Amtrak: Great Way to Travel If You Don’t Care When You Get There

The Statesman has an editorial in support of a bill to study on the feasibility of bringing back the Pioneer Route through the Treasure Valley.

A train would be a fun and interesting way to travel. If you didn’t care too much about getting there.

This past Summer, I met my brother at the State GOP Convention. He decided to take the train. The train ended up four hours late coming and I believe six hours late going back. At the time, Amtrak “boasted” on its website of a sixty-six percent on-time ratings. Some boast. Any airline with that record would be out of business.

And really for business travelers, a sixty-six percent on-time rating just isn’t good enough, and heck, I don’t even think a lot of vacationers will choose to sit around for 4-6 hours. Amtrak is a joke, and with the price of oil falling (for some reason the media hasn’t been playing up the fact that oil is now under $100 a barrel with some experts saying its headed to $80,) Amtrak ridership is going to fall back down. The solution for good rail service on this is to privatize the whole thing and to get competent management in there.