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What Should be the Future of Amtrak

What Should be the Future of Amtrak

  • Continue Subsidies at Current Level

    Votes: 2 3.9%

  • Stop Subsidies for Amtrak completely.

    Votes: 20 39.2%

  • Continue Subsidies, and Maybe More, but Improve Service

    Votes: 26 51.0%

  • I have never ridden Amtrak, and never will.

    Votes: 3 5.9%
  • Total voters
    51
JasperL said:
Good point! Our interstate system makes money, why can't Amtrack!!??
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The interstate system is not a business. Amtrak is a business, just as the US Postal Service is a business. If a government run business can't at least break even, then they should fold. It's kind of stupid to charge 55 cents for mailing a letter across the street and yet you can mail a letter from Maine to Hawaii for 55 cents. Surely it costs the post office more than 55 cents to mail most every letter. And they wonder how the post office loses so much money.
 
Lord of Planar said:
Your blogger link in post 100 is very far fetch.

Can you back it up with facts?
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I could post thousands of analyses that show that trucks and other heavy vehicles wear the roads and infrastructure much moreso than cars. I'm still waiting for you to post ONE that states otherwise. Come on! Just one! I dare you!
 
Moderate Right said:
The interstate system is not a business. Amtrak is a business, just as the US Postal Service is a business. If a government run business can't at least break even, then they should fold. It's kind of stupid to charge 55 cents for mailing a letter across the street and yet you can mail a letter from Maine to Hawaii for 55 cents. Surely it costs the post office more than 55 cents to mail most every letter. And they wonder how the post office loses so much money.
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So it's OK to spend Trillions to maintain highway infrastructure, but it's not OK to spend anything on rail infrastructure? Aren't the Conservatives the ones that say that government should be run like a business? So let's charge tolls for every interstate highway.
 
Moderate Right said:
The interstate system is not a business. Amtrak is a business, just as the US Postal Service is a business. If a government run business can't at least break even, then they should fold. It's kind of stupid to charge 55 cents for mailing a letter across the street and yet you can mail a letter from Maine to Hawaii for 55 cents. Surely it costs the post office more than 55 cents to mail most every letter. And they wonder how the post office loses so much money.
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No, the interstate system isn't a business because we've decided to subsidize 100% of what is a business in other settings - think, toll roads. The point is we heavily subsidize every form of transportation in this country. Your standard is rail must be self supporting, but not those roads you use everyday for free and are 100% subsidized. It makes no sense except you like roads and like that they're free and don't use rail and so don't want to pay for rail. You certainly cannot defend the difference based on some principle.

Same thing with the post office. There's a national benefit to having a post office, which is why it's in the Constitution, which gave Congress the power to establish the post office and postal roads. It doesn't say - at no cost to taxpayers - any more than the roads we build are at no cost to taxpayers.
 
Media_Truth said:
What should be the future of Amtrak? Although Amtrak had revenue of $3.3 Billion in 2017, it still lost $194 Million. Is it reasonable to expect Amtrak to turn a profit? Roads are built using Federal, State and Local tax revenue. Often states extract Sales Tax revenue (General Fund) for road projects. The Federal Government is about to pass another huge "Infrastructure" bill.

Why Amtrak train tickets are so expensive - Business Insider

In an attempt to rescue the service, then President Nixon signed a law in 1970 that ensured government funding. This act created the National Railroad Passenger Corp., which eventually became Amtrak. Of the 26 railroads offering passenger service, six declined to join Amtrak.
...
To this day, trains still have a low profit margin and rely heavily on subsidies to operate. According to the company's 2017 fiscal year report, Amtrak had a total revenue of $3.3 billion. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to make Amtrak profitable. It still had a total operating loss of $194 million.
...
According to Amtrak's company profile, it operated some 300 trains a day in 2017. In comparison, SNCF, the French National Railway Co., operated 14,000 trains daily. That's about 47 times as many trains, serving a nation that has a quarter of the population of the United States. France is also even smaller than the size of Texas.
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I hear you can get free shoulder rubs from Joe Biden all the way from Delaware to DC!
 
Media_Truth said:
So it's OK to spend Trillions to maintain highway infrastructure, but it's not OK to spend anything on rail infrastructure? Aren't the Conservatives the ones that say that government should be run like a business? So let's charge tolls for every interstate highway.
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Feel free to read up on the (non) High speed rail project in California.
 
Media_Truth said:
So it's OK to spend Trillions to maintain highway infrastructure, but it's not OK to spend anything on rail infrastructure? Aren't the Conservatives the ones that say that government should be run like a business? So let's charge tolls for every interstate highway.
Click to expand...

Your argument is just downright ridiculous. Amtrak is not needed. That's why it's losing money. Get rid of the whole thing and hardly anyone will know.
 
