Sometimes I wonder why rail and transit have such poor reputations in this country. I know that all systems have some weaknesses, but folks are always going on about how rail is totally unreliable and a black hole for money, when in fact transit and rail in this country provide remarkably good service given the constraints imposed upon the systems by a hostile federal government.

Maybe part of the antipathy stems from shoddy journalism:

At the same time, the first-ever National Train Day, under the direction of Amtrak’s anodyne marketing department, came and went May 10 without significant fanfare. No groundbreaking outreach to get cars off the road this summer. No new service lines announced. No innovative ticketing schemes to take advantage of the airline crisis. Acela trains zoomed around the nation (or rather, trundled, and at extreme cost) as usual…

I actually think air competition is a good thing, especially in such a large country. But unless the train monopoly–federally funded in extremis, seemingly without conditions–engages some hard-nosed reforms, my guess is we’ll all just have to stay put.

That’s the New Republic’s Dayo Olopade. So let’s see. Acela doesn’t “zoom around the nation.” The Acela routes are confined to the northeast corridor. And maybe those trains aren’t fast relative to European high speed rail, but they get you from central Washington to central New York in 2 hours and 45 minutes–at least twice as fast as the bus, and not that far off from the plane (with much less hassle). Acela service is also frequent and reliable.

I’m guess Dayo has no idea how much money is allocated to Amtrak each year–that he didn’t even bother looking. Amtrak gets, for the record, a little over $1 billion a year from the feds, to run its high traffic lines as well as the lumbering cross-country routes Congress insists upon. The 2007 DOT budget set aside about $1.3 billion for the Federal Railroad Administration. The Federal Aviation Administration, by contrast, got nearly $15 billion. The Federal Highway Administration got over $31 billion.

Amtrak would love to unveil all kinds of new programs, and I don’t doubt that Americans would like to have better rail options to help them avoid driving. Unfortunately, our government pours most of its transportation money into modes that use expensive fuel far more intensely than rail. And then, of course, when farsighted politicians try and boost the funding for rail, they get angry calls from their constituents telling them not to throw money away on rail services that are money-hungry and slow. I wonder where those constituents get that impression?