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?
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.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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