Amtrak Needs More Federal Backing, Not Privatization

To the editors:



Re “Plane Pain,” op-ed, May 10,

Emily Ingram tells us that the answer to inadequate rail passenger service in the United States is to privatize Amtrak just the way the British privatized their national rail system.

Unfortunately, Ingram didn’t do her homework. If she had, she would have discovered that British rail privatization has been a disaster, that, in fact, the British system has been substantially “deprivatized” after dozens of passengers were killed or maimed on the system, and that today, Britain is spending a lot more public money on its national rail passenger system than it was prior to privatization.

Moreover, Ingram doesn’t seem to understand that the American rail passenger system was privatized, and it went bankrupt. That’s why the Nixon administration created Amtrak. And the private freight railroads, which are doing well these days, want no part of a return to passenger service. They couldn’t make money on it when they ran it, and they would require massive public subsidies to return to the passenger business.

There is nothing wrong with Amtrak that a modest but consistent amount of capital investment couldn’t cure. Virtually every region of the country has detailed plans for major improvements in the Amtrak system if the Bush administration would wake up and understand that we desperately need a first-class rail passenger system in this country.

In fact, even with the annual budget battle that the system has to endure every year, Amtrak ridership has hit record levels in the past three years. It takes approximately six-and-a-half hours, not in excess of nine, to travel from Boston to Washington, D.C. on the Acela, and it wouldn’t take much in the way of capital investment to cut those times significantly. The private freight railroads are required by law to make their rights of way available to Amtrak, so there is no need for Amtrak to “lease” them. What is needed is a collaborative effort between Amtrak and the freight railroads to expand and add capacity to the existing system so that Amtrak trains don’t have to wait around for freight trains to get out of their way—the single most important reason why Amtrak’s on time performance on some of its long distance routes isn’t what it should be.

Finally, Ingram should check her facts. The French railroads are run by the government, and they are excellent, as anybody knows who has ridden the TGV.

Amtrak doesn’t need a repeat of the British disaster. It already has strong bipartisan support in the Congress. What it needs is a president who understands how critical a first-class national rail passenger system is to the future of the country. Unfortunately, we will have to wait until 2008 to finally achieve that goal.



MICHAEL S. DUKAKIS

May 13, 2006



The writer, a former vice chair of the Amtrak Board of Directors, is a former governor of Massachusetts and a former Democratic presidential nominee.