Part One – Summary

Let’s face it: Intercity travel in the U.S. today has become a miserable experience.

Highways are crowded and dangerous, killing 42 thousand travelers per year. Non-highway travel modes are safer and usually faster, but they suffer from limitations of their own.

The ostensibly speediest mode, commercial air travel, fails to live up to its promise for shorter trips because of elements that prolong the actual door-to-door travel time. Most American airports can be accessed only by highway. Time driving to the airport and parking plus long check-in lines adds considerable travel time in all but airports serving smaller cities and metro areas. 

The third and potentially most effective travel mode, intercity passenger trains, barely exists in the U.S. Frequencies are few, trains are slow, and schedule-keeping is unreliable. Unlike highways and aviation, passenger rail in the U.S. suffers from a fragmented service with too few routes and frequencies. It further lacks a comprehensive, interconnected network to form a system comparable to highways and aviation.

Highways and aviation also enjoy well-funded, government-owned infrastructure, which invites participation by multiple and often competing private interests. Passenger rail suffers from a unique “dual monopoly” on routes outside the Northeast Corridor (NEC), infrastructure is supplied primarily by one or more private host freight railroads while Amtrak is the only intercity operator of trains. Amtrak is in a unique position to negotiate for access to deliver limited passenger services, but at great cost to the public and riders. The need is increasingly for dedicated passenger service tracks, which a few states have been able to advance with support from federal partners. Other countries have benefitted when these passenger tracks are made available through “open access” to competitive passenger rail ventures.

In much of the nation today, intercity passenger travel choices are few, expensive, slow, unreliable, and inconvenient. Many places are now transportation deserts as public transportation atrophies. Deregulation of airlines gave us more competition and low fares for a time, but then a wave of consolidations and cost-cutting led to a significant reduction in service to smaller cities, more forced transfers, longer layovers, crowded airports and planes, and fewer amenities. Intercity bus service has been declining for 60 years. Greyhound stations are being sold and stops moved to more remote locations that are less transit-accessible.

Likewise, urban public transit is neither convenient nor frequent in most cities, does not reach large parts of the metro areas they serve, and does not always connect well with intercity transportation modes.

Rail passenger service has shrunk to a sub-skeletal level that leaves many cities off the map and operates once or less daily in much of the country. Several states are only served at night. Outside of the NEC and a few state-supported services, trains are infrequent, slow, late, and worn out.

Our national rail passenger system is at a crossroad. While a majority of Americans support more and better passenger rail service, the model the country uses to provide it is deeply flawed and incapable of developing a robust, modern network. Responsibilities are left to individual states or rare multistate coalitions to deliver service. We are left with a great need for a national vision with dedicated capital and operating funding to advance interstate planning and investment.

This leaves the auto as the only practical form of transportation for the vast majority of trips over distances shorter than 300 miles. Yet, because most travelers are forced to drive, we are paying in the form of large personal investment in the ownership and maintenance of automobiles, an overwhelmed highway system, huge costs for highway maintenance and new lane-miles, inefficient structures for personal and business travel, along with societal costs such as asthma induced by vehicle exhaust in urban areas, noise pollution, over 2 ¼ million car accident injuries annually[1] (many life-altering), and hazardous travel conditions.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, and paradoxically in a nation with a huge highway and airline system, large areas of the U.S. are effectively becoming isolated, leaving the U.S. drifting toward the formation of two national cultures—one consisting of urban areas with more jobs, amenities, transportation, service and education access, and the other made up of struggling rural areas and small cities with few amenities and no transportation options other than driving.

An invigorated passenger rail industry can help reconnect the country.[2] In particular, it can help restore a vigorous small-town life, which is essential to the nation’s cultural and political health. Aviation and highway travel may be abetting this divide by forcing economic activity out of town by the Interstate or the nearest airport. Other countries have settled into a natural investment balance between highway, air, and passenger rail modes. Our country’s transportation investment mix is decidedly unbalanced. This in spite of the fact that population and job densities in the US megaregions are comparable to Europe and, in some places, Asia.

