Biden wants to bring Amtrak to a Northeast commuter corridor. Will riders support it?

Biden wants to spend billions to create new passenger train lines, including one connecting the Lehigh Valley to New York. Its future is uncertain.

NBC News

By Adam Edelman
By Olivier Douliery / AFP via Getty Images
By Olivier Douliery / AFP via Getty Images

Every morning, Patty Kennedy wakes up long before the sun rises to take a two-hour bus ride from Allentown, Pennsylvania, near where she lives, into New York to get to her job as a food importer. It’s a lengthy, expensive commute.

But given the hypothetical option to take an Amtrak train instead — something President Joe Biden wants to make possible with funding from his massive infrastructure proposal — she’d refuse.

“I’m acclimated. I don’t mind the bus. I sleep anyway and the train is going to be so much more expensive,” Kennedy said as she stood inside the underground tunnel at New York's Port Authority, where her bus pulls in five times a week just after 6:50 a.m.

At the moment, for the thousands of Lehigh Valley residents who commute daily into New York, by car or by the area’s only bus operator, there are no other options.

Publish : 2021-06-21 12:57:00

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