Why did Amtrak's Silver Palm fail and would a state funded Amtrak service be viable now?

The bottom line, in part, includes these issues:

• A train, as much as we like them, will not alleviate the issues you speak of. It simply won't.
• No Amtrak train makes money. Not even on the Northeast Corridor.
• Florida has never been a place Amtrak wants to go. Don't forget that even after the infrastructure in the Gulf was fixed after Katrina, the Sunset Limited never went East of New Orleans ever again. All those depots along the Alabama and Florida coasts sit dormant to this day, even though the service wasn't used much anyway before that. Yeah, the Auto Train leaves out of Florida, but gets out of there as fast as it can with that through service. And like all other Amtrak trains, your tax dollars subsidize every ticket.

As much as I hate to say it, there will probably come a day when Congress says they're getting out of the passenger train business.

No. Brightline is a fresh start with no union rules forcing them to pay coffee shop attendants $75,000 per year, for example. And a "director of affirmative action" at $180,000. Plus a 20 person staff. When service is extended to Jacksonville, I think Brightline will stand a good chance to make money. Anybody but Amtrak.

p51 posted:

The bottom line, in part, includes these issues:

• A train, as much as we like them, will not alleviate the issues you speak of. It simply won't.
• No Amtrak train makes money. Not even on the Northeast Corridor.
• Florida has never been a place Amtrak wants to go. Don't forget that even after the infrastructure in the Gulf was fixed after Katrina, the Sunset Limited never went East of New Orleans ever again. All those depots along the Alabama and Florida coasts sit dormant to this day, even though the service wasn't used much anyway before that. Yeah, the Auto Train leaves out of Florida, but gets out of there as fast as it can with that through service. And like all other Amtrak trains, your tax dollars subsidize every ticket.

As much as I hate to say it, there will probably come a day when Congress says they're getting out of the passenger train business.

https://media.amtrak.com/2016/...6-financial-results/

https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...g-true-costs/412237/

Highways and airlines/airports are heavily subsidized by the government too so there is really no major form of transportation in America that does not receive some sort of subsidy from the government.  The new Orlando airport terminal costs over a billion dollars.  I understand any new Amtrak service would have to be subsidized but the goal should be to keep operating loses to a minimum.  The Pacific Surfliner,  Capitol  Corridor and San Joaquin which are state funded by Amtrak have very impressive ridership and are some of the most frequented routes outside of the Northeast.   The reason why Amtrak does not invest more time into Florida is because the state government is very hostile to intercity passenger rail and CSX has Tallahassee in their pockets.   If the state decided to fund passenger rail I am sure Amtrak would be more then happy to cooperate.  I mean how many more lanes can they really add to I75.  It is already six lanes from Wildwood to the Georgia boarder and they are making it six lanes from Wildwood to Tampa now.  US301 is pretty much 4 lanes from Baldwin to Wildwood except for a small section south of Bellview.  It would cost billions to add new lanes and it would still not relieve congestion or reduce suburban sprawl.  

There have been several threads about FL passenger service.  This is one of them:

https://ogrforum.com/...k-service-in-florida

It seems as if the people of FL do not want to pay for government services.  I have heard from family members that live in FL that even schools are under funded.

California, on the the other hand, has some of the highest taxes in the country.  The sales tax is 10% in the SF Bay Area and the maximum income tax is 11%.  The legislature just voted to raise the gas tax by 12 cents a gallon and to charge electric cars $100 per year in order to fund transportation projects.  Basically, Californians are willing to tax themselves to pay for transportation and other services.  I suppose that you get what you are willing to pay for.

NH Joe

That's it, make the people who don't need a service pay the bill.  Karl Marx thought that was a great idea. You buy everything in his store whether you want it or not.

I just think most transportation services need to be privatized.  Water and air also.  Those ROW would become tax paying.

