New York Sun: "Realign Amtrak"

The New York Sun, a conservative city-based paper, published an op-ed making the case for privatizing Amtrak ("Realign, Amtrak," Joseph Vranich, September 15, 2006):

Today the Senate will vote on whether to give Amtrak a record $1.6 billion in subsidies for next year and still more for a loan bailout. This is wrong. It's past time for someone in Congress to apply the brakes to the run-away Amtrak train

The bill at issue, promoted by Senators Lott, Clinton, and Schumer, aims to reform Amtrak. But it is only a pretend reform. One problem is that it prohibits competition against Amtrak's monopoly by private contractors who have taken over and improved trains in Europe, Australia and South America and won contests against Amtrak to run commuter trains in Boston, Los Angeles and San Diego. The bill allows domestic freight railroads to bid on any one Amtrak route in 2008, but freight lines like Union Pacific and CSX have made it clear they have no interest in doing so. Hence, the Senate bill thumbs its nose at innovative solutions that 56 nations have applied to their Amtrak-like problems.

A transportation expert at the Heritage Foundation, Ron Utt, hits the nail on the head when he notes that the proposals taken as a whole fall short of real reforms: "It is replete with directives, alterations, restructurings, subsidies, studies, reports, metrics, five-year plans, transitions, and other forms of top-down micromanagement designed to create the impression that spinning wheels represent forward movement."

Part of the case Vranich makes is that cutting under-used routes would free up resources for Amtrak to concentrate on useful routes, most notably the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C., and Boston.

He largely models a proposed privatization scheme on the British privatization of railroads in the 1980s.