May 26, 2006
Trains Running, But No Word on What Caused the Amtrak Power Outage
At present, trains on Amtrak and NJ Transit are running on schedule, but commuters are wary (and weary) after yesterday's power outage along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor that stopped service for both train system between Queens and Washington DC. This was the biggest transit power failure since, oh, the blackout of 2003 (and, yes, we heard words like "cascading" and "tripping circuitbreakers" on the news last night and cringed, too). Officials are unsure of what caused the power outage, but there was some speculation that a feeder wasn't supplying enough electricity, causing a circuitbreaker to trip - which means that would be the worst circuitbreaker to trip because that caused the entire system to go down. Eek. Thousands people were stranded for three hours, and conditions on the trains weren't that great, as there was no air-conditioning, or, as put in our favorite quote, from Jeff Oppenheim, NYC actor and director, who was on an Acela: "When you lose the power, you lose all the flushes, too." Blegh!! Another awesome quote from a five-month pregnant woman: "I was in the World Trade Center. I was in the blackout. This is nothing."
While actors on one train taught lawyers how to improve their courtroom demeanor, the bigger question is what the hell to do with Amtrak. There's talk of suspending government subsidies (which have already been dwindling with the Republican-controlled Congress) to Amtrak until the problem is fixed, but if Amtrak is already in the red, isn't it going to be hard for them to fix the problem? As some of our commenters noted, perhaps the key is in the profitable Northeast Corridor: Privatize it or get rid of the rest of the money-losing routes. And this power outage is all the more fuel NJ and NY politicians need to get a NJ-NY tunnel separate from the Amtrak ones.
Here are some articles questioning Amtrak: Time magazine 2001, the Guardian 2002, and the 2002 NY Times magazine article "Amtrak Must Die." For kicks, check out the Department of Energy's Blackout Investigation report.
Photograph from Mark Lennihan/AP
|
To say yesterdays Amtrak outtage was worse than the events of Sept. 11th makes you seem like the stupidest person in the world. No one died yesterday and no useless war was begun because of this (yet). Grow up and think before you ever compare something to Sept. 11th.
Remember, ALL highways are money-losing too, except we call funding them "investments", while funding Amtrak is called a "subsidy". It's time to fully fund Amtrak.
Except that highways are paid for by the users in the form of gas taxes.
Actually, gas taxes do not pay fully for highways.
James,
Where was the Amtrak outtage described as worse than September 11th??
"I was in the World Trade Center. I was in the blackout. This is nothing."
That pretty clearly says that the Amtrak outtage is just a stupid annoyance as compared to September 11th. No one would be dumb enough the say the opposite of that.
A new tunnel would do nothing if Amtrak still provided the power.
What the states of New York and New Jersey need to do is purchace the Amtrak infrastructure in their respective states and actually maintain in. The MTA and CDOT do a very good job of maintaining their part of the Northeast Corridor in Westchester and Connecticut, where Amtrak is a tennant on Metro-North's rails.
Amtrak's fares in the Northeast have gotten very expensive, and part of that is because some of the cost goes to offeset some service that hardly anyone takes in the middle of nowhere. The whole Northeast Corridor could be profitable, if well run and managed, preferably not by Amtrak. It is the middle of nowhere trains that drag things down.
Something is wrong when you can get to Trenton from New York via train (on NJ Transit) cheaper and more frequently than you can between New York and Albany (where Amtrak is the only rail option). I am sure if Metro-North went to Albany the service would most likely be better, more frequent, and cheaper than Amtrak.
follow the yellow brick road.
Toby,
To be fair, Trenton's less than half the distance from NYC that Albany is. A Metro-North ticket to Poughkeepsie (peak times) will get you about halfway to Albany and cost about half of the Amtrak fare, so it's not much of a savings. Amazingly, I did see one fare for Amtrak that matched a competing Greyhound schedule for the same destination, but others were about 33% higher and even did badly against JetBlue fares. Agreed that they could stand to run a few more trains, though. Amtrak doesn't seem to even run many redeyes anymore, which is a bother if you don't want to waste an otherwise useful day on the train.
Like highway travel, air travel is subsidized too, although in a perhaps less obvious way than Amtrak is: not in the form of a line item in a budget but in the form of (1) cheap loans to airlines; (2) inefficient assignment of takeoff and landing slots that disadvantages popular flights and prevents the airport from recovering its full economic value.
(Not to mention wars for oil...)