Amtrak COO and Acting President William Crosbie asserted, “We know how to
do high speed rail.” He said Amtrak is the country’s first HSR
operator, with crews and teams with first-hand experience and
institutional knowledge of the hurdles and the bottlenecks to HSR.
Yet
Section 502 (of H.R. 2095, the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement
Act (Amtrak reauthorization and rail safety bill) is the provision that
mandates the U.S. DOT to issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) from
private companies or consortia to establish high-speed rail (HSR)
service on any of the 11 federally-designated HSR corridors within 60 days
of bill enactment.
http://www.narprail.org/cms/index.php/main/hotline_580/
Why the heck don't we have Amtrak submit a proposal?
Oh yeah, that's right, our gederal government loves to pay "beaucoup" extra for private company profits. That's been their plan for Universal Healthcare too.
Meanwhile, Amtrak finally secured steady funding, something that was sorely missing, and part of the plan to replace Amtrak with a host of unregulated private companies.
"Starving the beast" if you will, as a concerted Repulican effort to make Amtrak irrelevant vs Private rail road companies.
Well, here is what a Democratic controlled Congress finally was able to accomplish:
Public rail gains traction
For years, Amtrak has struggled along without dedicated funding. And for
years, Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey has campaigned for permanent funding,
without which Amtrak has been unable to make reliable plans for upgrading
infrastructure, providing new rail cars and building new rail lines.
This legislation lays a framework for funding over the next
five years. The last time Amtrak got multi-year funding was in 1997.
and:
With this funding, Congress is acknowledging the cost effectiveness, energy
efficiency and convenience of rail travel. Steadily increasing ridership numbers
in recent years support those advantages. Amtrak recently reported a record of
28.7 million riders for fiscal year 2008. A little-noticed provision of the
legislation provides grants to states for connecting local rail lines to Amtrak
-- a valuable contribution to the national goal of increasing the use of public
transportation. All this is also a step toward greater transportation balance in
a country where we spend $40 billion on roads, $14 billion on airports and, up
to now, $1 billion on rail. In the past, every request for funds had to begin
with a debate over whether funding Amtrak was a good idea. Now, with the
creation of a benchmark, that question has been answered.
