SACRAMENTO, CA -- The war on the automobile waits to take over from the war on tobacco, now all over but the reparations. The coming anti-car campaign will force those looking for alternative transportation to consider government-run Amtrak, something this writer recently attempted.

I needed to make a 9:30 am meeting in San Francisco, a scant 90 miles away but often clogged with cars of commuters forced to live in the hinterlands by the city’s high housing costs. Many of these long distance commuters would prefer to forego the drive.

The Amtrak people said their 6:30 am train would get me there at 9:00 am, half an hour early. This run, they said, required a reservation but only a dozen or so people showed.

The train arrived at 6:45, and we did not board where they said we would. By the time the train actually moved it was well after seven. I asked the neatly uniformed ticket-puncher the reason for the delay. “I have no idea. I just got on myself,” he said, departure times evidently not being part of his job description.

Another Amtrak worker handed out pillows that might have been taken from a Barbie doll set. But we were moving at last. Sort of.

In the hey-day of rail, people would say they were going to “catch a cannonball.” On this run one realizes how things have changed. A battered, four-cylinder Hyundai easily passes the train.

While buying coffee I heard a couple say they were going to Jefferson City, Missouri. “You are going the wrong way,” said the cashier. Turned out that they weren’t. To get there, they first had to go 400 miles south to Los Angeles. It seems that’s just the way it is on Amtrak.

There aren’t many stops but they seem to take too long, as though the conductor might be showing the train to his friends. At Emeryville we transfered to a bus on which we need to show our tickets again. The driver chatted with many of the passengers all assumed to be tourists with no schedule to keep.

It was nearly 10:00 am by the time we hit the Ferry Building in San Francisco, a full hour after the advertised time of arrival. This clears up the reason for the lack of interest in Amtrak.

Most employers require their employees to arrive on time and this government-run outfit clearly cannot do the job. But its lethargy serves as an apt metaphor for the government itself.

It promises but doesn’t deliver, can’t seem to resolve its own inefficiencies, and is apparently incapable of change--on a rail, as it were. As the war on the car heats up, maybe someone would be willing to buy a used railway network, run it on time, and give commuters an alternative they could actually use.

--K. Lloyd Billingsley, Editorial Director