough round numbers a 25 MPG car and 50 cents per gallon external subsidy, cars are getting subsidized at about 2 cents per vehicle mile. Amtrak (again there is the question of fully-allocated and direct cost), is subsidized at about 20 cents per passenger mile. Amtrak in that sense requires 10 times the subsidy as driving.
The essential Amtrak problem is that the subsidy is small compared to the total amount spent on other modes but large on a passenger mile or other unit of of work product basis.
The other issue with subsidy of the other modes is that with airlines there is everything from the runway surface and below, and everything from the landing wheel tire patch on up. On the everything on the landing wheel tire patch up basis, airline operations are run on a for profit basis. Yes, 9-11 airline bailout, but that was a one-time thing. If there was some kind of one-time grant to Amtrak to put it on a for profit basis forward, you would find a lot of support.
The case for Amtrak subsidy needs to be made on its own merit in terms of unique social benefits of having rail transportation because if the case is made on "everyone else is getting subsidy" we will fail.
Paul Milenkovic wrote: So, just just how many billions of dollars do the airlines and supporting industries kick into the construction of airports, homeland security, air traffic control, the power grid, fuel tank storage on site, and everything else that keep the friendly skies friendly to the tax paying public? Do they contribute a fair share or is there just a little subsidy, here and there? If you look at one major subsidy, in rough round number, the FAA gets about 12 billion to run the air traffic control system of which 10 billion comes from airline tickets and av fuel taxes and which 2 billion comes from general revenue. Furthermore, airlines carry about 100 times more passenger miles than Amtrak does in intercity travel.
How many passengers would the airlines be carrying if they only flew three airplanes a day from let's say Chicago to LA, or Chicago to Denver, with no landings in Des Moines or Wichita, Phoenix, Nashville, or Louisville, and dozens of other major cities? It would be kind of hard to justify the expense of the airport, the plane and the taxpayer money 'thrown at it."
Now Paul, I understand your points, and am not arguing this to be combative. Everything you have said is correct, and indisputable, and sadly unfortunate for this country. We're not getting ahead with such a system, where actually digging ourselves in deeper and deeper, laboring under a collective sense that we're wasting money on Amtrak, when we can't keep up with the demands and responsibilities of maintaining the other forms of surface and air transportation. So why do Americans think they're over-taxed when we can look forward to a bright future of 16 lanes cutting quarter mile swaths across the landscape? Heck, think of the jobs it creates, the road crews, the sign holders, the port-a-potty maintenance business, the orange cones and the years of job security to improve a two mile stretch that consumes over 4.5 years-and it still takes 30 minutes to travel 23 miles because the top speed on this stretch is 65mph, but all you'll ever do is average 39mph, at best.
Also, when there is a fatality (or serious accident) these days, the highway patrol has taken to shutting down the entire highway no matter what kind of traffic jam it causes in order to do a thorough crash-scene investigation. This can last 2-3 hours.
Amtrak should get the 6 year bill for 11 Billion Dollars when the Highways to get about 40 Billion and Airlines is get about 15 Billion and poor old amtrak is getting pennys to these big players and this Aid to these other Countrys every year 200 Billion. Spend the in money in the Good USA
Amtrak's current level of subsidy for the LD trains is very hard to defend. Many of the reasons the subsidy is so high have been discussed here - low frequency of service vs. fixed costs, lack of labor productivity improvements/no profit motive, low equipment utilization/cost of ownership, etc. These are all intertwined.
So, is it all hopeless? No.
If the backbone of Amtrak was a series of short/medium haul corridor daylight trains whose expense was justified by avoided public spending for highway/air expansion, then the LD network would only have to be justified in terms of their incremental cost to operate.
I think this is what Kummant sees when he talks about Amtrak as a growth industry. The problem is getting the political stars to align properly to get on with this.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
Here's an interesting comparison: Airtran vs Amtrak.
Airtran has 8800 employees, 70,000 passengers day who ride an avg of 750 miles per trip.
Amtrak has 18,500 employees (8700 employed on trains or in stations), 78,300 passengers per day who ride 232 miles per trip.
Airtran has TWICE the labor productivity of Amtrak (using just the train and station employee count), based on passenger-miles and number of employees.
Sounds like a broken business model, to me.
And what, exactly are the other ~10,000 employees doing? Some are Mech, C&S, MoW, etc, which Airtran pays for in other ways (ticket tax, contract maint, etc.) but still.......
I don't want to kill it. I just want it fixed. Not everyone who suggests some change is an enemy.
CG9602 wrote:S. 294 has passed the Senate with 70 votes in support.
This is good news, and it would help if everyone who cares would rally in continued support. Amtrak has problems and needs fixing. The private sector will not readily step and and take the lead, and since Amtrak is now a national railroad, we the people need to encourage our government to rebuild and expand a working passenger rail system.
My perspective on Amtrak spending is that our rail passenger system has been snipped to point of collapse. If most of it had gone under and all that was left was the northeast, that system would/may have continued as the equivalent of a big light rail system.
Airways and highways have their place and are vital for transportation infrastructure. These systems are also under great stress. I'm stressing balance, and a modest increase in a passenger rail system contribues to the balance and actually benefits the other systems.
conrailman wrote:Great bill for Amtrak over 6 Years about 19 Billion Dollars, to Airlines 15 Billion & Highways 40 Billion Dollars every year. When Amtrak just gets about little over 1 Billion Dollars every year. We needs Amtrak in the USA not less service, but more trains in the USA.
Amtrak has historically done a horrible job or leveraging their subsidy. Horrendous labor productivity. Horrendous overhead. No real mgt incentive to improve either.
