You may have heard about the tiny bit of I-5 bridge that’s fallen into the Skagit River. Anticipating increased demand while the bridge is being repaired — a temporary replacement may come sometime in June, while a better fix could take until September — the state has talked Amtrak into adding a roundtrip train daily between Seattle and Bellingham.
It will leave Seattle at 8:15 a.m. and return from Bellingham at 5:15 p.m. The trip will take two hours and forty minutes, with stops at Mount Vernon, Stanwood, Everett, and Edmonds. Reservations are required; visit Amtrak Cascades to view ticket prices and availability. Lowest fares for a Seattle-Bellingham trip should range from $17 and $23 one-way, Seattle-Edmonds, $7 one-way.
For you early-birds, the regular morning train leaves Seattle at 7:40 a.m., and gets to Bellingham about a half an hour sooner, for the same price.
Washington Transportation Secretary Lynn Peterson thanked Amtrak, Sound Transit, and rail-freight giant BNSF for helping make the train a reality: “We are so fortunate that we have the relationships to make this urgent service a reality so quickly.” Amtrak will operate the train, but the actual cars are on loan from Sound Transit (because Sound Transit is a commuter system, there will be no diner car), while BNSF, of course, provides the rails.
The exact schedule for the bridge repair remains in flux, but the train may continue to operate until a permanent bridge is in place (that’s an illustration of a temporary fix, above) — it depends upon passenger demand. This doesn’t help trucked freight, of course. Sen. Maria Cantwell highlighted the impact when she visited the collapsed bridge, pointing out that, “Every day, trucks carry around $38 million of U.S.-Canada trade cargo across the Skagit River on the I-5 corridor.”
Last week, Wonkblog’s Brad Plumer delved into the myth of the “money-losing” Amtrak passenger train service, raising the notion that passenger rail could be profitable. (Like airlines? Peruse this list of airline bankruptcies carefully.) Business Insider picked up the profitable-Amtrak story, too. But both tend to skip over how the most profitable line in Amtrak history got that way.
Chronic operating deficits have plagued Amtrak since its inception. Even today, as it carries record numbers of passengers, Congress directly subsidizes the service. In 2011, that amounted to $1.4 billion against total revenue of $2.7 billion. (Besides Big Bird, former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney wanted to eliminate Amtrak’s federal subsidy as well.) Terrible spendthrift Amtrak, you’ve heard for decades, they can’t even make a profit on concessions.
Yet Amtrak doesn’t look much different from King County Metro when it comes to the struggle to meet operating costs while being directed to serve the greatest number of people, per geographic equity. That operating deficit is no accident, it’s baked in, just as it is with public transit agencies. And just as with public transit and public education, government has shifted costs elsewhere: In 1980, fares and other revenues met 42 percent of Amtrak’s operating costs. Per its 2011 annual report, Amtrak covered 85 percent of the cost of its operation, with the federal government still balking at 15 percent.
So where does the money go? Plumer refers you to a study by the Brookings Institution, which zeroes in on one likely culprit: “Amtrak’s 15 long-haul routes over 750 miles.” Congress, like the American people they represent, love services but not paying for them:
Many of these were originally put in place mainly to placate members of Congress all over the country, and they span dozens of states. This includes the California Zephyr route, which runs from Chicago to California and gets just 376,000 riders a year. All told, these routes lost $597.3 million in 2012.
This New York Times story, “How to Spend 47 Hours on a Train and Not Go Crazy,” gives you some idea of both the snail’s pace (relatively speaking) of cross-country train travel, and of the people served by Amtrak’s long-hauls (a large number of senior citizens and people with disabilities, says Amtrak, solidifying the public transit analogy).
In contrast, routes under 400 miles between major cities, argues Brookings, tend to pencil out nicely. You can see it in the numbers: 83 percent of Amtrak’s more than 31 million in ridership comes from these routes. Not all break even, but thanks to the extraordinary success of a few — the Acela and Northeast Regional routes now make a profit of $205 million — operating costs for this segment of Amtrak trips are covered and then some.
