McCain's Agenda on Amtrak

According to Harper's Index:

Average number of passengers on Big Sky Airlines daily flight from Lewistown MT to Billings last year: 2

Subsidy that the federal government paid the airline per flight: $770

WE all know how the trolley lines were bought up and destroyed by GM and the others. Heinous. Until we start screaming day and night about these things, and I mean screaming, nothing significant will happen. The empire has succeeded in ossifying itself...who'd a thunk it?

But help is on the way : Gas prices are going to go up steadily forever now, and it needs to Keep going up and we need to ask for more gasoline taxes so as to subsidize public transport! Sorry, have a nice day. Notice how the thread doesn't like biting any real bullets?

heav y runner - I totally agree with what you say about European trains. But we would have do more than to buy the cars from the French. We would have to add to and improve the tracks to add new routes, to support the new speeds and to bypass any stalled trains, especially in the expansive West where one stalled train holds back trains for many miles.

Perhaps we could also import the managers from France who take safety seriously (real safety, not bogus anti-terrorist show me your passport and take off your shoes type mullarkey) and have an inkling of what customer service means.

Let's talk about the well served North Eastern Corridor.

McCain would travel round trip between NYC and DC in his enormous private luxury jet at a cost I cannot even imagine.

On Amtrak coach, round trip for two adults and a child between NYC and Washington CD costs between $350 and $600, depending on the time of day. Why? Is it because of CEO salaries, inefficiency or negligence lawsuits? Amtrak also has poor customer service in terms of communicating with passengers regarding delays and cancellations. I will not recount my infuriating experiences here. I see self-serving, not so intelligent incompetents in charge of Amtrak.

I can take the "Chinese Bus" or Bolt between NYC and DC for between $2 and $40 each round trip, depending on temporatry specials, which amounts to $6 to $120 for 3 people.

A round trip by car costs about $100 in gas and tolls door to door in our little used 1991 Toyota Camry.

We have to go to a family event in the DC area. The ecologist and the hedonist within me want to take the train, but the accountant says no.

I LOVE TRAINS and would take them as much as possible if they were available and at reasonable cost. It is important to look at why our system is such a failure. Obviously the first place to look for best practices is Europe where the trains are reliable, frequent, fast, reasonably priced and go everywhere. They are supported by government funds as a service to the public and to the environment, just as roads are supported here.

Best practices are not state secrets. The deficiencies of Amtrak give talking points to privatization junkies like "Private Plane McCain", who does not want to improve rail transit, but either make it private or let it die off.

The public transportation here is not a system but a cobbled together, thinly distributed, ill-coordinated set of lines that favors the assumption that you can always take the car. Huge stretches of the country have no train service. A city as big as Nashville has no railroad station.

I'm all for rail, but after reading David Cay Johnston's "Free Lunch", I'm not going to be taking Amtrak anytime soon. CSX, under Treasury Sec. John Snow, cut back on inspection and repairs to save money. This willful negligence caused an Amtrak derailment in which people died. A victim's wife was finally awarded $50 million by a jury, but under the terms of the government's agreement with CSX, Amtrak pays any legal settlements arising from Amtrak accidents on CSX rail lines, even when said accidents are directly due to blatant criminal negligence on the part of CSX. Our tax dollars paid that award, and CSX paid nothing but its lawyers' fees.

Thanks for printing this article. I knew that many (mostly Rethug) politicians had long been trying to strangle Amtrak. I didn't know the degree to which McCain was involved.

It's ridiculous. Amtrak has been underfunded a long time & it shows.

Some in my family traveled cross-country on Amtrak and were dismayed by the many problems, all budget-cut-induced, no doubt.

And it's a wonder that many good-sized cities do not have passenger rail nearby.

Compare this with Europe, where passenger rail is accessible and easy. Even in rural areas like Scotland. We fat Americans are stuck in our Armadas, and Navigators, and Hummers, and Tundras. Passing out from the heat of our own ($$$expensive$$$) fumes.

