Mr. Chairman,

Good afternoon. My name is Bruce Richardson, and I am President of an independent rail research organization called "United Rail Passenger Alliance," based in Jacksonville, Florida.

Beginning in 1996, I worked with Amtrak Intercity as a consultant on marketing and passenger services issues, working directly with long distance train route managers.

The low national system ridership talked about today is the single result of one reason - management philosophy and prejudice that no one wants to ride a conventional train.

Thank you for the opportunity to present URPA’s views on Amtrak.

Detailed documentation of these remarks and the Selden Plan have been submitted separately.

URPA has studied Amtrak in depth for 25 years. Our research shows conclusively that, from the standpoints of economics and consumer preference, the heart and the backbone of our intercity rail passenger services are in the long distance interregional markets operating at 80 to 90 mile per hour speeds.

Long distance markets today produce nearly half of Amtrak's revenues and more than half its output, despite having had less than 5% of its capital investment. That's a superb return on investment, at a total cost that is a trivial fraction of the cost of any "high speed" corridor. According to Amtrak, the annual subsidy needs of the long distance trains are less than one-quarter the total annual subsidy needs of the Northeast Corridor.

Long distance trains are heavily used, especially in places like my home state of Florida. Their load factors are twice the load factor of any short corridor, including the Northeast Corridor, and their total output is one and one-half times greater than the output of the NEC. Amtrak turns away thousands of high revenue customers a year for lack of capacity on long distance trains. Rail's market share is highest in the 600 to 1,000 mile markets, and the average trip length on long distance trains today is over 800 miles.

Shorter corridor markets provide socially useful and economically stimulating transit and local mobility, and the regions that enjoy such services are clearly better served having that service. Amtrak's greatest weakness – what stands between it and both commercial and financial success – is the inadequacy of its national network of both interregional and corridor services. Responsible development of a route matrix system feeding the long distance trains from realistic and desirable passenger origins will increase ridership exponentially across the entire national network.

This network can be built using modern, 80 to 90 mph trains, at modest cost. All the empirical evidence, including travel behavior after September 11th, shows that Amtrak's real competition, even in 200 to 300 mile markets, is the private automobile, not airlines. High cost, high speed rail therefore is presently not viable, and lies in the future. Our friends in Europe and Japan built High Speed Rail only when their underlying conventional networks became fully developed and saturated. That condition exists nowhere in North America. But demand for rail exists everywhere in the U.S. – in Texas and Montana just as much as in the Northeast and California, so federal funding support for a truly national system remains indispensable.

In the short term, our business plan for Amtrak, submitted separately, shows how we could grow a successful national rail passenger system at current levels of federal subsidy, deferring until later the extreme costs of High Speed Rail development.

Thank you Mr. Chairman.