President Bush had taken such a bold step, sort of, when he included nary a penny for Amtrak in his budget request last year. In doing so, he had thrown down a gauntlet, challenging the passenger service to reform or die. There had even been talk from the administration that bankruptcy would be a possibility, thus allowing a spin-off of the profitable northeast corridor between Washington and Boston to a private operator who could make the trains run on time. The president eventually conceded defeat, signing the $1.3 billion Amtrak appropriation Congress sent him, but he had taken a stand and put the issue on the table. Now he’s got the Stockholm syndrome, requesting, in his new budget, $900 million right off the bat, even before the Amtrak-loving Congress has had a chance to inflate the expenditure.

In his defense, Mr. Bush hasn’t completely abandoned the cause of Amtrak reform. While $500 million of that money is requested for capital maintenance and investment, he asks that $400 million in operating subsidies be divvied up by the secretary of transportation on the basis of detailed financial analyses and revenue projections for individual lines. In theory, this allows for more accountability on a system prone to operating unprofitable routes without a second thought – taxpayers subsidize just one such line, the Sunset Limited between Orlando and Los Angeles, to the tune of $466 a passenger each way, or roughly $1,000 roundtrip.

This budget represents another missed opportunity to take one step that would benefit taxpayers and commuters more than any other Amtrak reform – forcing Amtrak to sell off the tracks it owns. The company currently owns most of the line along the northeast corridor, as well as a few key miles in other major metropolitan areas like Chicago. As a result, whenever it runs short of cash it can threaten to turn off the power on the tracks, stranding the hundreds of thousands of commuters who constitute the majority of America’s rail passengers. In New York, this means that riders of New Jersey Transit, Metro North, and the Long Island Railroad become unwitting pawns in Amtrak’s periodic efforts to extract more money from Congress.

The president remains committed to Amtrak reform, including eventually handing the northeast corridor over to a consortium of the states through which the tracks run, according to a spokesman for the Department of Transportation, Brian Turmail. In the meantime, Mr. Turmail notes that the budget request includes more money for a reserve that would fund operation of the tracks if Amtrak tried to shut down service in the northeast. Which is new kind of socialist mugging in that taxpayers are now paying into a sort of insurance fund to protect them in case another taxpayer-subsidized company doesn’t do what taxpayers fund it to do. New York commuters and taxpayers will only be safe once someone has wrested control of the tracks away from Amtrak.