Moderate Right said:
Your argument is just downright ridiculous. Amtrak is not needed. That's why it's losing money. Get rid of the whole thing and hardly anyone will know.
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I ride bikes on country roads all the time that also "are not needed" and if bulldozed "hardly anyone will know." So we should do that, right? Same thing with a lot of those electricity lines, phone lines. Let's start charging rural residents a per household tax for the entire cost of building and maintaining those roads, etc. If they go down in a storm, that's a shame but those rural people in KY like in TN can pay out of pocket for the crews to come and put them back up!
 
JasperL said:
No, the interstate system isn't a business because we've decided to subsidize 100% of what is a business in other settings - think, toll roads. The point is we heavily subsidize every form of transportation in this country. Your standard is rail must be self supporting, but not those roads you use everyday for free and are 100% subsidized. It makes no sense except you like roads and like that they're free and don't use rail and so don't want to pay for rail. You certainly cannot defend the difference based on some principle.

Same thing with the post office. There's a national benefit to having a post office, which is why it's in the Constitution, which gave Congress the power to establish the post office and postal roads. It doesn't say - at no cost to taxpayers - any more than the roads we build are at no cost to taxpayers.
Click to expand...

I'm beginning to cave on the Amtrak thing after doing some research.

Something needs to be done with the post office. Tech is making it an obsolete entity. All it seems to do is deliver junk mail. The 21st century is catching up with the USPS. There's really not much they can do that can't be done via another method or by a profit making company and we don't need any junk mail. In effect, the US government is subsidizing sales marketers to send us loads of junk mail, polluting our landfills with unnecessary crap and cutting down trees in order to produce said junk mail. The USPS gets the huge majority of it's business from junk mail (they like to refer to it as jobs mail). So, taxpayers are basically paying out over 5 billion dollars per year to the USPS so that we can receive that junk mail. So, we give these people jobs at our expense so that we can throw the junk mail in the garbage as soon as it is delivered.
 
JasperL said:
I ride bikes on country roads all the time that also "are not needed" and if bulldozed "hardly anyone will know." So we should do that, right? Same thing with a lot of those electricity lines, phone lines. Let's start charging rural residents a per household tax for the entire cost of building and maintaining those roads, etc. If they go down in a storm, that's a shame but those rural people in KY like in TN can pay out of pocket for the crews to come and put them back up!
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I'm going to give up on the Amtrak argument. You win.
 
As someone said earlier, distances and densities hurt passenger rail service ROIs. There is nothing that can be done about it either except to subsidize these routes. But look at it more efficiently. If Amtrak were to analyze routes and optimize services on those routes that make money or break even, I think everyone here would welcome having them as an option. If routes do not make sense, stop serving them or charge accordingly. A long distance rail ticket is not cheap and it can take hours by rail when a flight can be much quicker and cheaper. People are not going to sit on a train for 10 hours when a flight can take one hour. In Europe, cities have massive transportation systems in place much like we do in certain cities like NY or DC. Start by making those systems workable and then connect to rail for inter-city options.
 
Media_Truth said:
All your rhetoric and snide remarks just show that you could not backup your statements, which were totally assinine to begin with...
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I understand the math. The damage the mass can do uses a 2nd power calculation, not a 4th power calculation. Then, it's also calculated by the number of tires, and the footprint of each tire. You are too ignorant to see that your bloggers fourth power math is a total joke. And you expect us to believe you have an engineering degree?

Hogwash!

Are you to ignorant to understand that your 9 ton truck is probably a 10 wheeler with 20 times the tire tread footprint of a 4 wheel car?

Notice how your blogger also doesn't specify squat.

He only takes the ratio of mass and does a simple fourth power calculation. A proper simple calculation would be to square the ratio, then divide by the footprint. If the 9 ton truck has 20 times the tire footprint of the car, then it becomes:

4.5 times the mass = 20.25 when squared.

footprint ratio 20

20.25/20 = 1.0125. An insignificant difference, and that is for acceleration and braking. Trucks have less mass per area at a stop, or constant speed.

Now if you run big rigs on roads not designed for their mass, then the damages can be more extensive. We have regulations for a reason. Your blogger must think 9 ton trucks are rolling down 25 mph residential areas all the time.
 
Try using excel for once in your life:

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Media_Truth said:
I could post thousands of analyses that show that trucks and other heavy vehicles wear the roads and infrastructure much moreso than cars. I'm still waiting for you to post ONE that states otherwise. Come on! Just one! I dare you!
Click to expand...

Your link is too much of a joke for me to waste time looking for a link against it.

You claim to be an engineer. If you don't see his work as total BS, then I say your claim to having a BS is BS.
 