We get much, much, much more for our tax dollar subsidy to air passenger and highway travel.
This bill helps starts moving things in the right direction.
We need to support this funding....
AND
we need to keep Amtrak's feet to the fire to deliver!
oltmannd wrote: Amtrak has 18,500 employees (8700 employed on trains or in stations)
Amtrak has 18,500 employees (8700 employed on trains or in stations)
Assuming that is correct, it really bothers me. Sure, people are needed for repairs in the shops, train cleaning in the yards, and MOW on the relatively short portion of the tracks owned by Amtrak. But what is it that those 10,000 people are doing?
Does anyone have a more detailed analysis of the headcount by function?
Dakguy201 wrote: oltmannd wrote: Amtrak has 18,500 employees (8700 employed on trains or in stations)Assuming that is correct, it really bothers me. Sure, people are needed for repairs in the shops, train cleaning in the yards, and MOW on the relatively short portion of the tracks owned by Amtrak. But what is it that those 10,000 people are doing?Does anyone have a more detailed analysis of the headcount by function?
http://www.amtrak.com/pdf/0708monthly.pdf page 77
Here are some high (low?) lights.
There's a small mountain of people in mechanical ~4000. By comparison, NS has about 1000 and the number or locomotives and cars Amtrak has is less than the number of locomotives NS has.....and NS has to inspect and lace up a few hundred thousand frt cars a week, to boot.
There are 500 people in purchasing. 300 in finance. 90 in the IG's office. 170 in HR (and this doesn't include labor relations - there's another 35 there)
There are 400 in risk mgt. (say what?)
There are 1700 in engineering to maintain 500 route miles of track, catenary and signals.
About the only number that seems right to me is the 250 in IT.
So the S294 19 billion over 6 years -- is this a standalone bill or is the Amtrak funding tied into a larger transportation bill? Do people have a sense of how this will fly in the House? The 70 votes in the Senate are a good sign if it comes to a veto override.
Does someone have a roll-call on this? It is almost certain that of the Wisconsin delegation, Herb Kohl (who is based out of Milwaukee) voted for this; there is a possiblity that Russ Feingold (who is based out of Madison) sided with the minority as a fiscal conservative.
I just want you all to know that I am happy this bill passed and I will e-mail Tammy Baldwin to support this in the House. I view this bill as "test of the hypothesis" that a significant infusion of funds can results in substantial improvement to Amtrak by some agreed upon metric. Once Amtrak gets this money, it will have to deliver. Part of a "test of the hypothesis" is that if Amtrak doesn't deliver, we will need to accept the consequences instead of blaming it on the Amtrak critics and highway interests.
The number of people in mechanical is an important insight into the cost-competitiveness of trains relative to airlines. What does Amtrak have in service -- about 2000 revenue cars and the locomotives that go with them? Assuming a high-level of utilization on LD trains and making some assumptions about the work week, that is roughly one worker-hour of mechanical work per road-hour of a revenue passenger car. I had heard that the early jetliners needed something like 4 worker-hours of maintenance per flight hour (keep in mind there is not that much downtime on a jet -- there may be a squad of workers assigned to a jet when it is in the maintenance hanger), and perhaps the jetliners have improved since the early days. Also keep in mind that each flight hour may be the equivalent of 10 rail car road hours in terms of mile productivity. Is this saying that operating a passenger rail car and its associated locomotive power takes twice the maintenance per revenue mile as a jet airliner?
The thing is that everyone assumes that a jet is mechanically expensive to operate because it has to meet strict standards of airworthiness and a jet needs to be lighweight to fly so it is built to narrow margins on strength and wear on bearings. A train should be cheaper mechanically because it is not on such a strict weight budget and can be overbuilt of longevity. If trains are higher maintenance than airliners, there is a major problem long term for maintaining train service.
Paul Milenkovic wrote: There's a small mountain of people in mechanical ~4000. By comparison, NS has about 1000 and the number or locomotives and cars Amtrak has is less than the number of locomotives NS has.....and NS has to inspect and lace up a few hundred thousand frt cars a week, to boot.The number of people in mechanical is an important insight into the cost-competitiveness of trains relative to airlines. What does Amtrak have in service -- about 2000 revenue cars and the locomotives that go with them? Assuming a high-level of utilization on LD trains and making some assumptions about the work week, that is roughly one worker-hour of mechanical work per road-hour of a revenue passenger car. I had heard that the early jetliners needed something like 4 worker-hours of maintenance per flight hour (keep in mind there is not that much downtime on a jet -- there may be a squad of workers assigned to a jet when it is in the maintenance hanger), and perhaps the jetliners have improved since the early days. Also keep in mind that each flight hour may be the equivalent of 10 rail car road hours in terms of mile productivity. Is this saying that operating a passenger rail car and its associated locomotive power takes twice the maintenance per revenue mile as a jet airliner?The thing is that everyone assumes that a jet is mechanically expensive to operate because it has to meet strict standards of airworthiness and a jet needs to be lighweight to fly so it is built to narrow margins on strength and wear on bearings. A train should be cheaper mechanically because it is not on such a strict weight budget and can be overbuilt of longevity. If trains are higher maintenance than airliners, there is a major problem long term for maintaining train service.
....so a likely conclusion is....
that maybe the Mech forces aren't all that busy
or
they spend a lot of time doing things that don't need doing
Amtrak's equipment is horribly designed and overly complicated.
(also don't forget one jetliner carries about 2 or 3 coaches worth of people. If you add in the current load factors for each mode, it's even worse - 55% vs 80%)
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