Alon, you mentioned the turf battles between Amtrak and local agencies. I'd just like to ask do you have any ideas on how to solve that issue? Because getting rid of this animosity could do a lot to benefit both Amtrak and the local agencies. For example with better relations maybe MARC wouldn't have been forced to go back to diesel trains.
...I don't. In some cases, pro-reform sentiment from above would help: for example, the MBTA and SEPTA could pressure their commuter rail divisions into accepting mode-neutral fares. SEPTA made that effort in the early 1980s, but it led to a protracted strike, in which the railroad workers simply refused to be treated like lowly city transit workers; but it won concessions, which it hasn't made much use of. The MTA could likewise pressure the LIRR and Metro-North to cooperate better.
There's already political cooperation between New York and New Jersey when it comes to building $20 billion tunnels, so it's not ASB to posit that there could be political cooperation regarding operations. But it does require someone to make the first move, and so far, nobody is interested. The source of the problem is that the people most capable of exercising reform pressure are heavyweight politicians, who gain a lot of kudos from being able to push through big-ticket spending, but not from reforms to operations that would take some time to prove their success.
It would help a lot if Amtrak made the first move on various things. For example, Amtrak's plan for incremental improvements in the Northeast, the NEC Master Plan, calls for three-tracking most of the Boston-Providence segment, to provide more capacity for fast intercity trains to overtake slow commuter trains. This is expensive and unnecessary: were the MBTA to electrify, no overtakes would be required at current Acela speed, and even at full HSR speed, doubling the average Boston-Providence speed, it would be possible to just four-track short, strategic overtake segments. The MBTA is of course not interested in electrifying, but Amtrak could, instead of proposing extra infrastructure spending, propose to partly federally fund electric trains on the Providence Line so that the MBTA would not need to be overtaken at first.
The problem is that Amtrak is the worst of all the agencies. While the commuter rail agencies are making noises about better local cooperation, Amtrak doubles down on its most exclusionary operating practices, leading to much higher proposed budgets for HSR because of frills like dedicated HSR tracks.