Why we should be fighting the breakup of Amtrak

States Rights? Image mosaic produced with FD's Flickr Toys.

In response to the question "Why exactly should we be fighting the breakup of Amtrak?" Andy Kunz writes:

Because this is the beginning of the end of Amtrak. Bush and company are trying everything they can to dismantle the entire train system nationwide, and by breaking it up into pieces, and separating out the northeast, which is the busiest part and probably the only potentially profitable part, the rest will end up shut down due to the states being forced to take on a much larger portion of funding when they are all strapped for money. This plan is to shift the burden away from the Federal Government to the states, and most states cannot afford this without federal help, and will end up cutting service and cutting some more until the trains are slowly shut down all across the country. Considering our current situation of rapidly rising gas prices, peaking oil, endless wars for oil, and global warming, cutting any train service, and getting us all that much more dependent on cars has to be the stupidest thing anyone can do. But if you are in the oil, auto, and defense businesses, it is the smartest thing one can do.

This is not a plan to improve the system, it is a plan to destroy our only viable train system. As you know, trains go hand in hand with everything we do to create walkable communities. Long distance and regional trains support local trains, which supports walkable communities and the ability to live without cars for many. The longer distance trains are an important part of the entire continuum, and without them, local service suffers and more people end up driving because taking the train is no longer convenient. To really promote urbanism and to help get us off the oil we need 3 levels of trains, long distance, regional, and local. With any of these 3 missing, the entire system suffers and people are pushed back into cars.

I'm not saying Amtrak is great, far from it, but it is all we have now. The way to fix our train systems is to start building a new, parallel system separate from Amtrak, but keep Amtrak running in the meantime. Once a new system is up and running (which could have private companies running the trains as they do in Europe on government owned and operated tracks), we can slowly phase out Amtrak. But to shut it down now will kill the entire system the way the streetcars were killed in the 1940s and 1950s, and now here we are 50 years later trying to rebuild it. With all those years without trains, the car-oriented pattern took over and going back is extremely difficult now.

________
Also, as I write ad infinitum, Amtrak is a local economic development issue in DC. The railyards and maintenance facilities provide good "blue collar" jobs for many. And it's likely that state transportation departments could care little about how well DC connects to Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.

Just like DCPS has a "State Education Office" to comply with various federal mandates, maybe we need a DC Railroad Transportation Division as part of DDOT.

Rather than giving tax incentives to Dress Barn (more later), we should really focus on this...

From a webpage, about Railroad Freight Transportation Planning at the State Level, for DC: "No freight organization in DOT". Click here for the DC State Transportation Profile and having done a google search for "railroad" and the ddot domain, I can't seem to find a railroad policy unit in DDOT.