Speaking in Indiana last week, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood said Amtrak’s success shows that American should build high-speed rail. “Amtrak is doing very well,” claimed LaHood. “They’re making money, that wasn’t true a few years ago.”
This led BoydGroup, an aviation consulting firm, to say, “This guy is lost in space.” BoydGroup points out that Amtrak lost $1.4 billion in 2010, which is actually underreported because Amtrak counts state subsidies as “revenues.”
The Washington Times has uncovered a nearly decade-old accounting scandal in which Amtrak employees deliberately falsified financial statements to make it appear that the government-owned company was more financially solvent than it really was. The employees were eventually terminated, but not until they had spent $150,000 of taxpayers’ money defending themselves from charges of fraud and misrepresentation.
Amtrak needs work.
Flickr photo by JFeister.
But Amtrak deceptions go back much further than just to 2001, the year in which the fraud was supposed to have taken place. In the 1980s, Graham Claytor — who many rail fans still regard as the best president Amtrak ever had, largely because Claytor had supported passenger trains and steam locomotives when he was president of the Southern Railway in the 1970s — responded to the Reagan White House by repeatedly promising that Amtrak would be able to cover all of its operating expense out of passenger fares.
Almost as soon as Claytor retired, his replacement, Thomas Downs, repudiated those claims and said that Claytor had been misleading people and deferring maintenance to make trains appear more cost effective. Of course, Downs took office when Clinton was president and he probably thought he could get a windfall from a Democratic White House and Congress. By 1995, when Republicans had swept Congress, Downs too began claiming that Amtrak could run without operating subsidies by 2002.
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Amtrak vice-president James McHugh recently presented a revolutionary idea to members of Congress: give Amtrak a hell of a lot more money. Okay, maybe that’s not so revolutionary, since it is the same idea of just about every agency in Washington DC.
Amtrak, according to the testimony, needs “long-term, sustainable funding.” Well, who doesn’t? Where will Amtrak’s funding come from? McHugh has no clue, except that he suggests that Amtrak be included in the transportation reauthorization bill that Congress will take up next year. Until 1982, all the money in this bill (which Congress revises about every six years) went to highways. Since then, it has mostly gone to highways and transit — none to Amtrak.
Whenever the Antiplanner reads a news story such as this one, which tells how Amtrak’s Boston-to-Portland Downeaster train hit an automobile, I think, “There were only 48 people on that train. We’re subsidizing a train to carry just 48 people?”
Flickr photo by lazytom.
While the route of the Downeaster is 116 miles, it is considered a commuter train and was subsidized by the Federal Transit Administration, so it is in the National Transit Database. Amtrak timetables indicate the train makes five round trips each day (which means two train sets each make 2-1/2 round trips). The 2008 transit database reports that it carries an average of 492 passengers each weekday, and slightly more on Saturdays and Sundays. That means the average train carries about 50 people. Since not everyone goes the whole distance, the average number of people on board at any given time will be somewhat less.
