Amtrak Won’t Connect Us

Biden’s American Jobs Plan proposes to spend $115 billion on highways that carry 87 percent of all passenger-miles in the United States and $80 billion on Amtrak that carries 0.1 percent of passenger-miles. That’s what rail advocates call “balanced transportation funding.”

Click image to download a six-page PDF of this policy brief.

Biden’s plan “is what this nation has been waiting for,” enthuses Amtrak’s CEO. It’s certainly what many railfans–the people who collect old railroad timetables and model trains–have been waiting for. But I’m not sure many other Americans care enough about an obsolete form of travel they never use to say they have been eagerly waiting to have more deficit dollars spent on it. Continue reading