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I think its time to stop the long distance routes
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by TheBriz09: [QB] All right, here are my responses: 1) Yes, I KNOW that the large cutbacks occured under the reign of Democrats. I've said before that Democrats [i]tend[/i] to be more friendly to Amtrak - those two are exceptions. Strong exceptions, to be sure, but exceptions nonetheless. 2) Okay, so where does Federal Transit Adminstration funding come from? The taxpayers. And which states are you referring to? As I recall, much of the capital improvement funding for the NEC came when Congress (and therefore the taxpayers) appropriated more than $2 billion early in the 1990s for that specific purpose. I could be mistaken, but I don't recall states kicking in nearly as much as Congress did. And who's paying for the NEC now? Amtrak, under Mr. Gunn, is slowly paying for a few capital improvements on the NEC year-by-year - with money appropriated by Congress and distributed by the US DOT. I know that 60% of Amtrak's riders are in the NEC, and I'm NOT saying that we [i]shouldn't[/i] pay for it - what I [i]am[/i] saying is that Midwestern and western Congress-people aren't going to continue sending money to Amtrak if all they're going to use it for is a Northeastern rail system. 3) Okay, so 20% of Amtrak's total riders get on or off at places where there are no other options. I could just sit here and say, then, that for those 4 million people, Amtrak means a GREAT deal to them. That is true. But note that the whole discussion here is about a [i]national[/i] system - so let's ignore those NEC riders (60%) and concentrate on those passengers who purely use the long-distance routes (in other words, the national system). The other 40%. So, based on rresor's posted percentages, that means that fully half (50%) of all long-distance riders are people who have no other option than Amtrak. My whole point in my earlier post was that Amtrak does not compete with airlines on long-distance endpoints. Where Amtrak competes is at the intermediate stations. And so this data seems to prove my very point, that Amtrak does not rely on endpoint riders as HALF of all LD riders use intermediate stations. Finally, I would just like to point out that, looking at the grand total of United States' transportation spending, $100 million per year is peanuts compared to what the highways and airways get. What exactly is your alternative suggestion for that $100 million? Shifting it to highway and airway development? You know, $100 million is so small compared to total highway and airway spending that adding it to one of their pots won't really make much of a difference at all. Pretty much the same story even with the Amtrak NEC - investing another $100 million will help, but in the grand scheme of things it won't really make much of a difference. It will maybe pay for part of an interlocking reconstruction - that's about it. [This message has been edited by TheBriz09 (edited 07-23-2004).] [/QB][/QUOTE]
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