John Mica Has an Agenda: Screwing Amtrak.
I have a big problem with Congressman John Mica (R-Florida), who, as a result of the 2010 election, finds himself chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. I have personally been present for a couple of Mica speeches and he is a preening, self-impressed and arrogant man. (I’ve always wondered … why would someone wearing such a terrible rug preen in the first place?)
Anyway, there was a meeting of the T&I Committee in Washington today and, according to a first-hand report from a transportation expert who was there, Mica made at least three statements about Amtrak that were misleading at best and knowingly false at worst. Mica, of course, has an agenda: he wants to privatize Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston and to do that he has to portray Amtrak as a failure.
I don’t want to bore you with all the details that refute all three of his misrepresentations, but here’s one good example of how he distorts facts to suit his personal agenda and ideology.
Mica says Amtrak is a failure and, to “prove” it, he stated today that Amtrak’s ridership from 1977 to 2010 has not increased. Trouble is, that’s just B.S. Mica was using 1981 figures! Furthermore, he failed mention that in that year Amtrak turned two very busy commuter lines over to railroads that are now carrying 2.2 million passengers a year into New York from Philadelphia and New Jersey. But that convenient omission aside, further study – honest study, that is – shows that Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains carried 7.7 million passengers in 1981, and 10.4 million in 2010 …and that’s a damn 26-percent increase, Congressman!
But if we consider passenger-miles – a better, means of analysis giving a truer picture — the increase is even greater. According to Ross Capon, president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, Amtrak posted 932 million passenger-miles on the Northeast Corridor routes in 1981 and 1.708 billion passenger-miles in 2010. And that, Congressman, is an 83% increase!
But you know what I remember most about the time I sat through one of Mica’s dissertations on transportation? After bemoaning as wasteful Amtrak’s annual subsidy of about a billion and a half dollars and referring with a smirk to “America’s Soviet-style railroad, Mica said he had more important things to do: trying to get a five billion dollar appropriation for a new runway at Miami International Airport. How’s that for prioritizing!
Let’s not forget that the reason for creating Amtrak in the fist place was that the private railroads were unable top provide passenger service and make any money doing it.
My problem with Mica is that he has an agenda. If revenue from the Northeast Corridor is taken away from Amtrak, the remaining long-distance trains would immediately show bigger losses, giving Mica and his conservative colleagues just the excuse they need to screech about cutting back or cutting out that service. And before we could say “all aboard”, there would no longer be a national rail passenger system.
Many, including me, extol the virtue of competition in regulating commercial ventures. But there are instances where competition just doesn’t exist. While it could be said to exist in transportation, the fact is there are both competitive and non- competitive elements in many industries, and transportation is the most obvious example. Ownership of rail lines will never be competitive; with few exceptions it doesn’t make sense to run parallel sets of tracks. But it does make sense to have competing train companies operating on those rails ( with, of course, traffic and safety control provided by the rail owner. After all, this is similar to the other modes of transportation. So let Amtrak become a rail company, and invite private investors to take over the trains.