Amtrak is requesting nearly $1.5 billion in supplemental funding from the U.S. government that it said is necessary to maintain minimum service levels across its rail network.
In a letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence, Amtrak president and CEO Bill Flynn said that many routes are operating with ridership levels of less than a tenth of pre-Covid-19 crisis levels. Current projections are that overall ridership for Amtrak will be down 50 percent year over year for the full 2021 fiscal year, which begins in October, he said.
"Current demand is running around 5 percent of normal, but we know from recent polls that approximately half of those surveyed expressed reluctance to ride a train in the next six months, and that more than a third said it would be more than a year before they would do so," Flynn said in the letter. "Furthermore, when demand returns, we anticipate that changed behaviors, such as increased telework and reduced discretionary income, will likely impact ridership, along with capacity limits that may be needed to achieve social distancing on our trains."
Amtrak plans to make up for lost revenue by cutting about $500 million in operating costs, about $150 million of which will come from cut capacity and frequencies, he said. The rest will come from workforce restructuring, including furloughs and early retirement packages.
The $1.475 billion in Amtrak's request, which comes on top of its pre-Covid-19 budget request of $2.04 billion, still will be needed on top of those cost reductions to keep minimum service and necessary capital projects running and to avoid "more severe" workforce reductions, according to Flynn.