Streetsblog Los Angeles

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has examined the question of whether the GOP plan to privatize Amtrak’s most valuable corridor is constitutional – and it’s determined that it is not.

Warning: this is about to get a little wonky. But I figure if Streetsblog readers can get all nerdy on transit, you can probably geek out on legalese every once in a while too.

CRS looked at two constitutional provisions and found that the GOP plan violates them both.

First: the Takings Clause [PDF]. The government is allowed to take private property for public use, as long as the owner is justly compensated. The bill proposes to transfer the corridor and rolling stock from Amtrak to the USDOT.

According to CRS, this poses three constitutional questions:

• Is Amtrak an entity outside the government? (It’s not a “taking” if property is transferred to different agencies within the government.) On this question, CRS says that the federal statute creating Amtrak unequivocally stated that it “is not a department, agency, or instrumentality of the United States Government.” The courts have upheld this definition.
• Do the assets to be transferred constitute “property” under the Takings Clause? CRS says they are “classic, well-established forms of Taking Clause property.”
• Is the transfer of assets from Amtrak to USDOT a taking? Indeed, it’s a “paradigmatic” taking, according to CRS. The only way for the term not to apply is if the transfer were somehow deemed non-coercive, since the draft bill contains no mechanism for enforcement. Still, CRS concludes that the “not-truly-coercive argument seems unlikely to succeed.”

OK, so it’s a taking. That’s fine – as we said, the constitution allows takings – as long as they’re justly compensated and for the public use. Whatever you think of the plan to privatize Amtrak, apparently just about anything Congress decides to do satisfies the “public use” clause. But the question of compensation is thornier.

Read more…

A powwow between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Obama, and House Speaker John Boehner last night failed to yield a compromise that would put a budget in place before the government shuts down at midnight tonight. The failure of yet another attempt to negotiate makes a government shutdown all but inevitable.

Just a month ago, AASHTO sounded the warning that the transportation sector could lose up to $100 million a day in case of a shutdown. However, Congress’s extension of SAFETEA-LU through the end of the fiscal year (September 30) has put their minds at ease. Now, AASHTO spokesperson Tony Dorsey says spending for federal highway programs will continue unabated, despite a shutdown. “At this point,” Dorsey said, “we’re not anticipating any issues.” Still, he said, they’re hoping that “should there be a shutdown, it will be a very, very short one.”

But that’s not the whole story. According to a detailed DOT shutdown plan, the vast majority of the Federal Transit Administration would shut down, keeping only 54 out of 575 positions working. Already-awarded stimulus grants would continue to receive oversight and the Lower Manhattan Recovery Office would continue to function. The $270 million that the FTA normally remits to transit agencies every week would cease.

Jeff Rosenberg, government affairs director for the Amalgamated Transit Union, says the SAFETEA-LU extension only continues government’s authority to pay for transportation programs. But “if the FTA isn’t authorized to open the door,” he says, those payments will cease. That could be especially damaging for smaller metros that receive operating assistance, not just capital funds, from the feds. However, he’s hopeful that a potential shutdown would only last a couple of days and would just be “a blip on the screen.”

What else can you expect to happen if the government does shut down as of midnight tonight?

• At least 800,000 federal employees would be furloughed immediately. That would cause a massive drop in transit ridership, especially here in D.C., where Metro is predicting a five to 20 percent drop in case of a shutdown. Michael Perkins of Greater Greater Washington estimates that this would result in a loss for Metro of a quarter million dollars a day.
• Amtrak’s federal subsidies – up in the air for months now anyway as Congress debates whether to eliminate them, reduce them, or maintain them – will stop. However, Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman recently assured employees that the rail operator can keep going on ticket revenue alone in the short term.
• The Federal Highway Administration will stay open, with no positions furloughed, according to the DOT shutdown plan. The FHWA is funded with contract authority and has enough funds available to operate in that way for about a month.

Read more…

When President Obama and Secretary LaHood talk about their bold new vision for high-speed rail, you don’t hear them mention the country’s very own train company, which just celebrated ten years of providing the closest thing this country has to high-speed rail service, in the Northeast Corridor.