A network of robust, market-responsive passenger rail services in the US would:

• Alleviate pressure on over-burdened highway and aviation systems.
• Provide more transportation freedom throughout the country, especially as the cost of driving is increasingly a financial burden on American households.[3]
• Improve the travel experience by creating more choices, with modern passenger rail services with the speed, frequency, personal comforts, and amenities desired by the public.
• Address generational changes which have brought about a market shift that demands more options to driving.[4]
• Maintain mobility for individuals who can’t or don’t want to drive.
• Contribute to the revitalization of downtowns in cities large and small through economic development and job creation around station sites.
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions while promoting development. Passenger rail investments promote development and economic growth while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving quality of life for citizens by offering them more freedom to choose how they want to travel.

The root of the problem with our passenger rail system is the policy inequity between how our highway and aviation systems are structured and how our passenger rail system is structured. Until this policy inequity is addressed, the U.S. passenger rail system will remain slow, skeletal, unreliable, and unable to reach its full potential. There is no tinkering with Amtrak’s enabling legislation that will result in growth and modernization of passenger rail without comprehensive federal policy reform.

Fixing America’s passenger rail system will require:

1. Establishing a permanent, dedicated funding mechanism that is comparable in size and scope to the Highway Trust Fund.
2. Constructing dedicated, publicly-owned tracks for passenger trains that are segregated from private freight traffic.
3. Opening the publicly-owned, passenger-only tracks to private competition through franchising and bidding.
4. Creating new alignments where curvy, 19th-century infrastructure prevents trains from offering automobile-competitive speeds.
5. Creating a federal passenger rail program that functions as well as the federal highway and aviation programs.
6. Creating a stronger federal role (note: stronger does not mean exclusive) in the establishment of interstate passenger rail routes and services, rather than relying solely on states. A national passenger rail authority is suggested as a possible mechanism to accomplish this.
7. Building a comprehensive passenger rail network that allows people to travel throughout the nation like they are able to do with the interstate highway and aviation networks.
8. Streamlining the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to remove unnecessary hurdles and speed up projects.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

The United States lags behind nearly every other developed nation (and an increasing number of developing ones) in the quality of its passenger rail network. Plagued by lack of investment in infrastructure and reliance on a model that is incapable of delivering a modern, robust network, we have a system that, outside of the Northeast Corridor, is slow, infrequent, and far too skeletal to capture a significant share of the U.S. travel market (or to further the national unity that mass mobility systems historically have sustained).

The History that Brought Us the Current Passenger Rail Network and Management

Historically, the U.S. relied on a model of private investment to develop passenger and freight rail capabilities. Because the young republic lacked capital for public works, it turned to private capitalists in Europe for the funds necessary for developing the new rail technology. From the 1830s forward, virtually all U.S. railroads were built by private corporations, and while many of them competed from end to end—such as New York to St. Louis—they also exerted monopoly power because most cities between major end points were served by only one railroad, so most passengers and most of the industries that relied on rail transportation had access to only one carrier.

This model worked until government capital became available to finance infrastructure for competing modes. Private capital developed the automobile and the airplane, but it was government capital that built the infrastructure on which they operate. It was this government investment that made them available to the public. The result was that air and highway travel became increasingly more effective in the market. Railroads did not decline solely because of a market outcome. When one industry that is dependent upon private capital has to compete with industries that receive generous public capital; and where the public sector owns the infrastructure, the industry that is dependent upon privately-financed, privately-owned infrastructure cannot effectively compete.

Furthermore, the railroads were subject to a unique liability from which their air and highway competitors were spared: they had to pay county property taxes on every foot of operating right-of-way they owned. It was a contest the privately-operated passenger trains could not win.

The result of this disparity was the decline of American passenger rail service. By 1970 it was on its deathbed. It was then that Congress stepped in and began debating what became known as the Rail Passenger Service Act (RailPax) that created Amtrak, which began operating a much downsized and skeletal system of passenger trains on May 1, 1971.

The problem with RailPax is that it did nothing to address the inequities between how public policy treats highways and aviation compared to passenger rail. This is why American passenger rail development continues to languish compared to other nations and why Amtrak’s service remains skeletal, slow, and unreliable. If we want to succeed in developing a modern, robust, national passenger rail network, we must emulate the highway and aviation models with generously funded passenger rail-only tracks on which private operators can compete to offer service.