Rail cannot overcome the advantages of air travel. It only makes financial sense for short trips between nearby cities. However, it is also the only public transportation for much of middle and rural America. So just like rural utilities, electricity, postal and phone service are subsidized, we should probably continue subsidizing some form of public transportation for these people.

BTW: high speed transcontinental rail ain't gonna happen in out lifetime. So don't hold your breath waiting for it.
 
Media_Truth said:
We've seen how faulty your understanding in this very thread, regarding road wear from semi-trucks. You never post links, and expect others to buy into your unsupported drivel.
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Heavy trucks (Semis) do far more damage to the road than a passenger car.

When I worked at an asphalt refinery many years ago, the value they gave was 100 000 to 1. It would take 100 000 passenger cars to do the damage of on loaded semi truck.

As for proof

https://www.lrrb.org/pdf/201432.pdf

The paper also tries to develop a method for differentiating between load-related damage and
that caused by the environment. Several mathematical models are included to predict the
progression of deterioration over time and traffic. It concludes by stating the following.
Estimation of the attributable road wear costs due to heavy vehicles, or the marginal cost of road
wear, can lead to a range of estimates depending upon the models and associated assumptions
used in making the estimates from the available data sources. The recent estimates for road wear
cost vary from 65 to 55% attributable to heavy vehicles for the average level of traffic loading on
the bituminous surfaced arterial road network of Australia.
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For visual experiment on a hot day go to a intersection which is made of asphalt, with heavy truck traffic and see the difference in deformation of the road surface when a car stops and leaves to a loaded semi truck. The deformation is visible with semi trucks compared to cars

http://asphaltmagazine.com/the-benefits-of-modified-asphalts/

The AASHO Road Test (1958-1962) is still widely used for pavement design. That research was based on a legal load limit of 73,280 pounds. In 1982, the load limit was raised to 80,000 pounds – which does not seem like a huge increase. But that 10 percent load-level increase corresponds to 40 to 50 percent more stress to the pavement.

Another change that brought greater demands to the pavement was the introduction of radial truck tires. Bias-ply tires typically had a pavement contact pressure of about 75 pounds per square inch (psi). Radial truck tires apply about 125 psi of pressure to today’s pavements.
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Last edited:
Fledermaus said:
I have. Last one was Anchorage to Fairbanks. It was wonderful.
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Actually I am wrong... thanks for the memory... I rode one from Skagway, Alaska into the Yukon.
 
DifferentDrummr said:
The fuel to generate electricity for a maglev system still comes to less than that required to fly airplanes over the same route.

Current maglev systems are above ground, so there's too much wind resistance. I was talking about a subway.

And do you know why Concorde was retired? It got too expensive to fly commercially.
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There is only one current commercially operated maglev system in the world, in Shanghai from the Airport to Pudong (commercial center) It operates at 400 km/hr or 240 or so MPH
 
Bodhisattva said:
Actually I am wrong... thanks for the memory... I rode one from Skagway, Alaska into the Yukon.
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Anchorage to Fairbanks in dead of winter... - 30+ Damn fine way to travel. Much better than trying it by car/truck.

Some towns along the way he route were dependent on the railway for resupply and mail.
 
Lord Tammerlain said:
There is only one current commercially operated maglev system in the world, in Shanghai from the Airport to Pudong (commercial center) It operates at 400 km/hr or 240 or so MPH
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Of course, a maglev train can't break supersonic speeds above ground at atmospheric pressure.
 
Media_Truth said:
What should be the future of Amtrak? Although Amtrak had revenue of $3.3 Billion in 2017, it still lost $194 Million. Is it reasonable to expect Amtrak to turn a profit? Roads are built using Federal, State and Local tax revenue. Often states extract Sales Tax revenue (General Fund) for road projects. The Federal Government is about to pass another huge "Infrastructure" bill.

Why Amtrak train tickets are so expensive - Business Insider

In an attempt to rescue the service, then President Nixon signed a law in 1970 that ensured government funding. This act created the National Railroad Passenger Corp., which eventually became Amtrak. Of the 26 railroads offering passenger service, six declined to join Amtrak.
...
To this day, trains still have a low profit margin and rely heavily on subsidies to operate. According to the company's 2017 fiscal year report, Amtrak had a total revenue of $3.3 billion. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to make Amtrak profitable. It still had a total operating loss of $194 million.
...
According to Amtrak's company profile, it operated some 300 trains a day in 2017. In comparison, SNCF, the French National Railway Co., operated 14,000 trains daily. That's about 47 times as many trains, serving a nation that has a quarter of the population of the United States. France is also even smaller than the size of Texas.
Click to expand...

As long as Biden is around, nobody will be able to do anything with his personal mode of transport.
 
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