Infrastructure Summer: Amtrak Victorious

The much-maligned rail operator gets some respect and more than a few billion in banknotes out of the bruising infrastructure battle.

by

Providing quality rail service to major metro areas and a measure of mobility for those in remote areas should not be controversial. But like vaccinations against an often fatal disease and teaching American history, dependable passenger rail service has been treated like a stain on what remains of the nation’s experiment with representative democracy.

Yet with the bipartisan infrastructure package, which cleared a key cloture vote over the weekend, Amtrak riders are big winners. The beleaguered rail operator scored $66 billion in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). After years of legislative chaos on the infrastructure front, nothing is certain. But if the bill passes, Amtrak will get some stability that adds up to a vote of confidence.

In fiscal 2019, Amtrak passengers made 32.5 million trips across the entire national network. More than half of them (18.8 million) were along the Northeast Corridor (NEC) between Boston and Washington. If those trips were instead made on Interstate 95, the often-gridlocked north-south thoroughfare on the East Coast, the highway would likely be unnavigable.

More from Gabrielle Gurley

Sinking $22 billion into the national network and $12 billion into brand new intercity rail services (along with $24 billion in federal/state partnership grants for the NEC) has nothing to do with misguided fantasies about the romance of trains. There is nothing romantic about big-city business travel, going home to spend the weekend studying, or hauling cranky kids to visit grandparents.

In remote wilderness expanses along the Canadian border like northern Montana, Amtrak is the only way for non-drivers to get to somewhere else. Southern Montana wants restoration of the route that used to connect its major cities, Billings, Bozeman, Helena, and Missoula, please and thank you. No private rail operator would ever serve the tiny towns of Libby (population 2703) or Browning (population about 1,000), the tribal headquarters of the Blackfeet Nation. Amtrak does. The Gulf Coast wants to restore the New Orleans to Mobile route that Hurricane Katrina washed out 16 years ago. Overall, Amtrak aims to launch routes that would eventually serve 160 new communities and connect the country’s 50 largest metro areas.

But absent a revolutionary shift in thinking about how to serve regional corridors, resolve frictions with freight rail, and raise the necessary billions (because “pay-fors” won’t cut it), Amtrak will never be able to provide the kind of true high-speed rail that France or China enjoys within the lifetime of anyone alive today. These are difficult facts for some rail enthusiasts to grasp, as they bemoan what they consider to be the flaws of the bipartisan package. Members of Congress like Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) put their shoulders to a laudable proposal for $205 billion investment in true high-speed rail to catch up to the investments made long ago in other developed countries. But if there is no appetite in Congress to commit to the INVEST Act’s proposed $95 billion rail investment, a sum that would have hurled Amtrak across time and space into 21st century, it is highly probable that that the reactions from Moulton’s colleagues range from eyerolls to polite pats on the back.

Critics of rail investment exhibit a willful inability to grasp that Amtrak is an essential form of travel, as deserving of federal dollars as highways and airports in the age of climate change.

At a practical level, an investment that offers millions of dollars per mile to specific corridors should be able to build what other countries did with a similar amount of funding from scratch. But the political reality is that the collapse of the California High-Speed Rail project has doomed any Amtrak-led push for true high-speed rail for the foreseeable future. President Obama launched a major push for high-speed rail, but after governors in Wisconsin and Florida turned down the money, he sadly put all his chips on the most ambitious project possible, a route from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It is frustrating and embarrassing that the state may only produce what amounts to a hellaciously expensive spur between Merced and Bakersfield in the Central Valley.  

It is not widely appreciated that true high-speed rail demands straight stretches of open land. These kinds of parcels really do not exist on the most built-out and densely populated intercity rail section in the U.S., the curvy NEC, between Boston and Washington. Transforming NEC into European-style high-speed rail would demand leveraging eminent domain powers that no local or state leader would propose or tolerate.

What is within the realm of possibility is higher speed rail, and the NEC would fit this approach well. The best way to get to higher speed rail is to prioritize and fast-track building modern bridges and tunnels that would allow trains to regularly hit speeds approaching 110 miles per hour, rather than the much-reduced speeds that Amtrak hits now.

President Biden got $30 billion out of his $36 billion ask for NEC, which in the current political climate is a major accomplishment. The replacements of the malfunctioning, delay-spawning Connecticut River Bridge between Old Saybrook and Old Lyme (1907), and its partner in crime, the Walk Bridge (1896) in Norwalk, Connecticut, are within sight.

There are two other major bottlenecks to eliminate. The new Baltimore and Potomac tunnel (1873) south of Maryland’s largest city (which will be renamed after Frederick Douglass) is a $4 billion project in the final design and land acquisition stages. And there’s the mammoth Gateway Program that includes replacing the creaky Portal Bridge (1910) and the leaky Hudson River (1907) tunnel between New York and New Jersey. The price tag for the tunnel alone is $11.6 billion.

Gateway will get a generous slice of the $6 billion destined for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, and can compete for $24 billion in NEC modernization grants along with other projects. But tunnel project costs in the United States have a way of blowing past initial projections, for a variety of unsavory reasons such as delays and mismanagement. There’s a cautionary tale that federal officials no doubt have in mind: The initial price tag for Boston’s infamous Big Dig, the most expensive public works project ever undertaken in the U.S to date, was projected to cost $2 to $3 billion The final cost was $22 billion. It took more than two decades to complete the highway/tunnel megaproject and won’t be paid off until 2038. 

A new report by the Eno Center for Transportation found that American transit project costs balloon out of control due to slipshod governance, ineffective bureaucratic processes, and custom designs for nearly every feature instead of standardization in railcars and stations, and other details. Gateway will require serious guardrails and rigorous oversight to ensure that it does not morph into a Bigger Dig.        

Critics of rail investment represent a willful inability to grasp that Amtrak is an essential form of travel, as deserving of federal dollars as highways and airports in the age of climate change. Rail service is one area where most members of Congress step on to something that looks like common ground. Unhappiness with how Amtrak spends its money should be countered with effective congressional overseers and competent state-level managers (and we should learn from our international counterparts in this respect). Riders should not endure subpar service because tired, old conservatives want to trot out tired, old diatribes about waste, fraud, and abuse at every conceivable opportunity.

The reason for Amtrak’s surprising success in this year’s infrastructure battle can be traced back to a grieving widower and father who commuted from his Washington job to get back home to his kids every night in Wilmington, Delaware. Amtrak provided the vehicle to do that. During those commutes, Joe Biden learned a thing or three about how Americans use and rely on a slow but steady rail network that needs to be kicked up more than a notch.

This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.

A second Trump administration will cement a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and put our collective future in the hands of someone who will be virtually unchecked by our institutions. The country has shifted rightward, and the reverberations will ensue for potentially the next few decades. In this climate, a robust independent media ecosystem will be more important than ever. We're committed to bringing you the latest news on how Trump's agenda will actually affect the American people, shining a light on the stories corporate media overlooks and keeping the public informed about how power really works in this country.

Quality journalism is expensive to produce, and we don't have corporate backers to rely on to fund what we do. Everything we do is thanks to our incredible community of readers, who chip in a few dollars at a time to make our work possible. Any amount you give today will help us continue reporting on what matters to our democracy.

You can help power this newsroom by making a one-time donation or by becoming a member today.