Railroads Can't Meet Demand

For several years I've been writing about the need to develop light rail for people-moving. I've advocated bigger budgets for Amtrak and an ambitious growth program linking smaller cities the way they used to be. I've been in a small minority who insisted that at some point there was going to be another gas crisis and that rail should be ready to handle the people who would want to switch. I pointed out that that would be the best time to get people used to using transportation other than their cars and that if we could get them in the habit of using less planet-hostile ways of getting around we could make some real inroads on cutting down pollution and slowing global warming. I supported Amtrak officials who saw the same thing coming and wanted to plan for a minimum-oil future.

We were all ignored. Instead of increasing Amtrak's budget, both parties have been reducing it and the Republicans of the Bush Oil Era talked fondly of eliminating Amtrak's funding altogether. "Let the market take care of it," they said. "If Amtrak can't make money then nobody wants it and it should die." An argument of such boneheaded simplicity, self-interest, and short-sightedness that it sometimes made me cry.

Well, the inevitable day has come and, sure enough, Amtrak - the only passenger rail we have left in this country - can't handle the demand from customers who just realized that it's cheaper to take a train than to put gas in the tanks of their SUV's.

Record prices for gasoline and jet fuel should be good news for Amtrak, as travelers look for alternatives to cut the cost of driving and flying.

And they are good news, up to a point.

Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month.

But the railroad, and its suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet the demand.

***

“We’re starting to bump up against our own capacity constraints,” said R. Clifford Black, a spokesman for Amtrak.

The problem is that rail has shriveled.

***

Today Amtrak has 632 usable rail cars, and dozens more are worn out or damaged but could be reconditioned and put into service at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars each.

And it needs to buy new rail cars soon. Its Amfleet cars, the ones recognizable to riders as the old Metroliners, are more than 30 years old. And the Acela trains, which have been operating about eight years, have about a million miles on them.

Writing specifications for bids, picking a vendor and waiting for delivery takes years, even if the money is in hand.

This article does not point out what ought to be its main theme: that Amtrak budgets have been cut every time a Pub has been in the White House since Reagan, barely held their own during the Clinton admin, and that since the GOP took charge of Congress in '94 its budget has been cut beyond the bone. Tracks have gone unrepaired, whole regional services have been eliminated, and personnel has been cut to a skeleton of what it should be. With the energy companies - especially oil and gas - in control of Congress, rail has been treated like a bastard stepchild the parents would like to put in an orphanage if they couldn't get away with killing it outright.

We are now paying the price of that selfishness and tunnel-vision. A golden opportunity to wean people off their gas guzzlers is going down the tubes.

Which is, from their vantage point, the name of the game. If we'd been ready, as we should have been, stuff like this wouldn't be necessary.

Worse than not mentioning the responsibility for Amtrak's poverty that belongs - principally if not exclusively - to cheap Republican rule is the attempt by NYT reporter Matthew Wald to shift part of that blame onto (this won't come as much of a surprise) labor.

H. Glenn Scammel, a former head of staff of the rail subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said the railroad should give up on some of its cross-country trains and redeploy the equipment on relatively short intercity trips, where it could provide enough frequency to attract new business. (Providing one train a day in each direction will not draw many new business travelers.)

But the railroad’s labor contracts provide stiff penalties for dropping routes, and dropping states from its itinerary would hurt its political support, especially in the Senate, where thinly populated states are overrepresented relative to their population.

(emphasis added)

That's either plain stupidity or deliberate misdirection. Those contracts were written that way to keep Republicans and Amtrak's management from eliminating routes as an easy way to save a few pennies. If Amtrak wants to build up the routes and add more jobs in the process, I have no doubt the union would be more than willing to renegotiate the contracts that are preventing it.

IF they feel the company - and the Congress - can be trusted to make sure it isn't just another management trick to weaken the union by firing union workers (an easy contract fix). The problem is that with all the promises made and broken by both political parties and Amtrak management, there isn't much good faith to be had.

Wald apparently knows next to nothing about the history of railroad unions or of Amtrak or of the GOP's intention to gut it. Maybe he ought to before he goes shooting his mouth off.

Comments

[PurpleRose]

Good posting. What made me about the article, beyond the points you make, is that Wald ignores the reason Amtrak was created in the first place. He mentions but does not expand on the history of railroads getting out of the passenger business that would have left the US without national rail service. His ending paragraphs in which he talks about privatizing Amtrak also leave out this history. (Of course, repugs do this all the time with government services -- the reason for Social Security, the reason for Medicare/Medicaid, etc. They ignore the idea that "the Market" doesn't always have a solution to a problem or is the problem.)

[mick arran]

Excellent points. When the Pubs can't re-write history to suit their agrndas, they ignore it altogether.