The administration has doled out $10.5 billion so far for rail improvements around the country. Some of that is going to existing rail lines that Amtrak runs, such as the Cascade service in the Pacific Northwest, which is using federal funds to improve on-time performance, increase frequency of service, improve signaling, and slowly increase top speeds.

But the banner projects are new, next-generation high-speed lines in places like Florida and California. Service on those lines is being opened up to competitive bidding. Will Amtrak be part of it? And if not, will the nation’s 40-year-old rail giant fade into irrelevance?

Florida is expected to issue a call for bids any day now (assuming Governor Rick Scott doesn’t decide, in the end, to kill the project like his colleagues in Wisconsin and Ohio). The state only represents a prospective 2.4 million riders a year (compared with about 13 million on the NEC) but it’s enormously significant because Florida and California are the only new lines projected to run passenger rail service on dedicated tracks – not competing with freight trains.

Where intercity passenger trains compete with freight – in most of the country these days, excluding the NEC – “Amtrak can only run a handful of trains per day because they’re leasing space on a freight railroad that doesn’t keep the schedules,” said Petra Todorovich, an expert on high-speed rail with the nonprofit America 2050. “When [freight trains] fill up their cargo from the yard, then they leave the yard. So Amtrak is trying to run passenger trains on a schedule on tracks that are owned by a railroad that doesn’t keep a schedule.”

That’s why rail service in much of the country has been infrequent and unreliable and has been in a poor position to compete with private automobiles or air travel. Amtrak continues to run those lines as a public service, in many cases mandated by Congress – but they’re not profitable or efficient.

So a dedicated track for passenger rail in Florida and California presents a unique opportunity for rail to show off what it can do for other parts of the country, which haven’t historically had world-class train service.

Read more…

A new Republican proposal would eliminate federal subsidies to Amtrak; kill New Starts, the primary federal transit funding program; and make painful cuts to dozens of other federal programs. It’s a plan by the Republican Study Committee, which is trying to keep alive House Speaker John Boehner’s campaign pledge to reduce the budget by $100 million. Boehner himself has been backing off from the pledge, given the popularity of many of the programs the Study Committee is now proposing to axe.

According to a Committee press release, “Compared to current projections, the Spending Reduction Act would save taxpayers $2.5 trillion through 2021. It starts by keeping House Republicans’ pledge to take current spending back to 2008 levels and repeal unspent funds from the failed ‘stimulus.’ At the beginning of the next fiscal year on October 1, 2011, spending is further reduced to 2006 levels and frozen there for the next decade.”

The proposal would shift some spending, like Medicaid costs, to the states, which are even more cash-strapped than the federal government. Media attention is focusing on proposed cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, USAID, and veterans’ programs. But the cuts to transportation are deep.

The FTA’s New Starts program is, in its own words, “the federal government’s primary financial resource for supporting locally planned, implemented, and operated major transit capital investments.” SAFETEA-LU authorized $6.6 billion for the program through 2009, and the extension gave another $2 billion for last year. It funds commuter rail, light rail, heavy rail, bus rapid transit, streetcars, and ferries.

According to Bureau of Transportation Statistics contributor William Mallett, “Partly as a result of federal support, rail transit route mileage in the United States almost doubled between 1985 and 2008, and rail transit passenger trips and passenger miles grew by 66 percent and 73 percent, respectively.”

Read more…

A few years ago I joined Amtrak's Guest Rewards program, which every month sends an e-mail showing my current point total. These also include a few tidbits of the latest Amtrak news. This is how I learned Amtrak's Customer Advisory Committee (ACAC) is currently recruiting new committee members to fill impending vacancies from several areas, including the Pacific Northwest, Southern California, North Carolina and the New York Empire Corridor along with regular riders of the the Sunset Limited^® or Empire Builder^®. The ACAC was formed in 1997 to represent the needs and concerns of the traveling public to Amtrak management.

To be eligible you need to be a frequent rider of Amtrak and willing to do a bit of travelling. Details are posted on the Amtrak website. The deadline to apply is August 21st.

