Jim Mathews is President and CEO of NARP. Before joining NARP, Mathews was Executive Editor of the Aviation Week Intelligence Network. During his 26-year tenure at Aviation Week, he cultivated the company’s digital strategy and led teams that twice won national awards for best news website.
Mathews served on the Amtrak Customer Advisory Committee for six years, including two years leading the ACAC as chairman. He is a lifelong train traveler with a deep-rooted vision for a robust national passenger train network within the U.S. Mathews believes rail can be an economic engine in the communities it serves, a potentially transformative mode in an ever-changing transportation landscape and the most environmentally responsible way to meet the transportation challenges of the 21st century.
At NARP, Mathews has been leading a reinvigorated advocacy and legislative effort which has notched several wins in 2015: fending off six separate House attacks on Amtrak, taking a meaningful role alongside Senate staff in shaping the Senate’s 2015 rail authorization and getting the rail bill included for the first time in 40 years in an overall surface transportation bill. Mathews spent the year traveling through more than a dozen states, building a coalition of significant grassroots support from mayors, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and local officials for investment in the Southwest Chief, new service east of New Orleans and critical Northeast Corridor infrastructure projects.
White House Hopes to Dismantle Amtrak
Everywhere you look in this country, infrastructure is really threatened. You would think that the emphasis would be to invest in passenger rail as a way to ease congestion, as a way to increase economic development in the towns that rail serves, as a way to improve the economic opportunities for residents in rural America. And yet, the White House proposal would eliminate that. Fortunately, Congress seems to have largely recognized the benefits that passenger rail brings to their communities.
Assaults Against Passenger Rail
We are mostly talking about support for Amtrak, although there are also programs that were threatened in the White House budget that support commuter rail, local transit systems. The TIGER Grant program is a good example of a program that continues to face the threat, and that’s been vital for helping communities work on their transit systems and their commuter rail. So yes, it’s largely about Amtrak, but not exclusively about Amtrak. The assault has been broad-based against passenger rail, generally.
Washington’s Infra Policies
Unfortunately, this is a time in Washington when a lot of campaign priorities seem to have fallen by the wayside. Whether you’re talking about infrastructure or healthcare or any one of a number of issues, what seems to have happened is that what’s said on the campaign trail has borne very little resemblance to what we’ve seen in official Washington…The good news is that over the years, members of Congress–even those who at one time were opposed to Amtrak–have come around to the idea that Amtrak really is a vital public service, a public convenience, and a necessity, particularly in rural America.
Citizen Engagement to Keep Rail Running
The most important thing that we can advocate for is more citizen engagement, more citizen involvement, and that’s true probably even beyond our own issues, that the best thing that citizens can do is to take part in democracy. Call your congressman, call your senator, write them, send them emails, show up at their town hall meetings. Show up when they come home to the district for their vacations, be visible, be seen, be heard, and be part of the process. We think that’s vital. We think that is absolutely the most important thing that we can get Americans to do, to take part and have their voices heard.
NARP: Advocating for a Connected America
We are the nation’s oldest and largest advocacy organization for passenger rail. Our organization is largely membership driven. Individual members join and pay their dues to support our work. There are 28,000 of them around the country. The majority of our money comes from those members who support our work and people who contribute donations and dollars to help us continue to launch campaigns like the one we did this summer. Our mission really is to work for a connected America which advocates for the appropriate infrastructure investment to support passenger rail as well as other modes. We very much support bike share, intercity travel and transit, and bus rapid transit, and really anything that will help us to become a more mobile society.
Download full Transcript (PDF): Jim Mathews on The Infra Blog
Tags: D, Jim Mathews, NARP, National Association of Railroad Passengers, Passenger Rail
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