(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 499: Expanding Amtrak Across America

This week we’re joined by Mike Christensen, Executive Director of the Utah Rail Passengers Association and a tireless advocate for intercity passenger rail. Mike chats with us about Amtrak’s expansion plans, the impact of the infrastructure bill and why things take so long to implement.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is an unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

[00:02:48] Jeff Wood: Mike Christensen, welcome to the talking headways podcast.

[00:02:56] Mike Christensen: Thanks for having me.

[00:02:57] Jeff Wood: Well, thanks for being here before I get started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[00:03:00] Mike Christensen: Well, to kind of talk about my journey, I actually grew up initially in the Bay area.

[00:03:08] I lived in the East Bay in Livermore until I was 10 years old. And then, uh, my parents got divorced. My dad and I ended up moving to Idaho, which is where he grew up. So I went from being in the California suburbs, being in a very small town in rural Idaho, 2000 people. But I was, I was blessed to have the experience of getting to live in Germany a couple of times as a teenager and young adult, I went there for a month.

[00:03:40] As an exchange student, the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, and that really started the process of exposing me to public transit. And then I ended up going back 2 years later as a missionary and lived in Germany for almost 2 years and I got around. Walking, biking transit during that entire time, and that really planted a lot of seeds in my mind that allowed me to start to challenge kind of these very stereotypical American dream ideas of like, okay, everybody’s going to live in a single family house in the suburbs and drive everywhere.

[00:04:23] And that is somehow the ideal. Lifestyle and yeah, my experiences and living in Germany taught me that that was not the case and that it often was even, you know, a higher quality of life for people that were living in urban areas and who weren’t spending every day driving. And, uh, it was interesting because I had a conversation with Jeff Speck about this a couple of years ago, and he really laughed and pointed out that, like, oh, so the church sent you on a mission to Germany to convert people.

[00:05:02] And you ended up getting converted to urbanism and I said, yeah, that’s actually pretty accurate. Because it took a while before I was really able to start to immerse myself and actually living that urban lifestyle. I’ve lived in Salt Lake City now for over 20 years. And for the last seven and a half years, I have been car free basically as a grad student.

[00:05:34] I was hardly using my car when I was a grad student at the University of Utah. And while I was in school, wanting to learn as much as I could about public transit and use public transit as much as I could. And I found that I would go sometime months at a time between actually using my car and it got to the point where I realized that I was going to be spending more maintaining my car over the coming year than the car was actually worth at that point.

[00:06:07] And that really. You know, make me realize, Hey, this just is a money pet. And yeah, and the last year that I owned my car, I only drove it about 1300 miles. And from like all the research that we’ve seen lately, like car ownership just does not pencil at all when you’re, your mileage is that low. Two years ago, I bought an e bike.

[00:06:33] In fact. It’s 2 years ago today that I bought an e bike and that has become my primary way of getting around Salt Lake City. Now. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I have no desire at all to ever own a car again. Sometimes they’re very useful, but I’ve also found that. In the times when I actually do need to car and go and rent a car, I get basically a brand new car for the day or however long I need it.

[00:07:04] And it’s nice to not have to worry about the maintenance or like any responsibility or so far. I have not even rented a car long enough to need to wash it. So,

[00:07:17] Jeff Wood: yeah, I mean, that happened to me too. I, I had a Volkswagen Jetta up until like 20, I think it was like 2010, 2012. But I kept on getting parking tickets for leaving the car during street sweeping.

[00:07:27] And you know, each of those tickets was like 85. It’s like, what’s, what’s the point. And I’m only driving this car once a week and I don’t really need it. Other than like longer distance trips, like to go visit family or if I want to go to the Redwoods or something like that, I mean, that’s important, but it just doesn’t pencil out.

[00:07:40] So at some point, like my clutch was deciding that it wanted to give out. And I got a quote and it was like 2, 000 and the car was only worth 2, 000 too. So it’s like, and around that time was when, you know, Uber and lift and zip car was available in the neighborhood and stuff like that. So there’s all kinds of options here in San Francisco.

[00:07:57] It was before the big scooter and bike boom, but you can get around pretty easily with that. Oh yeah. But I’m also interested in kind of your journey with inner city passenger rail. I mean, transit in cities is one thing and going to Germany and all that stuff, but there’s also that longer distance trip that you are, you know, famously an advocate for.

