Most of what is written on the financial side of Amtrak is completely incorrect. The NE Corridor carries the most passengers but requires over half of the budget for less than half of the passengers, and this doesn't include depreciation and replacement maintenance, so the line has effectively been "de capitalized". Amtraks West Coast service almost all recovered "above the rail" costs but are required to carry system overhead costs, so recovered between 45-55 percent from fares (far more than the NEC). Break up might be considered, if Amtrak was shutting down? Or we could finance rail passenger service adequately and run it right?

I did an analysis of Amtrak and Transit as a percentage of the US Gross Domestic Product that we spend on surface transportation in the US, a few years ago. Transit and Amtrak accounted for about 4.5% of trips, about 3% of person miles traveled, and took about 2.7% of our national expenditures for surface transportation. We appear to get about what we are willing to pay for. Less than 1/3 of transit costs are directly covered by "private" sources, and between 80-90% of auto costs are "private". The remaining costs are public costs. Public costs for streets and roads still dwarf transit expenditures, and this doesn't include massive hidden government subsidies.

The rental value of parking, much of which is supplied by governmental mandate through zoning, not the market, is not counted in this analysis and adds tens of billions of dollars to the auto "subsidy" side of the equation. Each car in the US is estimated to have between 12 and 27 parking spaces per vehicle. Each space has a current cost of about $20,000 per space. This can come to a capital investment 10-20 times as much as our cars.

My analysis on the auto costs side of the equation did not include the billions in annual health care costs for auto accidents, fire, police, and paramedics, nor national defense costs for maintaining our oil addiction? These indirect costs and subsidies to the automobile are substantial. Victoria Transporation Policy Institute has a compendium of cost and cost estimation techniques and peer reviewed papers on the subject, if one is interested in how these types of analysis are done.

From an economic standpoint our national investments for rail and transit have been paltry, but they are relatively efficient. Only our investments in bicycles are more efficient.