Amtrak: a model for essential transit during COVID-19

The Capitol Limited's sightseer lounge. Visible outside: Harper's Ferry, WV. (Photo by me)

As I biked up DC’s deserted 4^th St SW on a recent evening, the silence of a pandemic-plagued city gave way to a familiar diesel-electric roar. I looked up to witness a shred of normalcy: two Amtrak locomotives hauling the Silver Meteor train down to Miami, as they’ve done daily since Richard Nixon nationalized U.S. intercity passenger rail service almost 50 years ago.

       

For sustainable transportation friends and foes alike, it’s easy to be tough on Amtrak. Be it the chronic delays, aging train equipment, or out-of-stock café cars, evidence of underfunding and neglect – or, depending on how one looks at it, an inability to make money – can be seen on pretty much any given trip. Though I’m an adamant supporter of intercity passenger rail, I’ve emphatically given in to negativity’s temptation and ragged on the railroad from time to time.

But the national railroad has done some things right recently. Northeasterners are getting brand-new Acela trains, while Southerners are set for a restart of service on the temporarily-suspended-for-15-years New Orleans-Mobile line. And freight rail companies have gotten some doses of sharper teeth when their dispatchers delay Amtrak trains. 

  

The railroad’s projected Fiscal Year 2020 operating profit – the first such outlook in its history – seemed a fitting reward for this progress.

That coronating projection didn’t account for novel coronavirus. But while the operating profit won’t arrive this year, amidst virus-inflicted adversity Amtrak has accomplished something no formula could have predicted: emerging as a model for essential mobility that the world can learn from.

Here’s what Amtrak has done to provide safe, equitable, national train service during COVID-19.

Amtrak has sustained nationwide connectivity

Amtrak trains at Pittsburgh, PA's station. (Photo by me)

With ridership at 8 percent of pre-pandemic figures, Amtrak has doubled down on its core mission: the lifeline mobility that keeps hundreds of communities, including many our air and highway systems have left out, connected. The railroad continues to operate its full national network of long-distance lines.

Amtrak has not had the luxury of chopping areas with severe COVID-19 outbreaks from its network, as the lockdown of Wuhan and Hubei Province allowed China Railway to do. Instead, it’s had to navigate a hodge-podge of state orders and federal guidance to keep its passengers and trains moving.

Amtrak’s ability to preserve its national network – in the midst of a leadership change, nonetheless – demonstrates the importance of publicly funded mobility to the country during crisis. For example, airlines – despite receiving 50 times as much stimulus funding as Amtrak did – have cut domestic capacity by as much as 80 percent.

The national railroad has also set itself apart from other North American intercity rail providers. In the U.S., privately-funded Virgin Trains USA has shut down Florida’s Brightline for the foreseeable future, while the state-owned Alaska Railroad suspended almost all of its passenger service through early July. Canada's Via Rail has also suspended service on its three long-distance lines that extend to the country's west and east coasts. 

When forced to make service changes, Amtrak has done so equitably 

A Northeast Regional train at Washington, DC's Union Station, as seen across the platform from the departing Palmetto. The Regional continues operating, albeit at reduced frequencies, during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by me) 

Amtrak has reduced service on many of its regional corridors, which normally constitute the system’s greatest ridership generator. It’s had to fully suspend service on certain corridor lines in cash-strapped states such as Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Michigan, while international mobility restrictions have forced it to temporarily truncate three lines that cross the Canadian border.

But for the most part, the railroad has maintained a level of essential service on its corridors, just as it has nationally. Amtrak has structured its regional cuts in a way that sustains affordable, equitable access for those who need it. For example:

• On the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak has suspended its Acela service – the white-collar demand for it transferred to Zoom and Skype for the time being – while continuing to operate all-day service (albeit at limited frequency) on its more affordable Northeast Regional.
• In Northern California, the dedicated, comfortable buses connecting Emeryville’s station to San Francisco are not running, but essential riders can still transfer to BART and use the region’s regular transit system to cross the bay.

Amtrak’s focus on essential corridor service differs from France SNCF’s strategy. SNCF has suspended its low-cost Ouigo trains, limiting high-speed service to only its pricier TGV InOui option.

