Orphan Road

There's an interview with Alex Kummant, Amtrak's CEO, in the New York Observer. The Observer has a conservative bent, but rail transit in New York is like National Health Care in Britain -- even the conservatives don't question its existence.

Kummant seems like a sensible guy (see this 2006 profile in the NY Times), one who's not interested in privatizing the system or even breaking off the NE Corridor.

In fact, Kummant downplays the idea of spending tens of billions on a 2-hour DC-to-NY HSR in the Northeast Corridor (where Amtrak already has 60 percent of the air-rail traffic), and instead suggests spreading that out over the system:

That's right. You cannot have commuters on [a high-speed NE Corridor line]. Again, we run 750,000 commuters a day on our line. You can't have any freight trains--we run 50 freight trains a day. You have to have completely different curvatures. You have to have different tunnels. And, again, wonderful, great, they're vision statements; but, at the end of the day, you have to spend tens and tens of billions of dollars to do that. Then you have to ask yourself, ‘Is that really where you would put that capital?'

We continue to hear about, ‘Gee, how much more could be done?' Fine. Maybe you can capture the other 40 percent [share of intercity Northeast air-rail commuters]. But I would argue you could capture that if we had new equipment; you could expand our capacity with new equipment; you could, again, drive the connectivity of the stations; you could make much higher-quality stations that basically drive connectivity with local operations. And I have little doubt that you could pick up another 20 points in share.

On the other hand, he suggests that HSR between Phoenix and LA is inevitable in his lifetime, which seems pretty aggressive (in a good way). He also uses the inevitability of such a line as a reason why we can't abandon long-haul routes. Why dismantle the tracks, the stations, and the infrastructure on those long-haul lines if HSR (or pseudo-HSR) is just a couple of decades away?