The Northeast Corridor is the largest single user of govt subsidy. Amtrak uses the Route-Profitability System of accounting, which, in a fashion resembling the accounting practices of Enron, takes the huge capital costs of the Northeast Corridor and distributes them across the rest of the system, thus causing otherwise financially sound long distance trains to show losses of ~$200 per passenger.
FUNdamental Wrote:
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> The Republican was trying to disparage the North
> East corridor operations,(the area that actually
> pulls a profit), not the areas that really use the
> subsidy. That was the most disturbing part of his
> argument
Your point fails. Although under RPS accounting the Northeast Corridor appears to break even or show a small profit, the bulk of Amtrak's losses is in fact generated by the NEC.
To put it another way, if the NEC was a stand-alone system, and could not spread the cost of its outsized capital expenditures to the entire country, it most definitely would not show a profit. The apparent "profit" is an accounting gimmick.
WashingTone-Locian Wrote:
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> If you listened to the testimony, the amount of
> money the Feds spend on Amtrak is infinitesimal
> compared to what is spent on air travel and
> highways. If airlines charged what it should
> really cost to fly without Federal and state
> subsidies, you can bet Amtrak would be more than
> competitive. That was the point the Amtrak CEO was
> making.
In 2004, the Department of Transportation analyzed the relative cost of federal subsidies for automobiles, buses, airplanes, transit, and passenger rail per thousand passenger miles for the period 1990 to 2002.
http://www.bts.gov/programs/federal_subsidies_to_passenger_transportation/pdf/entire.pdf
In every year except one, passenger rail was the most subsidized mode of transportation. (See Table 3 on p. 25 of the report.)
For example, in 2002 Amtrak subsidies per one thousand passenger miles were $210.31. Over the 1990 to 2002 span, the average subsidy was $170.28.
By contrast, the subsidy for automobiles ranged from -$4.50 in 1998 to -$1.31 in 1990, which means that drivers more than supported themselves through tolls and fuel taxes.
The subsidy to commercial aviation ranged from -$4.11 in 1999 to a high of $10.38 in 1996.
Thus a comparison between air, automobile, and rail subsidies fails to support your point.