I’m fretting because as I was on the Amtrak Northeast Regional last week to Boston and then the Downeaster to Portland, Maine I read that Amtrak’s CEO Stephen Gardner abruptly resigned.
News reports reported that he resigned because President Trump asked him too. And then Elon Musk weighed in in a recent Morgan Stanley conference that “Amtrak is an embarrassment,” or something similar.
On top of that the new Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, is bragging about how he wants to put the brakes on California’s high speed rail network from San Francisco to Los Angeles, or at least scrutinize why the project isn’t completed 10 years after construction commenced.
And then Bill Maher, a Californian, ridiculed the project on his show last Friday while talking to Ezra Klein, saying that so far there’s only a current segment almost ready to transport passengers between Merced in the north and Bakersfield in the south in the Central Valley.
But California has had to go it mostly alone in funding it. It did a get a decent sum of $3 billion during Biden’s presidency but with Elon Musk on a rampage of cuts and being hostile to high speed rail when he was in California a decade ago, California will probably have to go it alone once again during Trump’s second term.
Interestingly I received an email after registering for a Zoom next week hosted by the High Speed Rail Alliance whereby the author Marc J. Dunkleman will discuss his new book (which I ordered) “Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—And How to Bring It Back.”
Even without reading it, you can easily conclude that the U.S. is not building out public infrastructure on the scale of, say, China.
I mean China has built out a 30K-mile high speed rail network in the last 15 years.
I just can’t believe we here in the U.S. don’t have a similar network. Outside the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak has to run on freight lines on its national network!
When I used to cover as a reporter 10 years ago House Transportation & Infrastructure committee hearings in Washington DC about Amtrak and California the input from, wholly, Republicans outside the Northeast was outright hostility to expand the rail network, not to advance it.
Well, those are my words before I board Amtrak tomorrow morning to Baltimore, and then a car rental to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania!