Republican John Mica of Florida, chair of the House Transportation Committee, wants to sell off the Northeast Corridor to a "different entity" which in turn would seek to sell it to some other investment group. According to todays Train's News wire he this is because Amtrak is a monopoly! Didn't he read the Nixon files that Amtrak was designed as a monopoly so that private industry railroads didn't have to deal with passenger trains? And isn't Amtrak already looking into spinning The Corridor off anyway? Except from some sensationalism headline grabbing, is this guy for real? What is different in what he says and what Amtrak is doing? Is this not in conflict with the reason big government and big business legislated Amtrak into existance in the first place.
That being said, I do believe times have changed in 40 years, and that private entities, competitive entities, might be able to make a go of some rail passenger services in this country. But I don't think it should be done by political grandstanding!
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Like many politicians (Rohrbacher of CA comes to mind) Mica seems fact-challenged.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Ideally, the government should own the Rails and operate them like a toll road, relieving the existing RRs of the property tax burden and allowing anyone who could afford to buy a couple of engines and a few cars to start a railroad.
The obvious problem with that system is that I have seen how well they maintain the roads.
Dave
Lackawanna Route of the Phoebe Snow
What does Dana Rohrbacher (one of the best congressmen, btw) have to with this subject?
In other words, stick to the subject and keep your politics out of the forum.
Mica is a Congressman and made his statements as such...therefore this is a politically charged thread. If one questons his understanding of facts and truths, that's part of the patter.
Bandito What does Dana Rohrbacher (one of the best congressmen, btw) have to with this subject? In other words, stick to the subject and keep your politics out of the forum.
Rohrbacher, like Mica, seems to be fact/thinking-challenged. He proposed cutting down all the forests to solve climate and atmospheric problems. This proposal is as absurd and removed from reality as Mica's.
So, if last year the Federal government spent 41 billion dollars for highways and in the last 40 years have spent a total of 35 billion dollars on Amtrak, is that statement political or factual? If we point to Congressmen and other leaders who don't take facts like that into account are we being political or factual? Which is the political part of the facts: money or highways or Amtrak?
I don't envy the moderators who must make exactly that call.
A certain amount of politics is a legitimate part of the discussion but care must be taken that it doesn't just turn into a lot of "my team is good and your team is bad" rhetoric.
My point was only that some politicians seem to come up with proposals that suggest an ignorance of facts and reality, and that we should not be surprised. If merely pointing out a statement made in public by a congressman is being political [I actually think the complainer means "partisan") then so be it.
henry6 So, if last year the Federal government spent 41 billion dollars for highways and in the last 40 years have spent a total of 35 billion dollars on Amtrak, is that statement political or factual? If we point to Congressmen and other leaders who don't take facts like that into account are we being political or factual? Which is the political part of the facts: money or highways or Amtrak?
Oh, political, definitely.
As a factual statement, furthermore, it is also a half-truth. Leaving out the boojum inflation-corrector formulas for comparing 35 billion over 40 years to 41 billion in one year, that statement indicates that there is a rough 40:1 disparity between highway funding and Amtrak funding. What is left out is that the disparity between auto passenger miles and Amtrak passenger miles is in the ratio 1000:1.
Hence, Amtrak is funded at about 25 times as much as highways by the Federal Government if you treat it on a per passenger mile basis.
Thus to say "Highways get 40 times the funding as Amtrak" without in the same breath adding "but Amtrak carries many fewer passenger miles meaning that Amtrak is funded at a much higher rate per passenger miles than highways" is purely an advocacy position rather than a disclosure of facts. I get the impression that many in the advocacy community would rather choke than to speak the second half of the preceding factual question.
So whenever the question of the high rate of Amtrak subsidy per passenger mile is brought up, the discussion always turns to, "Yes, but you are not taking into account cross-subsidy within the highways system", "Yes, but you are not taking into account the environmental impact of highway transport and highways being excluded from property tax rolls" and so on.
If I press people around here hard enough, I never get anyone to admit, "Gee Paul, the high rates of Amtrak subsidy per passenger mile pose some serious problems to getting more trains. I think we have a enough smart people in our ranks to try and figure out why Amtrak is so expensive or perhaps focus on where Amtrak is cost-competitive with a particularly expensive highway solutions." I would have to perform the Heimlich Maneuver to save people from choking on those last few words that are just stuck there in the lower vocal tract.
The closest to any meeting of the minds on this question is that people will admit "There are so many factors, it is difficult to make direct comparisons between train and highway costs" at which point, the passenger train advocacy community position is as non-fact based and in deed as faith based as whatever those highway-loving Republican Congress Critters are saying.
