Working on the Railroad

The best one can say about the National Defense Rail Act, introduced earlier this month, is that its co-sponsors, Senators Schumer and Clinton, are trying to bring the pork to the right state.

The legislation is a $23 billion appropriation over the next five years for Amtrak. In addition to developing new high-speed corridors, the bill aims to promote the Northeast Corridor that links Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston by rail.

The senators' press release announcing their sponsorship of the bill makes much of the bill's security measures. Mr. Schumer is quoted as saying, "We cannot wait another day to make sure that if an attack occurs while a train is in a tunnel, every commuter can quickly evacuate to safety." While commuters who use Penn Station will no doubt be grateful for Mr. Schumer's advocacy, little of the bill's appropriation would go toward security. Of the $23 billion the bill seeks to appropriate, only $1.3 billion would go to security upgrades, and less than $776 million of that would go toward upgrading safety in Penn Station's six tunnels. Tagging a spending bill with the buzzword "defense" does not mean that it will dramatically, or even primarily, improve security.

Not that such a move is without precedent. The country's interstate highways were built by the 1956 National System of Interstate and Defense Highways Act, a domestic spending measure that won political support as a Cold War defense tactic. This is not the time or place to recap the debate over the 1956 act, but let's just say that by slicing through urban neighborhoods and making access to the suburbs easier, it wasn't exactly the best piece of legislation for urban America.

Additionally, the senators promote the bill as a boon to noncoastal New York, pointing out that $6.5 billion is set aside for high-speed rail corridors. "These funds could be used for the Empire Corridor which serves upstate New York," the joint press release from Senators Clinton and Schumer says.

Albany to New York City to Washington — a cynic might say this sounds like a pretty good transportation system for, say, a New York politician. Amtrak's Northeast corridor also includes Boston, which will host the 2004 convention of Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Clinton's political party, the Democrats. (Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts is another cosponsor of the Amtrak bill.) But to the average person who has little time or inclination to be cruising up the eastern seaboard, the bill looks like Amtrak itself: an expensive boondoggle. And if one probes the matter, one finds that not even the politicians voting to subsidize the railroads ride them all the time. Mr. Schumer's staff acknowledges he primarily gets back and forth between Washington and Brooklyn by airplane, us ing the train only occasionally. Reps. Charles Rangel, Edolphus Towns, and Gregory Meeks tell our Washington bureau that they almost always fly instead of taking the train.

Private bus services like Greyhound and Peter Pan, and newer entrants like the companies that ply the routes between Chinatowns, can get passengers to Boston or Washington for less money than the train, with a smaller taxpayer subsidy. The US Airways, Delta, and American Airlines shuttles can get passengers there faster — and sometimes even cheaper — than the train. And when you fly, you can pick up those free copies of your favorite magazines, too. Why should the taxes of poor workers who ride the bus, or of the rich executives who fly the shuttle, go to subsidize the few politicians and others who prefer the Metroliner or Acela?

Environmentalists argue that the federally supported highway system already subsidizes gas-guzzling drivers, so a little support for trains is only fair. But there's got to be better ways to spend $23 billion on the environment — research on low-emissions vehicles, parkland acquisition, tree-planting, you name it — than by subsidizing a railroad.

The federal government has no business running a railroad that already faces huge operating losses. If Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Clinton really wanted to do New Yorkers — not to mention American taxpayers — a favor, they would introduce a bill to Congress privatizing Amtrak and getting the federal government out of the business of providing cost-inefficient transportation for a few members of the East Coast political class.