All the high-flying, short-sighted and costly, other arguments for really wasting the $8 billion might get the nod but, if we want the most bang for the buck, we'd better look at merely improving what's already in place.
Well, don't forget that Amtrak still relies on Congress for funding, so politically strategic bang for the buck is a significant factor.
Merely improving what's in place may or may not get the most transportation bang for the buck, but less efficient, less effective stunts may help raise political capital, helping Amtrak down the line.
Political pandering is largely why AMTRAK is as dysfunctional as it is now. Politicians will only fund more "less efficient, less effective stunts". That's the only capital that will be raised politically.
AMTRAK has got to get loose from political dependence. Even if it doesn't, the improvements I've suggested could be claimed for credit by supportive politicians as well as by those through whose districts the higher-speed lines run. Looking at a map of the routes; that's a lot of politicians.
With AMTRAK's publicly stated finances and ridership numbers (if accurate): AMTRAK should be able to gradually (within perhaps eight years or so) become self-funding and adequately pay the host railroads for track time IF they begin charging a flat $3 per coach seat for each station passed (without gimmicky "bucket fares" or discounts that appear to conceal gouging of those paying full fares) with $9 for a roomette, $18 for a bedroom, and $3 per standard piece of baggage per entire line; and IF trains are scheduled to leave origins after and arrive at destinations before usual work hours between the largest cities every 500 miles or so-- creating a national commuter and overnight, sleeping and dining car, business rail transit system rather than the current vacation excursion trains only usable as discretionary diversions. Charging the coach fare for about 68 inside and a roomette fare for about 34 outside, carside advertisement spaces could subsidize any shortfall in ridership revenues or even provide additional revenue. AMTRAK's current partnership with other businesses is a good step in the right direction.
Allowing humanely confined pets to be transported in baggage cars and offering group travel for one seat or sleeping space fare would enable many more to use AMTRAK for real travel. A group ticket would be needed.
Eventually, First Class Coach, single-seat compartments could offer the "privacy of one’s own car" at only double the amount of a regular coach seat fare. First Class Coach fare could also include showering privileges-- with possession of ticket, presented on demand and punched by the Porter for entrance into a sleeping car shower. Exiting from the shower would indicate finishing that one use of the ticket. Other uses would be purchasable.
AMTRAK should lease equipment, allowing them to decrease or increase as trends demand. Guest commuter or other services on AMTRAK-owned rails should have to pay their fair share of the costs of that trackage.
I know this fails to goose-step behind the socialistic mantra that ""no rail passenger system in the world operates without subsidy". No other country in the world allows free enterprise the way America is supposed to allow.
If AMTRAK believes in a socialistic model for passenger train operation, they should be true to that model by paying
everyone in the company (including
every manager--top management included) only the same union-level wage. Many managers could do their management duties while on the Porters' and Waiters' Extra Boards, if they don't qualify for anything else. Union officers have to do their union management jobs in addition to their labor jobs. That actually saves even potentially superfluous managerial jobs without cutting often essential labor jobs-- the opposite of the usual formula for cost saving.
If the rest of us believe in socialism, we need to have socialized groceries, restaurants (if restaurants aren't too "bourgeois"--a left wing version of puritanism), clothing, housing and every other currently privately operated business. The grocery business is just as vital to our survival as is health care, or transportation for our economy.
If Communist China is having to dabble in "filthy capitalism" in order to make their ends meet (and those ends appear to have more than met), maybe we should do the same. We American taxpayers certainly now appear to owe
them big-time for bailing out our biggest so-called capitalists with money our government has borrowed from them!
All but perhaps one of our railroads are self-funded (an actual utopian libertarianism)-- merely by the stark efficiency of rail-- even with their huge corporate bureaucracies. They even fund the government (including AMTRAK) by paying taxes. They and their freight shippers further subsidize AMTRAK by allowing AMTRAK government-mandated,
discounted access to their tracks.
Of course, AMTRAK's labor-intensiveness funds the Railroad Retirement system, allowing the railroads to financially get by with eliminating many of their labor positions. That appears to be a major balance that barely keeps the railroad lobby in "support", or at least tolerant, of AMTRAK.
AMTRAK could actually pay its current salaries and other expenses with the fare revenue from the reliable, voluminous, daily ridership that could result from running trains that actually accommodate rush hour traffic from 50 miles away and providing huge overnight alternatives to wasteful, hour-long commuter flights to 500 miles away. The trains would actually be more usable even to the discretionary traveler by allowing travel after and return before work hours-- often saving at least four days of time currently needed merely for midday AMTRAK departures and arrivals. It's a shame (and should not be allowed by taxpaying constituents of Congress) that all of AMTRAK's resources, and now $8 billion of borrowed and taxpayer-owed money will likely be further wasted on "politically strategic" "stunts" to raise capital for more politically strategic stunts in order to do more of the same....
If we can't do honest, valuable, logical business for a fare price rather than by coercive taxation for essentially nothing but more of the same wasteful, coercively and actually un-democratically tax-obtained funding for dysfunctional "service" and authoritarianism; maybe we shouldn't have anything to show for it but loss. I think the laws of reality will bear that out for us. Just how extensive will that loss be?
Demand legislators that AMTRAK (and every other bailout) fund itself (and take its own losses) or go out of business and be taken over by someone who will run it self-sufficiently. We love our cars, trucks and planes too much to use trains anyway, don't we?
We actually need usable and sustainable rail passenger service to save our mass and long-distance mobility and economy-- that is, if we intend to have a real economy and survivability rather than an economy, and therefore an existence, made of smoke and mirrors. We need a private rail passenger market for our own freedom to choose the best operator-- a self-regulating and quality assurance feature.
We taxpayers and our dependents actually have a moral right to 100 shares each of AMTRAK preferred stock at about $.40 a share, instead of it being held "for us" by the government. If we can be expected to keep up with paying taxes and filling out the mind-vexing forms to do that-- all under pain of imprisonment for even honest mistakes-- we can surely handle owning and disposing of our own AMTRAK (and now, automaker and bank) stock for which we have paid with our taxes and our self-imperiling federal debt.
