http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050202/us_nm/bush_amtrak_dc
I’m not saying it’s primarily this administrations fault but wouldn’t it be nice sometime if our reprentatives stopped pandering to the oil companies and car companies?
Maybe we wouldn’t need 30 freaking lanes of traffic if we had a few more trains, metros, subways, and buses?
Here’s why:
Already receiving $1 billion a year (that was in 1996) in federal subsidies for operating costs, Amtrak now wants a trust fund established to cover capital needs. A new study from the Cato Institute rejects the passenger rail service company’s plea.
Established 25 years ago, Amtrak was supposed to become solvent five years later – but did not.
Amtrak has so far cost taxpayers $13 billion in federal monies.
Taxpayers subsidize each rider by an average of about $100 – or about 40 percent of the total per passenger cost.
The round trip subsidy for a passenger going from New York to Los Angeles runs $1,275 – more than three times a typical discount airfare.
Only 0.4 percent of Americans traveling between cities use Amtrak.
Cato’s economists figure some of Amtrak’s busier routes could be profitable if they were freed of red tape. (One rule requires that laid-off Amtrak workers get six years severance pay.) Routes which could be money-makers include Boston-Washington, Santa Barbara-Los Angeles-San Diego and Chicago-Seattle.
Many economists contend that the best solution is to privatize the system and get Amtrak out of taxpayers’ wallets.
I agree IR… but I believe Amtrak has been intentionaly kept as it is to discourage public transportation rather than improve it. For once, I’d gladly see some compitition but we need the new railways and infrastructure to do it.
edited to add… just think about all those other gov programs that don’t pay for themselves and waste money? I doubt we’d have any left if we got rid of all the wasteful ones.
Yes, the subsidies to Amtrak do add up. But how do they compare to the subsidies for cars? What was the last “transportation,” i. e., road construction bill? $375 billion? And that’s just the Feds, it doesn’t include the states. Now, THAT’s real money.
I dunno where I stand on the Amtrak thing, but I hate it when I hear people whining about subsidies for public transit, all the while driving on roads paid for by taxpayers. Why should we subsidize a very inefficient way of moving people around, but not subsidize the more efficient, environmentally friendly ways?
All of our transportation infrastructure is heavily subsidized, especially air and highway. It’s also falling apart. Add in our drinking water and waste water infrastructure. Someone has to pay and this administration has decided it’s not the rich - they got the tax cuts. Guess who that leaves.
Every time I see a city bus, it has no more than two people on it, and frequently I see empty buses driving around. That upsets me, but only because it means the cost to operate that bus is FAR exceeding the revenue it’s generating. Public transportation only works in dense urban areas, and US cities tend to be spread out.
More efficient?
Check out Amtrak.com and see what the schedule is like for a trip from (for example) Chicago to San Francisco. It takes more than TWO days. The route that I looked at had travellers being sent first to… Los Angeles, then to SF. That’s efficient? A jet can have you there in just over 2 hours.
Another Amtrak route I check to go from Chicago to somewhere less distant was Chicago to Denver. That takes “only” 18 hours. A jet takes 1 hour 55 minutes. Like the man said, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it starts to add up.” (Barry Goldwater)
As for the last transportation bill, it is currently paying for both highway reconstruction AND light rail construction in several large cities… I know that Denver has a huge light rail system going in, and Los Angeles has recently added one. By the way, federal transportation bills DO include states - they help to pay for Interstate highway & US Highway repairs.
I’d rather pay for those kinds of infrastructure improvements than trying to keep antiquated methods around (i.e., Amtrak).
You don’t often hear about subsidies for things like buggy whips and horse & carriage subsidies, and there’s a reason for that. The same is true for
snort :roll:
Oops…sorry, I SERIOUSLY didn’t mean to do that. Seriously…
I’ve decided that cheeky becomes me
Salt Lake’s public transporation is a joke. The buses run far apart and only on the main highways. They whine here about nobody using the bus system but I’ve checked it several times and found my 20 minute drive to work would stretch into 1-1/2 hours–and would still drop me off several blocks from my office.
I checked with Amtrak for times/fares when my daughter moved to Sacramento and found that the 1 hr. 45 min. flight or 8-9 hr. drive would turn into a 14 or 18 (I don’t remember which) hr. train trip. No thanks.
Susan
I think Chas was referring to energy efficiency, and reducing damage to the environment.
For those of us who hope to still be alive on the planet in 50 years time, this should be a major concern.
When I was in Washington and discovered that I could take the Metro practically anywhere I wanted to go, I was amazed.
Cincinnati’s bus route stink - you can’t go east to west across the city, you must go south into downtown, transfer, and then go north to where ever it is you want to go. There is talk of light rail, but so far the routes aren’t going to have any effect on the highway congestion - they aren’t where the traffic currently is.