(SNCF, however, deserves commendation for using its TGV trains to shuttle coronavirus patients from hard-hit areas like Strasbourg to other French regions with more hospital capacity.)

Furthermore, Amtrak has caught up on some deferred maintenance during the service reductions. For example, workers have replaced door motors, suspensions, and other key components of Capitol Corridor railcars in aforementioned Northern California, putting the line in position to provide more reliable service to riders once they return.

Amtrak has done its part to prevent COVID-19 from spreading

A segment of the California Zephyr line, seen here making its Davis, CA stop during non-pandemic times, was suspended for two weeks when an employee tested positive for COVID-19.  

The friendly social scene onboard a train normally is one of Amtrak’s main selling points, especially for its long-distance lines.

But the idea of being onboard a vehicle for days at a time, dining together and using the same restrooms, has parallels with a much less essential and sustainable transportation mode that catalyzed much of coronavirus’s early spread: cruise ships. Prior personal experience had me concerned about how people riding the rails might fare during COVID-19; a couple years ago, I experienced some nasty norovirus symptoms starting about 36 hours – the normal incubation period for that disease – after a trip on Amtrak’s San Joaquins line.

The railroad, however, has responded to the pandemic with neither the laissez-faire approach of cruise operators nor the heavy-handed enforcement of some local transit providers.

Instead, Amtrak has employed diligence and professionalism akin to Seoul’s subway, keeping its riders and employees safe while sustaining the essential mobility it’s tasked with providing. The company has enhanced its sanitation practices, messaged the importance of mask-wearing and other hygienic steps riders can take, limited bookings so coach-class riders can spread out, and provided contactless room service to sleeping car passengers. It has also respected the risk and sacrifice of transit employees and other essential workers, organizing the national April 16 #SoundTheHorn campaign in their honor. 

Amtrak is by no means sheltered from COVID-19, as people have ridden its trains when unknowingly infected. But when an employee came down with the coronavirus, the railroad quarantined all members of the employee’s Salt Lake City crew base, resulting in temporary suspension of the California Zephyr’s Reno-Denver segment that those Salt Lake personnel operate. After the employees completed their 14-day quarantine, service on the segment resumed.

Thanks to these steps and strategies, no cluster of COVID cases to date has been linked to an Amtrak train.

What’s Amtrak’s role in this crisis going forward?

The Silver Meteor's tracks, as seen near Jacksonville. (Photo by me)

Amtrak, just like all of us, faces an uncertain future. But it’s positioned itself to fulfill three clear-cut societal needs in the coming weeks, months, and years:

• Firstly, the railroad will provide essential mobility, as it’s doing now and always has.
• Amtrak will also be essential to our economic recovery from COVID-19. It’s unclear how quickly airlines will be able to restore capacity as society recovers, meaning people’s ability to resume intercity travel – be it for business or pleasure – might depend on rail connectivity. The railroad has prior experience with this, having surged capacity when the skies were closed after 9/11.
• And finally, Amtrak’s resiliency during this pandemic will make the railroad an essential resource for other transportation providers. For example, it could collaborate with currently-moribund cruise ship companies to bolster and expand intercity ferry services like the Alaska Marine Highway that connect to rail lines and provide important connectivity.  

In order for this to happen, our leaders must understand that the national railroad is essential. Without such understanding, the U.S. would risk the fate that befell Mexico’s intercity passenger train system shortly after a 1990s economic downturn – near-complete disappearance. 

  

Fortunately, Amtrak has bipartisan support, rendering such a fate unlikely.

But COVID-19 has not meant a moratorium for Amtrak’s ongoing infrastructural and operational challenges. The Amtrak Alerts Twitter feed, for example, features its regular cocktail of freight train interference (also essential during the crisis), mechanical issues, and signal problems. In late March, the railroad’s Auto Train derailed in DeLand, FL, forcing it to suspend or reroute all of its Northeast-to-Florida lines; fortunately there were no serious injuries and Amtrak worked to restore service on those lines within several days.

Can elected officials synthesize their support for rail and address these challenges?

Earlier on that bike ride the Silver Meteor rolled above, I traversed the Anacostia River Trail’s bridge over those same CSX tracks a couple miles up the line. My bridge crossing coincided with the passing of a long freight train hauling lumber, tanks carrying unknown liquids, and a litany of other items. Mesmerized, I stopped to watch it, reflecting on how our freight rail system – the world’s best – is keeping shelves stocked, food on the table, and lives from falling apart.

