News & Commentary
Action Needed: Call for Better 2014 Amtrak Funding!
June 25, 2013
Written By Malcolm Kenton On Friday, the House Appropriations Committee released fiscal 2014 spending levelsfor transportation that savage Amtrak, state corridor development, and high speed rail. Amtrak would get just $950 million, down 31% from this year. The High Speed & Intercity Passenger Rail Program—which has funded projects ranging from improvements to Maine’s Downeaster to development of a new 220 mph statewide high speed system in California—received was zeroed out. Meanwhile
Passenger rail expands globally
June 20, 2013
Written By Colin Leach Despite record decreases in government spending across the globe as well as the persistence of anemic economic growth, many countries are making heavy investments in improving existing passenger rail services, as well as constructing new ones. Whether these investments take the form of constructing new lines or introducing new technologies to improve existing services, both public and private stakeholders recognize that passenger rail can be the key to economic growth.
Tell your mayor to Stand Up for Trains!
June 19, 2013
Written By Sean Jeans Gail The House Appropriations Committee’s attack on Amtrak, which we reported to you yesterday, is just the tip of the iceberg. The House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee leadership has criticized the long-distance trains, and appears poised to write an authorization bill that will threaten those trains, possibly by requiring states to pay for them—something NARP and others consistently have attacked as unworkable. Chairman Bill Shuster (R-PA) has, refer
Are US crashworthiness standards “dooming” passenger rail?
June 18, 2013
Written By Colin Leach One frequent criticism of passenger rail’s viability is that it entails high fixed costs and thus discourages potential investors. While many of these costs, such as track maintenance and equipment maintenance, are relatively constant, at least one can, according to a recent study, be significantly lowered: that of equipment purchases. In a new paper released by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, David Edmonson argues that outdated Federal Railroad Administration (F
For California, “No Build” is Not an Option
June 17, 2013
Written By Sean Jeans Gail CNN is at it again. The latest entry in their series of anti-rail attack ads focuses on California’s statewide high speed rail project, which will connect the state’s biggest cities through 220 mph service. In it, they found an unlikely ally in Quentin Kopp, one of the key architects of California’s high-speed rail project. Kopp is angry that the California High Speed Rail Authority has backed off from the construction of a planned four-track rail corridor int
Salt Lake City Transit ignores partisanship to put transit to work for them
June 12, 2013
Written By Logan McLeod Wikicommons; Author: Cool Hand LukeRecent statements by House GOP leadership underscore how transportation, once a bipartisan issue in the U.S. Congress, has become politicized at the national level. But as Angie Schmitt’s story on DC Streetsblog proves, that partisan divide vanishes at the local level, where local leaders more interested in bolstering mobility and facilitating economic growth than political posturing. In her story, Salt Lake City: How a Remote Red-St
Help preserve the National Network!
June 11, 2013
Tell Congress a National Network is "non-negotiable"! Amtrak’s long-distance trains are under the microscope again! On June 6, House Transportation & Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster (R-PA) reportedly said Amtrak’s nationwide service mandate is “something we have to take a hard look at… There are places that it costs us a lot of money and the ridership is not there.” Some 173 million Americans—more than half of our total population—live within 25 miles of an Amtrak stat
Is investing in the future really a "risk"?
May 30, 2013
Written By Colin Leach A recent article in Bloomberg contended that Amtrak may be wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on “equipment it doesn’t need”and runs the risk of requiring further federal subsidies. These concerns, voiced in Amtrak’s Inspector General’s May 28th report on fleet planning practices, stem from the railroad’s purported lack of a “disciplined process to analyze its equipment needs in a manner consistent with sound businesses practice.” Lack of such a pr
Americans aren't happy with auto dependence
May 29, 2013
Written By Malcolm Kenton Train advocates hear it all the time: "Americans like their cars too much, and our communities are too spread out, for passenger trains to really be viable here," or some variation on that statement. But those who make such sweeping declarations likely aren't paying close enough attention to what's happening in most of the country's metropolitan regions, and are unaware of the increasingly evident trends in Americans' travel habits as evidenced by most data gathered ov
New Swiss study: it’s not just the farebox
May 28, 2013
Written By Colin Leach Koln, Germany (Wikicommons; calflier001)A traditionally vexing problem for public transportation systems has been that of measuring economic utility. Is farebox recovery the best measure of a system’s economic value? What percentage of costs should be covered by ticket sales? Thinking along these lines, as Eric Jaffe argues in an Atlantic Cities article, causes policymakers to take a narrow view of what constitutes economic benefit. Such a view, he argues, allows them t