Crusader for Amtrak
By Colin Peppard, Transportation Policy Coordinator,
Friends of the Earth
 What
would you do if you learned that Amtrak was about to end
service to the station that was your commuting lifeline
for years? If you’re like many people, you’d
grumble to your friends and fellow riders, and start looking
for another way to work.
But you could fight back. That’s what Rick Booth did
when he heard rumors that Amtrak was going to end its service
at his Cornwells Heights station, the only Amtrak stop in
Pennsylvania between Philadelphia and Trenton.
Writing letters and making phone calls were Rick’s
first steps. After that, however, Rick went further. He reached
out to the mayor of his town and to U.S. Representative Michael
Fitzpatrick (R-PA and co-chair of the House Passenger Rail
Caucus). He also started doing some grassroots organizing:
passing out flyers to commuters, taking head counts of riders,
encouraging others to call and write letters, and starting
a web site - www.SaveCornwellsHeights.com.
Rick’s work paid off! Amtrak reversed its decision
and instead of closing the station, the management decided
to work harder to build ridership - installing more signs
to let commuters know the station is there, increasing the
frequency of service, and considering ways to better promote
the station.
Having a taste of victory, Rick continues to pressure Amtrak
to offer more and better service. His website, which has built
up a thriving community, is a hotbed for discussing the benefits
of rail travel with other riders. The discussion on the site
also gives Amtrak a rider's point of view of how to run better
service.
Rick was kind enough to take time away from his job in
New York to answer a few questions from us. Read the interview.
Interview with Rick Booth
Q: Tell us a bit about yourself. Have you
ever done activist work or organizing before?
A: I’m a software engineer who lives in Pennsylvania
(wife, 3 sons, 5 dogs, 3 cats) and works in New York City
at a small (but rapidly growing) Manhattan company doing low
level digital video engineering. I’ve written a couple
of books on software performance optimization, too. I’ve
never done any sort of activist or organizing work before,
but the station was being abandoned for all the wrong reasons,
so I had to do something.
Q: Why do you take Amtrak to work rather
than drive?
A: Amtrak was what made it possible for me to take
my current position in New York City. It’s faster, less
expensive, and far less stressful than driving. I can get
in a good hour of sleep, work, or recreation twice a day on
the train. It’s just an extraordinarily civilized, low-stress
way to begin and end the work day.
Q: How did you first react when Amtrak announced
it would close your local station?
A: Well, they didn’t exactly announce it. The
conductors told me that if I didn’t get to the politicians
fast, the station would be closed, probably with little or
no formal notice at all. So I wrote directly to Amtrak’s
public relations division asking for the truth, and they admitted
we were two months out from closure. I protested and argued
the case in a couple of e-mails, but their pat response was,
effectively, “Drop dead. Thank you for your understanding.”
So I headed straight for the mayor of Bensalem, PA, and Bucks
County’s Congressman Michael Fitzpatrick.
Q: When you started getting active, what
was the response from others in your community? How did that
differ from Amtrak’s response?
A: I passed out survey forms, took head counts, talked
with almost everyone who rode the train from my station, started
the website www.savecornwellsheights.com, and attended nearly
all the northbound train boardings for almost three weeks.
Many of the people I talked to had no idea the station was
about to close and were shocked and worried about their jobs.
Response to me personally was uniformly friendly and supportive.
After receiving three consecutive “Drop dead”
e-mails from Amtrak, I didn’t bother writing to their
goal line defense team any more.
Q: What role did Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick
(an ally of FOE’s) play in this fight?
A: You might equally well ask him what role I played,
because he might well have kept the station open even without
my activism, organizing, and research. I was the first, though,
to alert him to Amtrak’s plan to abandon its one and
only stop in his district. I worked with his staff over a
period of a few weeks to build a very strong case for keeping
the station open, and he did an amazingly effective job of
going to bat for us. He was a rail travel and Amtrak supporter
long before the station issue arose. He called Amtrak into
his office, brought me in on it too, and got the job done.
Q: How did it feel when Amtrak decided to
keep your station open? What was your meeting with Amtrak
CEO David Gunn like?
A: Amtrak was actually in the process of trying to
kill my station in two ways at once: outright closure or,
barring that, a nearly 57% fare hike (about $4,000/year) that
threatened to drive half of my fellow commuters back into
their cars, heading for half-that-price commuting at Trenton,
18 miles away. Hearing that the station would stay open was
partial relief, but simultaneously hearing that the fare hike
was put on hold felt even better. Unfortunately, the hike
only stayed on hold for a few weeks, and I’m still working
on that problem.
The meeting itself was cordial, and there was a lot
of good straight talk. I was very impressed with Mr. Gunn,
and I got the very strong impression that he is a man who
would far rather oversee the building up of rail infrastructure
in America than be charged with gradually divesting the last
of its resources as Amtrak dissipates into an under-funded,
under-appreciated puddle of rust.
Q: Where would you like your work to go
from here?
A: I would really like to do what I can to help save
Amtrak from its own gradual dismemberment, which is what appears
to be going on. If Amtrak goes out of business a few years
down the road, my station will end up dead again. Amtrak is
an odd beast, basically being run by the federal government,
but structured as a private company. Federal “sunshine
laws” (freedom of information) don’t apply to
it, so there is no public visibility into Amtrak’s management
problems – and there should be. I’ll be lobbying
to make Amtrak much more open to public oversight. I’d
like to see it better run, better funded, and able to build
infrastructure towards future needs instead of constantly
surrendering it. I’d like to help get Mr. Gunn another
tunnel or two under the Hudson.
Q: How do you see Amtrak’s potential,
not just in PA, but across the country? What challenges does
the system face?
A: In the densely populated sections of the country
like the whole “Northeast Corridor” from Washington
to Boston, Amtrak makes a lot of sense for both general inter-city
and commuter traffic. Unlike airports, train stations tend
to sit conveniently close to the center of town, so when you’re
there, you’re there. I honestly haven’t studied
the problems of keeping Amtrak on the low-volume, long-distance
runs it makes elsewhere in the country. There are apparently
plenty of routes where Amtrak would actually lose less money
by handing their customers plane tickets and a giving them
a free ride to the airport. The transportation pendulum, though,
is starting to swing back towards trains as gas prices rise.
Once you shut down a line, bringing it back may be next to
impossible.
Amtrak has required federal subsidies in order to operate
every single year since it was born by an act of Congress
in 1970. The subsidies currently amount to about $5 to $10
per U.S. citizen per year. That’s peanuts beside the
overall federal budget, beside the costs of war, beside
the costs of hurricanes, beside the costs of roads, and
even beside the billions we’re spending on building
up Iraq’s infrastructure right now. Yet America seems
to love to try to kill its own national rail system every
year. There’s an enormous public psychology problem
there that needs to be fixed.
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Promoting
the use of public transit and organizing local, state,
and regional groups to support energy efficient transportation
policy 