Treating our national passenger railroad with similar dignity will bring America’s people together.

How neighborhood land use and equity define #StayHome

A chalkboard sign in an Arlington, VA front yard urges people to stay home. (Photo by me) 

Stay-at-home orders are the mobility misnomer of our day.

Just as rush-hour-only “commuter” transit lines frame inequitable service as acceptable and calling someone a “jaywalker” blames people for unsafe pedestrian environments, #StayHome is a perfect on-paper solution to coronavirus.

But a true stay-at-home order – i.e. literally no one can leave their homes – severs people from their life needs, and around the world chaos have resulted when something even closely resembling one has been announced. For example, Turks dangerously crowded into stores moments after the country curfewed 31 cities this past weekend; Donald Trump’s abrupt cessation of Europe-U.S. travel last month led to comparably unsafe and unsanitary conditions at airports. And mass flight from Wuhan preceding that city’s lockdown helped make the then-regional coronavirus outbreak into a global one.

To avoid these types of problems, U.S. states and cities’ mobility restrictions, though often worded as “stay-at-home” orders, have plentiful exemptions that make them something more along the lines of “stay local, act reasonably, and socially distance” directives.

Constructs such as built environment, wealth, and occupation then influence how the directives play out, shaping how people move and interact.

Accordingly, though COVID-19 doesn’t consciously adhere to zoning codes or telework policies, such societal constructs affect how the virus spreads and who it hits hardest. Though the mechanisms may vary by a given place’s combination of land use and density, the end results we’ve seen tend to be similar and tragic: the essential, but overlooked people society most depends on are ravaged by not just the disease itself, but also the unemployment, hunger, and other devastating consequences it’s brought us.

But is there a built environment that can stave off coronavirus’s health and economic impacts, protecting people from illness, keeping communities logistically and economically functional, and sustaining quality of life? Or is telling everyone to stay home, knowing that’s not actually feasible, really the best we can do? In pondering what might constitute the right mix of separation and connectivity during this time, I’ve found that my own neighborhood just might offer some answers.

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Social mixing is a way of life in high-intensity, vertical cities. This mixing facilitates collaboration that powers our global economy and allows for a fun, fast-paced lifestyle, but it also renders people in dense places particularly vulnerable to coronavirus exposure.

Strong, proactive leadership can control COVID-19 in these places, as seen in cities such as Seoul, Hong Kong, and Singapore that have sustained relative normalcy in the face of the crisis. But the experiences of Wuhan, Madrid, and New York show how explosively the situation can escalate in a dense environment should the aggressive measures needed to suppress an outbreak be absent or belated.

Dense places allow people to live near their life needs, but if too many people are outside at once fulfilling those needs case numbers may rise uncontrolled. This conundrum shaped New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent statements about overcrowding of outdoor spaces, in which he incorrectly but perhaps instinctively referred to the crowding as “density.” Viral spread amidst such crowding tears these places apart by attacking the people who shape their character and connectedness, like the 50 New York MTA workers COVID-19 has taken from us.   

Conversely, fear of such overcrowding and out-of-control spread might pressure everyone who can do so to stay inside, even if stay-local orders deem things like outdoor exercise and fresh-air-getting essential activities. For example, on a recent socially-distanced bike ride through Arlington, VA, I observed a desolate Rosslyn-Ballston corridor – one of the densest parts of the U.S.’s national capital region, an emerging coronavirus hotspot. Closed businesses like Clarendon’s delicious Heritage Brewpub and Roastery symbolized the crisis’s toll on the transit-oriented corridor’s economy and well-being.   

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At first glance, it might seem that people who live in low-intensity, horizontal suburbs and exurbs – where much of life happens in spacious homes and yards – can maintain relatively normal routines at minimal risk of contracting or spreading the virus. They can go out on walks with their families and pets, for example, with little reason to be concerned about accidentally stepping within six feet of someone else.

It’s easy for residents of these places to feel self-sufficient and protected in their homes, whether or not they’re told to stay local. Accordingly, it’s also easy for these people to assume that everyone else “shouldn’t be on buses, they should be at home,” as the city manager of Montebello, CA, a Los Angeles suburb, stated when that municipality shut down its transit network as a COVID-19 control measure. 