[00:08:14] Mike Christensen: Yeah. At some point through the years, I can’t even remember how at this point, but I got involved and, and became a member of, at the time it was the national association of rail passengers. We’ve changed our name and rebranded to the Rail Passengers Association, but I got involved and became a member, which one of the purposes that you do get a little bit of a discount on Amtrak tickets.

[00:08:43] And I eventually. Signed up, basically applied to be a representative from Utah on the nonprofits council of representatives, which basically is the big leadership body and got involved pretty heavily starting about 10 years ago in 2014. And have been involved in leadership at RPA ever since, and went on to be elected to the board of directors in 2019.

[00:09:15] So I’ve been serving for five years now on the board of directors and that has got me like very much in the midst of both. Well, I kind of have an interesting perspective because I went to grad school and got a master of city metropolitan planning and, um, both Certified AICP now and also accredited.

[00:09:41] Congress for the new urbanism, so I’m also very much involved in things like seeing you and strong towns, but then on the other side, I’m also very involved in the advocacy side of it and realize that there’s definitely a role to be filled by people who are. Constantly pushing our elected officials to ensure that there’s funding available for the things that we really need more of in the U.

[00:10:12] S. And one of those big things is intercity passenger rail. Which for anyone who’s like, really familiar with Amtrak, you understand that we have the Northeast corridor, which is, you know, where we really have our, our most dense concentration of passenger rail and we have. A lot of state supported corridors around the country and I usually point to California as being one of the best examples of it because aside from the Northeast corridor, the best performing Amtrak routes are in California with the Pacific surf liner and the capital corridor.

[00:10:50] But we also see like our biggest growth in Amtrak ridership. Being the state supported corridors, for example, we just launched the Borealis connecting Chicago and the twin cities, and it has attracted enough ridership that it’s actually. I’m not sure exactly which metrics they’re using, but the word on the street has been that they’re actually having enough writers that they are breaking even on the operating costs on

[00:11:22] Jeff Wood: So I’ve seen quote unquote profitable, but I don’t know exactly what that means.

[00:11:25] Right. Talking about Amtrak.

[00:11:27] Mike Christensen: It’s always hard to know exactly how that’s being measured. Yeah. And it’s also important to point out that public transit in general does not need to be profitable in order to, in terms of like. You know, not requiring an operational subsidy in order to be valuable and useful for the people that it serves.

[00:11:50] So, yeah, I’ve been very involved in passenger rail advocacy, especially over the last 6 years. After I finished my master’s degree as part of getting a master’s degree, I had studied what an Amtrak expansion for Utah would look like in terms of doing state supported routes in Utah. And I saw that that was something that was very much needed.

[00:12:16] I also experienced firsthand that we didn’t really have the institutional capacity in Utah to be able to move forward on that. Another way of stating that is, like, we just don’t have anybody in state government in Utah who is really focused on being the champion for projects like that. So I realized that there was an opportunity.

[00:12:45] For advocacy to fill that role in the meantime, so I started my own nonprofit, the Utah rail passengers association and have been working as its executive director. Ever since then, I’ve gotten lots of good support from people. That is, as I talk about expanding passenger rail across Utah and the neighboring states, the general.

[00:13:10] People are very supportive of that, but there hasn’t been much in the way of financial support to really allow me to do the level of work that I want to be doing. I am hoping in the next year or so to get enough sponsors to be able to hold a Utah rail summit. And actually bring together a lot of the local leaders and also a lot of the national voices together and kind of have a big meeting of the minds and get people to understand that Utah is.

[00:13:49] Unfortunately, even though we’re growing rapidly, we haven’t really built the institutional knowledge and the desire to kind of move away from being, well, like, pretty much every state DOT is still very auto focused.

[00:14:06] Jeff Wood: Yeah, and I want to ask you about that because I feel like that’s something that we had talked about previously is that, you know, the lack of institutional capacity and the lack of kind of even institutional, uh, wanting for lack of a better term to move forward with things like passenger.

[00:14:20] I mean, we’re lacking capacity and a lot of things with transit related, but this is a specific need that state DOTs probably don’t want to have anything to do with, but they’re kind of forced to. Into that by the way that Amtrak is organized and how it’s funded for those state level lines that you were talking about.

[00:14:36] Mike Christensen: Exactly. And as I started talking with people in our state DOT here, the, the Utah department of transportation, or. You dot I was kind of surprised to learn that, like, most of the planners and leaders within you dot had really no idea how Amtrak even operated in terms of subsidies. Because I remember talking with 1 of the state planning directors.

