WHAT YOU NEED NOW - CONTENT UPDATED THROUGH THE DAY
Nov. 12, 2005
COMMENTARY: Thriving Amtrak Sustains Life-Threatening Blow with Firing of
David Gunn
By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
Hinton, WV (HNN) – The nation’s only long-distance and regional rail
passenger system took a major punch to the gut this week with the firing by
the Amtrak board of David Gunn, the best ever Amtrak president in my
recollection.
Under his leadership over the past three years, Amtrak has attracted 25
million riders and it’s growing as he has managed to improve on-time service
and stay within the budget for what was never intended to be a profit-making
agency – any more than the U.S. Army or Postal Service is.
Readers of this site should know by now that I’m not only a booster of
Amtrak, I actually use it; Amtrak service – the Cardinal, to be specific –
is one reason why I picked Hinton as a place to live. In the past year, I
used the Cardinal to travel to New York City and Chicago on two separate
occasions. In Chicago, I took the Hiawatha to Milwaukee, the sensible and
economical way to make the journey.
My libertarian friends remind me that proper reading of the faith’s prayer
book demands absolute privatization of transportation: If it can’t make it
in the marketplace, it should be allowed to die.
This is fine if you have multiple transportation options, but much of rural
America – and all of West Virginia really falls into that category – needs
rail links like Amtrak’s Cardinal to major cities like Washington, Chicago,
Philadelphia, New York, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Baltimore.
It’s no secret that the Bush administration wants to destroy Amtrak as we
know it, retaining the heavily used Northeast Corridor and letting the other
services die or be adopted by states that are fighting budget deficits and
have little or no money for a vital transportation link. If we lose our
train service, we’ll be worse than a Third World country: They have
passenger train service!
As the New York Times pointed out in a Nov. 10, 2005 editorial, U.S. Sen.
Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ and U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-MS, “managed to get a
93-to-6 vote to authorize $11.6 billion for passenger rail service in the
next six years - as close to an all-out endorsement of Amtrak as you can
get.”
The Times editorial obviously wasn’t written by John Tierney, an anti-Amtrak
columnist at the Grey Lady. I’ve blasted his allegedly libertarian arguments
calling for a sink-or-swim approach to Amtrak – and I’m more or less a
libertarian. I even voted for the Libertarian presidential candidate in
1996.
After he was fired, Gunn said of the Amtrak board: "Obviously what their
goal is, and it's been their goal from the beginning, is to liquidate the
company."
Kudos to The Times for saying: “This should be a call to arms. Amtrak should
be a public transportation trust. It will never be self-sufficient, nor show
a conventional profit, any more than the airline industry can fly without
federal help. The Bush administration long ago threatened to disassemble
Amtrak. Yesterday it began at the executive suite.”
