Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 12

Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 12, 2002:

Michael Dukakis
Vice Chairman, Amtrak Board of Directors

Security Issues and Transportation: AMTRAK's New Focus

Thank you, Mr. Hayama. Apart from that lovely introduction he skipped over my defeats. You notice there was a gap there from 1978 to 1982 when I was Governor and when he said I was nominated in 1988. What happened? Anyway, here I am. It’s great to be with you all. Special greetings to the Consul General of Saudi Arabia and let me say that I hope the Saudi initiative begins to bring some light and understanding and peace to what is a terrible situation. I’m not here to speak on foreign policy though any former presidential candidate is ready to speak on anything at the drop of a hat. As Mr. Cheney runs around planning another war, I hope you understand that the house is burning in Israel and the West Bank and that’s doing us a lot more damage than any of this other stuff in the Arab world and we’d better get cracking on it and get deeply and actively engaged before we find ourselves with more problems on our hands than we have today. And a special greeting to the Greek Consul General with whom I will lunch on Tuesday and in case you’re not aware of it, folks, March 25^th is not only the day that you’re going to have the Slovakian former Prime Minister but, ladies and gentlemen, March 25^th is Greek Independence Day and if you don’t know that you should. No reflection on your event, Curtis, but I hope you’ll bring out the Greek flag on March 25^th.

It’s great to be with you. What are the Dukakises doing? By the way, this is the second time this has happened. I’m going to have to check that bio -- we did not go to Australia and Hawaii for five years, it was five months. We didn’t desert you. I want you to know it was great, terrific. There are more Greeks in Australia in Melbourne than there are, I think, in Solanica (?) but I couldn’t walk down the streets of Melbourne without having all these countrymen of mine grab me and hug me. I should have run from Australia. I would have won in a walk-in.

Well, these days, what is this guy doing for you? Well, for the past seven years I’ve taught nine months of the year at Northeast University in Boston which at least a few of my former constituents who were nice enough to show up know is our great urban university and our great co-op university and then since Northeastern is on the quarter system and UCLA is on the quarter system and since all of our three kids decided to move West on us, one in Denver, one in San Francisco -- who by the way just gave birth fourteen days ago today, Olivia Dukakis _____, and our son here in Los Angeles, we’ve got all our kids out here. I don’t know what we did to them and four grandkids as of two weeks ago, so for the past seven years we’ve dragged ourselves out of New England a few days after Christmas and we go back in late March when the crocuses begin to appear and nine months in New England and three months in Southern California, folks, in January, February and March, is not a bad gig. So, here we are.

