Posted on 06/26/2002 5:40:30 AM PDT by southernnorthcarolina
End subsidies for nostalgia: Derail Amtrak
This nonessential servive will never be able to cover its costs
ROBERT SAMUELSON
WASHINGTON - It is time to let Amtrak die.
Actually, Congress should never have created Amtrak and, having done so, should have long ago killed it. The Amtrak problem is not mainly about transportation, because passenger trains move so few travelers. It's about politics, which is to say Washington's inability to control spending.
Since its start in 1971, Amtrak has required $39 billion in federal subsidies (in "constant" 2000 dollars), says the General Accounting Office. Its annual cash needs are now running at $1 billion or more. Because Congress hasn't yet provided quite that much, it's running out of money. In the future, these amounts can only grow. Amtrak will never be able to cover its costs. What's the justification for subsidizing it?
The national government has two basic purposes: to solve national problems and to provide nationwide public services -- services that can't be supplied by the private market. Amtrak doesn't qualify on either ground. Its services aren't truly national. About two-thirds of its ridership is in the Northeast Corridor between Boston, New York and Washington. Nor does Amtrak represent an essential public service. If Amtrak didn't exist, most people would still get where they want to go.
Amtrak provides only 0.3 percent of intercity transportation -- a proportion that has steadily declined. Cars, planes and buses supply the rest.
In fiscal 2001, says the GAO, Amtrak carried an average of 64,000 intercity passengers a day. By contrast, airlines carried 1.8 million and buses 984,000. Amtrak operated in 45 states in 2001, but in 34 of those, it carried fewer than 1,000 passengers a day.
Because Amtrak does so little, it can't contribute significantly to solving any national problem: alleviating congestion, reducing air pollution or saving energy. One 1995 study of trains between Los Angeles and San Diego estimated that they kept 2,240 cars off the road a day. Surely, no one noticed in a corridor where millions of cars move daily.
The lesson of Amtrak is that Congress does not demand that federal programs serve true national needs. If it did, Amtrak -- and many other programs -- would disappear.
If Amtrak shut down, its closing would be greeted in the media as a small national tragedy that was, somehow, a blow against sensible transportation and the environment. People have a romantic attachment to passenger trains. Amtrak is a subsidy for nostalgia.
To disguise this, Amtrak's advocates construct artful arguments. It's said, for example, that because the government has subsidized highways and airways, passenger trains also deserve subsidies. But most airline and highway subsidies are covered by user fees, and the scale of the subsidies -- measured per passenger -- are much smaller. On Amtrak's long-distance trains, most passengers are subsidized at least $100 per trip. On some routes, the subsidy exceeds $300. Highways and airways don't get anything like that.
Congress also periodically pretends that Amtrak can become self-supporting. In the original legislation, subsidies were supposed to be temporary. A few years ago, Congress again decreed that Amtrak become self-sufficient -- a goal so unrealistic that it's hard to see how anyone with a shred of intelligence or integrity could have endorsed it.
Passenger trains made sense when Americans crowded into cities. But post-World War II suburbanization, interstate highways and jet travel made trains economically unviable and socially irrelevant. Trains couldn't compete with cars on cost and convenience. They couldn't compete with planes on time and cost.
Because mounting losses were weakening private railroads, Congress created Amtrak to assume responsibility for deficit-ridden passenger trains. Congress dared not let passenger trains disappear. But neither could it allow railroads to slip progressively into bankruptcy, impairing their main economic function: moving freight. Railroads still carry about 40 percent of all freight.
In an ideal world, Congress would set a termination date for Amtrak, say a year or 18 months from now. During that time, states and localities that wanted to continue passenger service (including many commuter trains) could make arrangements to assume Amtrak's trains and costs. Because the benefits are mainly local, subsidies should be local too.
Given Amtrak's dreary history, the chances of anything so sensible happening seem slight. Probably Congress will muddle through the present "crisis," throwing more money at Amtrak and proving once again that no federal program -- no matter how unjustified -- is ever a candidate for the ax.
Yep.
I think some of the most amazing manifestations of taxpayer-funded passenger rail systems are taking place in medium sized cities. Charlotte, for example, needs rail transit like a bull needs teats. Yet it's on the way. Incrementally, of course. Once they get the first line funded, why, they can't stop there, can they?
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