I have answered Sam1’s critique of long-distance passenger trains many times, and he does not answer specifically the points I r aise, but simply points out the same arguments time and time again.
Long distance trains benefit the USA:
Emergency backup long distance transportation when airlines are grounded.
Tieing the needed corridors into a Naitonal system that can be supported by the entire population, without a Kansas farmer saying: “Why should I support investment in rban area corridors when they own’t even let me have my one train a day that just maybe I may want to use for a vacation trip.”
Handicapped and elderly access to the vast continental USA for people who cannot fly for medical reasons.
Internal and external tourism. Just and New York would have to shut down if all its subsidized rail servides quit (subways, commuter trains, and Amtrak’s NEC and Empire Corridor), there are hotels, restaurants, and rental-car agencies that would quit if long distance trains were to quit. Indeed, the loss to the economy and the additional expenses for the remaining corridors might well surpass the savings by eliminating long distance trains!
Again, concerning economics, I make two important points, which Sam1 so far had not answered:
The corridor trains show high ridership because they are primarily used by business travelers, most ofo whom take between 50 and 500 trips a day on the particular corridor they use. These corridors demands investment and possiblyi subsidization because the alternative in land taking and construction for highways and airports would cost far more today. The long distance trains are patronized mainly by twice a year vacationers and tourists. Their share of the operating subsidy and the investments is far lower on a per-citizen (rather than on a per journey) basis.
Sam and I often disagree, but one place we DO agree is that there is a very limited market for spending 12 hours or more on a train, and one train a day or three trains a week is not useful transportation.
Your desire for private toll roads is becoming much more common than most of us are comfortable with.
Amtrak should use their limited funds to upgrade the high density interstate corridors and run long distance trains only where it makes economic sense to connect multiple corridors. More states should fund commuter trains within their own borders around and between their own cities.
Dave, your #1 answer is a big reason rail passenger services died. Railroads could not afford the upkeep of a good passenger train much less service for when the snow flies and the roads are closed or when storms preclude flying into or out of the weather. Equipment became scarece and service faltered that even when somoeone boarded a train it was not a quality ride. No. Rail passenger service has to be dedicated to providing rail passenger service or else, let them slip off and fly away if that’s what they really want. Do it right, do it so it attacts clients all the time, do it so that it is a transportation service and not just running trains because Congress says they should run.
This isn’t going to be a popular statement, but one of the biggest obstacles to a decent passenger service in the US (outside of the NEC, at least) is the dependence of the operator, whether Amtrak or some private outfit, on the freight railroads: incompatible objectives.
Funny, but the biggest enemies of Amtrak, long-distance trains included, are right here in this forum. I suggest that the general public knows little and cares less about Amtrak, if they think of it at all. Long distance trains and the much-vaunted corridor trains beloved by many here, are all the same to the general public.
I think John Q. Public is more favorably disposed to Amtrak than many contributors here. How infinitely sad and discouraging to this railfan.
And if Amtrak dies from lack of support, a whole bunch of people here can write in FOR YEARS on what Amtrak should have done better. Imagine! Arguing with each other for years…just like we do on so many picayune topics. Maybe THEN the bean-counters among us will be happy, but I doubt it.
Funny, but the biggest enemies of Amtrak, long-distance trains included, are right here in this forum. I suggest that the general public knows little and cares less about Amtrak, if they think of it at all. Long distance trains and the much-vaunted corridor trains beloved by many here, are all the same to the general public.
I think John Q. Public is more favorably disposed to Amtrak than many contributors here. How infinitely sad and discouraging to this railfan.
And if Amtrak dies from lack of support, a whole bunch of people here can write in FOR YEARS on what Amtrak should have done better. Imagine! Arguing with each other for years…just like we do on so many picayune topics. Maybe THEN the bean-counters among us will be happy, but I doubt it.
I don’t consider that statement controversial at all however I believe the day when our government is capable of building a new right of way system like the interstate highway system is behind us. Such a project would be strangled by the bureaucracy.
I have answered your (Klepper) points regarding long distance passenger trains. You are correct in one respect. My views have been consistant.
In the 50s and 60s commercial airplanes were much more susceptible to grounding for a day or two than is true today. Today groundings are rare thanks to advanced navigation capabilities, as well as weather forecasting, etc. Last year the nation’s airlines were on time 82% of the time. Most of the delays were caused by air traffic control issues, some of which were weather related or missed connections, thereby requiring a hold on some of the connecting flights. Maintaining a secondary system, i.e. passenger trains, for a low probability failure rate is cost prohibitive. It would be akin to having a fail proof electrical system. Only the very rich could afford the service.
Supporting the long distance trains because a rural states Congressman would not otherwise support federal funding of corridor passenger train services is a theory. No one knows whether they would pull their votes. Moreover, politics is a horse trading exercise. Those in favor of having the federal government support corridors could offer rural representatives a sweetener. It is done all the time. The Essential Air Services program is a sweetener for rural representatives.
