Forget Minot vs. Lubbock; why are the feds contributing next to nothing to improve transportation in

Growing up in the United Kingdom, a country with passenger trains radiating from or converging on the capital every 30 minutes or better in all directions until late in the evening, I ve never quite been able to wrap my head around the American conversation about intercity rail. There seem to be essentially two camps, the conservative Amtrak is a money-losing boondoggle, sell it off stat , and the Every train is sacred liberal camp fighting to preserve what we have today; Eric Jaffe s post today over at Atlantic Cities was an effort in the latter camp. Alas, I can find no organized group of people discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot saying, Let s figure out what works and what doesn t, double down on what does and abandon what doesn t .
Some basic geometric facts: Intercity rail in the UK works because of the 63 million people in the country, 53 million of them live in England, an area about 16% smaller than the US state of Georgia, or 30% smaller than Washington, which has less than 7 million; discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot most of the rest live in a small belt of Scotland or a pocket of Wales . There are therefore nearly an order of magnitude more people discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot within a distance of each other that can be traveled by rail in a time competitive with flying.
discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot Only two places in the US offer this kind of aggregate mega-regional density, which is essential to sustain a network of intercity trains at a reasonable level of public subsidy: the North East Corridor, possibly extended west out to Chicago; and the coast of California from San Francisco to San Diego. In other places, individual city pairs could make sense (e.g. Portland Seattle), but those will always be A-B(-C) lines, not part of the network where you can travel widely.
My understanding is that the real reason to run the long-haul trains at taxpayer expense is to touch enough states that most of Congress can feel good about Amtrak in general. discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot The other arguments discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot presented here sound largely rhetorical. Ridership may be rising but it s a long way from profitable discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot or even a reasonably level of subsidy per passenger. National rail network sounds like rhetoric without content. Rail is optimal for particular distances. Europe has lots of great rail services, but still, if you re going 2000 miles within Europe, and you re not a tourist or time-rich wanderer, you re definitely discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot going to fly.
Australia has a national rail network made of long-haul trains traversing comparably discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot vast distances. But they re run by the private sector with fares set to ensure profit based on an explicitly tourist intent. Australians think of them (accurately) as beloved tourist trains that everyone must ride once in their lives, not as a national rail network . Australia is too big for rail networks to be national, and so are the US and Canada.
It may be that by touching so much of the country, the long-hauls are playing a crucial role in maintaining national support for Amtrak, both in Congress and among the population. But if we over-hype them we just sow confusion about what really discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot successful rail lines look like. If some segments discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot of long-hauls show so much ridership that they need more local frequency (e.g. Minneapolis-Milwaukee-Chicago), then target those corridors for more frequent shorter-haul trains. But I m puzzled by what national interest is being served in one train a day for Fargo, ND, passing through between 2:00 and 4:00 AM. States and compacts of neighboring states must be the leaders on intercity rail, because they exist at the scale where rail can actually succeed.
discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot Ultimately, you re either discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot into transit advocacy as a workable alternative to car ownership for working adults who can t spend three days to get from Seattle to Phoenix, or you re into it because Yay, trains! I m in the former camp.
I don t think there s any reason why Amtrak s trackage easements couldn t be transferred. Certainly, discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot if there were an intelligent, informed decision made in Congress to stop pouring money away on long-haul lines and direct that to regional lines via the states, the easements could be transferred legislatively.
Why shouldn t we provide an essential long-distance rail service as an alternative to air travel? Sure, it loses money. So do a lot of much larger federal investments social justice is a concern that s often lost in this conversation about national rail. There are bus routes in Seattle that we should run service on at a higher level than ridership would indicate, because they serve communities that have higher discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot dependence. The same goes for a lot of Amtrak service.
My suspicion is that if we actually discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot said okay, let s do intercity discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot bus service instead , the demand reduction would mean the subsidy to that service would end up being higher discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot than the subsidy to the trains, because the tourist dollars wouldn t be there.