HEAVY RUNNER: Right on!

Many spiritual realms of reference believe each of us must answer for our actions/beliefs/choices when we "cross over." Imagine McCain trying to justify his cheerleading for weapons, while cutting off sane transportation! Priorities... it's all about priorities!

idnearthsea. . . you have some facts wrong about public transit and the San Jose airport. You state that there is no bus to the train. . . there is a free shuttle bus that takes air passengers to the nearest Caltrain station and to the nearest light rail.

You could have taken lightrail or Caltrain to downtown San Jose, where you could have taken a bus to Santz Cruz. The whole thing mighta cost you fifteen bucks, instead of the $75 you spent on a shuttle. Plus it would have cost you some time. . . . but, imho, time spent sitting on a bus or train or waiting for a bus or train is quality time with myself.

I am disgusted by the way McCain has refused to support Amtrak.

True, in the greater Bay Area, public transit could be better . . . but public transit in the Bay Area is fantastic. I live in Mountain View, about midpoint from San Jose to San Francisco. I don't own a car. True, I do walk a lot. Out here in suburbia, bus stops can be far apart. But I can get almost anywhere on public transit. It takes longer (quality time with self).

Your whining, idnearthsea, about local transit to the San Jose airport is not quite relevant to a discussion of Amtrak. Amtrak is not, not yet, a commuter rail system but a system of interstate travel.

safiyyah. .. your whine about BART bugs me, too. People who complain about BART service and BART pricing must be locals who have no idea how good public transit is in the BAy Area compared to other parts of the country. Also, people have to stop whining about public transit just because public transit is not perfectly convenient. Yes, sometimes you have to wait for a BART train, yes, sometimes BART is off schedule and, yes, it would be great if BART were cheaper. . . . but we are all in this together and if we are going to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, guess what, we are all going to have to change how we live. There will never be a public transit system that will pick us up at our front door, for free, on our schedule, and deliver us, for free and on time, to our destination. That time you spend waiting, that is your one real life. Enjoy that time with yourself, think about your loved ones, rethink a challenge in your work, listen to music, pull out your laptop, dance on the platform, be happy . . . and get over your primadonna, narcissistic, American belief that we should be cosseted and pampered by BART.

I don't own a car. In the two years I have lived in the Bay Area, I have used a taxi one time. Occasionally, but fairly rarely (like once a month) I hitch a ride in a friend's car. Public transit is cheaper than owning a car. Much cheaper. even BART's prices are cheaper than owning a car.

Let's not malign the few good transit systems. BART is a good thing. not perfect. And, also, not really related to a discussion about federal funding for AMTRAK.

Has anyone in this thread taken a train interstate?

I have. I have criss-crossed the country on trains (also, of course, in cars). I fly between San Jose and Seattle regularly. There is something wrong with our transit system when I can fly from SJ to Seattle for less than Amtrak costs. Amtrak should be subsidized and, gosh, doesn't it seem like it should be cheaper to take the train from San Jose to Seattle than to fly? Guess what? Flying is usually cheaper. I'm not complaining about the airfare or the train fare. . . .

also, the trains between SEattle and San Jose are jam packed much of the year. The service on the trains is atrocious. It takes about 40 hours to train travel from Seattle to San Jose and I have sometimes been unable to buy food on the train because they don't provide enough service for all the passengers. There I am, stuck on the train and hungry but the conductor says all the seats for dinner have been allocated. . . . shouldn't Amtrak, um, duh, provide enough employees, staffing dollars and dining cars, for the folks who pay premium prices to ride the train?