[00:15:09] This was a zoom meeting. So it was some time, like when we were all doing zoom meetings from home during the pandemic. And this particular planner said, well, if Amtrak wants to operate in Utah, can’t they just start operating? And at that point, I realized, oh, yeah, like, a lot of these leaders don’t understand.

[00:15:31] That in order for Amtrak to start up new service, there needs to be a partnership between the States in order to cover the operating costs on that. And that all has to do with, I believe it was Priya that was passed in 2014. I forget all of the various acronyms for all of these. It’s too many. There is exactly, there’s a statute in there that places a very firm dividing line at 750 miles and delineates that everything shorter than 750 miles is a state sponsored Amtrak service and the states that are involved in sponsoring that route are on the hook.

[00:16:24] For providing the operating funding for it and the annual appropriation that Congress gives the Amtrak can not be used to to fund those routes that are under 750 miles and then all of the routes that are longer than 750 miles in length are designated as long distance routes. And we currently have 15 long distance routes, the 2 that are kind of unique or the auto train and also the Palmetto, which is the only long distance route.

[00:17:03] That is just a day only train. It goes from New York to Savannah and does it all during the day. Well, generally daylight hours, but yeah, so that’s 1 of the 1st things that people need to be aware of when we talk about Amtrak, you know, an inner city passenger routes in general in the U. S. is that there is a very firm delineation at 750 miles.

[00:17:32] Jeff Wood: Do you know where that came from? 750 miles?

[00:17:36] Jeff Wood: seems kind of arbitrary, but maybe it’s not, maybe there’s a particular reason for it.

[00:17:41] Mike Christensen: It was interesting because I think it was drawn because all of the overnight trains were longer than 750 miles. So I think that’s why it was picked, but it’s, it’s very interesting because it set a weird delineation between the Palmetto and the Carolinian.

[00:18:05] The Palmetto is just over 750 miles. The Carolinian is just under, and the Carolinian goes from New York city to Charlotte, and it was already receiving some. Funding from the state of North Carolina, and the strange thing is that they operate using almost the identical equipment, but yeah, one of them, the Carolinian falls under state sponsored service, but the Palm Meadow falls into the long distance category.

[00:18:33] So, yeah, that would be interesting to research the history of exactly why that. Line was drawn

[00:18:40] Jeff Wood: because I know that like 500 now we talk about 500 miles is the best kind of competition with airlines. Right? So anything under 500 miles to use the best competition for short haul airlines and, you know, best from an environmental standpoint, from all kinds of other things.

[00:18:53] So, you know, Yeah. Just giving an extra 250 miles. It makes sense that it would be the separator between overnight and day trains. But, you know, now that we’re thinking about these connections between different cities, and especially you’re looking at the FRA is going through the process of putting together more routes after the infrastructure bill gave Amtrak, you know, 66 billion.

[00:19:10] Well, there’s a whole new world out there for picking routes and maybe the old ways are a little bit, um, anachronistic.

[00:19:18] Mike Christensen: Yeah, exactly. And also we would love to see flexibility on that 750 mile delineation because 1 other very interesting thing about Amtrak is the fact that it is technically a private company, but it has 1 shareholder, which is the federal government.

[00:19:39] And it very much parallels the privatization of the post office where just like the, the post office has to get permission from Congress. Every time it wants to increase the cost of stamps. Amtrak also has lots of. Micromanaging from Congress is probably a good way to say it, and it would be great if Amtrak were given more flexibility in its ability to be able to decide whether it wants to kick in some of its own funding to cover subsidies on some of the shorter routes, and sometimes it would make good business sense to do that.

[00:20:22] A good example is. For example, looking at the route of the California Zephyr, which goes from Chicago to the Bay Area. It gets a lot of use just like within the state of Colorado, a lot of ridership between Denver and communities like Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. And sometimes the fact that it Gets that heavy ridership means that it’s taking up seats for shorter distances that could have been sold to passengers going longer distances on the train.

[00:21:03] And so the conclusion that you draw is that it would be great if Amtrak could have additional service, like let’s say from Denver to Grand Junction. Yeah, do a shorter haul day train that would relieve the California’s effort of some of that. Load in order to do that, and the way that things are currently written that route subsidies for that route, the operating costs would have to be completely underwritten by the state of Colorado.

[00:21:30] It would be great to have some flexibility for Amtrak to be able to be more flexible in making business decisions. I think that’s a good way to say it.