My friend from Massachusetts who are a delight to see here also know that I’ve had an obsession with transportation in general and fixed rail transportation in particular for a long time and it’s not an accident that Boston has the best public transportation system in America. I’m not quite sure where this obsession came from except that as a kid I used to pour over Lionel train catalogues and my father refused to buy me any and he probably made the right decision. He was a pretty frugal Greek. As a matter of fact, his son is rather frugal. Kitty says I’m cheap. I’m not, but the first Greek word my wife ever learned and she pronounces it perfectly is tsigounis which as those of you who speak Greek, and I suspect there’s only two of us in the room who do, means miserly, I guess. Anyway, it may go back to my Lionel catalogues, I don’t know, but from the time I began getting into public life – and that goes back to the late 50s and early 60s -- as I watched a once great rail passenger system deteriorate before my and your very eyes and as I watched what I knew as a kid as the bus and elevated street railway – it’s now the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority – deteriorate before my very eyes, as the planners began to get us ready for a Los Angeles-type freeway system in Metropolitan Boston, I kid you not, when I ran for the legislature in 1963 I said “There’s something wrong with this.” Now, I’d been out here in 1960 to watch my hero, John Kennedy, be nominated for the presidency of the United States. I was in the arena with a lot of other people when he came over that night to say “thank you” after he got the nomination, and it was a great event, but I have to tell you, I couldn’t wait to get out of town because it was like living in a toxic stew around here. Remember? If you are old enough to remember those days when you couldn’t walk down the street without your eyes burning and tearing and so forth? Well, I looked around at this beautiful place and I said, “What have they done to it?” And even then, friends, in 1960 the freeways weren’t working and I ran back to Boston as fast as my little legs could take me and I said, “We’re not going to do this here.” In fact, can I make a confession cause we love Los Angeles and we’ve had a wonderful time. My slogan was “Don’t Let Them Los Angelize Boston.” I apologize for that but without you I wouldn’t have been inspired to do this. So, I went back there and with a very small band of my colleagues in the legislature and others we began fighting a battle which lasted ten years to kill any further highway construction inside Route 128 – I mean kill it, totally. Not an inch. Even Wellesley, no more highways, and to pour our funds into mass transit and fortunately – and that was not easy at the time, folks, became those were the days when we had a highway trust fund that you couldn’t bust for public transportation. We became, thanks to a sainted man named Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. in the Congressional delegation, Massachusetts became the first state in the country to be permitted to use its interstate highway allocation, which we didn’t want, for public transportation. So when you go to Boston and you ride the T – thank you, friend Dukakis. You can ride it for a buck and go anywhere. It’s terrific, and it’s one of the reasons why today arguably Boston is the most successful city in America. Now, regrettably that didn’t happen out here, and you need public transportation badly but at the same time that our great transit systems, including by the way the best street railway system in America in Los Angeles were permitted to deteriorate and, in fact, in the case of this city were essentially ripped up and thrown away, this great rail system of ours which somebody recently described as the Internet of the 19^th century, it really was you know. And by the way, do any of you know who was responsible for the Transcontinental Railroad? What president was principally responsible for the Transcontinental Railroad? Where are the historians in this room? The Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869 – who was the president? Abraham Lincoln. In 1863, in the middle of a very dark period of the Civil War said, ”We’re going to build that railroad.” Lincoln had been a lawyer for the Illinois Central and he was committed to this. And the completion of that Transcontinental Railroad absolutely transformed this country and so did rail generally. And yet after World War II for reasons that we’re all familiar with, we essentially turned our back on our great national rail passenger system and we began pouring billions, trillions, into highways and airports and essentially said, “Well, if the private railroads can run it, fine. If they can’t, that’s it. We’re not going to support it.” And it got so bad that by the middle or latter-part of the 1960s private railroads said, “No, we’re out of here. We don’t want to do this.” And just to make sure they did everything they could with a few rare exceptions to make the service so bad that nobody would ride it and it was under Richard Nixon, of all people, and a Secretary of Transportation named John _____ who was a very good man and one of my predecessors as governor, that we created Amtrak. And Amtrak officially was created in 1971 and the interesting thing about all of this, folks, was that while we were watching this once great system which I would argue is an absolutely essential part of a modern transportation system to go to hell in a hand basket our friends in Japan, which after all we had virtually destroyed in the 1940s during the war, and our friends in Europe had the good sense to say, “Hey, we’re not going to let it deteriorate. We’re going to start investing in it.” And I remember in the ’50s as a young G.I. doing my R&R in Korea riding in a pretty good train system in Japan, even in the ’50s. In 1964 the Japanese inaugurated the first bullet train. It only went 130 miles an hour. Now it goes 190. And Japan today, as many of you know who have been there, has a remarkable system of high speed trains that virtually cover the country and they’re fast, they’re comfortable, they’re efficient and they’re frequent. Tokyo-Kyoto, 300 miles. Two hours every twelve minutes from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. That’s Japan. And in Europe, especially France and subsequently Germany and other parts of Europe, Italy, now Spain and the entire European community,have a network of high-speed trains which gets you today from Paris to Brussels in one hour and twenty minutes; Paris to London, two hours and forty minutes and the latest TGV Downtown Paris to Downtown Marseilles, 510 miles in 3 hours. It’s not ___________, it’s not Buck Rogers, it’s not magic, it’s a train. Now, it’s about 400 miles from here to San Francisco. You can go from Paris to Marseilles in three hours – what do you thing a TGV-type train could do for California? And in point of fact, I would argue that if there’s any state in the country that needs a first-class modern high-speed rail system it’s this one. You are going to have 15 million more people living in this place between now and 2025 or 2030. You can’t move as it is. You know, you’re looking at one of three people in the city who walks to work. It’s wonderful. Kitty and I have a little apartment over on Kelton Avenue, on the other side of Westwood and it’s a great walk, 20-25 minutes in the morning, 20-25 minutes at night. This is a great walking city for those of you who walk. I hope many of you do. It’s good for you. But I won’t go on the 405 except maybe at 6:00 in the morning on a Sunday. I do try to ride the MTA. It’s not that bad to tell you the truth and I don’t know what I would do without the No. 6 Culver City bus from UCLA to the airport. Seventy-five cents, 35 for senior citizens, like me, and that’s a $35 cab ride. Tsigounis, right? Tonight when I go speak to the Simi Valley democrats up in Simi Valley I’m taking the Rapid Red to Western and Wilshire, taking a subway to Union Station. I’m going to take the MetroLink. I’m not going to try to drive up there. So, it’s not that bad but it could be a lot better, couldn’t it?