We just got back from New Orleans. Now THERE is a city that has great public transportation. Besides buses, you have the street cars. A one way trip is $1.25, an unlimited one day pass is $5 and an unlimited three day pass is $12 (I know there are also monthly passes for residents, I don’t know that cost). Between the three street car routes (Canal Street, St. Charles and River) you can get within easy walking distance of just about anything you’d want to do or see - The French Quarter, the cemetaries, the Riverwalk, the Zoo, and all the restaurants and hotels. We got the three day pass and it was well worth it. Oh - and that pass is good on both the streetcars AND buses.
Missy
Yeah, I work with a guy who used to live in DC, and he says the same thing about the metro.
Re: the latest transportation bill and spending on pork barrel projects:
I wonder – how much longer will taxpayers (since roughly 75% of all American taxpayers are funding it) have to foot the bill for that $14 billion fiasco known as the ‘Big Dig’ in Boston?
Talk about a boondoggle!
Just so we’re clear, the big dig is a actually several connected projects. Over time it will have huge postive benefits as well as the benefits it now provides.
Still, it’s mighty expensive. And I can’t imagine a project that’s done a worse job of explaining itself to the public. Interestingly Massachusetts (as we all know) is an overwhelming Democratic state. The 100% Democratic Congressional delegation brought home the pork from DC. (rightly so if my view). The succession of 100% Republican Administrations since 1990 have thoroughly mismanaged almost every everything about the project, not least of which is the cost. Go figure. Now the blame game is to try to point to the contractors and say they screwed it up. Maybe so, but I’ll bet the succession of governors and their transportation chiefs signed off on everything, every step of the way.
Is it true that you have to have passed a swimming test prior to entering the tunnel? As last I read, there were more than 200 panels that were leaking - some of them badly.
I also recall a report from about this time a year ago that yer man Kerry was involved in some campaign donations from various insurance companies who were trying to divert money AWAY from the project, something in the tens of millions of dollars. Kerry denied that his vote had anything to with it… until it was pointed out that tens of thousands of dollars were now in his campaign kitty.
tsk tsk tsk.
Piggies at the trough.
Getting back to Murph’s original complaint:
Mass transit works best in highly urban areas. You need a LOT of steady riders to even come close to justifying a heavy rail subway system like BART. If the urban core has most of the jobs in a region, it may be cost effective to run commuter lines. For San Francisco and it’s closer cities, that model works fairly well. For the South Bay, and southern SF peninsula, that model doesn’t work.
An overhead-electric commuter line (with shared rails) is cheaper (doesn’t need full grade separation, can buy much more standard running stock - think CalTrain, for the SF Bay folks), but not as “cool”,
And for suburban areas, bus is probably the best solution - cheap, flexible, and fast to set up.
Then there’s “light rail” - trolleys. In an urban area they’re a good idea - much cheaper than a heavy rail subway, but can handle much more load than busses. But they don’t work well in the suburbs - like any rail solution, they need fairly high ridership to be cost-effective.
The problem is that many of the transportation powers-that-be around here are pushing BART or nothing. San Jose (essentially a huge suburban area with no real urban job center) spent a LOT of money to build a light rail line first - and the farebox recovery has never topped 20 percent of the cost to run it. So now they want to build an even more expensive system (by a couple of orders of magnitude!) to bring commuters to those nonexistant downtown jobs.
What would make a lot more sense (in my opinion) would be to stop BART where it is, add commuter rail links (overhead electric) for the South Bay BART alignment, improve some off the worst freeways, and - important! - add a LOT more bus routes. You could have it up and running much faster, and you could either deliver an equivalent level of service for less money or much better service for the same amount of money.
Sorry, you non-Bay Area folks. I’ve been frustrated about the situation around here for a long time. I used to live within walking distance of a commuter train station and rode the train every day. But now, although I’m less than two miles from a light-rail station (and my current employer is less than half a mile from a commuter train stop), it would add a MINIMUM of an hour a day to my commute time to use the train (drive to station, wait for trolley, ride to train station,wait for train, ride to destination). If I want to use the bus instead of driving to the station at this end, make that a minimum of an hour and a half. A good part of the problem is that in a less urban area the trains don’t run very frequently. What makes the subway systems work in places like New York or London is that they run most places, run very frequently, and are both faster and cheaper than driving. Unless you can duplicate all these attributes, ridership falls off pretty fast.
My mom and I tried to visit relatives in W. Virginia quite a few years ago. We were going to take Amtrak because my mom didn’t want to drive. (She’s really freaked out about driving in the mountains, and I used to get carsick on long drives.) I dunno why we wouldn’t fly. Anyway, our train was going to be something like 10 hours late because one of observatory cars or something totally unnecessary was broken. Once we actually got to Chicago we would have to wait there overnight to catch the connecting train. We didn’t go, but if that isn’t terrible customer service, I dunno what is.
There was a leak that got a lot of attention. Engineers say all tunnels leak, but the gusher that happened was faster than any pump could ever handle. The project isn’t done yet. The contractor says there are actually 200 spots that need a little sealant. ooops! There are still some exits under construction. It’s probably good to retain a sense of humor about all this.
By God, I actually agree with Dcrom!