So those highway-loving Congress Critters are coming at this from a different point of view as many persons in the passenger advocacy community. They love their highways as mucch as we love our trains. It is a free and diverse country of ours, and we can agree to disagree on many things. But when the jibe is made that people who disagree with us are "fact challenged", that rises beyond a political discussion to one of incitement of a very heated partisan debate. C'mon, this "fact challenged" phrase is a fancy way of calling these members of Congress out as being liars. Yes, the First Amendment gives us the civil right of calling our members of Congress liars as part of a spirited political debate. The First Amendment also empowers our moderators and hosts to exercise whatever restraint they see fit on this fine Web site to best reflect their outlook.
But it is not as if the facts clearly line up on our side as many people seem to think. So in so many words to call members of Congress with whom we have different opinions as liars and then to say, "oh, no, I am being political but I can't help it because passenger trains are a highly charged political subject." There is a word for this, help me out here, is it "coy?" (meaning to feign innocence on matters when socially convenient when one is thoroughly aware of what is being said and meant by what is said).
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
If you want to know why Amtrak is such a money loser, you need to consider the economy of scale.
If I was thinking about starting a bakery and decided to test the waters to see if it could make money. I would not buy an oven, rent retail space hire a couple of clerks and make one cake a day to see if it sells. If I did that I would have to charge $500 per cake to make money. I would never be able to compete with the grocery store down the street that sells them for $10.
In the world of automobiles, low volume hand built automobiles cost ten times what their mass produced counterparts do.
Amtrak cannot make money running one train a day between two cities a thousand miles apart.
A) One train a day is not useful transportation, so that will depress ticket sales.
B) One train a day makes the cost per train of manning the stations astronomical.
C) One train a day makes the cost per train of leasing and maintaining the stations astronomical.
Amtrak needs to pick one or two high density corridors and do it right, expanding slowly to add additional corridors over a period of many years.
"Hence, Amtrak is funded at about 25 times as much as highways by the Federal Government if you treat it on a per passenger mile basis"
But Paulo, the point to be considered is what if $40billion or even $35billion a year had been given to Amtrak over that same 40 years would not the passenger count be more even or better for Amtrak. It doesn't make sense to me to argue how much worse and more expensive Amtrak is since it has never been dealt with on a one for one basis even with the highway lobby. I don't drink beer because I don't buy beer therefore fruit juice is a bigger part of my diet. Makes the same sense. I haven't seen a movie in a theater in years because I don't go to movie theaters. Our trains don't carry the same amount of people as our highways do because we don't build and provide passenger train service!
And as Phoebe says, and I've always said, one train does not a service make. If we had built only one highway where would we be? If we funded Amtrak to run trains at the same rate any given interstate hiway carries people, where would we be? It is easy to snipe at Amtrak and passenger trains as not being available when we don't make them available.
Phoebe Vet If you want to know why Amtrak is such a money loser, you need to consider the economy of scale.
This is back to the question of economy of scale. Would 10 times higher Amtrak funding result in 10 times the passenger miles?
The authors of the Vision Report did not think so. Their premise was that over a 50-year period, a 10-fold increase in government spending would result in a 10-fold increase in passenger miles.
The Vision Report is based on the European experience, and the authors say as much in the Appendices. In Europe taken collectively, government subsidy/capital spending on trains is pretty much the U.S. Federal Highway budget, and for 50 times Amtrak spending they get about 50 times as many passenger miles -- 5 percent of total passenger miles compared with .1 percent.
As far as I can tell, where the Vision Report authors got the idea of spending 10 billion/year on trains instead of 1 billion+/year as we do now and 30-50 billion/year were we to match Federal Highway spending was to say, OK, we should increase train spending, the full highway budget spent on trains is not going to work politically, so lets split the difference.
So it comes down to pretty much a political argument, that is, what modes of transportation do people like? That some actors on the political stage prefer highways to trains comes down to differences in values rather than people being misinformed or politicians engaged in deliberate obfuscation.
The real problem is that America wants to hash out politics and religious morals rather than sit down and design a program that will solve a problem. Of course Amtrak and passenger trans is a political discussion and not one of hardware and action. But my point is, or question is, that if we put the right or equal amount of money into rail passenger services...forget politics, forget moral issues, forget private enterprise vs socialism as many would put it...but somehow putting the right amount of money for passenger service from the beginning that would have at least matched the highway financial effort, would there not be a more favorable passenger ratio than there is today? Of course highways look better, like I said, because that is where we put our money. We didn't put in passenger trains or ferry boats or even bicycles, we put the money in the motor vehicle! If we had not put money in the motor vehicle lobby we would have a completely different set of values to argue over today. But because we didn't back then, and because we have environmental problems, fuel and energy problems, congestion problems, land use problems, etc., today, does that mean we should't look at all avenues of transportation? Does doing the same thing that brought us to this crisis point make any sense when it appears that it will only get worse if we do? I don't undrerstand people who don't learn from history, who want to keep making the same mistakes at best, not think out of the box at worst, and argue political philosophy instead of seeking real solutions to a problem...they often don't want the government to make a move in fear that it will offset the right for private enterprise to make a buck when private enterprise is clamoring for help in making a decision! We want the cake, the icing, we want to eat it, and we want to shove it all in someone else's face all at the same time. Even if you argue for the sake of stopping progress your arugement actually allows for the dismantling of the present!
