October 23, 2007
Amtrak Strike Looms as Ridership Tops Record
There's an unsettling series of headlines today about Amtrak. Breaking just now is word that the unions representing Amtrak employees are expected to reject an offer this week for binding arbitration with the passenger rail service, which sets up a possible strike at the beginning of 2008.
The news comes on the same day that Amtrak is reporting a record year of ridership. 25.8 million passengers took Amtrak in the last fiscal year, up 1.5 million over 2006. The growth was primarily fueled by increased ticket sales in the Northeast, noted especially in the surging popularity of the Boston-to-Washington Acela Express line.
As the AP points out, Amtrak has never had an employee strike in its 36-year history, though one was seriously threatened in 1997, and another in 2004. Congress is likely to intervene in this current deadlock, as it has done in the past, to attempt to prevent a strike. Considering how many more people are relying on Amtrak than ever before, even a short January strike would likely be a huge disruption along the Northeast corridor.
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Amtrak trains might run more efficiently with no employees.
Does this mean that fares will be even more exorbitant?
You two perfectly distilled Amtrak into its essence: slow, unreliable, and expensive. I still don't understand why anybody wastes their time with this service. I would much rather take the extra two and a half hours and ride the bus for a fraction of the cost.
Actually, there weren't 25.8 million passengers. There were 25.8 million tickets sold. It's heavily used by a very small subset of the population--maybe there were 10 million distinct passengers. With the phrasing you used, you could say that, last year in the U.S., there were 60 billion automobile passengers--because everyone rides in a car so often.
Friend of you -- the transit industry uses the phrase "passenger trips" (or to be totally technical, "unlinked passenger trips") since there is no way of knowing how many of those trips were the same person. Similarly, growth in automobile travel is measured in vehicle trips and vehicle miles traveled.
As for intercity rail passengers being a small subset of the population, that small subset is enough to fill up two trains an hour in the peak periods -- have you ever seen the line for the New York-bound train at 5:00 on a Friday?
Um...why would I want to take Amtrak to New York? Possibly because I'd rather spend 3 or so hours in an environment where I can read, sleep, or actually hear music through my headphones instead of spending the same amount of time to be cavity searched by TSA an National and wind up in Queens facing a $50 cab ride into Manhattan.
No, Amtrak isn't as reliable as it could be. Some of that is Amtrak mismanagement. Some of that is bad infrastructure (the system is, after all, dependent upon tracks it does not own and is not allowed to maintain). Some of it is out and out sabotage by the Fed (what else can you call massive airline bail-outs and no investment in high speed rail?). At this rate we'll be the only "civilized" country without a functioning rail system before we hit the second decade of this century.