If you’re going to hype $66 billion to Amtrak as the largest investment of all time, you should be able to point to some results.
To bewildered Democrats who can’t imagine why an entire presidential term based on ever-larger government spending wasn’t popular with voters, here’s a good example of why Bidenomics didn’t catch on.
In 2021, Amtrak was given $66 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure law that Biden immediately claimed as his own after he signed it into law. For an idea of what that money was supposed to do, let’s go back to news coverage at the time.
On November 8, 2021, NBC News quoted Amtrak CEO Bill Flynn as saying, “We have a clear vision for how we want to grow our business and reach more of America.” Flynn added, “This represents the largest investment of its kind since Amtrak was founded in 1971.”
The Association of American Railroads and the Rail Passengers Association praised the funding. The university professor quoted in the piece said, “I would expect a good portion of that $22 billion is probably going to the Northeast Corridor,” considering that that’s where most of Amtrak’s ridership is and the needs are great.
We don’t even have to go back that far to get glowing reviews of how the extra money for Amtrak was going to change the world. “President Biden Advances Vision for World Class Passenger Rail by Delivering Billions in New Funding,” reads a White House statement from November 2023. “Bidenomics and President Biden’s Investing in America agenda are tackling long-standing infrastructure needs, supporting communities nationwide, and making it possible to get people and goods where they need to be safely, quickly, and conveniently,” it begins.
Yet service reliability on the Northeast Corridor has gotten worse, and the Christmastime travel rush this year has been a disaster.
According to the Department of Transportation, in the past three quarters, on-time performance for the Acela, Amtrak’s flagship service, has declined from 83 percent to 69 percent. On-time performance for non-Acela trains on the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak’s most-used services, went from 86 percent to 74 percent. In July, only seven of Amtrak’s 47 services had on-time performances higher than 80 percent, which is supposed to be the minimum federal standard.
For perspective, the DOT-reported on-time performance for all U.S. airlines, which have a much harder task given the effects of weather on flights, was 78 percent in 2023. The on-time performance of the Japanese Shinkansen high-speed rail system is nearly 100 percent. And Amtrak considers a train to be delayed only if it arrives more than 15 minutes behind schedule. In Japan, that threshold is one minute.
The past two days have been a travel nightmare for Amtrak passengers on the Northeast Corridor. Due to problems with signaling and overhead wires, many trains traveling between Philadelphia and New York City, the busiest stretch of the national network, have been either canceled or delayed. Those delays then compound because trainsets and crews are not in the right place at the right time to start their next services.
Amtrak’s Borealis service between Chicago and St. Paul is one of the new offerings that is supposed to be a huge win from the $66 billion in spending. One of its trains was stranded for over three hours in Hastings, Minn., on Saturday. Overall Borealis on-time performance is 53 percent.
If you’re going to hype something as the largest investment of all time and talk incessantly about how “historic” and “transformational” it is, then three years later, you should be able to point to some results. If people think the service still stinks and has barely changed, they won’t thank you for spending their money. They’re going to conclude that you wasted it.