During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.

This testimony discusses the future of intercity passenger rail. Intercity passenger rail in the United States is at a critical juncture. It has become increasingly clear that the current approach to intercity passenger rail is not likely sustainable. Given Amtrak's worsening financial condition and opportunities for intercity passenger rail to play a larger role in our nation s transportation system, there is growing agreement that the mission, funding, and structure of the current approach to providing intercity passenger rail needs to be changed. There is less agreement on how they should be changed. Both longer-term fiscal pressures and the new commitments undertaken after September 11th sharpen the need to look at competing claims and new priorities. Stated differently, there is a need to consider what is the proper role of the federal government in intercity passenger rail.

This report was prepared at the request of AASHTO's Standing Committee on Rail Transportation. It provides for AASHTO's members and others committed to developing a national intercity passenger rail system a summary of the recent favorable actions by Congress and the Obama Administration, a description of the work of the states over the past decade, the views of the essential partners to the states and other commentators, and some guidelines for advancing the effort.

To its critics, the automobile is a voracious consumer of irreplaceable energy resources, a leading polluter of the environment, and a destroyer of cohesive communities. The most outspoken opponents call for greater regulations and restrictions to ultimately replace the automobile as the country's primary means of transportation. But their proposals all ignore one simple fact: Americans love their cars! Millions of citizens have made the automobile the most successful method of mass transportation ever developed, and they are not about to give up the personal mobility it offers. This book presents the controversial view that, for the vast majority of Americans, the automobile is not the problem, but the solution to transportation needs. While acknowledging the automobile's significant drawbacks, the author refutes much of the shrill rhetoric and doomsday predictions of its opponents. He takes a skeptical look at the major policy initiatives to tax, regulate, and provide alternatives to the automobile, pointing out that any policies designed to remove Americans from their cars without offering them a superior means of mobility are "worse than useless" and doomed to failure. The book offers suggestions and guidelines for politically realistic initiatives that preserve the benefits of the automobile while building public support for policies that will reduce its negative effects on energy use and the environment.

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