JohnActon posted:

That's it, make the people who don't need a service pay the bill.  Karl Marx thought that was a great idea. You buy everything in his store whether you want it or not.

https://www.strongtowns.org/jo...i-scheme-part-2.html

Most roads built actually do not create enough tax revenue to cover the cost to maintain them.  I do not use Medicare but my tax dollars still cover that and my tax dollars cover subsidizing air travel and roads to rural areas I do not visit or live in.  If everyone said they did not want their tax dollars to cover a certain piece of infrastructure or social program nothing would ever get funded and society would crumble.

Dominic Mazoch posted:

I just think most transportation services need to be privatized.  Water and air also.  Those ROW would become tax paying.

Every developed country subsidizing their transportation infrastructure because it is seen as a creator of commerce and a public good.  Even back in the day private railroads were subsidized through land grants and during the 1930's the Pennsylvania railroad got a loan from the government to finish their electrification.   if airlines were not subsidized all you would be left with would be routes between major hubs and any air travel to any rural or medium sized city would disappear.  Most highways would end up becoming toll roads and you would be at the mercy of who ever owns the road charges.  Passenger rail would probably be only the North East Corridor and maybe some of the California corridor services would still exist.  

Sure highways and air travel are subsidized, but those are used way more than passenger rail.

Like it or not, a tiny fraction of Americans ever get to see an Amtrak train, let alone go riding on one.

JohnActon posted:

That's it, make the people who don't need a service pay the bill.  Karl Marx thought that was a great idea. You buy everything in his store whether you want it or not.

Your taxes pay for all kinds of things you'll never use. I don't have kids, so does this mean I shouldn't pay any taxes for schools? Should I only be taxed for the roads I travel on and not the ones I never will? The VA denied my disability claim, so does this mean I shouldn't pay any taxes that go for vet services?

Of course not. There'll always be things the government pays for that you never use. That's how it's supposed to work.

I do agree that the spending has gotten a little silly in recent years, lawmakers asking that those with, give bigger portions to those without...

I will be attending the NMRA convention in Orlando during the first week in August and then driving to Jacksonville.  I will get to experience the FL roads first hand on bus tours and by private auto.  My brother, who lives in the Jacksonville area, was an Amtrak manager / planner before he retired.  I'll ask him about the various FL transportation proposals.  He was involved with many of them and still knows the people who are doing rail planning in FL.

The problem in CA is that the population keeps growing at a faster pace than we can build new roads.  Also, there isn't any more space to build new roads.  I think that the CA high speed rail will eventually be completed between SF and LA although it is having a rocky start.  Caltrain which owns and operates train service between SF and San Jose (about 60 miles) is about to start a major line upgrade including electrification of the line.  The electrification will be one of the first high speed rail projects.  A new Caltrain / High Speed Rail terminal has been under construction in downtown SF for the past several years.

The counties (Marin and Sonoma) just north of SF across the Golden Gate Bridge are about to start a new SMART commuter train service.  SMART stands for Sonoma-Marin Rail Area Transit.  The SMART system is built on the old SP Northwest Pacific right of way.  It is using diesel powered train cars (modern versions of RDCs) with positive train control.  It should start running later this year.  This line is 43 miles long and will hopefully relieve congestion on Highway 101 which is a parking lot much of the day.  This is another example of CA investing in new rail transportation systems with tax payer support.

Here is a link to this new commuter rail service:  http://sonomamarintrain.org

The people of the Northeast are fortunate that the PRR and NH railroads decided to electrify their lines in the early 1900s.  

NH Joe 

JohnActon posted:

That's it, make the people who don't need a service pay the bill.  Karl Marx thought that was a great idea. You buy everything in his store whether you want it or not.

That is a typical statement, but those who say it never realize who is paying the bill for services they use. Farm subsidies amount to close to 100 billion a year, for example, people in rural areas have things like electricity, phone service and broadband cable access because of subsidies, public schools are generally funded from property taxes whether you have kids or not, and the guy who has 5 kids pays the same property tax as those who have none, which is a subsidy. There is an irony in all this, some of the people who are the most subsidized are the ones who run around grumbling about socialism, about forced to pay for others, some of the places that grumble the loudest about this are some of the most tax subsidized states in the union, whereas places that often advocate for this kind of spending live in places with negative tax return to their state (ie pay more than they get back). 