[00:21:41] Jeff Wood: What does the 66 billion mean? What’s the vibe like now after getting such a huge injection of cash?

[00:21:47] Mike Christensen: Yeah, it’s been very exciting, but it’s also been very slow.

[00:21:53] It has been difficult and it’s. Partly we’re, we’re a little bit frustrated with the Federal Railroad Administration, who’s the one that’s overseeing all of that funding. But we also realized that they have had to staff up from basically not having any staff at all to oversee that, to build out a new program.

[00:22:17] It’s always about

[00:22:18] Jeff Wood: capacity.

[00:22:18] Mike Christensen: Exactly. And so it’s, Yeah, it’s been been great to see that it was the, uh, the rail passengers association that played a huge role in getting that 66 billion into the infrastructure bill. In fact, like right after the 2020 election, there was a big buzz about new administration wants to do this.

[00:22:45] Big infrastructure bill and wants to have a whole lot of funding for passenger rail, especially inner city passenger rail in it. And yeah, it’s been exciting to have all that funding available, but it’s been disappointing that we haven’t been able to roll out any new services yet. Basically, and yeah, we’re still working on it.

[00:23:08] But one of the hugely exciting things, at least from my perspective, is the bipartisan infrastructure law instructed the federal railroad administration to perform the Amtrak long distance service study, which I had the privilege to be able to participate in. And it was. Designed to look at the needs of our long distance system.

[00:23:39] And when, when you look at the current Amtrak map, you realize that there are a ton of gaps in service where there are cities that a lot of cases had passenger rail in the past, whether it was pre Amtrak or in the early days of Amtrak. And that services has disappeared. Also, there’s been changing demographics around the country.

[00:24:07] So there definitely has been a shift in the needs or transportation needs over the last half century. So this was really an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and look at what. Potential new routes would look like I’d like to start off by saying to that the study also recognize the low hanging fruit in long distance service improvements, which 2 of our current.

[00:24:42] Long distance routes only run three times a week rather than running daily. Yeah, that’s the Chicago to New York Cardinal and the, uh, Los Angeles to new Orleans sunset limited. And when you look at the ridership performance, you would guess that a route that is only running three days a week would basically.

[00:25:08] Have a ridership reduction that would average about 4 7th, less than than typical routes, but the ridership actually performs even lower than that because of the fact that it makes it so much harder to actually plan out a trip when a train is only operating 3 days a week. Like you almost have to memorize which days.

[00:25:34] The trains are operating, so it makes it really difficult to plan trips on those routes. And so the, like, number 1 things coming out of the study is to bring those services up to daily services and that’s. It’s really very low hanging fruit because it’s just a matter of making sure that additional equipment is available because the stations are already there.

[00:26:02] Everything else is already in place to do that. The results of that study recommended. Adding an additional 15 routes around the country. And it’s been very exciting to see new services coming out of that for me in here in Utah. It’s exciting because it would give us 2 additional routes, long distance routes that would serve Utah 1 that would go from Los Angeles to Denver through Salt Lake City and another that would go from Seattle to Denver through Salt Lake City.

[00:26:43] So we’re seeing. A lot of connections. There’s a lot of interest in wanting to be able to connect Salt Lake City to places like Boise and Las Vegas, which had service until 1997. yeah, we would love to see that restoration. There’s been a little bit of concern about the long distance study. Like one of the big concerns is it is on a timeline right now, where we wouldn’t expect to see any of these new services rolled out until at least 2040.

[00:27:22] So the, the disappointing thing is that, yeah, the, the timeline and the reason for that lengthy timeline is. We don’t have the equipment available. We don’t have the rolling stock available yet. And part of that is because we’re already in the process of having to replace all of our rolling stock. That’s on our 15 long distance routes and we.

[00:27:56] Would need to on top of that, come up with additional equipment for another 15 routes. So we’re hoping that we can build enough momentum and we can be able to push Congress enough to fund. What needs to be funded in order to roll out all of the service sooner and as like, 1 observation made by by Jim Matthews, who’s the president and CEO of rail passengers association.

[00:28:29] He said that. Yeah, he’s very disappointed by this. You know, minimum of 15 year timeline. And it’s like, Hey, like we were able to put a man on the moon in much less time. So we say that a lot. Exactly. This is not as complicated as going to the moon, but yet. Yeah, so it’s basically all about political willpower.

