ARTICLE: Why can’t this country get rail service right?

Pretty "explosive" article: Medium.com

Already an hour delayed on a Northeast Regional train parked at New York’s Moynihan Station, I could see snacks and drinks in the cafe car, but no attendant to serve them.
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This was my second time in four months traveling this stretch of track, and the second multi-hour delay. In March, a brush fire near Edison brought all trains to a standstill, and my New Orleans-bound Crescent sat at the Rahway train station for more than four hours.
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What the author of that article and other proponents supporting intercity passenger rail forget is that the government is doing two different things with Amtrak and the Highway System.
What do I mean by two different things? With highways, airways, and seaways, the government subsidizes the routes and their safety. Riverways and canals, roads and highways, runways and radar-controlled air routes do not provide the final service. They only provide the infrastructure to use the final service safely. There is no Amflight flying service. There is no Amship shipping service.
Meanwhile, with most intercity railroads services, the government is expected to do more than provide the means, they are also expected to provide the final service. Amtrak's annual subsidy to provide the final service is up to close to $1 billion each year. Additionally, Amtrak or the FRA is often expected to pay for railroad infrastructure projects as well.

What many do not realize is that those Federal funded railroad infrastructure projects would be subsidized whether Amtrak existed or not, just to move freight goods around the country efficiently. Much railroad infrastructure subsidies end up in the pockets of the freight railroads eventually.

What gnarls at many intercity rail opponents so much is those annual operating subsidies for providing a service less than 2% of the populace use while getting 4-6% of the annual Transportation budget, percentage wise twice as much funding as it is being used. Yet intercity rail proponents want more? That does not make any sense to the opponents.

Essential Air Services are fully subsidized by the Federal government -- which effectively means most (if not all) airports not serving a major city are subsidized as if there was an Amflight flying service. There is an "Amship" shipping service in Alaska called the Alaska Bypass that is is estimated to subsidize 70% of all air freight in that state called the USPS "Alaska Bypass" (mandated by congress, paid for by you every time you use a stamp).

Where did you get that transportation budget or ridership number? Amtrak's operating grants are less than $2B out of a DOT budget in excess of $75B (or ~2.6% of the annual transportation budget) and per US DOT, Amtrak carried 32.5M passengers in 2019 (last full year pre-COVID), or ~9.75% of the populace.

RandallW wrote:as if there was an Amflight flying service.

Please identify the airline that is fully owned and operated by the United States Government, using crews that are U.S. Government employees and with U.S. Government owned aircraft, that provides EAS.

RandallW wrote:There is an "Amship" shipping service in Alaska called the Alaska Bypass

Again, please identify the airline that is fully owned and operated by the U.S. Government, using U.S. Government employees, and U.S. Government owned aircraft (provide N- numbers).

One other way to put it: Airlines and Highways get roughly 1-2 cents per passenger-mile in "subsidy". Amtrak gets over 40 cents per passenger-mile. Let's bring some equality into the equation and reduce Amtrak down to what EVERYBODY ELSE gets. Why should Amtrak's "top 1%ers" get such an outrageous subsidy - and yet the railfan foamers still complain it isn't good enough?

I did not make the claim that the US government owns an airline--I made the claim certain routes and services are completely subsidized even if operated by another entity, and at that point, there is no functional difference.

The Alaska Bypass services are from a little shipping company called the United States Post Service.

The Federal Government held a minority position in Delta as a result of how they received COVID bailout funds in 2020, and may own minority stakes in every other airline that received COVID bailout funds, but I can't tell from some quick Google searches if they still hold those stakes.

Since Amtrak is not wholly owned by the US government, but only partly (admittedly majority) owned by the US government, and there are private owners, your claims aren't of interest.

"Amtrak is not wholly owned by the US government."

For all practical purposes it is, since the minority shareholders have no power, nor are their investments worth anything. Amtrak police cars have U.S. Government license plates, and members of Amtrak's board are nominated by the President. If memory serves, the Supreme Court has even ruled that Amtrak is a government agency.

In retrospect, government should either have paid the railroads to maintain their passenger service, or bought their tracks and converted the railroads into something like the highways, where companies run their vehicles on public infrastructure. Amtrak has never been a viable transportation option for most people outside the northeast.

"Pretty "explosive" article: Medium.com"

Paywall, can't read.

Jeff Smith wrote: ↑Sun Sep 17, 2023 7:18 am Pretty "explosive" article: Medium.com

Here's the thing with Medium: I can write up and post an article to it. It is an opinion piece pushed out to the aether, not backed by any major (or minor) publication, and should have no more weight than a post on social media.

But it is a decently researched piece that should of been published instead of just posted.