Amtrak,the attempt to renew U.S. rail service

The decline of railway passenger train patronage and the deterioration of service in the United States have led the U.S. Government to assume control over the operation of trains via a quasi‐federal corporation called “Amtrak,” but some basic causes of the decline remain and new problems will arise as a result of this action.

Two results of the neglect to assess external costs against the various transport modes is an unbalance in favor of those with the higher external costs and the continued, seemingly fundamental, unprofitability of railway passenger service, which exists even for equipment that operates at capacity!

Some way of collecting external costs will have to be found, and the problems created by the new intrusion of the U.S. Government into transport will have to be faced.     

The S.K. people mover

The S.K. people mover has presently been operated for more than six years during each exhibition at Paris - Nord exhibition lot at Villepinte. During two major exhibitions - EXPO'86 at Vancouver, Canada and YEs'90 at Yokohama, Japan - it was operated twelve hours daily during six months in each case with very short night maintenance shifts. The small cable-driven cars carried ten million people quite trouble-free with an availability better than 99.5%. After those installations on exhibition or entertainment sites, a new S.K. system is under construction in Marne-la-Vallée (near Paris, France) to link a newly-built urban development area and a regional railroad station. A S.K. is also to be installed in Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport. Other projects are being studied too. Presently entering a new class of systems, the S.K. people mover features a number of newly-designed components intended to further improve comfort and reliability.     

Economic evaluation for U.S. railroads

In the United States the railroads are the only intercity freight carriers that own the vehicles, routes and terminals that they use. Routes and terminals are natural monopolies and need regulation; the operation of vehicles is naturally competitive and, at most, needs antitrust. On this view, the operation of rail vehicles should be divested and deregulated; the routes and terminals need improved regulation. The present objective is to propose a method of regulating the tolls that would be charged by the route operators. The network would be partitioned into separately owned route segments. Each segment would be operated by a supplier of route services under a franchise bidding scheme. The unit of service would be a linear space on a track; this unit would equal the length of the train plus a safety interval, and it would move along the track at a standard speed. The heart of the proposal consists of a rule for pricing this space. A unit of route service is produced if and only if the revealed gain from exchange is nonnegative, and any unit produced is sold to that train operator who values it most. Price equals incremental cost, and a bidding scheme ensures that the subsidies will be such as either to yield normal profits in the long run or else to cause the route segment to be shut down.