[00:28:54] If we can get Congress fired up, hopefully we can cut this down to about an 8 to 10 year timeline and be able to see new services rolling out a lot sooner.

[00:29:06] Jeff Wood: I mean, even that is like eight to 10 years. I mean, that’s a whole lifetime. I mean, 10 years ago, let’s see, most people were just barely getting iPhones.

[00:29:13] Like I, I, the timelines are so ridiculous these days. And this isn’t even like building or tunneling

[00:29:20] Mike Christensen: or building a

[00:29:21] Jeff Wood: whole new viaducts and stuff like that. It’s just like new train.

[00:29:23] Mike Christensen: Yeah. One, one thing to point out on the, the long distance study is that. None of the routes that are being proposed require any substantial improvements.

[00:29:35] It’s all existing corridors that already have track laid that wouldn’t require building anything substantial in order to get it started. So really the limiting factors. The biggest limiting factor is not having the equipment available. And part of that, you know, I’m here in Salt Lake City where we have had, uh, Statler as a rail manufacturer in our community for, I think about 10 years or so now.

[00:30:08] And the big problem is that we don’t have enough. Rail equipment manufacturing capacity in the US to be able to meet the demand that we’re hoping to be able to ramp things up to in the future. So 1 of the things that we would really love to push Congress to do is to. Basically preorder a whole bunch of real equipment and the advantage of that is that it gives the rail manufacturing companies like Statler and Siemens and all from and others cover to be able to make.

[00:30:52] Their own investments in improving and increasing their capacity because they’re, they’re not willing to expand factories unless they have a reliable commitment that there’s going to be that demand that will justify that investment.

[00:31:11] Jeff Wood: It’s interesting. We had Ken Prendergast on a few months ago and he was talking about like this competition between Brightline and Amtrak in, in Ohio.

[00:31:19] And, and the idea that the state wasn’t really that interested in doing funding for Amtrak that they would need to do it, put together a line, like we were talking about earlier, basically the state funded ones, it’s required that there is a state sponsor of some sort. And so they’re like, Oh, well, why can’t just like Brightline do this?

[00:31:36] And so. So, you know, there’s that discussion too of, of, well, if Amtrak isn’t going to be doing anything until 2040 on some of these routes, like why isn’t like the Brightline just a better alternative to that?

[00:31:47] Mike Christensen: Right. And well, part of it too is even Brightline is even limited by the same manufacturing limitations.

[00:31:57] Even when you look at Brightline West. A lot of that funding for that is coming from federal programs, so it’s still subject to the Buy America Act. So, it still needs to be manufactured substantially in the U. S. to qualify for that. But when I look at the Brightline question, the limitation on, on Brightline being able to do more is kind of the fact that Amtrak is really the only inner city passenger rail operator that has the shortcut of being able to, for lack of a better word, demand things from the freight railroads and demand access to to existing freight tracks and get that access at a reasonable price.

[00:32:45] Which that was a result of the passenger rail act of 1970, which created Amtrak and, uh, relieved the freight railroads of their obligations to operate passenger service, which that’s a whole other topic of discussion.

[00:33:03] Jeff Wood: I was going to say, maybe we shouldn’t have relieved them of their requirement to provide passenger service.

[00:33:07] It’s interesting to think back on what it could have but we are where we are and we have what we have. The map that you, you shared where these new services that are coming online, it’s really interesting to see how much like expansion there potentially is when that report comes out. And the lines probably I’m guessing are pretty much finalized in terms of like, which ones are probably going to be where they are, that that report should be coming out.

[00:33:29] By the time this show is released, I imagine that that will be out. But I’m interested in some of those hubs, the places where a lot of the lines cross each other. There’s Dallas and Atlanta and even Salt Lake city. Some of those places are going to maybe see a really huge uptick in passenger transportation that they hadn’t seen before.

[00:33:46] Mike Christensen: And that really begs the question of whether the stations in those locations have adequate capacity to be able to handle those passenger loads. But yeah, this plan. Definitely establishes a whole lot more hubs around the country. And you see that in places, especially like Dallas, Fort Worth area and Denver, a little bit less or so in Salt Lake City, we are here in Salt Lake City are trying to look at better ways to improve our station.

[00:34:20] And I have to give a shout out to 1 of the plans that we’re trying to push forward, which is called the Rio Grande plan. Which not only would restore passenger rail to the former Denver Rio Grande Western Depot in Salt Lake City, which hasn’t seen any trains since 1999, but it also would put the rail lines that go through downtown Salt Lake City in a train box below grade, which is similar to what Reno did a couple decades ago.