If one of the justifications for the long distance trains is to provide commercial transport for potentially handicapped persons, i.e. mobility, medical, etc., is valid, then the government should, as I have stated, provide train service to every community in the United States with a population above a defined threshold. The cost would be enormous just in Texas.
Approximately three to five per cent of the U.S. population uses passenger trains for intercity travel of more than 50 miles. It is hard to imagine that the percentage of overseas visitors using them exceeds this figure. The exceptions NEC, California, and Illinois corridors may be ex
If Amtrak dies something will take its place, especially in the relatively short, high density corridors. If there is a market for a service, someone will fill it. This is fundamental economics.
Look at all the airlines (Eastern, Pan American, etc.) that have died. Their place has been taken because there was and is a demand for air service in the markets that they served.
YOu have answered some of my arguments but not all. First, I will rebut your rebut. Before you assume that tourists have the same low percentage as the population, you should check on this, but I would agree the percentage would be only slightly higher, say about 5%. But sitll this is significant. As far the three percent, the trains they ride are important to them, and they are USA citiznes and pay taxes. Much the same could be said about National Parks, on a yearly basis. But if three per cent use the trains each year, it is likely that half of the three per cent use them only say once every ten years. So the overall population that uses the long distance trains is higher on a long term basis than 3%. Examples are the high school or college graduate on a once in a lifetime trip, the honeymoon couple, the elderly couple moving to a retirement home. It may be that in a ten year period, 10% or 15% of the USA population have used trains outside of corridors once or more.
You are overconfident about air emergencies. No one predicted the WTC-Penetagon event and predictions of Katrina’s severity were way off. From my point of view, if Minetta had not been so anti-Antrak, Gunn would have turned to him or the-President Bush to overrule the New Orleans mayor and 1000 lives would ahve been saved.
The handicapaped and elderly do not need service to every community as long every commujity is within read of an Amtrak station by a relatively short bus or private car or taxi ride. Spending 12 hours continous on a train can be a pleasure. Spending it an automobile or bus f or an elderly or disabled person can be a horror. But nnoe or two or possiblyi three hours is tolerable.
Now, back to economics. I should have just written “citizen” but “citizen passenger.” Joe uses a corridor and buys an 800 dollar monhtly. &nb
Amtrak, like all other forms of public transportation (and the highway system is very much a form of public transportation) is a “public good,” something which society as a whole needs but which cannot be provided at a profit to a private firm. Here is a good discussion of public goods (in the context of highway spending, but it applies to rail transportation as well) I posted in the closed thread, from the US Congressional Budget Office:
The public sector provides most highway infrastructure for several reasons that tend to limit the role of the private sector. First, such infrastructure displays, at least to some degree, important characteristics of “public goods.” Such goods are usually not profitable for the private sector to produce, because once they have been produced, they are available to anyone who wants to use them; as a result,they are often provided by the public sector. Second,because such infrastructure is costly to build, though less expensive to operate and maintain, having competing
Maintaining a secondary system, i.e. passenger trains, for a low probability failure rate is cost prohibitive. It would be akin to having a fail proof electrical system. Only the very rich could afford the service.
SAM1; The placing of all our eggs in one basket IMHO is very foolish. The Iceland volcano almost brought northern European air traffic to a stand still. just an unanticipated calming of that volcano allowed air service to resume. but northern Europe with some adaptation was able to use its fine rail system to get persons around. I wonder who has done an economic analysis of the economic damage done by the volcano and how much the rail system saved ? The Spain - France border choke point was the exception but hopefully that will be a fogotten problem in a few years.
What will texas do if one of the central american volcanos blows or some pacific volcano blows and the winds take the ash over your state and maybe the whole southwest for weeks or even months? Granted RRs would have problems but a stopped train isn’t an enginless airplane glider. the gliders have happened more than once.i
. The Essential Air Services program is a sweetener for rural representatives.
Yes and the transportation bill restored to previous levels all services. so $500 / passenger Macon - Atlanta ( a 1;10 drive to airport even in rush hour traffic ).
The long distance trains lose on the order of $750 million per year or approximately 75 per cent of Amtrak’s operating loss.
Yes and the silver service route study shows that if more equipment was available the loss would be less. will not pretend to apply to other routes other than crescent which is in same report. as henry 6 says there is not enough service. station costs should be almost the same but spread out over more passengers ( trains ) . wonder what per pass costs of t
Show me the math that indicates bankrupty costs are a large subsidy to the railroads. the land grants were paid off prior to WWII by the reduced rate of haulage for government freight in place at that time. How would you justify the WWII and beyond, ticket and waybil tax of 15% at one time. I am sure right of way taxes don’t figure into your analysis.
Remember the 1955 study on the interstates found that few of the routes not already built could be built as toll roads, and they used around $0.12/vehicle mile as the test. That is why the interstates were built using funds from all existing roads, around 3,700,000 then in existence to build a 40,000 some mile network. It was a classic cross-subsidy arrangement. Even still accidents cost the government alone around $0.02/vm on the interstate.
