Four Officials Who Cannot Build Rail

This afternoon, I livetweeted an Eno Center webinar that was ostensibly about how Amtrak and CTDOT were going to realize the CONNECT NEC 2035 program with major gains in productivity during track outages.

Spoiler alert: not one specific was given about how they were going to do this. The webinar largely consisted of self-congratulation. The four presenters, Richard Andreski, Nicole Bucich, Dennis Newman, and Mitch Warren, all of whom are longstanding members of Northeast Corridor top brass, claimed they had worked hard to reconcile the needs of multiple stakeholders and arrive at a workable plan to cut travel times on the existing Northeast Corridor. This claim is belied by the price tag of $117 billion—about threefold the cost of the entire Milan-Naples high speed rail spine to deliver a fraction of the end-to-end trip time cut. Moreover, a remark from Bucich that went something like, “We try not to use the word prioritization because we have so many stakeholders...we don't have answers yet," suggests that little actual critical thinking has gone into this plan at all.

As I previously tabulated, the Northeast Corridor has for nearly twenty years received well over what its management claims its steady-state cost to be, let alone what it should be. I would understand a claim that there is a $7 billion state-of-good-repair backlog. There is no reason why it should have grown from $9 billion in 2010 to multiple $10 billions today.

A five-minute Google search will turn up reports showing a large resemblance between the Northeast Corridor and many other routes such as the West Coast Main Line or East Coast Main Line, not to mention Japanese trunks. They show that every factor which the Northeast Corridor’s management claims is unique to its rail line (presence of more than one operator, mixed traffic, aging infrastructure, funding swings) is anything but. The Northeast Corridor is virtually alone among these in enjoying little to no improvement to its service offering in recent decades.

It is only fair to expect that an official charged with changing the course of a singularly stagnant piece of infrastructure would not claim there is nowhere to learn from outside a country singularly poor at running trains. Amtrak could realize most of the 56 minutes of Washington-Boston travel time gain that it says will cost $117 billion virtually overnight by slashing scheduled dwells. Sixteen-car Tokaido Shinkansen trainsets typically reverse at Tokyo Station in ten minutes or less, during which time they are cleaned.

The culture in my field has its issues, but I am certain that anyone who said something like “I have nothing to learn from any professional outside America,” would meet instant and widespread scorn. This is an area where Americans made and make valuable contributions. I personally know of many people at US transit agencies who know what they are doing and challenge themselves to get better. The mentality of those folks bears no resemblance to that on show at this webinar. No one who says, I don’t use the word “prioritization” belongs in charge of a $117 billion program.