[00:34:58] So, uh, Which would greatly improve access in Salt Lake City, because sometimes freight trains can come through town in a way that, uh, makes causes them to be delayed and sometimes block grade crossings for an hour at a time. And that’s very detrimental to the. Success of a growing city. So this idea, this concept is currently being studied by Salt Lake City as part of a Salt Lake City was awarded a reconnecting communities grant from the U S department of transportation in order to study better ways to connect our east and west sides of Salt Lake City, which is divided, not just by.

[00:35:44] By the railroad tracks, but also by the freeway I 15 through Salt Lake City. So we’re, we’re hoping to see positive results that would show that even though this concept is something that would be very expensive to undertake, we’re hoping that it will show that it has huge economic benefits in the long run.

[00:36:07] Jeff Wood: Yeah, in Atlanta, it looks like they’re looking for a 30 million grant for planning their station downtown. And I know that like Denver has, you know, rebuilt Union Station into something very impressive with a lot of their commuter lines that they’ve put together. I also have a question about cities being involved in this too, because I know that like Mobile, Alabama, for example, is in the news lately because the city council isn’t quite sure whether they want to fund it.

[00:36:29] Fund the expansion of line. So you have the federal government, which funds Amtrak and kind of these overall things, you have the States, which are supposed to be involved in the local, in the trains that are in state or lesser distance, but then you have the cities. And so I think Alabama was just kind of like delegating the funding of the line to the city and the city is like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, hang on.

[00:36:49] Maybe we don’t want this. Cause it’s going to cost a lot of money.

[00:36:52] Mike Christensen: It’s been very interesting looking at the city of mobile because all of the other communities along the route. Along that particular route between new Orleans and mobile, especially the communities that would get service along the Mississippi coast.

[00:37:09] They were very adamant that they wanted this as a way to they’ve been impacted ever since Hurricane Katrina and have wanted to, to have this as a way to reinvigorate their tourism industries. But for some reason, mobile has been the holdout. And they have often tried to justify their objection and hesitancy by wondering whether the increase of having basically two, two round trips a day of a passenger train coming in and out, that it would somehow negatively impact the access to freight coming in and out of their port.

[00:37:53] And they eventually got A little bit shamed by even Amtrak got involved, but, uh, Transportation for America and the Rail Passengers Association were both involved in putting up a webcam that looked. Out onto the so called busy freight corridor and kind of showed how few freight trains were actually using this corridor and that kind of built a lot of support for kind of deflating their argument that it would interfere too much with freight traffic, the biggest.

[00:38:32] Difficulties that we see is that often big freight railroads like to use the term precision scheduled railroading, which is a bit of a misnomer. It basically just means running really long trains so that you have a very low number of employees moving more freight in order to reduce the cost of moving freight.

[00:38:59] In the end. Getting more profit for the railroad problem is that those really long trains cause a lot of different issues. And 1 of them is that it makes it harder for more freight to actually be moved. So, they are actually decreasing their own capacity to move freight by doing what is profitable for them by running long trains.

[00:39:24] But, overall Reduces the capacity of their own rail networks, and a lot of it has to do with, especially if the freight lines are single track. If they are suddenly running trains that are longer than their own passing sightings. Then that significantly hobbles their capacity. So a lot of the capacity complaints that the freight railroads try to blame on passenger service proposals really are of their own making is a good way to say it.

[00:40:00] It’s kind of like the meme of the boy with the boot. And he’s pressing against his head where a lot of the freight rail issues are a result of their own doing. And unfortunately, the way that we have deregulated freight railroads over the last half century has led to them becoming very profit focused.

[00:40:23] And they make a lot of decisions that are very much based on short term profits, rather than long term considerations. For example, there’s, there’s been lots of sections that used to be double tracked that freight railroads have reduced the single tracks, just so that they have less of a maintenance obligation.

[00:40:49] And so they have taken the path towards, you know, maximizing profitability today, rather than long term considerations. That’s also 1 of the reasons why none of the freight railroads are the least, but interested in electrifying the freight system, because that is a huge investment for them that would take decades, if not a century to actually.

[00:41:16] Pay off on their balance sheets. And that’s not something that they’re interested in. They’re interested in quarterly reports and providing big profits for their shareholders.