If you add everything up you get a cross subsidy for the interstates of around $0.08 for capital and $0.02 for accidents outside of your insurance. If you expanded even the current Amtrak style operations by increasing the number of revenue cars per train you can easily best that number, including capital costs linked to the long distance trains and a proportional share of overhead.
What is in the public good is in the eyes of the beholder. Obviously, in a representative republic, if the majority of the people’s representatives believe it is in the public good, it will happen.
Given passenger rail’s paltry ridership numbers in relation to the total number of people moving about the United States in the modes of transport available to them, claiming that passenger rail is in the public good is a bit of a stretch.
I have never argued for duplicate roadways anymore than I would argue for dual electric transmission and distribution systems, i.e. duplicate poles and wires, although Lubbock gave it a go. What I have argued for is that each mode of transport should pay the full note without any subsidies. That includes subsidies for rail, air, and highways.
Highways are not intended as profit centers. They are common access areas that are paid for directly or indirectly by the users. Whether the users pay their share has been and probably will continue to be debated far into the future.
I don’t know where the $150 billion comes from. In FY10 the federal government transferred approximately $14.7 billion from the General Fund to the Federal Highway Trust Fund (HTF); $4.95 billion was counter transferred from the HTF to the mass transit, bikeways, etc.; $1.2 billion was transferred from the HTF to other funds, e.g. Land and Water Conservation Fund; and 569 million was transferred from fuel and fees to the General Fund. Thus, the net transfer to the HTF was approximately $8 billion or roughly $38 per licensed motorists as per 2009 numbers.
Based on IRS tax return data for 2009, approximately 46 per cent of those filing a federal income tax return had a federal income tax liability. This means that they pay taxes to the federal government. Thus, to the extent that motorists had a tax liability, they pay the $38 to the General Fund that was subsequently transferred to the HTF. Moreover, in Texas, 25 per cent of th
Among other places it can be found in the second sentence of the CBO document I linked to above:
The nation’s network of highways plays a vital role in theU.S. economy; private commercial activity and people’sdaily lives depend on that transportation infrastructure.In 2007, the public sector spent $146 billion to build,operate, and maintain highways in the United States. About three-quarters of that total was provided by stateand local governments.
I had been “called out” on that other thread for being one of those enemies of Amtrak.
Two years ago, there was money allocated and a plan in place to bring the Talgo train to Madison, Wisconsin. Two years ago, that plan was changed from the long-standing expectation, to place the Madison, Wisconsin train station at East Wilson Street instead of by the Dane County Regional Airport about 8 miles away from Downtown.
The plan was changed because the Honorable David Cieslewicz, Mayor of Madison and charter member of 1000 Friends, an environmental/anti-urban sprawl advocacy group went on a rail tour in Spain in support of the Talgo plan and was impressed how downtown-to-downtown train service facilitated people living without cars, which had been a long-term vision of his for Madison with his streetcar and other proposals. I have long reasoned in posts on this site that the fuel savings or environmental benefits of direct substitution of train for auto trips was minor in relation to thei
Your original post stated; “although that hides the subsidies in the form of around $150 Billion per year in highway spending, only about half of which is paid for by fuel taxes…” That’s what threw me off and caused me to address the issues of subsidies. Presumably it should have said the total highway spend bill is approximately $146 billion.
That the nation sends approximately $146 billion on highways at all levels is not a mystery or unknown to people who track transport costs. What the nation s
There are only a handful of places in the country that John Q Public knows what Amtrak is and does. The largest is the along the NEC and it’s branches. Amtrak is relevant to the lives of people there. Everyone in NJ knows where Amtrak goes and what Acela is, even if they don’t ride, for example. The other main places are the California corridors and the the Chicago hub corridors. Outside of that, if Amtrak went away, almost nobody would even notice.
Add to that Amtrak’s subsidy per passenger mile for the LD trains is obscene - and the butt of many jokes.
Add to that Amtrak is bloated with personnel - just benchmark them against just about anything. It’s pretty obvious they don’t do much bench-marking on their own…
The conclusion is that Amtrak needs to start behaving like a real, ongoing passenger travel BUSINESS. Not that they will ever operate in the black, but that they need to start heading there instead
I don’t agree. Amtrak dies and there will be no national passenger train operating entity. There will only the states and what they can manage on their own or with neighbors.
Amtrak COULD be a leader in coordinating new corridor service, like getting the Richmond to Raleigh segment up and going. They should have been doing this all along. It’s their job. Mostly they have abdica
With all due respect, of course I “get it.” I simply don’t agree with you at all. Nada. Period. I don’t agree with any of your points or assertions.
I think this topic, and all the others here on related topics, remind me of the abortion debate, in that since 1973 I’ve never yet met one person who changed his mind on that subject because he was persuaded by some letter to the editor.