I’m sorry but the only possible area of growth and the only place Amtrak has a chance to shine is long distance. When you consider that Brightline has reached the ridership level of the San Joaquins and it is only half built, and that high speed authorities or private companies are cherry picking the best of these possible “corridor” services they might expand to, they are left with little. Service would have to be faster than driving, frequent enough to provide many options, and reliable enough to trust for any real meaningful ridership growth. This high bar for service isn’t there for long distance.
And it’s a little dishonest to only quote ridership like that. A better metric that is more accepted in transport industry is passenger miles. Notice they don’t say a thing about that. It’s because the long distance network has a huge share of that total. Fewer people but traveling much longer distances.
Brightline also has over twice the frequencies of the San Joaquins (I count 17 trains/day...roughly hourly service with one or two mini-gaps and an extra rush hour train...for Brightline versus 7/day for the San Joaquins). The circumstances of both routes Brightline is working up are also unique (Florida featured a railroad that was cooperative in pooling dispatching control and 200 miles of route that was at least already built plus a workable expressway ROW to go the rest of the distance
and an expressway ROW to get to Tampa if they want to go forward with that; LA-Vegas featured, IIRC, a completed EIS that was submitted for federal funding a few years previously but rejected). Replicating either situation is going to be nearly impossible.
Elsewhere, Amtrak has room to "shine", but they've almost gone out of their way to tick off their partners:
-Virginia's DRPT wasn't informed when Richmond Staples Mill went from 24/7 to closing overnight. They found out when I initiated a call to them.
--There was also the charming incident where they tried to throw VRE out of Union Station when they lost the contract.
-New York had the "black box accounting" incident, where Amtrak essentially tried to submit an invoice for "services rendered" and had to be told "nice try" by the state.
-The relationship with Connecticut has been fraught. Amtrak didn't lose the bid for the Hartford Line because CT loved them...
-...and the same can be said for the saga of the Hoosier State, where Indiana had previously asked for food service and been blown off. Amtrak didn't even take the possibility of Indiana going with an external vendor seriously until the eleventh hour (which led to that circus of Boardman showing up and saying "Hey, Indiana just has to let us know what they want for service" when...well, IN
had let them know and been ignored).
-There's also that mysterious mess in the 90s where the Surfliners went from showing a profit to gushing losses because the "costs" skyrocketed.
And so on and so forth.
The bottom line is that Amtrak has had plenty of situations where they could probably have done better in collaboration with the state/local folks. In a number of cases, they've chosen not to engage constructively, for various and sundry reasons...but which basically come back to a parochial mindset that probably resembles Ma Bell.
