END OF THE LINE? President Bush's budget does not provide for the continuation of Amtrak. National Corridors reports that the National Association of Railroad Passengers, a lobbying organization that combines train enthusiasm with occasional careful introspection, is not pleased.

“The National Association of Railroad Passengers condemns this proposal as radical and irresponsible.”

NARP executive director Ross Capon declared, “It would end virtually all intercity rail passenger service in the nation, including through service on the Northeast Corridor between Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. This places the burden of funding intercity passenger rail entirely on states that do not have the financial resources to assume such an unfunded mandate.”

He said, “States with limited resources would place first priority on saving the commuter operations within their borders. The $360 million the Administration proposes is to allow freight and local commuter rail operations over the Northeast Corridor to continue. It is not clear that this would be enough to accomplish these purposes, and not even the Administration claims it would allow continuation of any Amtrak trains.”

Capon added, “Past experience suggests that the only way to fund services which cross multiple state lines is at the federal level,” and added, “The Bush Administration misleads the public by saying that a ‘restructuring’ based on zero federal support ‘should lead to the development of short-corridor routes between major population centers.’"

The Chicago Tribune takes a somewhat different view.

In a few places, like the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington and possibly the Chicago-Milwaukee area, Amtrak does draw a noticeable number of people off the roads. But that fact only lends weight to the administration's preference for letting states decide which operations warrant continued support.

Under its proposal, Washington would offer a 50-50 match for state capital investments. Deprived of operating aid, Amtrak has various options: ending service in most places while cutting costs so it can make a profit on selected routes, letting private companies take over some trains, and transferring particular segments to state or regional agencies.

Rail buffs say the money given to Amtrak is a pittance compared to that spent on infrastructure for drivers and fliers. In fact, on a passenger-mile basis, which measures how much it costs to transport a given number of travelers a given distance, the subsidy to Amtrak is huge. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports that from 1990 to 2002, Amtrak averaged a subsidy of $186 per thousand passenger miles. Commercial aviation, by contrast, got just $6--and the government actually got more from highway users than it spent.

Given its meager performance, which shows no sign of improving, it's impossible to justify that expense. In a time of many urgent budget needs, Amtrak is a luxury that the nation would be better off without.

These observations merit further consideration. Although Amtrak is not supposed to be a commuter train operation, it is difficult to interpret its Philadelphia-New York and Sacramento-Oakland service as anything but a commuter service. Some of the Western trains currently operate as a convex combination of cruise train to the national parks and accommodation train to intermediate small towns, a compromise that pleases nobody, as schedules optimized for sightseeing imply prairie towns served in the wee small hours, but those stops add to the running times of the trains. The interstate corridors might work better if express trains coexist and exchange passengers with local trains, something not currently encouraged on those tracks shared by Amtrak and Metro-North, New Jersey Transit, Metra, Metrolink, and other commuter rail authorities.