A Call for Change: Rethinking Amtrak's Subsidies

Maybe they need to see how they handle rail travel in Europe and perhaps adapt that here.

When I was serving in public office, I was assigned to the Mass Transit Advisory Committee in our community. At that time, we were losing $12.50 per bus ride taken. The 'FEDS'were subsidizing most of the loss. The Liberal Pipe Dream is that Mass Transit is necessary so that people on welfare can get off their arses and have easy access to ride the bus to work. This is flawed from the beginning. These large buses run routes through our community to haul one- or more likely no one at all- around. In the meantime the buses beat the heck out of our municipal streets and require constant street repair. For absolutely nothing, except the few bureaucrats at the top of the food chain who get cushy lifetime no-show jobs; their only requirement being quarterly reports to the Advisory Committee to tell how much money they have lost. Stop all subsides for buses, rail, and Mass Transit in general.

When it is cheaper and faster, and easier to fly why would anyone ride the train. Commuter routes are what is needed, anyone wanting to go across country will fly.

Everything the left does requires a taxpayer subsidy: EV's, Amtrak, buses, solar panels, windmills, free college educations, free sex changes, free abortions, free housing, schooling, health for illegals, Ukraine.

Re #1, the comparison to Europe is invalid. The distances are far shorter there than in the USA, and there are big subsidies to European RRs, too. Aircraft and cars work far better here in the USA. The passenger train is an obsolete travel form here, and should be left to die, or if they can figure out how to give decent customer service, perhaps a few scenic rail trips might possibly survive. Several friends have attempted to 'enjoy a scenic rail trip through the mountains and deserts of the west' and found things like the dining car being out of service, no backup available, so their fine dining experience was sandwiches, chips and pop from a can. And there weren't enough of the bubble top cars to be able to sit up and watch for hours.....you got a bit of time in the scenic car, and then back down to the regular car, where the views are much more ordinary. And they had delays for many hours on sidings so that some of the most scenic areas were passed thru at night. Just a pure crap trip, and tough rocks if you didn't get what we promised. If you could actually get a find meal in a nice restaurant car, have a reserved seat in a bubble top viewing car, and hold a schedule to see the beautiful areas in daytime, my wife and I might pay for such a trip, even though we've drive and flown our own aircraft over much of the western USA. But the reason I know of these problems with the Amtrak scenic trips is from asking friends about it while contemplating taking such a trip ourselves. The experiences of friends soured us on even looking further.

A couple of years ago, three of us took the train from Baltimore to New York. The round trip for the three of us was unbelievably expensive. This wasn't the Excella train, but the train that stopped about twelve times on the way coming and going. One could almost get a round trio ticket to Hawaii for the price we paid for the cost of the train trip, and the train was packed. How any train system could lose money charging those kinds of prices for such a short trip could only be explained by government inefficiency.

A few years ago I looked into taking Amtrak from the east coast to New England. It was just as expensive as flying with a 5 hour layover in Washington DC. I drove.

Amtrak has never made a profit in it's entire 22 year history and has accumulated over $25 billion in operating losses since it's inception. Time to stop shoveling money to those clowns. I can drive form Charleston WV to Washington DC in 5 1/2 hours. On the train, it takes over 10 hours

A huge problem with Amtrak is that the rails are owned by the big freight hauling RRs, Candian National RR being one in the midwest and south and Union Pacific in the west. The Amtrak trains are required to get out of the way of any freight trains which results in very long siding waits, while freight gets priority. Unless passenger trains get priority on the rails, train travel will remain super slow and unreliable of schedules. And since the freight lines own the rails, it isn't going to change unless there is a law giving passenger trains priority, which is very unlikely. The big rail companies gave up on passenger rail, and it is a barely tolerated nuisance to them, and they don't care in the slightest if they shunt a passenger train onto a siding where it sits for five hours. You cannot make them care.

There are multiple issues with this article. To make AMTRAK better, the Northeast Corridor needs to be broken apart as a separate company. That will ensure proper accounting for ridership. When the mail contracts were removed from passenger rail, it spelled the death of passenger service. Only by the beneficence of the government has it survived this long. Long distance passenger rail is a public service, not a moneymaking operation. If there was money to be made in passenger service, the Class 1's NEVER would have given it up. I ride AMTRAK frequently, and there are places that it goes in this country that are no where near airports or affordable transport. BTW, I love the Auto Train, easiest way to get my vehicle from Florida to DC. AMTRAK should look at expanding this service to the Midwest and West Coast.

Too bad for the horse and carriage industry that it wasn't able to convince Uncle Sam to create something like "AmBuggy" to save it from extinction. The line running north from San Diego is great for college students traveling on breaks (there's a new stop on the campus in San Luis Obispo) but it's slow: 8-1/2 hours for a 300-mile trip, but the time can be spent more creatively than when driving. Less stressful than air travel, too - park (free), walk less than a minute, wait a couple more minutes for the train to arrive, and board.

Amtrak is the most expensive means of mass transportation per mile in the country except maybe for New York taxis (Sorry Jimmy Failla). It runs like it was planned in California and probably has democrat and labor union fingers in it everywhere. Cut it off and let the homeless have the cars, win-win.

Smells like another Leftist Money SCAM!