I agree. Frankly, the country is crippled already. However, it's apparent that California is quite capable of operating on its own, and the Northeastern bloc of states should be able to operate independently as a functioning economic unit once gerrymandering is eliminated in Pennsylvania, which is probably going to happen this week. The situation is much worse for people in states whose state governments have also been wrecked.
That's really what I meant. Florida is a big beneficiary of the Auto Train and Silver Meteor/Star bringing tourists into the state, so I would think Florida would act to preserve those routes possibly even without interest from other state governments along the route.
Nope. Because people will keep paying. Which at this point is actually a problem for Disney. There's massive overcrowding at their parks.
Northeast to Florida is the largest airline corridor market in the US. If Amtrak disappears from there hardly anyone will notice in Florida, unfortunately. There is close to zero chance that Florida will step up to fund LD trains to Florida at this point. With a different government in Florida things may be different.
Exactly. Also Disney is big but not the only thing in Orlando to make it a tourist destination either.
Exactly. Amtrak is functionally irrelevent in long distance transportation. The value of long distance trains is in the ability to serve people traveling overlapping segments of the route between midpoints or from mid to end points, which is not a market airliners can compete in, and if demand is sufficient can be done more efficiently than busses.
I'm not sure what this is or what you expect me to do with it. Someone you cannot name said something you cannot properly quote in a location you cannot link? If you were in my shoes would this mean anything to you?
End-to-end travel is indeed dominated by airlines but mid-route travel is dominated by private vehicles. Neither example makes a strong case for Amtrak on its own. In most industrialized democracies the passenger rail sales pitch revolves around improved safety and faster speeds compared to driving with improved logistics and lower environmental impact than flying. Unfortunately at the moment Amtrak's long distance network would have a heck of a time promoting their questionable safety record or their slower-than-everything speeds or their outdated particulate spewing locomotives or their poor schedule keeping or their once-a-day arrivals into barely used stations featuring few if any traveler related services or last mile connections. I'm not intending to say this is all Amtrak's fault but it's a hard sell nonetheless.
On the one hand I agree that Amtrak does a terrible job at self-advocating. On the other hand they're legally restricted from overtly promoting policy awareness or requesting political support from passengers and citizens. Which to me is the strongest evidence that Amtrak was probably never intended to survive this long in the first place.
Yes, I should have qualified that it is a market they *can* be competitive in if there is adequate investment. At the moment it is stagnant.
In a perfect world policy promotion and advocacy organization would be NARP's role. Unfortunately they seem to see themselves as joined at the hip with Amtrak as opposed to the traveling public. They should have been holding Amtrak's feet to the fire with regards to the PIPs for example, instead of allowing them to vanish into the ether. On the other hand, Amtrak doesn't seem to have any idea what it's supposed to be doing with the long distance trains, other than running them because that's what they've always done. As far as I can tell, their advertising is somewhere between limited and nonexistent, and they have not made a case at Congress to obtain anything in the way of investment. Their annual requests are always similar to the previous year, perhaps a little larger but not enough to be meaningful. I have read fleet plans for years that lay out equipment replacement objectives for whenever funding is available, but never a reference to actually trying to locate funding. How hard can it be to add a line requesting such and such amount for Superliner replacement or Amfleet II replacement? At least try to initiate the discussion, there is nothing to lose.
The states of NY and NJ are operating at such large deficits that they might as well be bankrupt. These are blue states and residents pay exorbitant tax rates. It doesn't matter how high the taxes go here, there will still not be any money to fund the Gateway project.
Here's the rub about this (and why I'd be extremely hesitant to duplicate this mindset in the US): There's a decent number of LD train route stops where the train is the only form of non-private-automobile transportation outside of the local area. There's no intercity bus service along US-2 in North Dakota or Montana, for example, and many of the small towns don't even have essential air service, much less a competitive airport. I'm not sure there's really enough political will to fully subsidize buses to serve those corridors, and especially on the US-2 corridor it may not even be a better option (trains are much more reliable in the snow than buses.)
I don't intend for those ideas to be a save-all, but hey, I'll take the couple of points. Doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing it. As for those communities that would lose service, yes, it would be an issue. But there are literally thousands of communities across that country today that used to be served by rail that don't have busses or EAS anymore. People adapt.
Yet another legacy law that somehow can't get overturned or revised. The advantage of the 401(k) vs a pension is that it puts the management of one's retirement on the responsibility of the employee. The employer's cost would vary, depending on it's desire (or ability) to match a percentage of it. Sure, pensions are favored because you don't have to think about it. But I've also heard horror stories about them vaporizing when companies fail, even if they are supposed to be fail-safe. In the Stock Market, you'll have your ups and downs, but the 10 year trend is always up. Annuities have similar problems.
Much of the year, our best LD routes are well patronized NOW. Without a lot more modern, reliable rolling stock what would advertising for these trains accomplish? For starters, we need the kind of "infrastructure" capital spending to produce the size, frequency, and routing of passenger trains that robust advertising budgets are meant to fill! And without Federal and State mandates for passenger trains to be given priority over freight traffic where feasible, all those newcomers to train travel that advertising produces may be one-and-done.
401K's are simply corporate rip-offs. Thanks, Republicans.