TRANS PO'S

WHERE WERE U 9-11-2/?
COMEPLANE--COMEPLANES
THEN ANTHRAX CAME FOR
SOME MORE HORROR ATAX
AMBUSHWACKS LIE WRACK
WARDEADDEBTOR INSTEAD
OF AVIATION TRUSTFUND
AND HIGHWAY TRUSTFUND
LESS POINTLESS ARROWS
BUY THE BULLET TRAINS
CRISSCROSS WANDERLAND
ON BRAND NEW TRAX AND
LIKE POST OFFICE MAIL
RE-FUND AMTRAK'S SAIL

DOWN GOES THE AIRPLANE INDUSTRY
COULD AMTRAK BE ALL IT COULD BE
I THINK IT CAN - I THINK IT CAN
STEAL FUNDING FROM THE MILITARY

not squat trains of thot deraild
sunkinky hot rods springing
crashtrakt truckee back
rode throo reno rold

icend bison snow plateau beautah colored rivers
spent avalanches of silver on skees passed
aspens gold stars and by chance
scard everblue trees

www.Gg-Re.org/POETREEFREE/TRANS-POS-AMTRAK.html
www.Gg-Re.org/POETREEFREE/not-squat-trains-of-thot-deraild.html

P.S.

AMTRASH poem

coming soon or
we get a real transportation system
whichever comes first

McCain is worthless on Amtrak and hurricane Katrina for that matter. He voted against the funding of the reconstruction of the train line from New Orleans to Florida that was destroyed by Katrina. I'm sorry he came back from Vietnam. This man is useless.

Public transport is "socialism"....Why save the environment when armageddon is around the corner?..Let the earth go to hell, because the "true believers" are going to a permanent place in "heaven"..

We should start spending the trillion or so a year we spend on militarism on energy and transportation conversion. It would work. We can catch up to Europe if we get our heads straight.

I love traveling on the TGV in France. People who have not been there imagine that it is sort of crappy and limited like our train system. It's not. They have their own right of way, very special tracks that are welded into continuous rails, so there is no clickity-clack. The sound is more of a "zing" or the ringing of a bell. And there are lots of these trains. You can walk into a train station in Paris and see 20 different fast trains on 20 different tracks that go all over the country.

And they are really comfortable and stylish. There are club cars where you can hang out at a bar and mingle with the other passengers. The newer ones can go over 500 kilometers per hour, or over 300 miles per hour. Passenger jets on domestic flights here in the U.S. only fly a bit over 400 mph now, not much faster than the trains that can go right into the center of the city, avoiding a lot of travel time at each end to get to and from the air port.

And the trains are very, very safe. Here in California we could line the tracks with photovoltaic panels and the entire thing could provide its own energy and be completely carbon neutral.

And we don't have to design the trains, we can just buy them from the French, so there does not have to be any delay. Let's stop buying B2 bombers and nuclear submarines and F-22 fighter planes and instead make our country comfortable and self reliant.

"There's only two parts of the country that can support a viable rail system — the Northeast and the far West."

So? Are not two parts of the country that could benefit (notwithstanding the smaller areas of service throughout the rest of the country) worth the minimal funding the service requires? Is McCain saying that just because right now (because he refuses to help fund it) it's not viable but in a few spots in the country, the entire concept is bunk? and that privatization would ostensibly fix this problem? If it's such a bad concept, according to McLame, then why, if it were privatized, would investors bother putting any of their money into it so it could be developed?

Why, according to McDumb, is a gas tax holiday that would cost millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs a better idea than, say, taking an equivalent of that tax and increasing funding so that passenger rail can expand to other parts of the country (which would help with gas prices in that it reduces consumption and the subsequent cost of it for that person)? Which lobbyist on his campaign is against passenger rail (because you can bet your ass there's at least one)?

Someone needs to point blank ask George W. McCain these questions. I'm sure whatever gem he comes up with will, at the very least, be entertaining.

Donkeyman will mop the floor with this clown.

Back in the days when gas sold at $2 per gallon, it was widely held that the real cost (hence the real subsidy) amounted to an additional $5-15 per gallon. Subsidies to Amtrak are a pittance compared to the subsidies for for cars.