Train service only will work where there is enough demand to make it work, pure and simple. In theory a corridor like Miami to Tampa should be dense enough population to support train travel, given especially how crowded Florida highways are, but if people choose not to use them, perhaps for example if taking the train was a lot more expensive then taking a car and likely slower, it will fail, pure and simple. People will curse at traffic jams, complain bitterly about the @&&@#*! politicians who do nothing, but when given for example train service where they wouldn't have to drive, they take the aggravation and whatnot of driving (among other things, people don't factor in the cost of driving totally, they might say "I will spend X on gasoline and Y on parking if I drive", but leave out the wear and tear on the car, the cost of insurance,etc. The figure for tax reasons a car costs around 55c a mile or so last I checked, if you trip is several hundred miles, that could come out to be a lot of money they don't figure for). 

Part of the problem with Amtrak is they are burdened by having to maintain routes that make no sense, often because of the same politicians who clamor to privatize Amtrak or get rid of it, there are a lot of towns being served by trains where ridership is nill, and trains have fixed costs of operation.  The people of Nowhere Special want to have train service, they would see losing it as 'abandoning them', but they their politicians claim Amtrak is useless and 'we don't want to pay for people in the Northeast to use Amtrak" (and leave out, of course, the many things, including those highways they love to expand or build, that are heavily paid for by the federal government, when interstate highways are built unless a state totally forgoes federal money (usually so they can make it a toll road), in many states large percent of the cost comes from the federal government, and it dwarfs the amount that state provides in for example gas taxes, whereas other states spend a lot more on highway construction than they get from the feds. Problem is people when it is them receiving the money, it is the way it should be, when others get it, it is frivolous. 

When you have population density and  more importantly business traffic, it makes sense to have alternatives. Many of the sun belt cities that were harkened as the future of the country, going to be the business centers, have hit brick walls, choking on traffic (Atlanta is one of them, our HQ is there, and when I go there the traffic reminds me of the Cross Bronx Expressway), whereas places that have mass transit plants do much better, even as much as people complain about them. A lot of things are subsidized, and for example the airline industry is much like Amtrak in that popular routes or less popular one, subsidies keep it going, airlines provide service to fly speck airports and rural areas, and the only way that happens is because it is subsidized. The cost of flying could become economically a lot less viable if airlines had to pay for the cost of airports, the cost of maintaining those airports, the cost of the air traffic control system and all the other parts that today they pay only a small fraction of the cost. Trucking is another heavily subdidized industry, what trucks pay for in road use taxes and diesel fuel taxes covers only a fraction of the cost of their trucks operating on the roads, a 40 ton rig causes exponentially more damage and wear to roads than a car does, yet cars pay for a lot more of the road costs then trucks do proportionally (a car typically pays more in fuel taxes then it causes in wear and tear). 

As I wrote in a post in the subway forum, the reason for these subsidies is that in the end, they create much more economic wealth than is spent, which sadly most people cannot see. Subsidizing Amtrak, for example, especially on the NE corridor, allows business people to travel, it cuts down the total commute time in many cases, and allows for business to happen, subsidizing mass transit means people can get to their jobs on time, and also means that businesses in the region can count on people being able to affordable travel to where they are, and also means they can get people from a wide metropolitan area, whereas for example expanding highways or building highways tends to create more congestion, and worse, because jobs are all over the place, you can't build enough highways to satisfy demand. 

I wonder if the people of FL and their politicians perceive that traffic is a problem.  Are the people voting to raise taxes for more transportation services whether it is rail, road, or air?  My perception of FL based on conversations with my brother is that most residents are not willing to pay for more government services but I don't know for sure.

NH Joe

New Haven Joe posted:

I wonder if the people of FL and their politicians perceive that traffic is a problem.  Are the people voting to raise taxes for more transportation services whether it is rail, road, or air?  My perception of FL based on conversations with my brother is that most residents are not willing to pay for more government services but I don't know for sure.

