Buying into Amtrak: One Way to Fit American Railroads into Government’s Transportation Spending
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The nearly certain failure of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) to meet a legislated mandate of attaining commercial self-sufficiency in 2002 and the major reassessment of transportation policies precipitated by America’s war on terrorism have opened a window of opportunity to improve the terms by which passenger trains fit into U.S. transportation policy. The future success of intercity passenger rail depends on going back to the drawing board of transportation policy to revisit railroads’ access to public finance. A major change from the public policy status quo on the rail mode’s financing recommends restructuring Amtrak to become a joint venture between government and privately owned railroads, as was envisioned by the original Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970. This change in corporate ownership would occur parallel with, and facilitate the implementation of, a new account in the transportation trust fund devoted to improvements in intercity rail infrastructure. This account would receive the tax revenues collected from some combination of federal excise taxes levied on railroad diesel fuel, other transportation expenditure by railroads (e.g., parts and equipment), passenger tickets, and express freight shipments. A share of railroads’ income taxes (or other sources of public revenue) could supplement the public revenues flowing into such a fund. Expenditures would be made on upgrading rail infrastructure capacity to handle increasing volumes of freight and passenger traffic and, where appropriate, to develop dedicated high-speed passenger rail infrastructure alongside existing rail rights-of-way.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".