Opinions

Letters to the Editor: East Rockaway, Lynbrook

June 11-17, 2015

Posted

Riding the rails

To the Editor:
I use Amtrak to travel to Schenectady and Albany/Rensselaer, and often try, usually unsuccessfully, to get family and friends to ride the rails.

Like most Democrats and too many Republicans, Jerry Kremer doesn’t distinguish between what we want and what we need (“[Name a bridge] is falling down, falling down . . .” May 28-June 3). The result is colossal federal debt that our children will pay in higher taxes and lost jobs, higher inflation or lower benefits for themselves.

Republicans don’t want to eliminate every program, they want to balance the budget, forcing us to choose between wants and needs, just like our families and businesses. Less than 2 percent of Americans make the 30 million Amtrak trips yearly. The great majority, 83 percent, use Amtrak’s short-run trains, which turn an operational profit and need no subsidizing. Amtrak subsidies fund a losing food service and runs over 400 miles long which, in total, carry about six million passengers a year (compared with the LIRR and Metro-North, with more than 80 million each per year.) Amtrak simply cannot compete with the airlines on longer routes.

Amtrak’s Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles carries 100,000 passengers a year, costs $52 million to operate and generates $13 million in income – thus losing $39 million a year or almost $400 per passenger. Kremer wants the rest of us to subsidize folks taking this slow, scenic route.

Since creating Amtrak, Congress has provided subsidies of over a billion dollars a year and, yes, House Republicans have, quite sensibly, proposed a 15 percent reduction to avoid piling on more debt. If it can’t at least break even on food service, Amtrak should eliminate it. In addition, it should eliminate or reduce service on its money-losing lines or raise fares to lower losses. Taxpayers should not burden their children with debt to subsidize either.

If Kremer wants to criticize Republicans, it should be for fighting to preserve an immensely inefficient service in their home states, not because they don’t use Amtrak, because very few do.


Dennis J. Duffy
Lynbrook