Everyone is aware of traffic, I don't care where you live.

But who wants to pay more? It's the classic two-edge blade of, "I want more from government but don't want to pay anymore," whereas elected officials want the opposite, to get more tax funds and spend as little as they can (unless it's on a pet project):

 Florida does have lower taxes then California but when it comes to road construction we find a way to pay for it.  

Lots of toll roads. No toll booths. If you don't have a transponder, they take pictures of your license plate and send you a bill.

I'm still scratching my head over this whole If-you-just-provide-a-train-the-problem-will-be-solved issue. (Sort of like "If you build it, they will come!")  My question is....

What do you use for transportation when you get off at the train station nearest your final destination, but you're still X miles....or XY, or even XYZ miles!...from your final destination?....i.e., your job, your relative, your school, your summer/winter home-away-from-home, your shopping, whatever, wherever.  Own/park a second car?  Buses, ubers, taxis?  Bicycles and safe pathways for the same?   Segways and battery-powered skateboards/scooters?  Hitchhike?  Walk/jog/run?  Beg/buy a ride from an obliging neighbor?

Seriously, folks.....why does the 'problem' go away, get solved, satisfy all criticism, etc., if we simply provide a train.....an INTERCITY train???  High speed, low speed, maglev, hamster-powered.....who cares?  And, I'll admit to not really understanding Floriduh....its demographics, its seasonal/daily ebbs and flows of populace, its growing residential/commercial sprawl, etc., blah, blah.  Even if the train makes no intermediate stops between major metropolises, the urban demand/problems for viable crowd dissemination/transportation are sill there....at a sustainable price.

And, of course, we all know that if that train doesn't stop at intermediate points, there will be H___ to pay among those denied serving their political base.  Witness the following annual ridership figures for the least-used Amtrak station stops for 2014 (compared to 2013):

South Shore, KY 995 (vs. 1010 in FY13)
Lordsburg, NM 729 (736)
Connersville, IN 690 (771)
Port Kent, NY 681 (847)
North Philadelphia, PA 644 (590)
Montgomery, WV 641 (614)
Alderson, WV 551 (586)
Thurmond, WV 390 (563)
Sanderson, TX 238 (261)

Seriously awesome.  Little wonder Amtrak finds its head on the budgetary chopping block annually.

Not an easy sell.......trains: the crowded highways solution.

IMHO, of course.

KD

dkdkrd posted:

I'm still scratching my head over this whole If-you-just-provide-a-train-the-problem-will-be-solved issue. (Sort of like "If you build it, they will come!")  My question is....

What do you use for transportation when you get off at the train station nearest your final destination, but you're still X miles....or XY, or even XYZ miles!...from your final destination?....i.e., your job, your relative, your school, your summer/winter home-away-from-home, your shopping, whatever, wherever.  Own/park a second car?  Buses, ubers, taxis?  Bicycles and safe pathways for the same?   Segways and battery-powered skateboards/scooters?  Hitchhike?  Walk/jog/run?  Beg/buy a ride from an obliging neighbor?

Seriously, folks.....why does the 'problem' go away, get solved, satisfy all criticism, etc., if we simply provide a train.....an INTERCITY train???  High speed, low speed, maglev, hamster-powered.....who cares?  And, I'll admit to not really understanding Floriduh....its demographics, its seasonal/daily ebbs and flows of populace, its growing residential/commercial sprawl, etc., blah, blah.  Even if the train makes no intermediate stops between major metropolises, the urban demand/problems for viable crowd dissemination/transportation are sill there....at a sustainable price.

