Amtrak is set to score $66 billion from the infrastructure bill.
In 2019, there were 32.5 million journeys on Amtrak. That means the $66 billion gift is effectively a new $2,000 subsidy per annual passenger journey!
It’s one thing for the federal government to aspire to be European and have lots of trains. It’s another thing when we realistically consider the country’s distances and population densities. Those factors just don’t support the idea of continuing to pay Amtrak.
What’s really going on here is that Amtrak is being subsidized to provide services that would not bear a prudent private sector cost-benefit analysis. No private rail operator would ever serve the tiny towns of Libby (population 2,703), for example, or Browning (population about 1,000), the tribal headquarters of the Blackfeet Nation. Amtrak does.
The reason no private operator would touch these routes is that only some small fraction of 2,703 people want to go see some of the 1,000 on any one day. And vice versa. We might even find that on any particular day, no one wishes to ride that route! This means that carrying the cost of running a whole train along this route each and every day, and probably two, one in each direction, is nonsensical.
It would be cheaper to hire a taxi, on our taxpayer tab, for each passenger. In fact, it would be cheaper to buy two cars and leave them on the edge of each town with the keys in.
Railroads are an excellent way of moving freight around. They’re also a necessary and necessarily subsidized manner of moving people around large conurbations. But running or even rebuilding passenger rail networks across wide open, low-population density spaces simply isn’t a sensible use of societal resources.
There are indeed problems that must be solved and that only government can solve. Running railroads where no sensible private sector person would run one just doesn’t meet that necessary test.
