It’s a good map, but it would be better if there were more dotted lines. Amtrak needs to be relieved of its obligation to run coast-to-coast money pit lines and focus on building up successful regional networks that can make money. Perhaps if it were allowed to do that for a generation, it would be able to gradually make some of the ends of healthy and profitable regional networks connect again.
Consider that most regional airline routes to rural parts of the country are subsidized as well (and far more is spent on it). Most of Alaska would lose air service. Large chunks of Texas, Arizona, and Alabama would be cut off.
I think we need to have a concept of essential rail service, like we have with road and air.
These routes should have have any obligation to make money, because they provide a benefit to tax payers. Most infrastructure is just accepted as something that should be funded.
Another reason these long distance routes should be left intact is because they are an important anchor for eventually expanding to high speed rail.
China kept their unprofitable rural slow passenger routes into the distant corners of their country, and now they are converting them to high speed.
China is an authoritarian state, so they can do any number of things that are strategic without worrying about popularity.
In the US, at the federal level at least, rail has a serious popularity problem which makes it politically difficult to sustain. That problem is largely driven by the fact that outside of the northeast our rail service is a joke.
If we want to have good quality rail across the country — which I would like to have, fwiw — I think we’d get there faster by focusing on serving just a few places with very high quality rail that everyone else would actually want. Then we could gradually expand the system with concentrated investments that hit that quality bar. After a generation of that, we could have broadly popular rail with a high quality of service. Perhaps that could even include highly subsidized service to rural areas, in the same way we have intensely subsidized highway and postal services to such places today.
But I think if we want to get there we need to start with a smaller goal of regional networks that are GOOD, so that people’s perception of rail changes.
I think you are 100% correct. Before I consider a train ride from coast to coast I need to see my large metropolis area implement local/regional lines that are good and useful. Optimize for my 80% use case, not my 20% use case!
Functionally, the vast majority of the Amtrak network is already the rail equivalent of Essential Air Service (EAS, gov-subsidized passenger air routes). Including government subsidies on a large percentage on routes. The NEC is the only Amtrak route that makes any meaningful amount of profit.
Exactly what financial benefit could there be in isolating those networks from each other? Probably 2% of people taking a long line are taking it from end to end. In the case of the route that goes from Chicago to Los Angeles, via New Orleans, I'd be surprised if the number weren't more like 0.02%.