Using this calculation, in 2011, the less-than-400-mile routes made a profit of $47 million, while the greater-thans “lost” $614 million. (“Lost,” to emphasize that a national passenger rail network serving the bulk of the country will have varying costs. These are what they are — the question is whether the value of those long-haul trips is worth $614 million. Even The Economist admits that’s worthy of discussion.)
Using the Brookings interactive infographic on Amtrak route ridership, you can see that the Amtrak Cascades route has seen immense growth in ridership, more than 150 percent between 1997 and 2012. It’s subsidized by the states of Oregon and Washington. Still, it runs at a deficit, with its revenues amounting to 85 percent of the total. (You’ll also notice that there doesn’t seem to be a strict correlation between route length, ridership, and the cost of running it — the Chicago-St. Louis route is longer, carries fewer passengers, and manages a shortfall of just four percent.) Could it become profitable?
The answer to that seems a clear yes — but with a significant caveat to the Brookings findings. The idea of trip-length-dependent costs is likely to delight urbanists, in that they seem to illustrate the efficiency of urban densities. Outside of the Northeast, other high-performing routes are California’s Capitol Corridor and San Joaquin Service. Or they would seem high-performing, if there weren’t such a thing as the Northeast Corridor (NEC).
On the NEC, the Acela Express carries about half the total passengers of the Northeast Regional (almost 4 million to NR’s 8 million), but it brings in about 25 percent of total revenue. Its profit margins are on a different planet. Though its average speed is less than half its top speed of 150 mph, it’s still managed to corral around half of all the air and rail travel market in New York, Boston, and DC, between those destinations. Add in the profitable Northeast Regional, which can travel up to 125 mph on the NEC, and you have a more nuanced story.
It’s true that shorter runs come closer to breaking even, but operating profits come from high-speed rail. That’s what the two most successful Amtrak routes have in common: They travel on NEC track that Amtrak owns and maintains, currently the only high-speed passenger rail track in the U.S. That’s important because it upends the notion that a trip length of 400 miles is the primary limiting factor. The tracks, and who owns them, are, because that determines both maximum mph ratings and real-world reliability.
Creating a high-speed rail line out of the NEC was and is expensive (and comparisons that don’t take the associated capital costs into account aren’t simply unfair, they’re misleading). Amtrak as a network absorbed the costs of implementing NEC high-speed rail by cutting service elsewhere, especially on long-haul routes. It now has plans for true high-speed rail (achieving more than 200 mph) along the corridor, but estimates range between $120 billion and $150 billion.
The Amtrak Cascades route, on the other hand, is leased from freight carrier BNSF, which has never had any need for high-speed rail. Though the Cascades’s Talgo-trainset can handle a top speed of 124 mph by tilting into curves, because of track conditions, Amtrak is not allowed to exceed 79 mph. BNSF also restricts Amtrak’s usage of the railway both logistically (Amtrak can only run so many trains per day) and functionally (slow-moving freight trains are a top factor in Amtrak delays).
A planned “high-speed” upgrade for the route should raise the top speed to 110 mph (or 15 mph less than the top intercity speed on the NEC), and cut travel time from Seattle to Portland to two-and-a-half hours. That might be just fast enough to bring Amtrak Cascades into the black — but the route will still be dogged by slow freight trains, the fight to fit more trains into the schedule (the route already sells out in advance around holidays), and mudslides.
Congressional critics of Amtrak, you might be surprised to learn, seem most exercised about the direct subsidy to Amtrak, rather than the benefits-to-costs ratio of a national rail network. Indirect subsidy — funneling federal transportation money to states who might then decide to spend it on rail — enjoys more support, especially as states are taking up the responsibility of funding rail on their own. The Brookings Institution’s vision of an optimized Amtrak feeds that dream of limited, intercity travel, funded by states from their transportation coffers.
But it doesn’t emphasize nearly enough the relationship of high-speed rail to operating profits — and whether, with those costs amortized, the high-speed routes we have look nearly as efficient. It would be ironic if, in the quest for efficiency, Amtrak was robbed of the ability to invest in the one thing that’s proven to move its numbers into the black.
This marvelous "Train" is courtesy of our Flickr pool's Great Beyond.