[00:41:27] Jeff Wood: Yeah. We just had Californians for electric rail on the, on the show. Right. And so we were talking about that and I, I’m just like, well, let’s, maybe we should just make them do it or, or.

[00:41:37] Figure out a way to pay for it or something. Cause it would be really beneficial for passenger rail as well. If you have those systems in place, the electrification and, you know, it’s not like it can’t be done and you can say, you know, China and in India are, it’s a different regulatory environment. I’ll just say that much.

[00:41:53] But India has electrified their whole system and network. And that’s, that’s a huge country. And so, you know, it’s not impossible to do, but it just, we have a different way of doing things, which slows things down and we can’t even get passenger rail on routes that already exist until 2040. So I’m frustrated by that because I think that that might be one of the.

[00:42:10] Better ways forward for reducing emissions and also just improving passenger rail in the United States, you know, just making it so that you could run trains more frequently and have more service and, you know, faster stopping so many times, even for diesel passenger trains, just that kills the timeline.

[00:42:25] And so imagine what you could do if you. We’re going from Seattle to St. Paul and could do that on electrified track rather than the way we’re doing it. Now, I have another question for you, which is, you know, the idea of this flashy attention seeking high speed rail, not in a bad way, of course, but versus like the lowly inner city passenger Amtrak train, there is a dichotomy there and there’s an excitement gap between the two, but they’re both really important.

[00:42:49] Mike Christensen: Yeah, and often there’s a big focus on, and sometimes high speed rail even is a bit of a distraction when, when it shouldn’t be, but there are some people that are very much in the camp of, it’s only a worthwhile rail investment if it’s high speed rail and they usually tend to be very focused on passenger rail, needing to compete with other railways.

[00:43:17] With air travel and my experience from going around the country is like, basically like, yeah, it’d be great to have more high speed rail, but there still is a huge passenger demand, even for trains that only get up to 79 miles per hour. That only run once a day, and it’s difficult to actually make a lot of reservations on Amtrak.

[00:43:47] Because there’s a demand, there’s lots of people wanting to travel by train. So yeah, when people ask me for advice on booking Amtrak, I warn them that they need to book early to guarantee that they can get, you know, the ticket that they want. And especially if they’re trying to book sleeper accommodations, I think that there is very much an under counted.

[00:44:11] Demand for travel, especially in the more outlying rural areas of America. And I think that there’s also not a focus on the importance of getting people out of cars and onto trains. There’s a lot of people like I, for one, have like, no desire to ever do long road trips again by car. It’s so much more relaxing to do it by Amtrak and leave the driving up to someone else and be able to sit back and enjoy the food in the dining car while the world rolls by.

[00:44:49] I think that there’s a big underestimation of the market and actually have some, uh, evidence that proves that, uh, a couple of weeks ago, some colleagues from Colorado came to Utah to do a tour of the Statler factory. And also just to hang out with, with fellow rail enthusiasts and advocates here in Salt Lake City.

[00:45:15] And one of these colleagues who. Works for the Colorado Department of Transportation CDOT mentioned that their own travel demand models significantly underestimate the need for rural transit and they know that because Colorado has a statewide bus system that’s called busting that provides service that connects to a lot of outline communities throughout the state.

[00:45:47] And their own travel demand models only predict a fraction of the ridership that’s actually being experienced by bus stay. And they only predict a fraction of the travel that Amtrak is seen on the California Zephyr within the state of Colorado. So, like, people traveling between Denver and Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction.

[00:46:14] So, yeah, there’s. A lot of underestimated demand for basically statewide transit, rural transit, things like that. That’s 1 of the issues that I’ve encountered as I’ve tried to have conversations with people at you dot about expanding transit. In Utah is they say, oh, well, our models. Show that hardly anybody would, would ride this service and it’s like, well, your, your models are calibrated, uh, the cars, the cars, exactly.

[00:46:49] Yes,

[00:46:50] Jeff Wood: I mean, the easiest way of saying it,

[00:46:52] Mike Christensen: right? And the models always show, oh, you know. Basically, it’s like, yeah, the answer is always expand highways, build more highways, even though that’s not always the question that’s being asked. It’s a little bit difficult here in Utah because somewhere along the line, we made the decision that transit is something that can only be done if there’s a transit district that’s established.

[00:47:22] And so if you look at where we have transit services in Utah, we have hardly any inner city transit and we, we have made it inordinately difficult to actually have transit services that connect between neighboring transit districts, even though the demands there, we, we have. Placed all of the different organizations in segregated silos and made it really difficult for them to talk together.