   

But the single-use zoning underlying those life-defining homes and yards makes hub-and-spoke mobility and supply networks essential to these places’ viability even during normal times. Thus, people working on the front lines can’t just stay at home if these neighborhoods are to persevere, but instead must toil in close proximity at the distant big-box stores and distribution centers that such neighborhoods depend on. If COVID-19 is introduced to such hubs, these essential workers are the first in harm’s way.

Evidence indicates that though the coronavirus may take longer to reach low-density places, it’s just as lethal once there, supporting the possibility of such hub-and-spoke behavior. Northern Italy’s ravaged towns demonstrate the most extreme potential consequences of this, while tragic flare-ups in places like Palm Beach County, FL show that U.S. suburbia is not immune to this danger.  

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If too many people go out during the COVID-19 pandemic, the consequences are obvious. But the cost of too many people staying in is also unacceptably high, and vulnerable populations bear the brunt of it.

This begs the question: is there a neighborhood-level combination of space, density, and land use that could equitably protect everyone from the virus until a vaccine is created? A combination that would help us avoid mass unemployment and stir-craziness while minimizing the risk of coronavirus exposure for essential workers and teleworkers alike?

In theory, such a medium-density, mixed-use neighborhood requires enough people and businesses to support a locally powered economy that takes care of life needs, but also enough space to ensure the customers and workers who power those businesses can do so safely:

• The presence of multiple small grocery stores, markets, and pharmacies keeps individual establishments from becoming overcrowded, protecting the health of and reducing strain on employees while providing residents diverse options. When possible, these stores utilize locally sourced, polycentric supply chains to keep their shelves full, minimizing the need for large-scale distribution hubs that could foster outbreak hotspots.
• People have space to go outside their residences and fulfill needs like groceries, exercise, or travel to essential jobs. This space ensures people on foot don’t have to interact too closely with each other or with automobile drivers.
• While most residents don’t have to leave the neighborhood for their own day-to-day needs, essential, sustainable public transit ensures people who need to get in or out, such as health and service industry workers, can do so safely and efficiently.

My DC neighborhood of Cleveland Park has some of these characteristics, but the community’s conversation surrounding density and growth – long ongoing, but certain to be changed by COVID-19 – demonstrates just how precarious a balance we must navigate to keep people and businesses healthy.

Even before the pandemic, the neighborhood’s businesses were in a fight to keep their doors open. Plenty of residents see influxes of mixed-use density, like that the proposed Macklin project will provide, as a way to expand businesses’ customer base while also giving local consumers more options. But others feel the community must become a regional hub, drawing patrons from other places largely by preserving and expanding car storage, to get an economic jolt.

The need to adhere to stay-local orders boosts the case for density that can make neighborhoods like Cleveland Park economically and logistically self-sufficient, as well as for space-creating conversion of currently car-obligated public spaces into bikeways or pedestrian plazas.

But the multi-unit complexes needed to provide that density may result in unnerving social mixing, and accordingly pushback that could fuel arguments for sprawling, auto-oriented land use contrary to the goals described above.

Now that we’re more attuned to the threat novel viruses pose, new complexes could be designed with features such as in-unit laundry and open, inviting stairs that minimize unnecessary mixing, helping alleviate anti-density concerns. These features, however, not only aren’t always feasible, but could significantly affect neighborhood affordability and accessibility.

Once the long-term outlook for this pandemic becomes clearer, it will be easier to envision how COVID-19 and the mobility limitations it’s necessitated will affect the built environment, space, and connectivity of our neighborhoods. But though the discussion is just beginning, finding the right balance could save lives, jobs, and our sanity.    

The antidote to COVID-19 and #StayHome: ruthless efficiency

Silver Spring's Denizens Brewing, on its last day open before COVID-19 forced it to suspend in-taproom service. (Photo by me)

Our inefficient, spin-filled society gave coronavirus the upper hand on us.

Overcoming this setback will require a thoughtful, but ruthless efficiency. This efficiency will not solve the world’s problems. But it will flatten the curve and get our lives back on track.

