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Amtrak Victorious

The much-maligned rail operator gets some respect and more than a few
billion in banknotes out of the bruising infrastructure battle.

 

An Amtrak Northeast Regional train slows for a stop at the Metropark
Station in Iselin, NJ on Novermber 25, 2019. (David Boe/AP Photo)

 

Providing quality rail service to major metro areas and a measure of
mobility for those in remote areas should not be controversial. But like
vaccinations against an often fatal disease and teaching American
history, dependable passenger rail service has been treated like a stain
on what remains of the nation's experiment with representative
democracy.

Yet with the bipartisan infrastructure package
,
which cleared a key cloture vote over the weekend, Amtrak riders are big
winners. The beleaguered rail operator scored $66 billion in the
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). After years of
legislative chaos on the infrastructure front, nothing is certain. But
if the bill passes, Amtrak will get some stability that adds up to a
vote of confidence.

In 2019, Amtrak passengers made 32.5 million trips across the entire
national network. More than half of them were along the Northeast
Corridor (NEC) between Boston and Washington. If those trips were
instead made on Interstate 95, the often-gridlocked north-south
thoroughfare on the East Coast, the highway would likely be unnavigable.

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Sinking $22 billion into the national network and $12 billion into brand
new intercity rail services (along with $24 billion in federal/state
partnership grants for the NEC) has nothing to do with misguided
fantasies about the romance of trains. There is nothing romantic about
big-city business travel, going home to spend the weekend studying, or
hauling cranky kids to visit grandparents.

In remote wilderness expanses along the Canadian border like northern
Montana
,
Amtrak is the only way for non-drivers to get to somewhere else.
Southern Montana wants restoration of the route that used to connect its
major cities, Billings, Bozeman, Helena, and Missoula, please and thank
you. No private rail operator would ever serve the tiny towns of Libby
(population 2703) or Browning (population about 1,000), home to the
Blackfeet Nation. Amtrak does. The Gulf Coast wants to rebuild the New
Orleans to Mobile route that Hurricane Katrina washed out 16 years ago,
with travel onto Houston. Overall, Amtrak aims to launch projects that
would eventually serve 160 new communities and connect the country's
50 largest metro areas.

But absent a revolutionary shift in thinking about how to serve regional
corridors and how to raise the necessary billions (because
"pay-fors" won't cut it), Amtrak will never be able to provide the
kind of true high-speed rail that France or China enjoys within the
lifetime of anyone alive today. These are difficult facts for some rail
enthusiasts to grasp, as they bemoan what they consider to be the flaws
of the bipartisan package. Members of Congress like Rep. Seth Moulton, a
Massachusetts Democrat, put their shoulders to a laudable proposal for
$205 billion investment in true high-speed rail to catch up to the
investments made long ago in other developed countries. But if there is
no appetite in Congress to commit to the INVEST Act's proposed $95
billion rail investment, a sum that would have hurled Amtrak across time
and space into 21st century, it is highly probable that that the
reactions from Moulton's colleagues range from eyerolls to polite pats
on the back.

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At a practical level, an investment that offers millions of dollars per
mile to specific corridors should be able to build what other countries
did with a similar amount of funding from scratch. But the political
reality is that the collapse of the California High-Speed Rail project
has doomed any Amtrak-led push for true high-speed rail for the
foreseeable future. President Obama launched a major push for high-speed
rail, but after governors in Wisconsin and Florida turned down the
money, he sadly put all his chips on the most ambitious project
possible, a route from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It is frustrating
and embarrassing that the state may only produce what amounts to a
hellaciously expensive spur between Merced and Bakersfield in the
Central Valley.  

It is not widely appreciated that true high-speed rail demands straight
stretches of open land. These kinds of parcels really do not exist on
the most built-out and densely populated intercity rail section in the
U.S., the curvy NEC, between Boston and Washington. Transforming NEC
into European-style high-speed rail would demand leveraging eminent
domain powers that no local or state leader would propose or tolerate.

What is within the realm of the possible is higher speed rail, and the
NEC would fit this approach well. The best way to get to higher speed
rail is to prioritize and fast-track building modern bridges and tunnels
that would allow trains to regularly hit speeds approaching 110 miles
per hour, rather than the much-reduced speeds that Amtrak hits now.

President Biden got $30 billion out of his $36 billion ask for NEC,
which in the current political climate is a major accomplishment. The
replacements of the malfunctioning, delay-spawning Connecticut River
Bridge between Old Saybrook and Old Lyme (1907), and its partner in
crime, the Walk Bridge (1896) in Norwalk, Connecticut, are within sight.

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There are two other major bottlenecks to eliminate. The new Baltimore
and Potomac tunnel (1873) south of Maryland's largest city (which will
be renamed after Frederick Douglass) is a $4 billion project in the
final design and land acquisition stages. And there's the mammoth
Gateway Program that includes replacing the creaky Portal Bridge (1910)
and the leaky Hudson River (1907) tunnel between New York and New
Jersey. The price tag for the tunnel alone is $11 billion.

Gateway will get a generous slice of the $6 billion destined for
Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, and can compete for $24 billion in NEC
modernization grants along with other projects. But tunnel project costs
in the United States have a way of blowing past initial projections, for
a variety of unsavory reasons such as delays and mismanagement.
There's a cautionary tale that federal officials no doubt have in
mind: The initial price tag
for
Boston's infamous Big Dig, the most expensive public works project
ever undertaken in the U.S to date, was projected to cost $2 to $3
billion The final cost was $22 billion. It took more than two decades to
complete and won't be paid off until 2038.

A new report by the Eno Center for Transportation found
that American transit project
costs balloon out of control due to slipshod governance, ineffective
bureaucratic processes, custom designs for nearly every feature instead
of standardization in railcars and stations, and other features. Gateway
will require serious guardrails and rigorous oversight to ensure that it
does not morph into a Bigger Dig.

Critics of rail investment represent a willful inability to grasp that
Amtrak is an essential form of travel, as deserving of federal dollars
as highways and airports in the age of climate change. Rail service is
one area where most members of Congress step on to something that looks
like common ground. Unhappiness with how Amtrak spends its money should
be countered with effective congressional overseers and competent
state-level managers (and we should learn from our international
counterparts in this respect). Riders should not endure subpar service
because tired, old conservatives want to trot out tired, old diatribes
about waste, fraud, and abuse at every conceivable opportunity.

The reason for Amtrak's surprising success in this year's
infrastructure battle can be traced back to a grieving widower and
father who commuted from his Washington job to get back home to his kids
every night in Wilmington, Delaware. Amtrak provided the vehicle to do
that. During those commutes, Joe Biden learned a thing or three about
how Americans use and rely on a rusty but steady rail network that needs
to be kicked up more than a notch.

Gabrielle Gurley is the Deputy Editor at The American Prospect.

 

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