Right Now, Our Fight For Trains Is Political

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

Sometimes we strike a nerve.

Earlier this week, Streetsblog – the nearly 20-year-old transportation and transit news site dedicated to ending car dependency – ran an edited version of the blog I shared with all of you defending public funding for Amtrak against political attacks by the new House Transportation & Infrastructure Chair.

Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL) contended that it was time to “wean” Amtrak off of public funds, partly because he claims that air travel and driving remain the “overwhelming preference” of most Americans. My defense, both then and now, is that Amtrak is not intended in law or by design to make a profit, and that instead it fulfills an important public purpose in providing vital transportation to places and in circumstances where private industry cannot profitably provide it. Air and highway travel succeed because they are subsidized at levels unheard of in passenger rail, not because they are inherently preferred.

That provoked a critique from fellow advocate and policy analyst Alon Levy in their blog "Pedestrian Observations," taking issue with my assertion that Amtrak can’t ever make a profit and should never be required to do so, and also suggesting that my viewpoint reflects merely American tunnel vision and a failure to aspire to the quality of European and Japanese passenger trains.

I really enjoy reading Pedestrian Observations, and I find Levy’s critiques of Amtrak and state rail planning efforts helpful in my advocacy. In fact, Rail Passengers has even found inspiration for policy reforms for our surface transportation reauthorization proposal in a paper they co-authored with their colleagues at NYU’s Maron’s Institute of Urban Management. I respect them and their analyses and use them often in our work.

In this instance, however, I think their criticism is unfair and misplaced. My op-ed was strictly focused on trying to blunt political attacks on the skeletal system we already have; nobody, but especially me, would try to claim with a straight face that American passenger rail is just fine or has nothing to learn from successes in other countries.

I often find that Levy tends to look at arguments with the eye of an engineer, as they have here. That can be useful at times; the U.S. certainly needs more experienced engineers casting a critical eye on our elderly hodgepodge of a network. But the majority of the problems Amtrak faces—and passenger rail in the U.S., more generally—are political, and are unresolvable with sophisticated mathematics or clever engineering. Moreover, right now in contemporary Washington, D.C., the political outlook for passenger rail is deeply uncertain. It’s unclear if Levy doesn’t know this or simply doesn’t care. If it’s the latter, I get it; some people like railroads and hate politics. But as a resident of the U.S. who actually wants to see expanded passenger rail in the U.S., and not just to write about it, I’m forced to care. And, more importantly, I’m forced to play chess where the pieces are already sitting and not just where I would want them to be.

You aren’t really going to understand why we have the suboptimal passenger rail system America has without understanding these thorny political problems (and yes, Americans do know we’re not the global industry leader for delivering or operating passenger rail. If anything, we’re the global laggard). And these political problems are, in many cases, at the heart of how the U.S. transportation network is planned and funded, and why it often produces dysfunctional outcomes.

Levy writes that “core lines, equivalent to Chicago-Detroit, New York-Buffalo, Washington-Charlotte-Atlanta, Los Angeles-San Diego, etc., would be high-speed and profitable.” Would the market characteristics of these city-pairs allow for successful high-speed rail service? You bet, they’re ideal. Would they likely be profitable — yes, they probably would be but, crucially, only above the rail.

And frankly that is immaterial to the argument about Amtrak efficiency. Because here, in this country, the United States of America, the decision about how to develop those corridors isn’t up to Amtrak, it is up to the state governments. The state, or states, would have to create a new administrative entity to handle project planning; identify a stable funding source; build a greenfield right-of-way (ROW), or find a way to use an existing ROW (say, the median of a highway, or purchase a freight rail corridor, for example); launch procurement on new equipment; and so forth.

I suppose that theoretically what I’ve described above is feasible despite the absence of a robust, stable Federal program. California is currently attempting it, though with limited success and many challenges. However, California is an enormous state and if it were its own country its economy would be the fifth-largest in the world. Expecting the state governments of, to pick a single example, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia to coordinate on this kind of megaproject in the absence of strong Federal coordination, on the other hand, is a fantasy. Particularly since state governments are getting annual formula disbursements through the Highway Trust Fund that cover 80 percent of the costs for intercity highway projects, whereas high-speed rail efforts have historically been 100 percent out-of-pocket.

In 2021 we started to shift that reality with passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). It led to the creation of a planning framework, providing robust, dedicated, multi-year funding for the first time in many generations. The planning framework the Federal Railroad Administration created is, in many ways, flawed, requiring overly-lengthy corridor development and environmental review processes, while also asking states to build out duplicative planning capacity in lieu of strong Federal guidance. Even so, it's a solid foundation that we are working to improve on in Congress’ upcoming surface transportation reauthorization.

But let’s now talk about reality today, where things are as I write this. We are in a moment of radical uncertainty, where existing passenger rail programs are getting ensnared in Executive Order-driven broadsides by the Trump Administration. Right-wing think tanks are dusting off tired old arguments that “trains aren’t profitable but roads cover their costs, ergo…” There is a real possibility that, without a concerted effort to defend passenger trains as a viable mode in the U.S., we not only see the undoing of the foundation for new and better service which the IIJA helped to build, we might even lose the few trains we currently have.

This is a problem for long-term planning. Levy knows this, because they helped write a paper about it just last year! To wit:

“[U.S. high-speed rail plans] and projects have never been institutionalized in the ways that highway, airport, and public transit development programs are both authorized in legislation and tied to public finance through trust funds.

“This start and stop approach to intercity passenger rail planning and policy is in part a product of more than 50 years of debate regarding Amtrak, the putative national passenger rail operator. This is in stark contrast to the nationally and European Union planned and funded networks in Europe and Asia.

…

“[Congress] has not resolved Amtrak’s largest issues: sustainable funding, greater control over the infrastructure it operates on, or a clear picture of how intercity rail fits into the national transportation policy framework (Perl 2003, p.186). This is not how other high-speed networks have been built in Spain, France, China, and Japan. It is clear that there has been little intention of committing to Amtrak as the national high-speed rail carrier or addressing the national network at the national scale.”

Levy writes “Americans generally resent having to learn about the rest of the world.” Maybe it looks that way from Berlin, but I know plenty of curious and interested Americans, many of whom learned to love trains while traveling abroad. I’m one of them. And while it would probably be better for our passenger rail network if the U.S. transportation planning looked more like France’s, with decision making centered in a culturally dominant capital city with an empowered nationally-owned railway, that’s not the country I live in. So we’re going to have to try our best to build intercity passenger rail with American characteristics. That must include reforms in Amtrak’s transparency, Federal and state environmental review and permitting processes. But it also has to be built with reference to the fractured and partisan reality in which we operate today.