A Stitch in Haste

The bureaucrats at Amtrak seem to think so:

Beginning this fall, travelers with an extra few days and money to spare will be able to climb aboard seven richly equipped vintage Pullman cars attached to Amtrak trains on three routes.

The promotion is a test of a partnership between District-based Amtrak and GrandLuxe Rail Journeys, an Evergreen, Colo., company formerly known as the American Orient Express.
...
The trips' prices will range from $789 to $2,000 per person for one- to two-night journeys.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. No rational consumer would pay more for a multi-day, not-at-all-scenic train ride than for first-class domestic airfare. That's not a question of subjective tastes and preferences; it's a question of objective "paying more for less" irrationality. And while there may be a handful of rich but irrational consumers (e.g., those with a fear of flying), there will certainly not be enough to make this a viable enterprise. The service will flop, and flop badly.

And besides, isn't the standard bromide of Amtrak's apologists the (no less absurd) postulate that government should underwrite affordable passenger rail? That (non-rich) Americans need, for some reason, an alternative to cars, buses and planes? How, exactly, is "expensive luxury train travel" a public good?

To review: The parts of Amtrak that lose money (i.e., almost all of it) lose money because few use it (i.e., few "need" it). Meanwhile, the tiny sliver of Amtrak that does make money (i.e., the Northeast Corridor) by definition needs neither a $1 billion annual subsidy nor, for that matter, to be run by the government in the first place. Amtrak is its own best argument for its abolition.

Yet instead of acknowledging this basic syllogism, Amtrak's managers and political protectors actually retrogress and sink deeper into the illogical muck of providing a service that nobody wants or that the government has no business being in the business of in the first place.

The mind reels.