henry6,
Well said! You summed up the problem we've created for ourselves and it will only
get worse as you sated "we don't learn from the past".
Mica, while seemingly being pro-hsr, shows an almost unbelievable lack of
knowledge about the NEC. He appears not to have a clue about the great
complexity of the NEC what with all the commuter agencies and freight
traffic that still must use it. What would happen to all that+
Paul Milenkovic Phoebe Vet: If you want to know why Amtrak is such a money loser, you need to consider the economy of scale. So it comes down to pretty much a political argument, that is, what modes of transportation do people like? That some actors on the political stage prefer highways to trains comes down to differences in values rather than people being misinformed or politicians engaged in deliberate obfuscation.
Phoebe Vet: If you want to know why Amtrak is such a money loser, you need to consider the economy of scale.
That rather begs the question. For most Americans, passenger rail service (as henry6 and Phoebe Vet have described it) is not available now and has not been available for over 50 years. If the public has never experienced a situation where one can easily use rail as a viable, everyday way of getting from A to B to C, etc. it is very hard to say what it would "prefer" should such a service be made available, as an alternative to roads and air (not as the only means). I believe some of us in this forum have had that first hand experience, but most have not. Citing reports as though they were the only source of useful knowledge is presenting a useful, but incomplete picture.
IMO, continuing to debate whether or not rails should get as much funding as roads is fruitless. Last I looked, our road infrastructure is crumbling while population is growing. We seem unable to properly maintain what we have, let alone provide the additional capacity needed for the future. Expansion of rail services should be in the mix as an alternative to the the many miles of land needed for more roads and lanes on existing highways.
One last related point. In Germany even many lightly used single track lines are electrified. In those situations, a rather simple cat is used, yet the trains can manage speeds in the 80+ mph range. Yet here, high cost per mile of cat is cited as a reason to preclude its adoption. I wonder what is the whole story?
It is interesting to note the German electrification of lightly used single track. Of course we wouldn't do it here in this country because we have a different philosophy...they evidently look at the idea of providing rail service and spread the cost where here we run trains and allocate costs per train and per train mile and per passenger mile, etc. Our bean counters is the only universally applied service of any kind in this country.
Fruitless debate. Hmmmm....but if we don't debate it, make points pro and con, discuss the needs and the outcomes and applications, then nothing will be done except to rubber stamp the past 50 to 70 years of transportation policies. No one will know enough to address the problems and solutions, the changes of philosophy and a technology needed to correct the problems we have created or have to work out to meet the immediate and future needs. Not saying the past has been a failure, but the past practices are what have brought us to this point and may be whose time has come to be eliminated, altered, or whatever.
I said fruitless in the sense that those round and round endless discussions keep us from looking forward. Only short-sighted individuals with no sense of the needs for expansion to keep ahead of population growth would suggest nothing needs to be done. We clearly need to assess our transportation needs 5, 10, 20, 30 years out and determine the proper mix to expand capacity, and then start doing something, rather than dithering or waiting for "the market." The great Interstate Highway system was not built by the market. Also the slow planning/implementing process (nicely pointed out graphically by Phoebe Vet) needs to be streamlined.
schlimm The great Interstate Highway system was not built by the market.
The great Interstate Highway system was not built by the market.
Oh, I love that line! It will be around for a long time because there are those who will use it to argue the opposite point. There are those who will say the Interstate Highway system was market driven because more cars, trucks, and buses demanded it. But the reality is that it was built to drive the manufacture and sale of cars, trucks, and buses. I hope that point is never missed or lost!
The number of motor vehicles in the US has risen by 157 million (212 %) since 1960 (1960: 74 mil. vehicles to 2009: 246 mil.), while the population of licensed drivers grew by 109 million (125 %). That certainly suggests that the big increases in Interstate highways and urban expressways which started in the late 1950's and whose routes were largely were completed by 1992, stimulated demand for vehicles rather than driver demand (as opposed to automaker lobbying) led to the construction.
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