AMTRAK IN CALIFORNIA

California Legislators must more carefully consider our national existing "third world rail system" before furthering the High Speed Rail concept they think is best for Californians.

The vision for future service to Californians should begin with overcoming the inertia of truly considering a strategy of leadership in changing mobility design for the urban realm.

The Amtrak Reform Council (ARC) is still fixed in the idea of singular intercity passenger rail service. Meanwhile the states urban development is spreading horizontally across our land in the formation of a mega-megalopolis, humorously named SAN-SAN by urban observers.

The long-standing flaws of non-electrified freight and passenger service on a single rail line are dreadfully outdated for any kind of satisfactory service. Even although Amtrak represents a low grade entitlement program or one train each way each day through the average Congressional district with a small smattering of jobs for rail labor, it's scale is modest when compared to welfare programs and farm subsidies.

Amtrak’s organization resists and resents change. ARC was created with much skepticism. The history of Amtrak's financial crisis never quite collapses but never makes headway. The reaction to ARC's report according to Gil Carmichael, the Chairman of Denver’s Intermodal Transportation Institute can be summed up as follows 'Of course Amtrak is defective, but don't mess with it.' Rail fans battle to preserve entitlements, while rail labor sees ARC as a threat.

Amtrak is failing under its current structure and operating philosophy. The institutional flaws, management, government oversight, funding allocations have little if any public policies for productive change. It is symptomatic of most current apartheid attitudes towards road, airlines and transit based transportation systems in which government plays the role of stasis.

The White House has a huge task of leadership in advancing the nations transportation futures. Leadership is not forthcoming from States or cities. It is time for questioning and appropriately answering intermodal connections.

Maybe it is time for citizens to seriously question the triad of Transportation Equity, Environmental Justice and Civil Rights with regard to all of our national mobility problems. Mobility connectedness deserves the highest priority in these times of national civil defense.

BY Graham Kaye-Eddie – Master Urban Designer.

Makabusi Inc. – Bakersfield – California

Email – makabusi@pacbell.net

Amtrak

The little engine that couldn't.

California, nation need Amtrak

California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein call on President Bush to approve a $200 million federal loan guarantee to allow Amtrak to continue its passenger rail operation.

Amtrak Wheeze, New York Shudder

The worry ricocheting through the New York region's transportation agencies yesterday was that if push came to shove in Amtrak's fight for emergency help from the government, the railroad would not just shut down its own trains, it would park them in the tunnels under Pennsylvania Station.

Whether or not such a threat was really uttered in the talks in Washington between Amtrak and Bush administration officials, the very idea points up the little-known but enormously important place Amtrak occupies at the heart of the unwieldy thicket of interconnected agencies that make up the metropolitan area's railroad network.

Amtrak's trump card, in effect, is its real estate. As the owner of Pennsylvania Station, the tracks beneath it and the tunnels leading to it from Queens and New Jersey, Amtrak has its hand on a spigot controlling a flow of 1,100 trains and more than 300,000 passengers into and out of Manhattan each day.

The largest contributor to that flow is the Long Island Rail Road, which moves 550 trains and 235,000 people to and from Penn Station daily. That railroad leases tunnels and tracks from Amtrak but employs its own dispatchers, electricians and track workers, said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

For that reason, Mr. Kelly said, the Long Island would have the "technical capacity" to operate if Amtrak shut down. But he acknowledged that Amtrak would still have to grant permission. "If they don't," he said, "then you've got another problem."

The Long Island Rail Road has had longstanding contingency plans for responding to strikes by Amtrak workers, Mr. Kelly said. Those plans include running buses along the railroad's routes and running trains to stations with easy connections to the New York City subway system.

Though the Long Island Rail Road is bigger, the New Jersey Transit rail system is more vulnerable to an Amtrak shutdown, said James P. Fox, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Transportation. Not only does Amtrak own the tunnels and much of the track on which New Jersey commuter trains run, he said, but Amtrak operates them, in exchange for a fee. So an Amtrak shutdown would make it impossible for New Jersey Transit to operate throughout most of its rail system.

A shutdown would idle 56 percent of New Jersey Transit's trains, affecting 82,000 commuters, or three of every four of its riders, Mr. Fox said.

The result would be chaos for the transportation network and for the regional economy, he said.

"I don't know how you plan for that," Mr. Fox said. "It'd be dishonest to tell the public there's a contingency plan you could put in effect that could mitigate that."

Mr. Fox said New Jersey Transit did not have enough buses to absorb more than 80,000 extra passengers. "It would take me 1,200 buses," he said. "First of all, we don't have 1,200 buses. And even if we go to the private sector, there aren't 1,200 buses to be had."

Commuters in Westchester County and Connecticut would be far less affected by an Amtrak shutdown. Unlike the Long Island Rail Road, the Metro-North Commuter Railroad owns its track, and charges Amtrak a fee to use it, said Dan Brucker, a Metro-North spokesman.

Mr. Brucker said an Amtrak shutdown would cost Metro-North about $850,000 a year it now receives as an incentive for on-time performance by Amtrak trains. But the only noticeable effect for commuters, he said, would be overcrowding on Metro-North's Port Jervis and Pascack Valley lines, which end in Hoboken and thus would most likely draw displaced New Jersey Transit riders.

In Connecticut, Amtrak operates the Shore Line East, a little-traveled commuter line that carries about 1,200 passengers a day between New Haven and New London, said Harry Harris, a spokesman for the State Department of Transportation. A contingency plan calls for buses to replace the six or seven three-car trains that run daily, he said.

Mr. Harris said that some freight trains ran on Amtrak lines between New Haven and Springfield, Mass., but that there were no contingency plans to handle that traffic.

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER June 25, 2002

Amtrak a historic relic

Users of Amtrak were waiting for word on whether the troubled passenger rail service would suspend operations as soon as tomorrow unless the federal government provides at least $200 million in emergency funding. A shutdown likely would have serious repurcussions, especially for commuters; 60,000 people travel on its trains every business day, with the heaviest volume in the Northeast corridor between Washington and Boston. Against that backdrop, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta was to meet with Amtrak officials as the Monitor went to press on a way to forestall a shutdown.

Rerailing Amtrak

Amtrak either needs a radical restructuring or a full-fledged commitment from Congress to amply subsidize the system.

HSR Transportation California

A $9 billion bond measure to start construction of a 700-mile, high-speed rail system was approved by the state Senate but the bill didn't get the two-thirds majority it ultimately will need. The measure would allow the state to sell bonds to help pay for the first leg of a system designed to link California's major metropolitan areas with trains running at top speeds of more than 200 mph.

The White House said Wednesday Amtrak won't be shut down. Officials say they will find a way to balance the books and keep the doors open. It sounds like we just found out where Arthur Andersen will be performing its community service hours. Argus Hamilton