Greg Moore wrote:So, there was a blog post the other day (mentioned here) in the WaPo mapping out Amtrak's late trains.
Link here again
That apparently has prompted a response in the WaPo linked here.
Note this is a completely biased sample set, but still interesting.
At this point LOVE outnumbers HATE 6:1 (and LOVE outnumbers LOVE/HATE 2:1)
I actually find that fairly impressive.
I think it's more pronounced recent movement firmly into the HATE WITH BURNING PASSION camp for most people with the airlines and TSA that's wiped Amtrak's slate clean of much past criticism. Including wiping clean a lot of the parroted talking points about passenger trains that stuck harder and longer than most of the actual substantive criticisms of the mode and Amtrak's setup.
They know flying has been made as unpleasant as possible for pretty much all including the very rich business traveler, so other modes get an unbiased look for a change. They like what they're seeing comfort-wise (although that's largely because the comfort of air travel has been forcibly taken away), and so a sweet spot has started to develop where travelers will readily trade longer travel times for lower stress and higher comfort if the pricing is appropriate. And on short-hops like corridor routes...the difference is small enough that it's starting to get outright competitive with airlines that have hyper-consolidated their regional routes and sharply reduced all non- megahub-to-megahub flight options. The annoyances like woefully inconsistent OTP are still there, but on trains and buses today it doesn't generate blinding
HATE like an airline delay + missing baggage + lousy customer service + hidden fees + being manhandled by TSA on the most mundane of trips. And so Amtrak gets a lot more patience for addressing issues than the airlines...who have run out of time to address longstanding customer service complaints, and have pretty much unilaterally (along with TSA) kept marching like a marauding army to keep squeezing the customer. So long as Amtrak doesn't take any major steps backwards in reliability, it's got the wind to its back to keep improving in fits and starts with the occasional setback.
The primary upshot of all this is that it used to be if you weren't an NEC Congresscritter without outright transit-dependent constituents it was guilt-free political points and general-purpose entertainment to mess with Amtrak anywhere else in the country. In both parties. That was almost the default state of affairs. Now the spread of train-dependent and mildly train-dependent Congressional districts is much-expanded, and many more states are screaming for better routes and investment in their corridor routes and corridor routes-to-be. There are still a lot of ideologically-locked pols who hate the idea of Amtrak, but it was noticeable in 2012 (and it'll be noticeable this Fall) that many more of them had to triangulate their stances with a lot more caution and coded language than before. The only ones still outright putting "abolish it!" as the #3 bullet point on their public campaign literature tend to be the ones that have no service or proposed service to begin with. For the rest it's become a much more artful framing about "my philosophy on government spending blah blah blah" and "private investment can do this better than Amtrak blah blah blah" to talk out of both sides of mouth while not going full-on "Bah!...choo-choos are stupid and I hate them!". Thank the airlines leaving such a profoundly negative impression that this new class of risk-averse pols can't just act solely on ideological id without making an issue of "But if not airlines, then what???" with their constituents. Yeah, that doesn't change Amtrak's funding situation for the better. Not with this Congress. It does, however, mean status quo is the risk-averse rule and there's not an annual threat any longer of Amtrak being gutted like a fish. Just those for-show transportation bills where the cuts never have a chance of passing and belatedly get bent back towards the status quo. i.e. The ones with an ideological point to make...make their point, without drawing attention or follow-up questions from their constituents forced by the constrictions of air travel to keep an open mind about other modes.
That's a huge shift in attitude. Simply making the pols more risk-averse around making blanket statements about passenger trains means attitudes have changed fundamentally enough that they perceive a threat
on their own turf about going too far. Threats on their own turf are pretty much the only constraint the public has on how a Congressman votes, so establishing risk aversion that didn't exist 15 years ago when Amtrak had its last truly mortal threat-to-existence is a big deal. Not yet enough to bust out of the holding pattern and get increased investment, but a big trickle-up change in public attitudes. Thank the incredible consolidating airline industry and the TSA's overreach for being the catalyst for this.