Now that the Obama administration has
awarded $8 billion in high-speed rail grants to more than two dozen
states, with $2.5 billion more coming soon, why not keep thinking big
when it comes to bullet-train expansion?

That’s the ethos of a new
report released today by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group
(PIRG) calling for a New Deal-like public works juggernaut that would
eventually connect all major cities located within 100 and 500 miles of
each other. For a look at how such a system would remake the American
rail map, check out the image above.

"The first step in building the network is to set a national goal
with an ambitious time frame, just like we did for the Interstate
Highway System or getting to the moon," U.S. PIRG senior analyst Phineas
Baxandall wrote in a blog
post unveiling the report. "We can link all our major cities
by 2050, if we set our minds to it."

Given the political wrangling over the deficit that continues to
paralyze Washington, however, it’s worth asking how an ambitious rail
program would be funded. The U.S. PIRG answers that question in several
ways: First, the group calls for a dedicated revenue stream for
inter-city passenger rail in the next long-term transportation bill,
with local investments matched by the federal government in the same
80:20 ratio that highway plans receive.

"By financing transportation projects equitably," the report’s
authors write, "states will be able to make rational transportation
decisions based on the needs of their residents, rather than on the
chances of securing a lucrative federal match."

Secondly, the U.S. PIRG aims to put government support for Amtrak
– often derided by
conservatives for its reliance on federal subsidies that also benefit
road projects — in perspective. When evaluated as a share of U.S. GDP,
government investment of passenger rail looks stunningly low compared
with other industrialized nations. The imbalance is visible in the chart
below:

Read more…

The nation’s Amtrak rider-in-chief, Vice President Joseph Biden, has penned an op-ed for the rail network’s monthly magazine entitled "Why America Needs Trains."

Biden
doesn’t get too political in the piece, eschewing calls for more Amtrak
funding in favor of a paean to the "emotional connection" he
experienced riding the rails during his 36-year congressional career.

But the vice president, who has taken on a central role in the White House’s high-speed rail push, closes with a strong endorsement of inter-city trains as pollution reducers:

Consider that if you shut down Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, it is
estimated that to compensate for the loss, you’d have to add seven new
lanes of highway to Interstate 95. When you consider that it costs an
average of $30 million for one linear mile of one lane of highway, you
see what a sound investment rail travel is. And that’s before you
factor in the environmental benefits of keeping millions and millions
of cars off the road.

The House oversight committee has launched an official inquiry
into the resignation of Amtrak’s veteran inspector general (IG) earlier
this month — on the same day that an outside law firm reported on
alleged interference with his work by management at the rail
corporation.

The
bipartisan congressional investigation focuses on a report commissioned
by Amtrak IG Fred Weiderhold several months before his June 18
departure. The report, prepared by the firm of Willkie Farr &
Gallagher, confirmed Weiderhold’s past contention that the IG’s
"independence and effectiveness are being substantially impaired" by
in-house policies at Amtrak.

But one particular charge in
the report caught Congress’ attention: that Amtrak managers prevented
Weiderhold from monitoring their use of economic stimulus money without
their approval.

As the oversight committee’s chairman, Rep.
Edolphus Towns (D-NY), and senior Republican, Rep. Darrell Issa (CA)
explained in a letter sent yesterday to Amtrak chairman Thomas Carper:

[T]he
legal analysis found that Amtrak management claims that all
expenditures of funds designated for the Inspector General must be
approved by Amtrak management. In other words, the Inspector General
may not use funds provided by Congress to investigate potential waste
and fraud in stimulus programs without the consent of the organization
being investigated. This is contrary to the clear intent of Congress
and is unacceptable.

In a statement released
yesterday, Amtrak noted that it had no opportunity to weigh in on the
Willkie Farr report and stated that "there was no relationship between
the timing of Mr. Weiderhold’s retirement and this report." Carper
added that the rail corporation "would like to maintain an open line of
communication
and are looking forward to cooperating fully" with the congressional inquiry.

Read more…