Other Structural Flaws of the Existing Model  

• Amtrak’s enabling legislation is not designed to foster growth and deliver the nation a robust, modern, national system of passenger trains. It was designed to take over a fraction of the passenger rail network that once existed and run it on private railroad infrastructure that, outside of the NEC, has been significantly downsized and is best suited for freight service.
• It lacks the key components that have made the highway and aviation systems successful:
  1. A well-funded, dedicated federal trust fund to build dedicated, public infrastructure for passenger trains;
  2. A federal entity with a clear mandate to consult with states on the design of a modern, robust national network and fund its construction.
• Lack of vision. Amtrak generally argues that passenger rail service can only be expanded if states ask for it and pay for it. Because of the absence of a coherent federal program with dedicated funding and a clear vision for modernization and growth, it’s the easiest place for Amtrak to go if they want to expand service. It’s problematic because there is no overall national vision for passenger rail service. Furthermore, adjacent states often disagree strongly on the need for passenger rail service, with one or more critical states refusing to help fund a needed buildup on a multi-state corridor. The following are examples:
  1. The popular Wolverine service between Chicago and Detroit, which is supported by Illinois and Michigan, is stuck at three daily round trips in part because Indiana has elected not to support the service. A shared investment is needed to improve track conditions, availability and reliability between the Chicago city limits and Porter, Indiana (where Amtrak line ownership extends into Michigan). Indiana also has elected not to support investments in passenger service in the Chicago-Indianapolis-Louisville and Chicago-Indianapolis-Cincinnati corridors, inhibiting economic development in a potentially booming cluster of Midwestern cities.
  2. New Hampshire has not contributed to the development and operation of the Downeaster Corridor between Boston, MA and Portland ME.
  3. Development of the Gulf Coast Corridor between Mobile, AL and New Orleans, LA has suffered years of delays, in part because the state of Alabama has not committed funds to the project. The city of Mobile has been left to fund the state’s share, but disagreements that have occurred on the city council have caused delays.[5]

In addition, Amtrak must ask Congress every year for the funding required to operate the existing system while often dealing with a few legislators—and occasionally Presidents—who threaten to zero out its funding. The result is that Amtrak’s budget is subject to political compromise which, more often than not, provides the company with just enough funding to keep the existing system running but not enough to expand frequencies, build high-speed corridors, or integrate discrete lines into a true and reliable network where trains make tightly scheduled connections at key junctions. In fact, Amtrak’s annual appropriation is so small and its legislative remit so murky that the company finds it difficult to keep equipment in a state of good repair or improve speed and reliability outside of the NEC.

A federal role is necessary to overcome competing state interests and clear the way to implement interstate projects. The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution applies here[6]. Federal funding is also important because federal spending priorities influence the programs in which the states are willing to invest. History has proven this with passenger rail. There have been only two times since Amtrak’s creation when state interest in passenger rail has surged beyond the few states that already fund trains. The first was after the passage American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which provided $8 billion for passenger rail development. State applications for federal funding exceeded the funds available. The second time was following the passage of the in Infrastructure and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021, which provided $66 billion. As of January 2025, approximately half of IIJA funds have been committed, and this funding supports 69 ongoing studies for new and enhanced intercity passenger rail services nationally.

In the next issue of Steel Wheels look forward to Part 2:

RESTRUCTURING PASSENGER RAIL IN THE UNITED STATES

The authors wish to thank:

James Coston, Executive Chairman, Corridor Rail Development Corporation and one-time member of the former Amtrak Reform Council,  Also a thank you to F.K.Pious

[1] USDOT National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, Overview of Motor Vehicle Traffic Crashes in 2022, https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813560

[2] Johnston, Bob (2023, January 11), Amtrak officials outline new goals, initiatives at public board meeting, Trains Magazine, https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/amtrak-officials-outline-new-goals-initiatives-at-public-board-meeting/

[3] Wilson, Kea, Study (2024, March 25) How Car Ownership is Keeping Americans from Financial Stability https://usa.streetsblog.org/2024/03/25/study-how-car-ownership-is-keeping-americans-from-financial-stability, March 23, 2024

[4] Nicholson-Messmer, Elija, (2025, January 16) Nearly half of young Americans don’t want to own a car https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article298661878.html Miami Herald

[5] Johnston, Bob, (2024, March 18) Gulf Coast impasse at Mobile remains unresolved, Analysis, Trains Magazine, https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/gulf-coast-impasse-at-mobile-remains-unresolved-analysis/

[6] Constitution Annotated, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C3-1/ALDE_00013403/, Accessed on 2/12/25