American Airlines is threatening to end service to various communities in early October absent more coronavirus relief funding.
Article with list. While I think the airlines merit a "bailout" as much as any other* corona-impacted industry, the federal government should make its efforts consistently, pursuant to a considered policy, so that necessary relief is provided but public money isn't wasted.
Note that many of the communities to lose American service are served by Amtrak:
Del Rio, TX
Florence, SC
Huntington, WV
Kalamazoo/Battle Creek, MI
Lake Charles, LA
New Haven, CT
Springfield, IL
Four of those airports serve cities with decent corridor and/or long-distance service, while three are on the less-than-daily
Sunset and
Cardinal lines.
While some public money
should go to the airlines during this unprecedented slowdown due to coronavirus, it should be to maintain a core of longer-distance flights to principal cities, not to provide duplicative subsidized service to smaller communities already served by Amtrak or that could be served by Amtrak more cheaply than the airlines. I would imagine keeping daily service on the
Silver trains (Florence) and making the
Sunset (Del Rio and Lake Charles) and
Cardinal (Huntington) daily would be cheaper than whatever American would want to continue service to those airports.
More generally, the federal government should examine which places receive Essential Air Service subsidies
(official list) but are, or could be, served by Amtrak. If part of the calculus in funding Amtrak and officially proposing changes to Amtrak services included the offsetting effect of not having to pay as much for EAS because Amtrak would take up some of the load, keeping and adding Amtrak service looks more attractive to legislators and officials who are not blatantly anti-rail but skeptical.
To give some examples:
*Altoona and Johnstown PA being on EAS and the
Pennsylvanian line is an argument for a second
Pennsylvanian.
*Similarly, EAS to Burlington IA and McCook NE are arguments for a second or at least increased-capacity
California Zephyr.
*Ditto a bunch of
Empire Builder stops in ND and MT.
*Or Dodge City and Garden City KS with the
Southwest Chief.
*Or Meridian, Laurel, and Hattiesburg MS with the
Crescent.
*Or Staunton VA and White Sulphur Springs WV as arguments for a daily
Sunset.
Even more generally than that, ideally the government (yes, I know those two words shouldn't necessarily be used together
) should formulate an actual transportation policy that determines the best funding and appropriation mix for the best transportation mix in light of existing and projected resources, demand, and environmental concerns. Having a plan and actually consistently implementing it isn't "socialism" (as some would allege) if you're already spending the money but doing so willy-nilly and sometimes at cross-purposes.
In a well-considered transportation plan, aviation has a place, and highways definitely have a place, but so does passenger rail. Some rail opponents seem to believe that rail should get nothing from the federal government because it doesn't go everywhere and can't do everything. I've seen stuff like "95% of travel is by road"** as an
argument that the government shouldn't pay for rail, completely ignoring that that state is at least as much the
result of earlier government decisions as the cause of them. If environmental concerns took their proper weight in a comprehensive transportation policy, rail's place in that policy would be at a much more robust level than now.
*Almost any other. IMHO, the foreign-flagged cruise ship industry should have to go to their low-regulation (and low-budget) flag nations for any relief money.
**Not necessarily an actual statistic.
