“Combined, Amtrak’s short-distance corridors generated a positive operating balance in 2011,” says the Brookings Institution’s new report on Amtrak. This suggests that the United States should “invest” more in such short-distance routes.
The problem with this is that just one short-distance route, the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor, dominates all the other routes. That one route carries as many passenger miles of travel as all the 27 other short-distance routes put together. Of those 27 routes, only three–the Carolinian and trains from Washington to Lynchburg and Washington to Newport News, Virginia–had a “positive operating balance,” to use Brookings’ term, in 2012. But all of those routes actually start in either New York or Boston, so really they are Northeast Corridor trains too.
In using the term “positive operating balance,” Brookings–with the help of Amtrak’s non-standard accounting methods–is being highly misleading. First, both Brookings and Amtrak count state subsidies as “revenues,” so Brookings doesn’t count a train’s operating loss that is offset by such subsidies against that train’s “operating balance.” Since only short-distance trains receive state subsidies, this leads to a strange recommendation from Brookings that Congress should encourage state subsidies of long-distance trains, as if that would make the subsidies go away. As someone told USA Today, “A subsidy is a subsidy whether it’s coming from federal, state or local taxpayers.”
