A summary of how badly Amtrak has failed the interests of passenger rail; some plausible reasons why; and a slightly outdated argument for its piecemeal privatization. Vranich has worked for Amtrak, likes trains generally, is a high-speed-train proponent.
Amtrak hasn't worked for anyone, doesn't like its customers, and is a proponent of redefining 'high speed trains' to get Amtrak more funding. I summarize, but even though I really like riding trains, riding Amtrak hasn't given me reason to distrust Vranich's tables of damning data.
Vranich's proposed solution is all about privatization, and looks a little scruffier now than it did in 1997 when this was published. As he wrote, Japan's railways had had wildly profitable privatizations in the '80s but were suffering as Japan's depression took hold; likewise for some examples about airline profitability as private ventures - which are a bit less convincing after the post-boom's airline closings, national airline subsidies, bailouts. Also, Britain's privatized rail isn't a gonfalon of glory for the process. So I would worry that the very good results reported during the economic booms depended on the booms.
A much more interesting argument, which Vranich adumbrates but does not, I think, ever say, is that train travel is now valuable because of cities. (He's so Northeast-Sprawl-centric that he may think it goes without saying. Even there, surely there's been some change in the popularity of train lines as the urban centers they were built with decay and regrow?) The death and tortured sort-of strangled-by-Amtrak-and-highway-authorities rebirth of rail in the States lines up very well with the death and rebirth of our cities.
The romantic view, and Amtrak in some unhealthy combination of romance, dog-in-the-manger, and Congressional pork, think of 'real' trains as long-distance trains. Japan and Europe have their glorious high-speed trains, which can compete with air travel. At, oh, an hour of plane flight, merely fast trains are competitive. (With longer security checkthroughs on planes, trains get another little edge.) But what makes a medium-distance train trip competitive with air between Seattle and either Portland or Vancouver, BC is not the shorter lines, or the roomier seating, but that I live in the city in Seattle - and am usually visiting the city itself at either end - and the trains pick me up and drop me off where I want to be. The airports are all to heck and gone; Portland's is convenient because they -- built a train.
Train travel also depends on the trains being even vaguely on time: Vranich's book explains that the long-haul train that goes all the way to California is under Amtrak's control, which is why it's almost-but-not-quite-dependably late; the BC-Seattle-Portland one is as much as possible a state endeavor, and is much nicer and more reliable, except when the long-hauler comes through and bollixes it up.
When the cities are really both ends of most travel, e.g. BostonNewYorkPhiladelphia, also increasing parts of California, commuter rail comes into its own, and obviously nothing carries as many people - thinking about London and New York reminds one that the subway and the elevator were equally needed to achieve those densities. There's something of a balance between the annoying non-privacy on the train, and the ability to do something other than drive. I like transit because I can't think about anything deeply while driving, not without becoming a total danger to myself, others, street trees. So driving is lost time, where the bus and walking aren't. The lagniappe that may finally get lots of people onto commuter rail is, as Brad DeLong remarked, WiFi access.
The routing problems are still hard, where two systems have to share rails or switchpoints. One of the oddities of Britain's privatization, it seemed to me, was to break the system into regional carriers - and then claim they were supposed to compete with each other, as though a trip from City A to City B could substitute for a trip between other cities. As with air travel, the interesting specialties are more likely to be between really different kinds of travel; private varnish scenic cruises, executive express commuter trains, seasonal car-carrying trains to and from snowy regions. All of these are likely to share some tracks with each other and with the freight trains.
Any train-ignorant computer nerd at this point is thinking, "Okay, packet switching protocol, collision algorithms - I guess we need collision avoidance algorithms - Shannon, innit? Model me something with competing trains over common lines, and tell me how to isolate the variables they're really bidding for - speed, reliability, ability to run really long trains. Cool problem." The freight companies have clearly solved some of it w.r.t. covering repsonsibility and costs for the tracks themselves - as the brownout over the Northeast showed this summer, that can be a hard problem in deregulating.
Nothing so specific in Vranich's book. I must go look.
ISBN: 0-312-17182-X
So wrote clew in Cities. , History (20th c.). , Technology. | TrackBack