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.
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. What is not said in public about the new operation is that it would by staffed by non union, lower paying jobs (w/most likely constant turnover). I doubt that the freight carriers would allow a 2nd party for profit company to operate on their trks. If a big profit were to be made in psgr rail, the freight carriers would be doing it themselves. Problem is that psgr rail simply is not a money maker. Yes this made Sununu look bad and it showed his lack of knowledge of Amtrak. The one that got me though was when Jeff Sessions of Alabama was on the floor talking about when the Sunset Limited was running east of New Orleans through his state prior to hurricane Katrina. He did not even know the name of the train or the train numbers, just refered to it as the 'overnight eastbound and westbound train that stopped @ Mobile". I have no problem w/someone stating their opinion on an issue but atleast do the homework, know by name in detail what you are speaking about. If anyone is interested in how each Senator voted on this issue, you can check the CPSAN or US Senate websites and that information should be in there somewhere.
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
Civil Service and iron-clad Union protection??? Obviously spoken by someone who’s never been in Civil Service.
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 l
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.
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…
[quote user=“Paul Milenkovic”]
Senator Sununu’s $200 per passenger subsidy cap may be a political maneuver, but it is a c
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.&
I am pro psgr rail also but do not buy into the current concept of Amtrk. This will never take place, but I would rather see all long distance routes abolished, every diner & slpr rebuilt into coaches and all that equipment be used on more short haul corridor daylight runs that would most likely create more public interest. I live on the route of the Southwest Chief. Gets old getting up in the middle of night to catch the train (I’ll be doing that on a vac next Feb). I will gladly replace 3&4 w/a daylight train to either KC or Oklahoma City anytime.
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
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[2c]
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.
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.
S-294 is on the floor today. The ammendments issues have been resolved and Lautenberg is speaking, the roll call has been completed and the Bill looks to pass probably around 65-27.
S. 294 has passed the Senate with 70 votes in support.