As David Brooks points out in his April Fools Day article, the Biden stimulus earmarks $80 billion for Amtrak. $80 billion amounts to $240 per American, $660 per household and $1,180 per taxpaying household. It’s roughly equivalent to doubling all the federal subsidies Amtrak has ever received. It’s enough money to subsidize rail travel at the rate of $250 per trip for ten years. Amtrak carries one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of personal travel and less than one percent of long distance travel, Amtrak’s supposed niche. In 2019, Amtrak carried 16.8 million round trip passengers. At that rate, ridership would have to increase twenty fold to reach just one round trip per capita per year. In 2020, Amtrak suffered a COVID-related loss of ridership bigger than any other mode, ending the year 47.4% under 2019.
In spite of 50 years of generous taxpayer support, Amtrak has established itself as America’s poorest performing, most expensive, least productive, least important and least resilient mode of transportation. Biden’s gift rewards 50 years of failure. Amtrak’s “wish list” is not a plan to improve its performance or to satisfy unmet public demand for passenger rail (clearly, there isn’t any). Rather, it’s a thinly disguised plan to expand into more congressional districts, to lock in additional reliable votes for more pork from more congresspersons who have little to no understanding of the relationship between supply and demand. What a waste. Americans should be outraged.
Dick Lemieux
Concord