[00:47:52] And then that’s also hampered by the fact that our state doesn’t really do a whole lot with transit. Like, basically, they, they do some coordinating. And they do some redistribution of federal formula funds for things like intercity bus service, but there is no statewide vision being put forward to connect the entire state by transit and connect to neighboring states.

[00:48:22] I keep trying to point out to our, our leaders here in Utah that we’re falling behind other states. You only have to look to Colorado to see evidence of that. So it’s great that, uh, there is 66 billion allocated by the bipartisan infrastructure law, but a lot of that funding in order to have it realized has to go, uh, at least one way or another through state DOTs and it is difficult when state DOTs kind of lack the capacity to be able to, for lack of a better way, think outside of the car.

[00:49:00] Jeff Wood: It’s a tale as old as time, right? Like this is the same thing for transit. It’s the same thing for active transportation, walking, biking, rolling, mobility, all that stuff. And passenger rail is no different. It feels like all the formula funds go from the feds to the States and the States have flexibility to do lots of different things.

[00:49:16] And they just choose to continue to do highways. And it’s really frustrating. And hopefully we can, we can fix that. So what can we expect from this report coming out, but also going into the future around these lines and the expansion of passenger rail?

[00:49:29] Mike Christensen: I think the bottom line on the FRA’s Amtrak Long Distance Service Study is that this is just the start of the work.

[00:49:41] Even though the report’s done, we really need to be pushing Congress to implement this report. And we are wanting to keep everyone from falling into the trap of zero sum thinking. We don’t want people to feel like they need to push for just the routes that will benefit them and realize this was designed to be additions to a national network that really, when you look at the network effect that comes from all of these connections, it.

[00:50:19] Would be stupid to not push to implement the entire thing. And so we are thinking of maybe organizing around the slogan of fund the 15, because it’s got 15 routes in it and we want to see all of them implemented. And we realized that they’re not going to be implemented all at once because that, Logistically doesn’t work, but we want to see an effort that prioritizes doing the entire system rather than falling into some type of competition over which routes are more important.

[00:51:02] It’s also important to know that. The corridor ID or the the Corridor Identification Development Program, which is geared more towards starting new Amtrak State sponsored services that is still on the books, and we are hoping to see another notice of funding opportunity released either right at the end of the year or the start of 2025.

[00:51:32] And there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done on that. A lot of opportunities. One of the things that I would also stress with that is there’s kind of been thinking that those are applications that need to be led by state DOTs. And that’s not necessarily the case that there’s a whole list of governmental entities that can apply that include cities and counties and regional planning organizations like MPOs and associations or councils of government that are all eligible and even federally recognized Native American tribes can apply for these opportunities too.

[00:52:18] Bye bye. So, yeah, there’s a lot of opportunity out there to be able to push the work forward and grab onto funding that we can use to study passenger rail, new, new passenger rail services. And again, I would point to the Borealis as being a really great example of like, I don’t think anyone expected the trains to be as.

[00:52:46] Successful, you know, the, the ridership to be as high as it is. And I’m hearing that some of the trains are overbooked and it’s standing room only along parts of the route. So there’s definitely a lot of evidence that we can point to that even these, these slower trains yield a whole lot of benefits for our communities.

[00:53:08] Jeff Wood: Yeah. There’s a lot of pent up demand. Where can folks find out more information or find out more about you if you wish to be found?

[00:53:16] Mike Christensen: I am still very active on the social media network, formerly known as Twitter. I refuse to call it by its new name. My handle is at MRC underscore SLC for Salt Lake City.

[00:53:34] And. I also recently started becoming active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there to to give a further shout out to the FRA’s work, you can find all of their materials on FRA long distance rail study dot org. And I’ll give a big shout out for the National Rail Passengers Association, which you can find at railpassengers.

[00:54:08] org, and the Utah Rail Passengers Association, which you can find at utahrpa. org.

[00:54:17] Jeff Wood: Awesome. I also want to say, I’m going to cross my fingers because our friend, Elaine Clegg has been nominated for the Amtrak board too, and Elaine’s been a good friend and a tireless advocate for transportation policy too.

[00:54:27] So as we’re talking about this topic, I kept on thinking about her work and, and, uh, hopefully she can help us out with all this stuff too. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

[00:54:36] Mike Christensen: Oh, you’re welcome.