This article appears in the March 9, 2015 issue of National Review.
In June 2011, an Amtrak train collided with a truck on U.S. Route 95, killing at least six people. This sobering accident near Reno, Nev., contrasts with the perhaps romanticized place of railroads in the American imagination. Few events seem to embody the fulfillment of the vision of a nation stretching “from sea to shining sea” as vividly as the completion of America’s first transcontinental railroad in 1869. And rare is the American western film that does not feature in some way the nation’s railroads.
Yet the reality is that American passenger railroads, dominated by Amtrak, deliver a standard of service far below that of other railroads around the world. The high-speed trains that connect urban areas in Japan and Western Europe put their counterparts in the United States to shame.
I was contemplating these facts in early February while sitting on an optimistically named “Acela” train to New York on a perfectly sunny day. At nine, the scheduled departure time, the screen at our track suddenly flashed the word “Delay.” Further information was unavailable. Nobody could tell us how long the delay would last. Then, at ten, I received an e-mail telling me the train was canceled. I dashed to the kiosk and moved myself to a later train. About 15 minutes thereafter, an Amtrak employee announced that my first train had not really been canceled. I raced to the kiosk and switched back. Eventually, I arrived in New York, about three hours late. But the slow-as-molasses trip afforded ample opportunity to research comparative train data.
While Punch-and-Judy annoyances like the one I experienced are one metric of the professionalism of a train system, the best benchmark of the quality of a nation’s railroads is safety, which is, after all, job one.
A good measure of safety is passenger miles traveled per reported passenger injury (defined here to include fatalities). A higher number is better: It means that a passenger can travel more miles before expecting to face an injury.
America’s number is low. It is so dangerous compared with rail in the more prosperous regions of Europe that it is difficult to get the data from the U.S. and Europe on the same chart. Based on data spanning the period 2004–12, for example, to expect one transit-related injury, a passenger would need to ride the French railroad for 4.9 million miles or the German railroad for 4.1 million miles. Yet he would need to ride America’s railroads for only 84,300 miles, on average, to sustain one injury. Adjusted for passenger miles traveled, Amtrak’s passengers get injured 58 times as often as those on French railroads.
Even the worst rail systems in Europe are superior to the Amtrak-dominated American railroad system. As the chart below shows, America is less safe by the end of the sample period than even the worst European systems. Countries on the periphery of the European economy, such as Greece and Romania, surpass the United States by a substantial margin. Only Lithuania appears to be comparably dangerous.
The injuries, of course, are the tip of the iceberg. It is highly likely that running on time and other aspects of customer service are correlated with these safety data. Given the high standards of rail service in the developed countries of Asia (whose systems are not represented in our data), it is safe to conclude that America’s is among the worst rail systems in the developed world.
The good news is that it would be easy to fix. Amtrak is the answer to the question “What would a railroad look like if it were run by the staff of the Department of Motor Vehicles?” If we end federal subsidies to Amtrak, and require it to liquidate, then private companies would buy up its stations and routes. These companies could then begin running our trains with a level of professionalism that Americans now experience only when traveling abroad.