The I-word was in the news last month when Amtrak attributed a drop in long-distance ridership and on-time performance to infrastructure issues. And we're not just talking about tracks and switches this time. We're talking about pipelines, or the lack of them.
According to Amtrak, both freight and passenger trains have been facing major delays in and around Chicago, the nation's major east-west rail hub. Amtrak believes the congestion is caused by rising freight traffic, including crude oil shipments.
As a result, Amtrak said delays of four hours or more have become common on its Cleveland-Chicago service (a mere 350-mile trip already scheduled for a glacial six hours). This kind of thing has led to a 4.5% decline in long-distance ridership for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, a drop that the National Association of Railroad Passengers called "precipitous."
The message here -- or one of them, anyway -- is that our nation's infrastructure needs are interrelated. Everything is connected. As we have seen, when airline travel becomes a hassle, people take to the highways. When subway and transit systems get overloaded, commuters bail and decide to drive to work instead. And now we are learning that if pipeline capacity hinders the flow of oil across the country, it will apparently go by rail, with the inevitable ripple effects.
We still have a committee structure in Congress and an organizational and budgeting structure in the Transportation Department that reflect outmoded, compartmentalized ways of thinking about passenger and cargo transportation. We approach highway problems with a highway fix, aviation problems with an aviation fix, transit problems with a transit fix, etc.
What we need to remember is that when everything is connected, one broken part affects the whole. Our message to the next Congress is: Fix everything.