And, of course, we all know that if that train doesn't stop at intermediate points, there will be H___ to pay among those denied serving their political base.  Witness the following annual ridership figures for the least-used Amtrak station stops for 2014 (compared to 2013):

South Shore, KY 995 (vs. 1010 in FY13)
Lordsburg, NM 729 (736)
Connersville, IN 690 (771)
Port Kent, NY 681 (847)
North Philadelphia, PA 644 (590)
Montgomery, WV 641 (614)
Alderson, WV 551 (586)
Thurmond, WV 390 (563)
Sanderson, TX 238 (261)

Seriously awesome.  Little wonder Amtrak finds its head on the budgetary chopping block annually.

Not an easy sell.......trains: the crowded highways solution.

IMHO, of course.

KD

I agree the last mile from the station has been a problem in America since the rise of suburban development post WW2.  To really make intercity passenger rail more viable you need to make sure there is local public transportation connections at the stations.  The Northeast Corridor and Amtrak's California services have actual transit connections at most of their stations.  The rise of Uber though does make the last mile issue less of a problem too.  On the route I am thinking about in Florida you would really need some good transit options in Tampa and Jacksonville at the stations and parking garages at the stations located in more suburban areas.  Connections to the airports in Tampa and Jacksonville would also help with ridership.

KD,

I'm glad you mentioned usage figures for various stations including a few in WV.  

Montgomery, WV 641 (614)
Alderson, WV 551 (586)
Thurmond, WV 390 (563)

Those do seem to be extremely low numbers until one recognizes they represent a large percentage of total population* for those towns. 

Montgomery, WV  1,638 
Alderson, WV  1,184 
Thurmond, WV  5 (not a typo) 

* 2010 census figures from wikipedia

North Philadelphia is a poor example of a place that doesn't warrant Amtrak service.

North Philadelphia is a secondary station in Philadelphia at which very few Amtrak trains stop, hence the low ridership numbers.   (It was more important back in PRR days when the east-west trains did not stop at Thirtieth Street, the main Philadelphia Station, as they now do.)  Any Amtrak train that stops at North Philadelphia also stops at Thirtieth Street which is Amtrak's third busiest station so it's not like Philadelphia doesn't warrant Amtrak service.  But North Philadelphia today is also a station for two Septa lines (Chestnut Hill West and Trenton) as well as for the NJ Transit Atlantic City Line so there probably would not be any savings from not letting a few Amtrak trains stop there.  They go through the station anyhow, whether or not they stop. 

It does make you wonder in places where ridership is very high, why Amtrak doesn't charge more to at least partially pay for the trips?

You can't often get on a Cascades anywhere on the route from a depot as they're usually sold out on the day of the runs and a few days before. At least on weekends when I've tried, anyway.

It does make you wonder in places where ridership is very high, why Amtrak doesn't charge more to at least partially pay for the trips?

The ridership between Albany NY and NYC is high. The "value" fare one way ranges from $43 to $62. The "flexible" fare is $82. The "premium" fare is $103. Apparently all seats are reserved.

How much higher could the fares go before people just take their cars?

The northeast corridor, which is their most travelled service region I believe, is not cheap, the cost of fare is pretty high, my son took Amtrak from Boston to NYC a lot and the fares weren't particularly cheap. I seem to recall that the percent of the fare that pays for service is very high on the NE corrridor and that Amtrak basically loses money supporting all the lightly travelled routes that in a sense they are forced to maintain. Rail travel has high fixed costs and those are killers on all the lightly travelled routes, the cost of maintaining the rail, the equipment, salaries and so forth are all fixed costs for example and when you are doing this to maintain service on lightly travelled routes you lose money, pure and simple. And they can't raise fares on those routes, not only would the local politicians go nuts, but likely would drive ridership even further down. There is no doubt Amtrak service should be rationalized, but the root cause is many of the politicians who complain about the cost to the government, talk about privatizing it, etc, are in many cases the same ones complaining if Amtrak dropped the money losing routes as being 'unfair'. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if said politicians thought their almost whistle stop train service is too expensive and pays for all those riders on the NE corridor and the like *sigh*. 

"The northeast corridor, which is their most travelled service region I believe, is not cheap."

It depends.  I just got an email about fares from DC to NYC on Northeast Direct for $49 if you reserve two weeks ahead.