A New York Times Editorial
July 15, 2002

Putting Rail Back on Track

In a sense, Amtrak's most adamant critics are right. The United States cannot afford to continue like this, cutting its national railroad a check for one hundred million dollars here, a quarter-billion there, merely enabling it to hobble along, from one funding crisis to the next. The nation should be looking at the big picture, investing in an efficient network of passenger rail as a cost-effective means of meeting pressing national transportation needs. This is the crucial, if seemingly odd, point often lost on both sides of the Washington debate over Amtrak's future — the issue is larger than trains.

The strongest case to be made for a vibrant passenger rail network is to think of it as an appendage of the nation's aviation system. Amtrak's supporters in Washington argue that the grounding of all flights after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks showed the need for alternative means of transportation. True enough, but the far more compelling case for developing rail could have been made last Sept. 10, when Americans complained about the paralyzing congestion at airports.

Given the long-term growth in air travel, it is nonsensical to have travelers taking up runway space flying from New York to Washington — or, for that matter, from Miami to Orlando, or Chicago to Detroit. In France and Germany, the mass transfer of business travelers onto efficient trains on heavily traveled routes of up to 300 miles is already taking place. Travelers at major European airports often find that their connecting "flight" is on a train.

Building high-speed rail corridors between major cities ought to be a top American priority. The investment of several billion dollars a year is modest when one considers that a proposed expansion of Chicago's O'Hare Airport alone is slated to cost $6 billion, or that $8.5 billion in federal money has been sunk into Boston's "Big Dig" — a project that essentially entails moving roads underground.

A rail trust fund — possibly financed by a portion of the federal fuel tax or other "user fees" already allocated to transportation — could help take politics out of the management of Amtrak. Too many long-distance trains do not serve a public need beyond collecting support for the railroad in Congress, and they should be phased out unless the states they serve are prepared to underwrite their costs. States should also be required to put up a share of the cost of developing the high-speed corridors.

Amtrak's new president, David Gunn, inherited a company in shambles, one forced to assume too much debt and defer needed maintenance just to get by in the short term. The legislated fiction that Amtrak could attain self-sufficiency is especially damaging. No other form of transportation in this country is expected to break even, nor any other passenger railroad in the world.

Mr. Gunn, who is getting high marks for his efforts to reform Amtrak, has said it needs a minimum of $1.2 billion in the next fiscal year. That is a conservative figure. The Bush administration has said it opposes more than $520 million, and it is pushing a series of reforms aimed at breaking up Amtrak's national monopoly and delegating more control of rail policy to the states. Some routes might indeed be served better by eventually being operated by private companies. But starving Amtrak of needed resources now in the name of advancing reforms that are impractical in the foreseeable future amounts to a death sentence for passenger rail.

The Senate Commerce Committee has already approved a bill by Senator Ernest Hollings, the South Carolina Democrat, that goes a long way toward financing Amtrak's comprehensive overhaul, including the building of high-speed corridors. The Bush administration ought to reconsider its position, and work with Congress to address the country's transportation needs.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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