BELLOWS FALLS — Last week's wreck in Philadelphia showed the need for massive investment in rail infrastructure in America. Instead, one day later, the House of Representatives voted to cut investment in Amtrak in 2016.
The argument goes that operator incompetence - “taking a 50-mile-an-hour curve at 102” - caused the wreck, not an infrastructure problem.
This makes my head hurt. The curve is there because the right-of-way was laid out 150 years ago.
There should be a state-of-the-art right-of-way for a system that now hosts more than half of all public transport between Boston and Washington, D.C., but that would cost well over $100 billion. That ain't going to happen - we spend that kind of money only on wars.
The cheaper solution is positive train control, or, on Amtrak, the Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System (ACSES). (It's cheaper because Congress mandated the railroads install it and pay for it.)
Amtrak is in the process of installing ACSES on the entire Boston-D.C. route, but anything having to do with funding rail causes frothing at the mouth among some politicians, so that project is proceeding slowly.
Funding for Amtrak is decided by Congress on a year-to-year basis, and people think Amtrak should be profitable.
Unfortunately, Amtrak is not going to be profitable; passenger rail doesn't make a profit anywhere in the world. Neither do highways, of course, nor airports, the air-traffic-control system, the TSA, air service to smaller cities. All are subsidized by taxpayers. Annually, the Federal Aviation Administration and Highway Trust Fund receive 45 times the governmental dollars that Amtrak does.
But only Amtrak seems to attract the ire of the rabidly anti-governmental, like a red cape to a bull. “Amtrak should be profitable!” they shout.
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Conveniently, we can blame President Richard Nixon, whose politically expedient tactic in 1971 helped create this perpetual annoyance.
On May 1, 1971, in exchange for selling a bunch of tired rail cars at low prices and the right to allow Amtrak to operate on their tracks, the freight railroads - at that time in very weak financial shape - were relieved of the burden of operating money-losing passenger trains.
The Nixon administration gave Amtrak $40 million and a directive to turn a profit within three years. The tacit expectation was that the mission would fail, that the public would continue to desert trains and that, within a couple of years, Amtrak could be quietly axed.
Three things went wrong with that. First, the energy crisis hit, and trains are very energy efficient. Then, Amtrak initiated modest improvements - such as a nationwide toll-free number - that made it easier rather than harder to ride what trains remained. And elected officials such as Rhode Island's Claiborne Pell and Delaware's Joe Biden proved tenacious advocates for rail travel, and others, such as Mississippi's Trent Lott and West Virginia's Harley Staggers, appreciated the pork-barrel aspect of keeping passenger trains in their districts.
Ridership began to creep upward. And it has kept creeping.
Ridership rose to an all-time high of 31 million in 2014, with the percentage of operating expenses covered by fares is at about 84 percent. Despite administration support that has ranged from tepid (Clinton, Bush I, Obama) to openly hostile (Reagan, Carter, Bush II), Amtrak has staggered on for 44 years.
Amtrak received $8 billion of stimulus money after the Great Recession, but that is only a drop in the bucket of what is needed.
As much as Rahm Emanuel seems like a pretty awful person, as soon as he left the Obama administration, no one there seems to have ever thought about rail again. For comparison's sake, Great Britain puts $8 billion (U.S.) a year into its rail infrastructure, and China is spending $128 billion (U.S.) in 2016.
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We are fortunate in Vermont that our congressional delegation and state administration are strongly supportive of rail. I could get into any number of eye-glazing details about what improvements need to be done to make rail a true economic driver in the state, region, and nation. Instead, I'd direct interested parties toward two organizations that do great work: the Vermont Rail Action Network and the National Association of Railroad Passengers.
It is sad that rail in general, and Amtrak in particular, has become a target for misplaced “conservatism.” Rail is the future, and those who profess belief in America need to start looking ahead, rather than fulminating about the past.