But before I get into that, the fun part: spinning the virus into an argument for sustainable mobility and urbanism.

Coronavirus isn't the only disease that can jump from animals to humans. Sprawl-induced habitat destruction will cause more such diseases to mutate and spread interpersonally. (Photo by me)

To start with, the health consequences of car driving cause and exacerbate the underlying health conditions that make COVID-19 more lethal. Studies have found that coronavirus mortality rates are higher in places with more polluted air, a finding linked to both the well-known health effects of the pollution and the possibility that particulate matter may bolster the virus’s ability to spread. And traffic violence drains healthcare resources needed to treat COVID patients, especially now that pandemic-emptied roads are encouraging drivers to speed.

Those, however, are the least scary stories to tell.

There’s solid evidence that auto-dependent sprawl infringing on natural habitats will allow more novel animal diseases like COVID-19 to mutate and gain the ability to spread from person to person. For example, though a recent rumor to this effect was false, imagine if something like the deer mouse hantavirus that infected 10 people at Yosemite National Park in 2012 – which takes up to 6 weeks to incubate and kills 36 percent of its human hosts, making the coronavirus look like a second-division bug – really could, with no warning, jump between people. As if there weren’t already enough reason for people in my home state of California to fear the wildland-urban interface, with the wildfire threat it poses.

Furthermore, as permafrost melts due to climate change, get ready for all kinds of viruses and bacteria to emerge from the ice and encounter the path to non-immune humans that they’ve awaited for ages. For example, a 2016 anthrax outbreak in Siberia stemming from a formerly permafrost-encased reindeer corpse killed a 12-year-old boy and hospitalized 70 other people, while melting of Neanderthal remains could give ancient pandemics that ravaged our proto-human relatives a chance to defend their title against us homo sapiens.

    

So shouldn’t we just do away with automobiles – the biggest contributor to the biggest source of U.S. greenhouse gases: transportation emissions – and build walkways, bikeways, busways, subways, and high-speed railways to everywhere, all funded to operate at frequent headways, while we still can?

In the early days of COVID-19, one vision of the post-pandemic future was on display. (Photo by me) 

There’s a big problem, however: just as I can publish the above position with the click of a button, auto and oil interests can spin the virus into a case against urbanism.

For example, the National Review recently published a piece claiming that COVID-19 is reminding us how terrible cities are, singling out transit systems and transit-oriented development specifically as pandemic catalysts. The article goes on to list terrorist attacks and chaotic hurricane evacuations as other problems that auto-dependency, suburban office parks, and single-family zoning are apparently the solution for.  

Shredding the National Review’s article to bits would be simple and satisfying. I wrote previously about how auto-dependency makes natural disasters and the evacuations preceding them more deadly, for example, and could list the many mass shootings that – if not perpetrated while driving – have taken place at suburban schools, workplaces, and big-box stores.

But would this really get us anywhere? I’m not going to change their view, and they’re not going to change mine. I can convince myself that they’re formulaic naysayers while I’m speaking for the experience-based greater good, but in the end, the subpar policy responsible for our mutual dissatisfaction won’t change.

An empty Cleveland Park Metro station in DC, on one of the last days before the station closed as part of WMATA's COVID-19 management. None of Seoul's subway stations have closed during the pandemic. (Photo by me) 

This never-ending cycle of negativity constitutes oppressive inefficiency. It was similar inefficiency – from authoritarian China and theocratic Iran to socialist Europe and the capitalist U.S. – that led people and their leaders to put their heads in the sand and allow COVID-19 to spread until it was too late to avert a health, economic, and quality-of-life catastrophe.

This all has me thinking back to an article I posted a prehistoric month-and-a-half ago, about the role of Seoul’s transit system in the Oscar-winning film Parasite. The film’s wealthy couple – facultative parasites, in contrast to obligate coronavirus – make classist remarks about their city’s subway and the people who use it. I concluded that the couple’s disrespect for the impeccable system underlying their economic success represents a flaw in the human condition.

In that article, written in the early days of Wuhan’s lockdown, I also suggested that a sudden calamity could be what’s needed for our species to evolve past this flaw.

If COVID-19 is that predicted calamity, Korean society’s structure – with ruthless efficiency underlying stark class divides – has proven not the problem, but the answer.

