Name: Why Amtrak Is So Expensive | So Expensive
Uploaded: 2021-05-29T02:44:53.000Z
Duration: 4 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

NARRATOR: Amtrak is the only passenger railroad service

that operates throughout the continental U.S.

the service has been operating since 1971.

But with high ticket costs, Amtrak is becoming

In fact, it's often more expensive to take an Amtrak train

from New York city to Boston than to fly.

a country that created billionaire railroad tycoons,

have such an expensive and inefficient train system?

of financial instability since its formation.

by private companies that operated freight trains.

nearly 42 million passengers traveled by rail

as buses, planes, and cars grew in popularity.

And by the 1960s, many railways, such as Penn Central

Passenger trains were no longer profitable,

then-president Nixon signed a law in 1970

Passenger Corporation, which eventually became Amtrak.

Of the 26 railroads offering passenger service,

Amtrak competed with other railway companies

from seven train terminals in Chicago into just one.

Throughout the early 2000s, the U.S. government

attempted to make Amtrak financially self-sufficient

which runs at a maximum speed of 150 mph.

But their plans failed, as Amtrak still had

a large sum of debt from years of underfunding.

To this day, trains still have a low profit margin

and rely heavily on subsidies to operate.

According to the company's 2017 fiscal year report,

Amtrak had a total revenue of $3.3 billion.

Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to make Amtrak profitable.

It still had a total operating loss of $194 million.

Amtrak uses profits from its popular lines,

Since this is one of the most popular routes,

and send those profits to other, less profitable lines.

Additionally, the USA is a very big country.

with about 3.8 million square miles of land.

the U.S. requires a lot more rail to cover its land.

Amtrak trains run on 21,400 miles of track,

For example, between New Rochelle and New Haven

the tracks are owned and operated by Metro North Railroad.

This means Amtrak needs to pay Metro North Railroad

which adds extra costs to passengers' tickets.

it operated approximately 300 trains a day in 2017.

In comparison, SNCF, the French National Railway Company,

That's 47 times more trains, serving a nation

that has one-quarter of the population of the United States.

France is also even smaller than the size of Texas.

While Amtrak has lost money every year since 1970,

it does intend to return a profit some day.

And the company has been reducing its losses

the brunt of reducing those losses even more.

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Why Amtrak Is So Expensive | So Expensive

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