In any event, why does California need this? Well, for one thing you have a freeway system that’s totally dysfunctional. Do we agree on that? For another, you have a great airport surrounded by regional airports which believe me as we recover, and we will, from 9/11 and the recession, will once again be a nightmare only this time it’s even worse. Now, we’ve been out here for seven years, folks. You’ve got one of the great ports and you’ve got one of the great airports and every year there’s another chapter in the great debate over whether or not we should expand LAX and it’s been seven years and nothing has happened. But 36 percent of the flights out of LAX are for 350 miles or less. I want to repeat that – 36 percent of the flights out of LAX are for 350 miles or less. Now, this is a great international airport, some of you are in the freight business, air freight, it’s an important asset for your economy and people are talking about spending 12 billion dollars, 15 billion dollars, 20 billion dollars to expand LAX and, of course, the good people of the Westchester neighborhood will be fighting it tooth and nail. You want to add capacity to LAX? Get the 36 percent of the flights out of there for 350 miles or less. Put them on a good high-speed train system and then you’ll have far more capacity than any of these expansion plans and LAX will be the kind of great economic and international economic asset that it ought to be. There are 72 flight a day between Los Angeles and San Diego – that’s 109 miles. There are flights to Palm Springs, there are flights to Santa Barbara, there are flights to Bakersfield, there are flights to San Luis Obispo – this is absurd. Those people ought to be on a high-speed train. And thanks to the good people at Amtrak, Gil ______, others who work with us and we have substantial numbers of people, and I’ll tell you a little bit about the Amtrak system. We could make dramatic improvements in the train system that currently exists, and I’m not even talking about a TGV-type system, with a relatively modest amount of capital investment. For example, I don’t know how many of you have been on the Pacific Surf Line between here and San Diego. If you haven’t, treat yourselves to a terrific experience. Now we have eleven trains a day, 2 hours and 50 minutes. We ought to have 16 trains a day at an hour and 57 minutes, and we could do that for you for a relatively modest investment. Santa Barbara. We ought to be able to knock 45 minutes off that train. In fact, we’re in the process of doing so. And, by the way we carry nearly 2 million people a year between Los Angeles and San Diego. Amtrak, right now. On brand new trains by the way which are terrific double-deckers, Pacific Surf Line. Take it. The fastest growing rail car in America is not on the Northeast, more of that in a second, it’s between San Jose and Sacramento. It’s the Capital Guarder(?) Ridership has doubled in the last five years and still going at a very steady clip. San Joaquin in the Central Valley. Next year we’re going to have a train to Las Vegas. It’s not going to be as fast as it should be, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot more fun than trying to drive back on a Sunday afternoon and while the Coast skylight is never going to be a high-speed train let me tell you, if you want the experience of a lifetime, take the train from Los Angeles to San Francisco and look at this state in a way that you just never experienced in any other way. Now, each of these corridors, not to mention Portland, Seattle, Vancouver which has excellent service and brand new trains from Spain. By the way, I should add at this point that the United States has lost the capacity to make a train. We can’t make them. When I was the Governor of Massachusetts for twelve years we got an awful lot of transport equipment, Kawasaki, __________ are the other manufacturers. The new high speed trains in the Northeast manufactured by a joint venture consisting of ______________ of Canada and also the manufacturers of the TGV in France – we can’t make them. The United States, this great country, can’t make them. And it isn’t just California, folks. It isn’t just the Northwest. The Northeast obviously and finally has a high speed train. If you go to the Northeast by all means take the newest _______ express. People are knocking down the doors to get on to it. At last we have a 150 mile an hour train but it can’t go 150 miles during the entire route because we have work to do. The four Southeastern states, the state of Florida (what’s the name of that Governor? --Bush.). Here’s one for you that you probably missed in the middle of hanging chads and other things but in that late lamented election in Florida the voters of Florida voted for an amendment to the Florida constitution mandating a high-speed rail system in the state of Florida connecting Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville and Tampa. The Gulf Corridor. Atlanta, Birmingham, Jackson, New Orleans – nine mid-Western states who’ve been working with us for the past three years on a detailed plan for high-speed service connecting Chicago to each of the major western cities, all of which with the exception of Minneapolis happen to be within 350 miles or less out of Chicago and by the way they’re in the middle of a blood war out there over the expansion of O’Hare or a third airport. They don’t need a third airport, they need a high-speed rail system that gets some of the air traffic out of O’Hare which incidentally doesn’t fly more than 350 miles. Well, you get the point here, folks. And this is hurting us in an economic sense in my judgment because we’re wasting thousands and thousands and thousands of productive hours sitting on freeways that don’t work and sitting around airports and many of us, I couldn’t understand until I realized I was traveling on one-way tickets, I’ve had to take off my shoes seven times. My dear mother, who by the way, came to this country as a young Greek immigrant girl at the age of 9 and is still going strong at 98 in Boston, Massachusetts, fortunately hammered into me the notion that I could not have holes in my socks otherwise I would embarrass her and me and the family so I’ve been OK in that regard, but you all know what’s happening here. There’s nothing we can do about it but it simply makes the airport experience even more difficult and it seems to me enhances the importance of investing in high-speed railroads.