No, the peninsula hasn’t fixed its figurative or literal divides overnight. In the south, kids are set to begin their school year of 16-hour days (albeit remotely) in hopes of getting a shot at a coveted position serving Chaebol oligarchs; people who miss out on that white-collar dream face stifling “Hell Joseon” realities. And courtesy of that guy up north, missiles still fly above it all.

But South Korea got things done as the virus closed in. The country took aggressive, arguably invasive, but absolutely needed measures to identify and isolate people who have or were exposed to COVID-19. Though sporting events and K-Pop concerts might be on hold for now, as a result of these measures people can sustain relatively normal daily lives, exercising outside or riding transit – with sanitized confidence that their stations will be open and their buses will show up – without facing public shame. 

A consequence of oppressive inefficiency. (Photo by me)

Sadly, it’s too late for the U.S. to overcome its oppressive inefficiency and experience a quick return to normalcy. But a pivot to ruthless efficiency could lift us personally and societally, making the pandemic more survivable and tolerable for not just the transit industry, but us all.

At the industry level, as tempting as it may seem we’re not going to efficiently unravel the social engineering that’s given us decades of car culture and road expansions. Nor are transit agencies going to efficiently flatten the COVID-19 curve by themselves.

But we can be ready to efficiently respond to changing transportation behavior as the outbreak continues and eventually eases. Among things to consider as we move towards the aftermath:

1. People may continue working from home in increased numbers, leading to more localized travel patterns than those pre-COVID, or may return to commuting to central offices.
2. When mandated social distancing ends we may rush out on the town en masse, our stir-craziness giving way to increased mobility demand, or we may continue to stay in more because our own finances and the businesses we patronize are slow to recover.
3. People’s perceptions of health and safety on transit vehicles may be unchanged or reassured, or they may fear that they’ll catch an illness on a bus or train, leading to the possibility of reduced ridership amidst worse traffic.
4. Regarding active transportation, people may continue to bike and walk more, having grown more comfortable with these options and developed a renewed appreciation for the outdoors, or they may revert to their old habits as gyms reopen and life in general becomes less stressful.

The agencies and organizations that manage our roads, transit systems, and bikeshare programs must be prepared to move the public under any and every combination of these four scenarios.

But looking back at that National Review article, certain behavioral outcomes of the four scenarios seem universally preferable:

1. The article posits that smaller-scale communities would alleviate stress and congestion in today’s monocentric metro areas. Such communities, in which more people work at or nearer to their homes, are by definition mixed-use and facilitate more polycentric, less peaked mobility. Thus, it’s relatively easy and cheap to connect these communities by transit.
2. Everyone wants a better economy; people and the markets earn more when businesses bustle and money flows in.  Our coronavirus-era pivot to hoarding and delivery has had the opposite effect, and things will get worse the longer this hub-and-spoke pattern lasts. This helps explain the article’s admission that dense, collaborative cities – with their spillover effects and economies of scale – have to date served as the globe’s primary hubs for productivity and innovation.
3. People who ride transit – and by people, I mean anyone who needs or wants to get somewhere – prefer that their buses and trains are spotless and don’t have any desire to fall ill when they ride. And no one – not even the writers of that article, who opine about awful car commutes – likes traffic, regardless of their chosen transportation mode.
4. People have always liked going out and getting fresh air, even if coronavirus is making them appreciate that air a little more. The article advocates specifically for walkable neighborhoods, for example.

So, we’ve identified some achievable efficiency goals: compact, connected activity hubs; an open, vibrant economy; safe, reliable mobility; and space to enjoy the outdoors. Now, how can we achieve these goals?

Focusing on activities within our control, like socially-distanced walks in Rock Creek Park, is a way to maximize efficiency during COVID-19. (Photo by me)

During this time of isolation, perhaps the best strategy is focusing on the one thing we can control: our own personal efficiency. 

   

We can start by just doing things that make sense. If you have the option to walk to local grocery stores and takeout places instead of driving to Costco or Walmart, do it. If you see an opportunity to benefit your community or just do someone a favor, take advantage. And if you’re not literally sick, but are sick of being inside, step outside for a while – just be sure to stay at least six feet from others.

Because by using our time more efficiently, we’ll set the stage for a more functional post-pandemic society.