Of your four major coal groups, Powder River Basin coal falls into the “sub-bituminous” variety, low in sulfur comparatively, but lower in energy content, averaging 8,500 btu per pound (anthracite can produce upwards of 15,000 btu per pound). You’ll find the Powder River Basin in southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming, where it contributes to Wyoming’s status as the leading coal-producing state in the country.
Regulating sulfur emissions from coal plants, to reduce acid rain, was the best thing to happen to coal mining companies in the West; it made low-sulfur, low-energy coal economically viable. However, it’s like switching to low-tar cigarettes–there’s more than just sulfur to be concerned about.
It may seem odd for Washington State to be caught up in the debate over the future of Powder River Basin coal: About 73 percent of the state’s electricity is produced by hydroelectricity, with coal providing just eight percent. But that eight percent of coal-powered electricity produces 74 percent of greenhouse gas emissions tied to electricity generation.
Recognizing this, state environmentalists and other people who like to breathe clean air have been pushing for the closure of Centralia’s TransAlta plant, in tandem with a national trend toward regulating coal-fired plants, as they currently exist, out of business. This is perturbing to coal companies, as the U.S. possesses huge resources of coal, hundreds of years’ worth, and yet their domestic market is declining. (Despite, nationally, just over 50 percent electricity being coal-generated–retiring these plants marks a huge shift in fuel dependency.)
But, as tobacco companies learned before them (as a side-note, tobacco company-style PR strategy was employed in the fight against sulfur regulation, so this isn’t a drive-by association), foreign markets are not so regulated. So it is possible to cede regulation to the U.S. while increasing sales overseas. The possibility of undercutting competitors on price in selling to China’s coal buyers depends, though, on there being Western ports capable of handling the volume and weight of coal shipments.
There would be so much coal traveling–the coal companies have argued publicly for one amount, while planning for a larger one–that a host of side-effects may arise where you wouldn’t expect. Coal dust pollution, which can cause emphysema, bronchitis, and black lung, could be a longer-term problem with around a terminal shipping tens of millions of metric tons of coal per year. How much would come back, airborne, as mercury and smog? And then there’s the sheer physical presence of, say, nine 1.5-mile-long trains per day traveling at in-city speeds.
Not surprisingly, some in the communities of Longview and Bellingham are drawn to the prospect of jobs creation, with a full-time terminal workforce of a few hundred. Sightline researcher Eric de Place says he understands the need for jobs, but that the coal-terminal boosters are ultimately “short-sighted.” “The toughest thing is the jobs question,” he admits, not because there are that many, or because the economic impact is so great, but simply because so many people are out of work in Whatcom and Cowlitz counties.
De Place argues that a state with a governor who has already made “some strong statements” about the need to phase out coal-burning plants (and who is, I note, familiar with tobacco company-style strategies) has already established a baseline for what’s both moral and responsible when it comes to coal-generated electricity. The atmosphere not being a great respecter of political borders, he notes, it makes little sense to suppress greenhouse gas emissions in one spot, and facilitate the generation of even more elsewhere.
One of de Place’s recent posts on Sightline surfaced a white paper on the economics of cheap coal:
One of the nation’s most respected resource economists, Dr. Thomas M. Power, just released a new white paper showing that coal exports to China will increase that country’s coal burning and pollution, and decrease investments in energy efficiency.
In a nutshell, Power demonstrates that the planned coal export facilities in the Northwest would add to the supply of coal to China thereby pushing down the cost of burning it. And because China is highly cost sensitive, even relatively small changes in price could result in significant changes in coal burning.
You wouldn’t think this required study, but PRB coal companies, as part of their “everyone else is doing it” argument, had suggested that their contribution would have no impact on China’s overall coal consumption, so it might as well be them as opposed to someone else. This was a little improbable on the face of it, as no one has suggested that China has satisfied its demand for energy.
If, in a perfect world, we could satisfy the need for jobs, it’s likely that far fewer, outside those directly employed by coal companies, would be arguing for these port projects, versus other trade opportunities. But, that being the case, doesn’t it make sense to work towards the perfect world, rather than in the opposite direction? What we would seem to learn from the debate is that the heartland of the U.S. is just a train-ride away from shipping to China.