Finally, of course, what happened on 9/11? For weeks it was Amtrak that was carrying this country around on its back. So, if the compelling need for investing in a first-class national rail passenger system wasn’t obvious to all Americans before September 11^th it certainly ought to be now, don’t you think? What’s it gong to take? No more than 5 to 10 percent of what we’re spending every year here in this country in federal funds alone on highways and airports – that’s what we’re talking about cause we spending close to 50 billion dollars a year on highways and airports in this country. You know what we’re spending on Amtrak? Three hundred and thirty-one million dollars net. This is absurd. The French put 20-25 percent of the national transportation budget in the rail, so do the Germans, the Brits a little less but they have a mess on their hands they’ve announced. Major new investments. I don’t know what the Japanese figure is but they’ve poured billions into the bullet trains which is why they have such terrific service and here we are, I don’t know whether you’ve had this experience, I come back from Europe, I come back from Japan and I’m embarrassed. And the question is what are we going to do about it?

Now, Senator Hollings has just filed legislation and this is the first genuine, honest-to-goodness serious comprehensive interstate rail passenger bill we’ve ever had in the Congress of the United States. It would allocate approximately four billion dollars a year. Remember, compared to 50 billion for highways and airports, four billion dollars a year to invest in the existing system, to get cracking on at least a dozen high-speed corridors all over the country that could give us the same kind of service that is not attracting people by the thousands – ten thousand people a day are using the train in the Northeast corridor alone. Ten thousand people a day and rising. And why is this and over the next ten years would give us the kind of first class rail passenger system that we need and deserve with a state match of about 20 percent, federal contribution of 80 percent, same basic and even calls it the National Interstate Rail Defense Act just to make sure that people understand. Remember the interstate highway bill and we called it the Federal Defense Highway Act, or something. There is a national security issue here which I think we all now understand clearly as a result of what happened in September and this is an issue in my judgment where the people are way ahead of the politicians. Don’t ask me why, but they are. Most Americans understand this. They don’t understand why we aren’t moving aggressively to invest in this absolutely critical piece of our national transportation system. And by the way, when you’re in a recession there’s no better way to get out of a recession than to invest in the nation’s infrastructure. Right? This is an essential part of it. So there we are. What are we going to do about it. Well, I hope that with your help and the help of a lot of good Americans and the California Congressional delegation and the governor, who by the way, has been terrific on this. There isn’t a state in the country who puts as much money in the rail these days than the Davis administration has been superb. We’re going to finally get ourselves a commitment at the national level for the first time in thirty years for a first-class rail passenger system which is a part of this country’s future and if we do I can confidently guarantee you that about one out of every four of those dollars will come to the state of California because you need it. You must have it and this is a great state and I don’t say this to make you feel good because I am a part-time Californian. It’s because as I said a few minutes ago, there is no state in the country that needs this as badly as you do and many others need it and need it badly.

So, as always I’m an optimist. I say to my students – and by the way I have wonderful students – we’re producing some terrific young people around here especially in this part of the country. I teach undergraduates and I teach graduates at UCLA and they’re wonderful, but this is a very special place, particularly now. You know I have seventy undergraduates that I teach public policy to and last year just for the heck of it I decided to go through the list and kind of figure out where they’re coming from ethnically and racially. Of the seventy, seven were of European origin. Think about it. Who were the rest of them? African-American, Latino American, Bangladeshi-American, Korean-American, Iranian-American. Incredible. These kids are going to be running the state in the next twenty years and, by the way, 90 percent are women. Ninety percent women, guys, let me tell you, this is the future. They’re terrific, and one of the things I’m trying to do is to encourage these young people to go into public service, but I just think this one is a no-brainer and while we do have a small and, I think, a relatively isolated group of folks in Washington who for some reason want to privatize us. You know, it’s terrible when you’re 68 and you run around with a Medicare card and getting senior citizen fares on the No. 6 Culver City bus and you say, “I remember when it was privatized. It was a disaster.” The Brits have tried it. It’s awful. We need a single integrated rail system in this country and that’s what Amtrak is capable of doing and don’t let anybody tell you that Amtrak is fat and happy these days. This is a lean, tough committed organization that is working very, very hard with practically nothing to give you the kind of rail service that you want to have and all we need is a commitment to a modest but consistent amount of capital investment in this system and let me tell you we’ll give you a railroad that knocks your eyes out. So that’s what we’re about and that’s what these days I’m about.

Kitty sends her love. She likes this place even more than I do and we’ve had a wonderful time here and we’re going back on the 24^th so I can march in the Greek Independence Day parade next Sunday in Boston. This is our seventh year out here and we’ve had a wonderful time and we expect to come back many, many times and I think you very much for inviting me.

I assume you have questions, comments, reactions, and thoughts about this and Curtis is going to field your questions and flip them up here. Let’s have a discussion. Thanks very much