I m sure you ve noticed that buying the easements is a very expensive proposition. Until Congress is willing discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot to fund high speed corridor rail improvements it s probably smarter to keep running the long distance trains as a placeholder for future short distance corridors. When passenger trains are removed from a line the freight rail companies can save money by devoting less money to maintaining the tracks at passenger standards. Then if Amtrak or the states decide years later that they would like to re-instate passenger service on the line, the freight discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot rail companies will hand them an expensive bill for the cost of upgrading the infrastructure to allow the passenger trains back on the line. Look at the propositions to restore service on the Pioneer route or the North Coast Limited.
But let s say that we decide to stop running the Empire Builder between the west coast and Chicago and choose to build up some sensible shorter corridors like Seattle/Portland to Spokane (or Whitefish) discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot and MSP to Chicago. Fast and frequent passenger service would likely be popular and maybe profitable on those corridors, but Congress and the States will have to negotiate access discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot and agree to increase capacity on those tracks. For faster and more frequent trains between Seattle and Spokane that likely means boring a new tunnel through discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot Stevens Pass or rebuilding the NP route through Yakima. Neither option is cheap, easy or likely to get funded in the near future, but does it make sense to kill the Empire Builder discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot instead?
Another reason that many of Amtrak discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot s LD routes lose money is that the system is short of equipment. In the high seasons it is difficult (and expensive) to get a seat or bedroom on many of the LD routes because there isn t enough equipment to meet demand. Amtrak could likely save money in the off-season by running some of the trains less frequently, but when the peak season arrives, Amtrak never has enough equipment.
It s very expensive to get the freight railroads to relent on speed upgrades even on lines that already host Amtrak discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot services, like Chicago-St. Louis and the Capitol Corridor. On the Empire Corridor, discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot CSX tried to demand 30 track separation between freight tracks and 90 mph passenger tracks. It s bad enough that in some cases it s not much more expensive to build greenfield HSR, avoiding the freight railroads entirely, than to incrementally upgrade.
It would require changing federal law. Amtrak has special privileges which no other passenger railroad has. The freight railroads would fight like hell to prevent those from being transferred to anyone else.
However, this seems to be missing the point regarding travel discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot options and environmental justice for people who live in the intermediate cities along Amtrak s long-haul routes. It s easy for some planner in a city to dismiss people who live in moderately remote areas (e.g., parts of North Dakota).
But let s say you live in Minot, and you want to go to Minneapolis for a week. If you left on May 1, returning a week later, it would cost $136 on Amtrak (9.5 hours), $422 for a flight via Denver (6.5-8.5 hours), or $786 for a direct flight. Greyhound is $208 (9-11.5 uncomfortable hours). You re not definitely going to fly when the cost just doesn t pan out, especially when incomes in rural areas are lower than in most cities.
What about the people in Twin Falls Idaho that want to visit Spokane for a week? The fact is Amtrak covers only a handful of the tiny little 40k population towns in the fly over states because it s an excursion train not a transportation system. Time to break out the violin and cue the story about how grandma won t be able to get to her kidney dialysis.
Nathanael, you re missing the point about Twin Falls. Amtrak long distance trains provide spastic coverage to a tiny number of hole in the wall locations simply because they happen to be where it was easiest to lay tracks a century ago. If you re really lucky the train stops at sometime other than the middle of the night and on occasion happens to connect to where you might want to go. Minot is only 42k people. Why on earth subsidize high capacity transit there and not say Lubbock Texas which is a population of 230,000?
Forget Minot vs. Lubbock; why are the feds contributing next to nothing to improve transportation in Upper Manhattan (population 550,000), Dorchester (100,000), Oakland (400,000), discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot the South Side (750,000)? The most important trip for almost everyone is the commute to work, and there, North Dakotans enjoy short car commutes while residents of poor big city neighborhoods have very long commutes by slow buses or trains that don t take them to where they want to go.
And Bernie? I m happy to subsidize service to Lubbock, too. If it has extremely good air and road service, discount broadway theatre tickets to spamalot the rail service will probably be unpopular. If it doesn t, the rail service will probably be popular.
Because at some point, non-cynical politicians will have to stare down the political calculus that makes it possible to run trains through North Dakota in the middle of the night but impossible to fund transit improvements where they re actually needed, and say, backasswards allocations harm us all.
This is a philosophical difference and one tha