I wouldn’t include the highway systems in the list, because they only represent a huge collection of subsidies at many levels: Federal, State, and Local: hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
The Post Office, NASA, and the Army Corps of Engineers are similar to Amtrak in that these are all single, fully functioning entities that do what a private enterprise could do if the task were profitable. Our government, in its wisdom, formed these, because our society feels they are valuable even though they will never be profitable. The Post Office is required to make deliveries to every citizen regardless of location; nobody can make money putting stuff into orbit around the earth (technology may change this in the future); the Army Corps of Engineers rebuilds beaches after storms and controls flooding rivers; and AMTRAK is supposed to provide alternatives to the highways and the airports for people who can’t fly (oxygen bottles), won’t fly (20% of the U.S. population is afraid to fly), or who are located too far from the alternatives.
The curious thing is that unlike the situation with the Post Office, NASA, and the Corps of Engineers (and other similar organizations) the congress has never funded AMTRAK at a level that would make it a viable enterprise. So, today we have the ridiculous situation where some in our government ridicule AMTRAK as a boondoggle just as we would ridicule a starving man for not being able to come to work on time each day. It’s like opening a retail store with almost no stock, and then wondering why the store has very few customers. Thus we hear outlandish comments from some in the media like “Amtrak doesn’t go anywhere people want to go” and “Nobody rides Amtrak.” Such comments come from a prejudice not reality, and those who attack AMTRAK feed off the prejudice.
More interesting to me is how utterly alone the U.S. is in the industrialized world in its hatred of AMTRAK and diversity in mass transit in general. Most of my friends here in Texas view AMTRAK as something for “fat cats in the New York – Washington corridor.” Most aren’t even aware of the long distance trains and how some people depend on them. Were AMTRAK properly funded, there would be much more service in many more places, and many more people would depend on it. We would not see the rural decay all of us are paying for. Similar arguments can be extended into justifications for all forms of mass transit: urban sprawl, pollution, urban decay, etc. But considering AMTRAK’s proper role requires our representatives to think of things as they really are: as complicated systems. That’s too much work and takes time away from raising funds for the next election.
