Your daily source of fresh takes on news affecting America's passengers. See also the weekly NARP Hotline.
September 28, 2016
While the presidential and congressional elections dominate the national headlines, state ballot measures across the U.S. are attempting to remedy the deficit in transportation investment created by federal inaction. On November 8, voters across the nation will consider more than $200 billion worth of transportation related ballot measures—and pollsters are saying, due to public frustration with...
September 6, 2016
Passenger trains need your voice in pre-election talks With the deadline to pass a budget just weeks away, and none of the 12 annual regular appropriations bills passed, Congress is gearing up to pass a short-term budget extension (a Continuing Resolution, or CR) to avoid a shutdown before the election. NARP is asking passenger advocates to support the White House's request to fully fund Amtrak...
August 12, 2016
By J. Abe Zumwalt The re-development of Baltimore Penn Station and its adjacent vacant railway owned properties is a missing and obvious project, that exact sentiment being expounded upon in the recent press release on the topic. To those keeping track of the state of the industry, this can hardly been seen as a surprise, given Penn's unoccupied acres of otherwise urban space, and three million...
July 15, 2016
As both houses of Congress adjourn for an election-year recess, they’ll leave Washington without passing one of the 12 annual appropriations measures. As NARP has been reporting, ancillary partisan battles halted progress on positive, bipartisan transportation appropriations bills that would increase funding for Amtrak, passenger rail, and transit. The Senate had already passed its version, and...
June 6, 2016
by Jim Mathews/President & CEO The Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper. I read it most every day and have for decades. As a practioner of the craft of journalism for more than three decades, I believe firmly that the WSJ is one of the last bastions of quality journalism left on the American landscape. That's why it baffles me that the WSJ can be so completely and consistently wrongheaded...