You are right bissot, but if the money used to subsidized Big Fat Oil companies and automakers was invested for a decent intercity rail system like the one in Europe, they would not need to share tracks with freight trains.
But it seems most politicians want to turn this into a 3rd world country (well, they already started)

Public transport in this country in general is pathetic. There are way too many reasons for it. For starters, Americans are spoiled brats. Each one of them wants their own car which runs according his/her schedule so he/she doesn't have to sit next to that weird looking man in the bus/train. Then there is the problem of frequency of trains and reach. Except for few cities like NY and Chicago the train system is non-existent. It is virtually impossible to move over longer distances between the city and suburbs using public transport in quick time. You would reach the top of the himalayas faster than travel from one end of the city to the other.

I did a research thesis on public transport system in Mumbai which has the largest volume of daily travel using public transport. Back in 2000 the then government promoted building flyovers, wider roads, etc to improve travel largely ignoring the fact that much of the population doesn't own cars/bikes. The bottomline is governments can make people use technologies if they make them feasible and cheap. Its not that Americans wouldn't prefer public transport if they had a choice, but in the absence of a viable option we continue on our spoiled ways.

Almost all developed nations have pondered over or acquired fast trains (bullet trains). Europe and Japan use them extensively. If the government invests in modifying current infrastructure to incorporate mass public transport system, the country can rid itself of its oil addiction by a large amount. Imagine if you could travel from Miami to NY in 12 hours? I agree its a little longer than a flight but considering the travel to the airport, screening, flight delays, stop overs, etc you end up using almost 8 hours for a 6 hr flight.

Raising parking fees in the city will also deter people from driving in with their own personal cars.

But all of these options are only feasible if there is an all-round commitment to creating an efficient, sustainable environment which doesn't trade in environmental damage due to our consumption of oil for profits.

Of course, in some places building more trains will help but there is a significant constraint on our ability to ramp up use of passenger rail. Specifically, other than subways and other dedicated light rail systems, passenger trains must share the tracks with freight - and freight gets priority.

So, for intercity rail, you can build all the trains you want but unless you build more track, all it will mean is more passenger trains pulled over to the side while the freight trains chug on by ...

Yes, Bay Area Rapid Transit is none of that. It should be renamed the Bay Area Expensive and Disconnected Transit Farce.

As to Amtrak? Obama has no rational rapid transit proposals that I have heard about? I mean other than continuing with Cheney's war to help the multinational oil companies corner control of the world supply of petroleum.

I am very well aware of McCain's past efforts to kill Amtrak.
I just went to St. Louis last week, and was amazed that for $2.00 I could take the Metro from the airport, a good 20 plus miles from downtown St. Louis, right to the riverfront and my hotel. This is the sort of thing McCain would like to not fund and kill, so that the situation that exists in California would prevail. I left my home in Aptos, near Santa Cruz, having to pay $75 for a shuttle service to the San Jose Airport, some 35 miles from where I live. At the San Jose Airport, one cannot take a bus directly to the train station, some two miles away, near downtown San Jose where I would take a bus to Santa Cruz; and there isn't a train stop anywhere near where I live anyway, despite a rail line that is only used for freight by Union Pacific, and has had a revival of passenger rail service fought against by people living near the track for the last seventeen years in what's supposed to be ultra- liberal and progressive Santa Cruz County! The light rail system was built in San Jose with a track a half mile to the east of the airport that is a wee bit too far for anyone to walk with luggage. Parking revenues were more important than serving the public for the good of the public!
Of course funding trains, whether high-speed, light rail in-city systems, or commuter trains from suburbs to city, is more important now than ever. The Europeans have gotten it right. Meanwhile, the Bushistas, in what we hope will be their last few months in office, have just put a two year hold on solar energy sites, and I've never heard the trained chimp in the White House say these two words together: public and transportation! Let's hope the oil wars stop, and the funding of mass transit, and a mandate that all cars in America be built as hybrids or electric is the goal of Obama, and that McCain is left on the dust pile of politicians!